Ravenswing

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But here, the intent is important - giving a far greater variety of symbols than would be normally needed if players were just creating characters to game with rather than roleplay.

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Okay, now we've covered this. You apparently think that a game will sell in the current market if the producer doesn't pay attention to character creation and costume. I think that's plain stupid. Since you insist on repeating the same argument again, I can only assume that it didn't sink in the first time, so:

The character creation system is there to sell the game. It is one of the main marketting points. Without it, this game would not be as successful as it is. Without it, people would sit there and laugh at CoH being a superhero game.

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Can missions be played through several times? I thought once a story-arc was done, it was done?

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Yes, for you. Do you only ever solo? You roleplay missions on your own?

No, then you'll find you can set off and kill Infernal ten times, Countess Crey a few dozen. Hell, people do one Atta/Frostfire mission after another in the Hollows. Those guys escape the Zig before the cops have the cuffs locked on them.


If you find yourself on Union around 9pm, come to Galaxy City and see if you can put up with the roleplayers there.

I tempted... so tempted... the word "shame" is just waiting on the tip of my tongue...

but I'll be strong!

Technically, Anna is kind of bi-lite, but she does have a man at the moment.

Mind you, looking at the other guests, she's going to feel a bit left out. She's possibly the only one that likes men!

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But the Balster down to 2 hps who uses Taunt on a fully healty foe who is pounding the groups Contorller, who is the Tanker character's mentor, is less frequent - it's not sensible gaming, and it lands you with debt.

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That would really very much depend on the situation. If the controller had the possibility of recovering to save the rest of the team, but the blaster couldn't, then dragging the mob off the controller is good game strategy.

My view on this kind of thing is that, yes, it's roleplaying, but it's roleplaying a hero and that's about all. I like roleplaying a character, an entire human, and doing that on missions tends to result in very, very slow missions.

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The vast amount of chest detail options, for example, seems to suggest that they were trying to give players a great deal of choice when it came to reflecting the personality and background of the character - important for rp-ing, not so important for bashing and levelling.

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Oh please. A badly implemented mechanism for mapping a smile, two-colour bitmap onto the chest. They changed it slightly later to become a sort of lapel badge for suits, which was nice, but they've never fixed the fact that for most forms of chest covering, the emblem looks terrible. It only really works with suits and spandex. Put it on, say, a leather jacket and it sucks.

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Like I said in my first post, I've not played all the way to the end yet, so I've not had a chance to pass judgement on the entire story yet

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Neither have I. Let me give you an example of the way MMO-ness destroys the RP setting.

I helped arrest Countess Crey last week. (As someone said on the mission, where does it say anywhere that she's head of a megacorporation and a powerful psychic?) Next week, if I go looking, I can arrest her again. One of the richest women in the world is arrested for all sorts of horrible crimes. There will be no nes coverage, no trial, no actual arrest, and no one will bat an eyelid when she's back at the head of her corporation again.

There are two different versions of what Warwolves actually are.

The entire Kheldian idea is a laugh.

Statesman gets rescued from Tyrant quite regularly... but no one knows where he is.

War Crow has Omega Level Clearence, which lets him access any information he wants... but Indigo and Crimson won't tell him anything.

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and am finding the rp-ing is sadly lacking

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Which server?
And do you just do mission RP or have you tried the GG meets?

Anna is back in town, and has a 'season ticket'. A bit of quality time with her daughter and daughter-in-law would be just what the doctor ordered after a couple of months being photographed in obscure but picturesque locations.

EDIT: Making it to Pocket D might be more of a challenge, unfortunately.

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Of course you can have fun soloing, but then that begs the question of why not make the game a normal PC game with an online play option?

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Well, if they had, I'd probably be playing it. Instead they made this one. I'm not an MMO player, prior to this my online gaming experience was Neverwinter Nights. I set up a server in that, and we roleplayed. If they provided some similar facility with a non-MMO online game, I'd happily be playing that.

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Rp-ing adds variety to missions

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I don't like RPing on missions much, frankly it detracts from the process of beating things to within an inch of their life.

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Why not just make a set of generic body-suits instead, if the characters are only going to be used for rushing, bashing and levelling?

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And the last time you saw a game released which had bald, features less dummies running around shooting things was? Games these days sell on their graphics (hell, they always did, I remember when PacMan had awesome graphics), if you released a game, even a single-player one, like that it would bomb so fast it's untrue.

CoH is a superhero game. Superheroes wear a variety of weird and wonderful costumes. Even the editor we have is restrictive, I'm sure there are people who would love to be able to do far more. CoH has a good customisation system for characters because it wouldn't sell otherwise.

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I wouldn't really call the backgorund "lousy" - sure, there are parts that I don't find as good as others, but over all, it gives a good variety of enemies and tasks.

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It's got gaps in the size of Nebraska and elements which directly contradict each other. To make things playable, key concepts in the IC justification for things get bent out of shape because Cryptic need to do it to get things to function.

And I want more from a background than just a variety of villains. I think you are looking at it from the point of view of a gamer. You see a viable game setting. I see a roleplay setting in the early stages of development, before the supplements come out and flesh out the gaping holes in the background.

PS. New player? Or new to the forums? Either way, welcome to the madhouse.

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i agree with Martial Arts/Regen but i would get any 1st power EXCEPT Katana (NEVER)



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And yet, katana/regen has enormous survivability, of the order of 60% better than anything else (aside from Broadsword, obviously, which is the same).

Broadsword puts out more damage than katana, but it does it slower, so without checking specific attack chains, I'd say it's difficult to determine which actually puts out more damage. Against minions, BS is certainly better, but I don't know if it would even out over a longer chain.

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Before I changed Nevermore, ...[snip]... no-one wanted to talk to him because of that attitude, and rightly so.

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And, let's face it, Nevermore was a small, fluffy kitten compared to the level of idiot that this SG would contain.

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offers them a chance to get out of their current situation (I was thinking they're all on their way into the Zig when this happens) by getting their heroes license.

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Sorry to say this, but it's been done. Wordmaker has a character called Alcatraz who should be serving a lot of years in prison. Instead, they stuck a chip in his head that lets them monitor everything he does, and lets them cut his powers off if they want.

Thing is, Alcatraz does actually regret the act that got him locked up. At the time, he felt it was justified, but now he's not so sure. (At least, that's my take on it, Wordy might have a different opinion.)

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I thought maybe a really, REALLY good lawyer

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Well, Crey have very, very, very good lawyers. I'd give you until about level 20 before Crey decide you should be inducted into their specialist research programme, where you can be dismantled in the name of furthering genetics.


To be honest, if you bring characters like that to GG, expect to be ignored by a lot of people. We won't be able to do anything about you spouting off on how you slaughtered such-and-such, or beat someone else to within an inch of his life for spitting, because we can't force you to be arrested. That generally leads to a lot of frustration, accusations of god-modding, and then being put on ignore lists.

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similar to 100 bullets

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I have no idea what that is, but I get the feeling from your description, that it's going to feature people who probably actually should be on death row (and please note, I don't agree with the death penalty) who are let out because "things are so bad we need people like this." Thing is that Paragon City isn't that bad, and the City Council sure isn't going to admit it even if it was! People like that don't fit in, and they'd get put straight back in the Zig.

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although that does defeat the purpose of a MMORPG

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I hate that phrase. Know what the 'purpose of a MMORPG' is? It's to have fun. Even Cryptic have worked out that it's possible, just maybe, to have fun on your own sometimes, so I wish people would quite with this concept that if you aren't teaming, there's no point in playing on an MMO.

(That wasn't a criticism of you, btw. I'm just trying to point out that if you have more fun soloing, then get on and do it!)

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I'm saving the later levels for when I'm rping in a group, so that there's more mystery and supense about what exactly you'll be encountering in each new mission.

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Unfortunately, I don't find mission RPing to be at all 'mysterious', or 'realistic'. The problem being that you'll end up facing the same villains over and over, on exactly the same missions. Particularly as your level increases, it starts getting totally stupid that (for example) Countess Crey is uncovered as a villain, an arrest warrant is issued for her, and yet, tomorrow, she'll be back at the head of her megacorp and no one will be any the wiser.

IMO, there is no such thing as an MMORPG. They are too inflexible, and too repetitive for suspension of disbelief to work unless you actually solo the entire game... at which point when you hit level 50, you've single-handedly rescued the whole city.

hence, I prefer RP sites like Galaxy Girl, where we make up our own one-off plots, we don't generally discuss uber-game-plot, and we mess about a lot doing things that are largely unrelated to the lousy background the game has.

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These days, Nevermore's a lot more mellow

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He got older... got off the Superadine and onto grass...

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unless you wanted them to keep their darker activities a secret

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Crow is quite happy to slaughter people if the need arrises. It's one of the things that old Nevermore and old Crow couldn't agree on. I dare say it's a bit of a bone of contention between the updated versions. Thing is, he doesn't mouth it around, and he doesn't kill unless it's required.

(Well, that's the theory. How you 'don't kill' when your method of arrest is a skull-splitting blow to your opponent with a razor-sharp, magically enhanced katana has yet to be explained in any way at all. )

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THe main concept I had going would be a group of heroes no-one liked but who had to be let do their job because they'd managed to get their heroes license.

[/ QUOTE ] It depends on why no one likes them. If they use excessive force, they can kiss their licenses goodbye. I kind of see FBSA issued Hero Licenses as Bounty Hunter licenses in the US, they have to stick to rules.

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Let me put it this way, one of the reasons that Nevermore gets away with it is that he doesn't kill. Ever.

The kind of 'heroes' you describe would need to make themselves very popular with the local heroes, or the first time they stepped out of line they'd be arrested. I somehow doubt they'd actually earn their license in the first place. Don't forget that Back Alley Brawler was an established hero before the license system came into force. They could hardly not give him one, despite the fact he's not exactly a nice guy. Brawler represents the old school, literally. He's supposed to be retired.

If you don't want to go regen, then go with Dark Armour, that's the next best set for defense.

Not sure why you seem to think you don't want regen though,

I think Spines has about the highest damage output, but I'm not totally sure. Spines/Regen is awesome, you need to see Chives to believe it.

Katana or broadsword both have a 'parry' attack which adds to DEF on a hit. This combines adequately with most other secondaries to boost your defense. The best combination is with Regen, where the extra DEF really makes for quite an unstoppable machine. However, you do lose out a little on damage against Spines, and maybe MA.

What do you want to do with it?

Best survivability is katana/regen or BS/regen.

V, like V for Vendetta?

I'd have to say that the setting simply isn't designed to support that kind of character. It handles characters like Nevermore by virtue of us largely ignoring the setting. It would handle V even worse.

But we've had this discussion before. (That was the Roleplay Community 'we', not you and I, Saint. )

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With this, the "I'm typing" afk message works wonders

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It helps, but you need to remember to set it up on every alt, and you need to remember to trigger it, and you mustn't click away while typing, and sometimes it goes down for no reason... and all of that is more likely to happen the longer you spend typing.

And beyond that, when I've been watching someone with the afk-typing message up for ten minutes and no results, I start to assume client crash, or the person has actually gone afk and isn't paying attention. (Of course, sometimes you look at the afk-typing for ten minutes, and then the toon says "Okay, bye then" or something else which didn't take ten minutes to type. )

Being really blunt, if I spend ages waiting for a reply, even if that reply consists of stuff William the Bard would have considered better than his own work, I start to wonder how I can get the last 5 minutes of my life back. Roleplay has got to be really stunning to support speeches that require a degree in Literature and Patience to be able to handle.


And, for the record, about the only toon I have who produced large quantities of verbiage was Jason Caine, and even he just used long words. His sentences tended to be quite short.

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Some do to good effect, like Aisla and Lief Roar, but generally.. meh...

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Now, Aisla glared at me balefully when she read my comments above, for she knows that, while I consider her grasp of English to be excellent, I also think that she spends far too long typing in RP situations. And, just FYI, she's a lot less likely to produce a forty page essay these days than she used to be.

I don't care what you write, so long as by the time it actually appears on the screen, you aren't alone because everyone else got bored waiting and left.

There's also a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regarding adjectives and adverbs which may explain some of the existance of 'purple prose'. It goes something like: "Thank the lord for adjectives, for togetehr with adverbs, they expand the word count." In those days, you were paid by the word...

A moment of revelation, it appears that Jason Caine's theme tune is "I Would do Anything for Love", by Meatloaf.

I did think of doing a toon like this a while back, just so I could actually have a toon designed to wear a cape if anything. I think at this point I'd fail to put the time in, so I'll pass, but nice idea.

I've never fully understood the term, possibly due to a lack of interest in discovering what it actually means, however, the basic facts gleaned from the previous posts lead me to make the following statement:

People can be as flowery and litterate as they like, but if it takes twenty minutes of faffing about to produce text I'm going to skim for actual content, then they're wasting their time, and mine. It destroys the flow of the session and by the time they've responded to you, or stood there for 5 minutes typing their (truly shakesperean) opening paragraph, you start to wonder if their client has crashed.

Generally, I think it's better to break up these superflously long paragraphs and perhaps add continuation marks, especially since the chat input line is really naff for editing those perfectly crafted descriptions. That way, people may maintain an interest in what you're going to say next.

That said, I'm also not a fan of the person who types six words... then another six words... and another... and you keep wondering when they'll stop so you can get a word in edgeways.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, type what you like, but if you find yourself running out of space to type it more often than not, have some consideration for the others involved.

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should MoG really be less effective under the severe concenquences of the after effects?

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Less effective is relative. I find MoG very effective when used in the right place. It isn't going to sufficiently less effective to be ineffective, and there are responses I can make to make it slightly better for me than it is now. Depends on your slotting.

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I say we converge on the NC Soft stand and take over!

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Who brings the duckttape?

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I'm sorry, but I'm not getting into anything which vaguely resembles bondage experiments involving Bridger. He's just not my type.

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And remember, a glass ceiling tends to stop the excrement from getting any lower

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Not in any company I've ever been in. It just means the smell they've caused can't get back up.