Samuel_Tow

This would actually be a good set to mix in some Nemesis gear, as well, I think. Sure, his is more 18th Century cavalry, but at least the gas masks and goggles are similar.

Um... How do you reconcile these two statements? "Hey, I'm sorry but I really don't care you're upset." Can't have it both ways, really.

And you weren't "a little" dismissive of villains and non-four-colour heroes, you were downright insulting to the very idea of their existence. Preferences are one thing, and no-one can hold you to task for what you like or dislike, but to go around telling people their concepts are wrong and worthless and don't belong in the game is not nice, especially when you cap it with the old standby of arguments that is "I don't take this seriously and I don't care about your feelings," as the spawn of the "it's just game" genre.

The truth of the matter is that if you want people to respect your opinion and your preferences and discuss that in a civil, friendly manner, you need to do the same in return and not go on a campaign to prove why certain heroes shouldn't be heroes and how people who play villains are wrong. Give courtesy and you shall receive courtesy.

A few points:

1. This seems to fly in the face of Zwill saying he'll bring this up, so at least one person agrees with the idea.

2. You're completely missing the point of adding more costume pieces and the costume editor in general. A costume pieces is most valuable when it can be used for themes other than what it was designed as, and pieces which cannot be adapted are inherently less useful.

3. There's nothing about a post-apocalypting theme that says everything has to be dirty. Even in the Fallout universe, water still exists and chrome steel was never destroyed.

4. What do you care if I get a piece I want that you won't use if it's not a lot of work to create it?

5. A theme can only ever be used as an argument for the inclusion of a costume item and never against the inclusion of it.

You're probably right. I just want the studio to hire at least one person whose sole job is to read other people's work and correct it. In essence, I want someone to go over the game's texts and storylines who can't have the excuse of "Oh, he was too busy animating bugs away with his pocket calculator to worry about how 'rediculous' is spelled!" I want this to be a job, not just someone's side project for whenever there's spare time.

It doesn't, not really. Metallic looks very good in white, silver and sometimes black, but as soon as you start colouring it anything RGB and you'll notice your colours blending with what the set is reflecting. Because the editor is, bizarrely enough, designed to reflect a scene with white buildings, green trees and a blue sky despite having a very red background, you end up Metallic looking greenish.

That said, I do agree with you that Metallic does TAKE colours better, it's just that those colours are then mixed in with what it reflects, whereas Celestial just plain doesn't take colour and honestly doesn't look like it reflects anything (it looks "shiny" like the old CoV parts), so it has to be an artistic choice. I don't know why that choice was made, but I'll always pick customizability over artistry, since what I make will naturally always appeal to me more than what other people make. It's the selfishness of self-praise.

This is actually a big problem I have with City of Heroes costume design from pretty much Steampunk until quite recently - the artwork is good, but it's very specific to the artist's vision. Again, no matter how good a piece of artwork is, what a player makes will always appeal more, if for no reason other than because the player made it. The more specific that our pieces get and the more it feels like we're selecting a character rather than making one, the less people will appreciate the artwork and the harder they will judge it. The worst thing that can happen to a good costume set is for people to say "Meh, it's not what I wanted so I don't care about it." Make it customizable and people will make it into what they want it to be.

We can argue exactly how much the old "the game will not be rebalanced around needing Inventions" has to do with NEW content being balanced around Inventions, but what I know for a fact it means is that EXISTING POWERSETS will not be rebalanced to require Inventions. Going with the idea that "IOs usually make these powers skippable" and then changing them into something I won't have a use for but a heavy Inventions build for could use is the very definition of breaking this rule.

I know that's not what you're implying, but I still want to say this because it bears repeating: No set should ever be balanced to function with the expectation that the player will be using a specific Inventions build. A set must work for everybody, including people who don't use Inventions and including people who don't even have access to Inventions. If crashing god modes are useless on heavy Inventions builds, then I'll be over there in the corner crying about crocodile tears about it. They're useful TO ME, and I don't want that taken away from me.

Honestly? I can believe it, but I'd say that at the very least someone who speaks English well will do just fine. Hell, I'd do it for free, but they'd never hire me

God-Man is what I had in mind when I wrote that.

Oh, um...



This. Is. AMAZING! Thank you! I'll go remake Isabella's costume as soon as this hits Live. Thanks!

And that's precisely the worst kind of way to structure a story. If good wins because evil is stupid, then good hasn't earned that victory and the story has lost its power. A good story needs a good villain because a good villain makes the hero's victory meaningful. There's no satisfaction to be had if the villain trips over his own feet and knocks over his own doomsday device (I think Drakken may have actually done this), because at no point did the hero's actions seem necessary or difficult. In order for a "good triumphs over evil" story to be interesting, good needs to earn its victory, and this requires a villain that this victory is meaningful against.

I think trying to look at this in terms of "good" and "evil" is misleading, so let's look at a basic wrestling angle of a "face" (someone you cheer) vs. a "heel" (someone you boo). In order for any wrestling angle to be successful, you need the crowd to cheer the face and boo the heel. One without the other will not work. You want to get the crowd engaged, you want them to care about the outcome, so you want them to like the face and hate the heel. That's what makes one "a good heel" - when he is able to get to the crowd and really make people hate him. You also need to make the heel look like a legitimate threat, like the hardest fight the face has ever had to fight, you want the audience to cheer every time the face gets the upper hand and boo when the heel takes control. In all of this, you NEED a good heel or this simply doesn't work.

It helps to look at this from the standpoint of a storyteller, rather than a player. When you're creating a story purely of your own, you need to manufacture the drama yourself. You cannot afford to favour the hero or the story you produce will be boring. A story about an invincible hero who never faces adversity and curb-stomps an incompetent villain is boring in the extreme, and this was probably THE first lesson I had to learn when I was first beginning to write. YOU need to create a good hero and a good villain and off those craft a good story. You cannot afford to take sides because this WILL be evident in the final story you create and observant people will pick up on it.

We don't want to see a hero lose, but we also don't want to see the hero win a victory he didn't deserve. Short of outright defeat, this is probably the worst outcome a story could have. In fact, depending on how it's handled, it can often be worse than a defeat.

Thank you for bringing this up and saving me the trouble of starting a whole new thread over it like I was gonna'

Heroes are not reactive characters. They can be, but it's not required, nor is it a part of their being a hero. Pretty much the only place you'll see the "reactive" heroes done the most strongly is Saturday morning American cartoons, and that's just because of the traditional format of one-of "shorts" that don't connect to each other in any way aside from featuring the same characters and setting. Pretty much any hero of the last few decades that you pull out of a cartoon will have roughly the same format, from the Swat Kats to Hong Kong Phoey, from Top Cat to Huckleberry Fin. But that's not all heroes can be about, it's just what's the easiest to re-run out of order.

But even speaking of Saturday Morning cartoons, I can instantly pick out a great counter-example: Samurai Jack. Jack's entire story revolves around needing to find a way back into the past to kill Aku before he took over the world and became invincible. Everything he does is either an effort to achieve this goal, or a distraction that happens along the way. In one episode Aku keeps flying away with a time machine, so Jack learns to "jump good." In one episode Jack finds a time portal, but he can't get to it because the guardian is too strong. In one episode Jack looks for a monastery with a time portal but Aku destroys it before he can use it. When you get down to it, that's all Aku ever seems to do - watch what Jack is doing from afar and try to react to his actions. In that cartoon, it's the villain who is reactive and the hero who is proactive.

And that's just American television. Pick pretty much any anime, watch a few episodes and you'll realise you're essentially watching one very, very long movie that's just broken up into episodes. And in that very, very long movie, you are, more often than not, following the heroes who have been sent on some sort of quest. Maybe they need to get to somewhere, maybe they need to find someone, maybe they need to learn the true meaning of friendship or whatnot, and the villain is generally either just trying to stop them or having parallel adventures of his own.

Even if you go to comic books themselves, you'll rarely see a run that's comprised entirely of heroes waiting by the Powerpuff Girls phone, then responding to a disaster when it rings and immediately going back to waiting by the phone. Maybe in the old days, like the 60s, when stories were, again, not very interconnected, but these days of "sequential art," you're pretty much always going to have the hero out doing something to move the plot. Sure, it might start with the hero responding to a crime in progress, but a lot of the time it will develop into a plot where the hero needs to be proactive - to take action on his own initiative - in order to resolve the situation. And that's if you ignore a fair number of heroes whose chief characteristic is something they're always trying to do, like Bruce Banner being driven by finding new ways to fail to rid himself of the Hulk.

Basically what I'm saying is it's very easy to write heroes as being reactive, but it's not a very good way to go about making compelling stories. In fact, if you look at pretty much any City of Heroes story arc from the oldest to the newest, you'll find heroes being proactive in it. Sure, it's the contact that comes up with the plans, but the hero isn't exactly a mercenary following orders for money. If you look at the relationship between hero and "contact" as the dynamic it was meant to be - that between a detective and a street contact - you'll find it's a collaboration. The contact comes up with the information and the hero and the contact agree on a course of action. Almost every story arc starts with "Something is happening and I don't know what it is. Go find out!" but immediately thereafter turns into "OK, that's weird. We need to understand this, and to do that, let's take the initiative."

Now contrast this with your typical I6 City of Villains story arc, let's say by Operative Kirkland. "Hey, I have a problem. Solve it and I'll pay you." "Hey, that didn't solve the problem, but do this other thing and I'll pay you." "Hey, that almost worked, but go do this last thing and I'll pay you." "All done? Get lost!" Where City of Heroes starts with heroes responding to a crisis but turns into a proactive investigation, old-style City of Villains starts with responding to a contact's needs and proceeds by responding to a contact's needs. Far, far, FAR too many I6 CoV story arcs don't really have anything to their story, so much as they're a string of paper missions joined by a common plot.

The reason Dean, Leonard and so forth have arcs that resonate so well with the community here is that they allow the villain to be proactive in much the same way as a hero would be - the villain would initiate the story by reacting to an opportunity, but will then proceed to be proactive in exploiting that opportunity. If a hero can be generalised as working for the greater good and thus working WITH a contact towards a proactive solution to a problem, so a villain can be generalised as working for his own agenda and thus working WITH a contact towards a proactive exploitation of an opportunity.

This is the direction future story arcs need to follow: What can I do with this situation to turn it in my favour? This is also the way future story arcs need to end: What do I accomplish at the end of this arc that helps me in any way?

That's the whole point. Mitigating or avoiding the crash of the power should not be an option because the crash is the price you pay for the performance. To me, this is essentially betting that you'll be done in three minutes, and if you're not, you lose by default. Or you run away, whichever. It's not really a gamble, since anyone with decent experience with the specific character will know more or less how long a fight will take. This, then, makes it a strategic decision and at most a calculated risk.

Being able to muscle through even extreme danger is one aspect of melee characters I'm not prepared to give up. Yes, it has drawbacks, but for the performance involved, I'll take it. As I said - unlike Nukes, you're actually in control of how effective the power is and what happens when it ends.

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Elude, however, is an exception. It gives massive amounts of defence, most of which is massive overkill, while offering no real form of protection beyond that. Considering I've been killed through Elude more often than through all other God Mode powers combined, I'd say the power needs a few tweaks.

If we do end up with a new torso for women and it's NOT a more muscular one, I'm going to cry foul.

There's also this, as well. For me, a lot of old cartoon shows were made good because they had a good villain. The Swat Kats had Dr. Viper and Dark Kat, for instance, and both of those were sold both as real, respectable threats and as very capable, powerful individuals. I've always hated shows with a weak, bumbling joke villain because it really demeans the accomplishment when he's defeated, which is why Kim Possible never worked for me. I don't like stupid villains any more so than I like stupid heroes, is what I'm getting at.

There are some stories where a villain will be so good you'll want to cheer for him. Not necessarily want him to win, obviously, but you'll want him to lose graciously and show up to be a villain again later on. THAT is the kind of villain I can respect. To this day, I feel that half the reason I watched Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is because of Mark Hamil's Skeleton King as the main villain. That guy is put over so strongly it's just a joy to watch everything he's involved with.

To me, City of Villains is the opportunity to create these kinds of villains for myself, and to play them off as the cool antagonists. That's what makes them fun.

Bottom line is they need an editor. At least one. What I mean by "editor" is a person whose sole job, or at least primary job to where he can put everything else aside, is to read through all of the stories suggested BEFORE they go into production to catch any glaring continuity problems, and then once more read through all the text of the finished arc to take a pickaxe to the writing. Mark for spelling, word choice, redundancy, sentence structure, grammar and general narrative. I get that QA exists sort of for this, but QA seem to be concerned with showstopping bugs and give text errors a very low priority and "writing" no priority at all. What Paragon Studios need is someone who's willing to tell people their baby is ugly because a LOT of the worst excesses would have been avoided if someone other than the people directly making the story were involved BEFORE the story were finished and put on Beta.

You know, right at this point, I'm convinced that the game would lose absolutely nothing by just opening up both cities to both sides in the same way it works for Rogues and Vigilantes and just letting those factions gather hero/villain merits anyway. I'll never argue for reducing teaming opportunities, but in this case I feel they're better handled out-of-character meta-game as opposed to trying to justify them via storyline. Just come up with a reason for why villains aren't attacked on sight in Paragon City and vice versa, and I'm pretty much on board.

That's actually a good question. Let's take Dean/Leonard and break that down to show why it's good. I think it may be helpful.

First of all, Dean McArthur, and to a lesser extend Leonard. Dean is a stooge. He's a small fish and he knows it. Dean doesn't try to control me, Dean doesn't talk down on me, Dean isn't using me. Dean is pretty much offering to serve me. He's the little puppy weaving between my legs as I go do grown-up stuff, and there's noting wrong with kicking him out of the way once in a while. By making Dean small, it paints my villain as big, and that counts for a LOT.

Secondly, this is an arc that's all about ME. Sure, Dean is still the contact and it's still the game system feeding me the mission objectives, but the narrative is presented such that it's MY ambition working towards MY own benefit. Dean is a source of information and a cruncher of information. He's the guy who says "According to what you did and what I know, this is the next logical step." His dialogue is presented as a reasonable course of action, rather than orders. This makes my villain feel independent. I'm not working for someone else, I'm not taking anyone's orders, and when other people do get in my way, I just step on them and keep going. That counts for a lot.

Lastly, it's vindictive. Revenge may be the most worthless of causes, but that's because it usually comes from deep loss that can never be healed. On the flip side, revenge against annoying people who have gotten in your way but not hurt you meaningfully can be VERY satisfying. I'm referring to Protean here. Protean is an *******. He's arrogant, he's self-assured, he's insulting, and he's such an insufferable jackass that beating his face in is very satisfying. And not only that, but the final mission has the sentiment of "Protean might have taken your clone lab, but you can get back at him by taking all of HIS money!" And I love it! I can just imagine Protean finding out he's broke now and angrily stomping on his hat. What's satisfying here is putting one over on the guy. He's so irredeemable that there's no way to feel sorry for him, so being able to hurt him is just bliss.

Why the Dean/Leonard arc work is because they allow us to experience emotions normally considered "wrong" in an environment that makes this sort of thing OK and actively cheers with us. It's fun because it allows me to be a petty, vindictive, arrogant bully and not just get away with it, but be praised for it. It doesn't get any better than that.

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Now, granted, you can say that that's not "evil enough," and it probably isn't. Evil can get a lot darker, and there are ways to do that even with Dean/Leonard. Saving your clone only to kill it, to the cries of "Why? I just wanted to meet you!" is one of the most unpleasant things I've done in this game, and I don't intend to repeat it. So the option is there, but if I choose to not take it, I'm still allowed to do very bad things and have fun doing them without feeling guilty about it.

Hence why I said I don't get it and asked for examples. And you're right, I'd completely forgotten about the baggy costumes of older heroes. I don't think I've even seen heroes in these outside of example picture, but I know what you mean... I think.

That's pretty much what we're asking for, though - villainous content that feels villainous, for at least some definition of the word. What I and others don't like is co-op content being passed off as "villainous" content when, by its very nature, it's hero-themed. You really can't make content that appeals to both heroes and villains at the same time. The closes you can come is making content that's unappealing to both heroes and villains in roughly equal measure, and then nobody wins.

The basic gist of it, when you get right down to it is "Enough with fighting for the greater good, already!" It feels like we've gone from one "larger than us all" war to another for the last few years, and it shouldn't be like this. Even from a pure storytelling perspective, the massive wars where everyone has to band together are starting to grow old. Swap a few names around and voilà! Here's your next plot that's more or less exactly like the previous one.

I know it's cheaper. I know it's easier. And you know what? It shows.

I never got this, myself. Solver/Golden age looks are pretty much patterned tights, are they not? We already have tights, we already have patterns. What else is there left to do? I remember David's thread on the matter but for the life of me, I can't remember something that's not either "modern" or already in the game.

Add my voice to the pile. I want to see cleaner versions of the parts, as well. One of the great things about the City of Heroes costume creator is our ability to repurpose existing costume pieces to look like something other than what they were originally intended to be. The less specific pieces are to a particular theme, the wider their use will be.

No. We, as players, expect more imaginative writing. This isn't an RP problem of "I can't explain my villains doing good." It's a customer problem of "the content you're designing isn't good enough." I get why they're doing it - it's cheaper and faster. Be that as it may, I'd prefer DECENT content over A LOT of content.

Basically, I can explain away anything I need to, but the fact remains that sometimes, I wish I didn't have to. I don't WANT to have to explain some things away, and I don't WANT the writers to keep putting me in the position to do that. There's only so long I can pretend my villains are working for the greater good while having unmentioned off-screen evil plans before I throw my hands in the air, go "Aw, **** it!" and just stop trying to read the story.

No, it's not. Dean McArthur did it. Leonard did it. Vincent Ross did it. Bane Spider Ruben did it. Brother Hammond did it. Time After Time did it. A whole bunch of Architect authors have managed it. It's neither hard nor time-consuming nor is it all that complicated. It just needs a writer who's willing to sit down and figure out what, exactly, he's trying to communicate to players.

You're using the old argument that "evil" is too vile to show for the game's rating, and it's an argument which never worked at all, specifically because so many of us have spent years outlining the many ways to do fun evil that isn't vile. Most people don't want blood and guts and murder and torture that make them feel icky for having played it. It's why Westin Phipps is infamous - because he's exactly the wrong kind of evil. What people want is a game that lets them have fun while being evil, and it's not that hard to figure this out if you actually pay attention to what's been said by people instead of hand-waving it away and jumping to convenient conclusions.

There are many reasons people in real life turn to crime, and "because I like evil" is rarely among them. People do it for personal gain, they do it for power, they do it out of ego, they do it because they believe it's the right thing to do, and all of those can be presented in a way that's fun to do. There's a reason old-style mobsters were seen as role models by young kids who didn't know better. They had the nice suits, the nice cars and the good houses, they had all the power to make others respect them and hurt those who would hurt them. They were glamorous when they were on top of their game. The poor people who worked their ***** off for pittance saw this as the better life, and that's exactly the kind of glamour villains need to capitalise on to have broad appeal.

What you and many others need to realise is that we don't want an objective lesson rubbing our faces in the mud and teaching us that evil is bad. I'm pretty sure everyone knows that already. What we want is a glamorous idealisation of villains as the kind of people we want to be when we're sick of the world around us and just want to punch the boss and go on to live a better life. It's escapism no different from playing a hero, only heroes offer relief from the frustrations of the good we can't do while villains offer relief from the frustration of the bad we really ought to not do.

And I'm sick and tired of repeating this exact same argument for six, seven years now, only to have people apparently just not read it and repeat what they were saying all along.

Yes, but it's not a meaningful one. There's no mandate that everything in City of Heroes has to conform to American comic books as published by DC and Marvel. I leave Image Comix out of this, because they gave us heroes like Pitt.

Pretty much the saddest thing that could happen to City of Heroes is to turn what made the game so versatile in the first place into the anchor around the neck which keeps it limited. Comic books as an argument for game additions should only ever be used to argue for something to be added and never against adding something.

I've lost count of the times I've Footstomped at nothing because someone blew the things around me out of range, or a Blaster nuked. Corpse-blasting will happen. I'm playing Street Justice right now and I corpse-blast half the time on a team just because their attacks were almost done animating when I hit the button. Corpse-blasting itself isn't a problem, at least not now that enemy drain powers will still drain even if the target dies mid-animation. It's the symptom of another problem altogether, which is that your team has considerably more outgoing damage than the enemies really need to take down.

I've seen this happen a lot. I usually solo at +0x2, so when I invite another person to the team, we now have two people fighting my solo spawns (since difficulty doesn't increase with people until the number of people exceeds the enemy number setting). With my Titan Weapon Brute, I could usually take out a whole spawn in about three attacks, which left my team-mate corpse-blasting a lot even with a fast set. My solution, when I don't forget to do it, is just to raise the difficulty to +0x3 so we're still fighting for one man over what we have.

That's precisely the point you're missing. We're not asking for "content for my villains," we're asking specifically for "villainous" content which not all "content for my villain" is. This isn't a question about quantity, it's a question about theme. That's not the same thing.

Let me put this into perspective. Suppose I just watched Aliens and I really really liked it. I told you "Hey, I have another couple of hours before I need to get ready for work and I'd like to watch another movie. I really liked Aliens, can you give me another one like it?" In response, you hand me of The Princess Diaries, insisting that "It's still a movie, right?" Well, it is a movie that I can watch, but it's not a movie that's like Aliens, now is it?

The Techbot clearly explained what he saw as villainous content - stuff like Dean McArthur and Leonard. He didn't ask for more content, any content whatsoever that his villains can run. He ask for a specific kind of content that fits the theme of the game it's introduced into. And he's hardly the only one who wants that.

The simple fact of the matter is villains have enough content. They've had enough content since Experience Smoothing. What villains need isn't more quantity, it's more quality, and masquerading hero content offers quantity and quantity alone.