Ravenswing

What challenge?

I mean, seriously, what's challenging about raising the level cap?

Let's take a look at that perenial of level cap raises, World of Warcraft (mostly because it's one of the few MMOs I've played that this kind of expansion applies to, though I think the same applies to LotRO since their expansions seem to be aiming the same way). Now, I got WoW before Wrath, and I was unemployed so I had plenty of time to play. I banged my character up to the level cap, got bored, and left. (Came back to CoH and levelled up a new character to 50, actually.) Wrath came out, raised the cap, and I tried to go back. Managed about a level and a half.

Thing is, it's not challenging, it's just boring. It's exactly the same game, just longer. The mobs are scaled to your level, so they aren't more challenging. You just have to kill more and more of them and do yet more tedious missions to gain a level.

What's actually making people sit up in WoW is not a raise in level cap, but the dungeon finder system.

What's actually likely to get me interested in the game again is Cataclysm, which has a small level cap raise, yes, but is heavily about changing the lower level game.

Level cap raises are not about challenge, they're about ego stroking. Content is challenging, and you don't need a level raise to create challenging content.

My partner started playing CoH because I did.

Mind you, I didn't start playing because I walked into a shop and saw the box. I saw a reference to the game at MMORPG.com. In fact, I've never walked into a game shop and bought a game because I saw it on the shelf. Not once.

As I said earlier, the lack of a box may result in some new players not becoming new players, but personally I don't have the knowledge to know to what extent that will actually affect player numbers. And, no, I don't consider 'common sense' to be an accurate judge of how much a box on a shelf means in these terms.

Still, far be it from me to stand in the way of another doom thread. Please continue.

Pre-orders start in March.

The only pre-order goodies are early access to the two new powersets, Dual Pistols immediately, Demon Summoning in April. That has resulted in me not bothering with the pre-order since I can live without that. However, they really aren't what I'm interested in as far as GR is concerned and, while I'd quite like a box... well it really just takes up space on the shelf.

I think they'll lose sales in the EU by not having a box, but personally, it really means very little to me.

And yet people now play it almost exclusively...

However, why is it that all these grandiose ideas seem to be an excuse to have world PvP?

Damn straight! I argued with my boss over this once, and found him something on the Internet stating that omitting the final comment was a 'base, journalistic habit' used because it allows fitting into narrow columns easier.

Speaking about the multi-contraction thing: I use them in dialogue. People say things you'd never right. Then again, if I were writing, I'd never write 'you'd'. So, in dialogue, I'll write 'he'd've' and sundry other things. I might even write 'I could of been a contenda!' because people say things like that.

Interesting mistakes born of English being confusing:

The cat's claws were sharp.
Its claws were sharp.
It's common for cat's claws to be sharp.

'Its' is the possessive form of 'it.' 'It's' is a contraction of 'it is.'

Could anyone provide a red name quote to that effect, because I never got that impression. In fact, I very much got the impression that any 'morality arcs' would happen outside Praetoria. In Praetoria, you get to select your starting side, and then the chance to pick which side you'll move to when you progress to Prime around level 20.

I'm actually very interested in seeing how the side-switch mechanics affect contacts. Many of the existing red-side contacts would not fit well with vigilantes, being effectively government contacts operating within the legal Hero system.

Indeed. I'm given to believe that this is the deciding aspect with regard to the in-game definition of a Vigilante. That's my perception of the concept from the seminar's and presentations at HeroCon. We'll have to wait and see what we actually get.

It was part of the DP demo, I agree, but the guy doing the demo stated that that was how they operated. It could have been engineered that way specifically for the demo, but I very much got the impression that that was not the case and that they were behaving normally. It would have been very easy to do that demo against other targets, seeing as DP isn't limited to Praeotoria. Engineering specific AI behaviour just for the demo seems kind of pointless. They did show off the new Clockwork models independently in the seminar on costume/creature design (they were terribly fond of the chest-opening-megablast animation) so they didn't need to show them off in that demo. We were all gushing about the DP animations, tbh.

I do agree with this. This is why I tried to focus this thread on people's view of vigilantism and what it represented to them, rather than on the mechanics of it in the game.

Being the person who likes to operate as much as possible within the game mechanics, even for RP, I'm kind of preparing to have some of my assumptions of how I'll actually let my characters behave trashed once the game comes out. I've been working on Praetorian Annette and Vigilante Annette since October, based on the impressions I got at HeroCon. However, that's like 9 months before release and the details are vague and could change anyway.

Always happy to help.

This.

About the best I've got on my main is Strength of Will, and if I'm expecting a tough fight at the outset, that'll be on cooldown by the time I need a panic button.

Willpower does have that delightul feature of a power which massively increases your regen if you're being mobbed (Rise to the Challenge), so it sort of has an auto-panic mode.

I actually think that's slightly off. Society has decided that personal revenge is wrong, but group revenge isn't. If I go too far with that, I'll derail the thread so I'll narrow it down to Vigilantism here.

Society has the view that personal revenge, or personal exactment of punishment (because there's a fine line between revenge and punishment when dealing with the treatment of convicted criminals) is wrong. Vigilantes believe that this is wrong, probably because they think society is unable, or unwilling, to handle it.

Going back to specifics, in Decisions of Import, Annette has concluded that society will not punish the man responsible for Claire's death, because he's too good at hiding his trail, and anyway the punishment would never fit the crimes.

I also think this is where CoH Vigilantes will diverge from typical real-world vigilantes. The vigilantes we commonly come across in the real world tend to operate on immediate crimes. It seems likely that CoH Vigilantes will be more investigative. Specifics:

The Death Wish movies were based on a real vigilante who was tried and aquitted in New York. There's an interesting video about him on the Watchmen Director's Cut DVD if people are interested, I'm sure it could be found elsewhere too. This guy shot some muggers who, he says, tried to kill him. It became a bit dubious when it transpired that he had gone out looking for muggers, used himself as bait, and then acted when he was attacked. Really, this is very much what (legal) street sweeping is like in CoH.

I suspect that CoH Vigilantes will operate more like Annette does. She found a crime, investigated it, located the person ultimately responsible, and then exacted punishment. This is far more dangerous because she might be wrong. If you wait to be attacked, you're pretty sure your 'victim' is a criminal; if you proactively locate them, without seeing an actual crime, you could get the wrong person.

I don't actually see this as so much of an issue because society hasn't got a great track record at getting it right either. Society does have a problem with that, however. I think it's a collective responsibility thing. (We have this weird issue with taking collective responsibility, we always look for individuals to blame, but we rely on it so we can say it wasn't our fault. Yes, I'm horribly cynical.)

I'm rambling again. Shut up, Birdy.

I'd actually say that that kind of situation comes up more often in real life than comics. The entire legal system is based upon aspirations and practicality.

We lock people up (or execute them) on the basis that it's better for society as a whole.

In comics, there's usually some clever way in which everything can work out right in the end. The hero saves the civilians AND his girlfriend, and the villain is caught. In real life, someone dies and the villain probably escapes.