Ravenswing

Oddly, the one member of my set of characters most initimately familiar with switching sides is the one who almost certainly won't. Jason Caine has spent 8000 years wandering between good guy and despotic villain as he tries and fails to seek his redemption and finally gain his mortality.

Currently, he's in a good phase and it would take something drastic to push him over the edge. Considering that he knows, quite intimately, where that edge is, he's better placed than many to keep away from it. A hero could slide into vigilantism almost by accident, or even for the best of reasons. I think that's where Annette is going. Jason, on the other hand, is always conscious of his moral position. If he goes bad, it'll be because he wants to.

Interesting responses, thank you.

As for that last one, it'll be interesting to see where the game mechnics take us. I can very much see Annette oscillating along the grey line because I think it requires extremes to make her enact her own punishments rather than allowing 'society' to deal with the perps. As Zortel pointed out, she has been willing to go that little bit too far for a while, though it's still generally been at the behest of someone else rather than off her own bat. The situation in the story falls into that category of selfish motivation: she wants to nail this guy as much because his minions killed someone she felt she had responsibility for. She might well go the same way if someone hurt or killed one of her UV team mates, though at that point I suspect Zortel (the character) and BODI might be lending considerable assistance. The UV looks after its own.

What will be interesting to discover is how some of the more heroic characters respond to this kind of thing, should they find out. I could see Liberty Girl, for example, being fairly conflicted. Not to mention that Annette has always been more worried about Libby's reputation than her own and may find herself conflicted if she's falling too far.

Now I'm rambling as well. I'll shut up.

Okay, the following is prompted by me writing a piece where Nitoichi (hero) turns Vigilante (now designated as happening sometime around July, it would seem), and BeyondReach's responce to that story (particularly in this thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=208633) which, thinking about it, is quite interesting.

First of all, from what I could gather at HeroCon, the official in-game view of a Vigilante is someone who takes the law into their own hands. Officially, we have not been able to act like that in CoH: we arrest people and they go through the court system. We may have roleplayed Vigilantism, but the game did not support it. With GR, it will.

But what are our views on this kind of thing?

With Annette/Nitoichi, I wrote up this piece (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=208508) to show the moment where Annette chooses to cross the line. (If we're being all Matrixy, it's actually the moment she understands the choice; the choice itself was made far earlier.)

Now, this is hardly the first time she's killed someone. Early in her career, she killed a Hellion who invaded her home. She has killed many a Rikti in the war zone. I've written up two stories in the last couple of months where she has assassinated people; the last one was pretty blatant and is done with a sniper rifle, as in Decisions of Import.

However, I believe all those are different because they fall into totally different categories of activity. The Hellion was self-defence, humans are at war with the Rikti, and most of the other cases are under orders from people like Crimson and Indigo.

Decisions of Import is the first time Annette sets out to find someone, hunt them down, and terminate them because she believes they have done things so bad that they deserve justice which the law is not going to provide. That's the point she turns toward the dark side (Luke).

Your thoughts?
Your views on what makes the difference between the good guys and the not-so-god guys?

Making the slight assumption that this is the same 'bug' as I'm seeing, having another application running in the background does not help.

Recently, I started playing again and I find that I can't seem to alt+tab to any other applications. Some investigation last night resulted in some very weird discoveries.

Actually, I can alt+tab to another application, it just doesn't allow the application to display over the top of CoH. I managed to get a browser window active, and accepting input last night, with mouse cursor changes, but no actual display.

It's annoying. I'm also on Vista with a Radeon graphics card of some kind.

Have to agree with Snow Globe. The concept of global channels was created so that you could contact your friends no matter where they were. They operate by global handle, which is allocated to an account. Making them 'per toon' eliminates the actual purpose of the things.

An automated unsubscribe if inactive for a given period would likely solve most of the issues being described here.

To quote Ramirez in Highlander:

B A L A N C E... balance

This has none. It would require re-engineering most of the game. CO was engineered with that in mind from scratch, and even it doesn't actually let you just randomly pick powers from all over.

It's also a great way to make the game almost unplayable for new players. You end up have to constantly respec to remove unplayable combinations.

Animation times become a major factor. Getting a working attack chain becomes quite a feat with mixed powers, especially mixing armed and unarmed powers. A lot of animations would probably need to be redone.

This is a glorious idea when put into a game working from scratch, but as a retrofit it's a non-starter really. CoH2 anyone?

I did wonder. Similarly fixed. Weird that the sig-block graphics are still working, but weird is par for the course, I guess.

Noooooo! I wanna roleplay!

Yes, I like levels 1-20.

Linked PDF. Some slight use of language, click at your discretion.

Parasite

Enjoy, or not, your choice.

I said I'd post the story I wrote for my OU writing course, and this is it, slightly tweaked. It's now a few hundred words over the limit that was set, but there were a couple of little bits I cut for length which, I feel, add to the narrative. You'll notice there's no actual reference to CoH in here, aside from the characters, which are mine from Union.

Timeframes: The flashbacks take place in January 2010. The 'now' bit of the story has not happened yet, it should be fairly obvious that it's a lead up to Going Rogue and will happen sometime around the release of that.

I've converted this to a PDF and linked it here since I hate having to reformat long stories for the forum, and because the story deals with some adult themes, so only click on the link if you're mature enough to deal with post-watershed TV.

Decisions of Import

I also let my account lapse for a while, so I don't get 60 for a while yet, even though I've been playing since the EU beta.

I'm also an ancient old codger in real life, as it happens.

Morning papers, February 6th 2010

Three security guards and two police officers were killed by an unknown female assailant wielding two knives late on Friday night. The police were responding to a break-in at a jewellery store in Founders' Falls. At this time, police have no leads on the criminal involved.

Thank you.

I've been creating a few new CoH pictures, as has my old friend Dan, btw.

Mine can be found on my DeviantArt page.

You can see a link to Dan's totally amazing and excellent work down in the 'Watchers' box (~Happy-Dan).

While you're there, you may also spot a link to the #CityOfHeroes group where you can discover such vast arrays of CoX artwork, good, bad and weird, that you may never need another link.

And for those who already knew about all that...

Not bad, I like it.