SlickRiptide

The part of my brain that imagines all of the really ludicrous possible outcomes of all of this has been wondering about the possibility of Shalice mind-riding into Rularu when Wade is defeated.

Assuming that Faathim gave us the straight scoop, it seems that there are no shortcuts to Ascension. Wade tried but in the end, he was already being consumed by Rularu. ("We are Rularu. We are eternal.")

Apparently our "well" is NOT just a huge pool of raw potential that takes on characteristics of personality that reflect the desires of the Mass Consciousness of humanity. Apparently it is, or at one time was, an actual entity with a gender and an identity.

Attempting to judge whether it is sane or insane is probably a pointless exercise. Human standards don't apply to cosmic entities.

I'd agree that Aqua Vitae (I just dubbed "him" that) was probably never human to begin with. If Rularu is truly an example of an ascended human then it probably doesn't matter anyway. Ascencion would seem to transform one into something that could scarcely be called human.

As an aside, we don't really know for a fact that Rularu is what Prometheus meant by an "unauthorized ascencion" and I'm inclined to believe that he means something else entirely or else he'd be less evasive about it. I rather like the idea of DJ Zero being the "unauthorized" deity. It certainly would help explain why celestial beings keep stopping by his club. Even deities sometimes need a place where they can just let their hair down and relax for a while. It says something interesting about Nemesis, given that some version of him finally achieved Ultimate Power and this is what he did with it...

So, the big release for 2013 is going to be "City of Heroes: Ascension!" with its own world-building tookit?

The scenery in this chapter salvaged a great deal of what was otherwise a lot of "blahbity-blah". No, really, I was saying that to myself as I read the dialog for the first few missions. It may be that I was just feeling cynical or it may be that it really was as pointless as it felt. I ghosted through the first two missions asking myself why I was even being faced with these minions.

Faathim's dialog had me shaking my head and saying "Well, it looks like Darren will be hoist by his own petard after all." I'm glad the story didn't end that way (though they hinted at it at the end). It would have been the ultimate anti-climax if it had.

I suppose that it established that Wade was sort of possessing Rularu rather than literally merging with it.

The outdoor scenery in mission three was when I sat up and took notice. I have to give some cool points for that one. It was pretty neat. It goes to show that sometimes epic writing is best conveyed with epic visuals.

It also established Wade as a mass murderer. After it was all said and done, I googled "How large a crew does a USA battleship hold?" and I learned that 1500 was a reasonably round number. There were five ships out there as I recall, which means that Wade "melted" around 4500 able seamen.

If I wasn't already snorting at his pathetic mewling about how unfair it was that he should be defeated, the thought of those sailors deaths would have been more than ample justification for killing Wade outright.

In fact, I sort of thought that's what Infernia was hinting at when she was briefing me about the press conference. I expected to have the opportunity to destroy Wade in front of a global audience. No such luck, though.

Penelope Yin was useless and I mentally told her so. In fact, my hero was uncharacteristically hard and cold throughout this chapter. I think he might be turning to the dark side for awhile as a result of all of this. I guess we'll see.

I would have liked to see the press conference questions have a more obvious answer-based result. It appears that only "attack the press" really had any noticable results.

Overall, the high points outweighed the negatives. A tentative thumbs-up, though that doesn't change anything I felt about the previous chapters.

Undecided here. The opportunity to meet George Takei may tip me over into "going".

Despite having re-upped my sub for a couple of weeks, I have not yet played Chapter Six. Given yet another chapter of despair, loss, and failure for the Heroes, I find myself mustering very little desire to play through it.

I'm really struggling to see how this story is going to have any kind of uplifting ending for Blue.

Given that I already know how it turns out, and I don't care particularly about the alignment merit reward, is there any reason to bother with it? Is there something in the mission that makes it worth running aside from the story?

The scary thing is that I now can imagine the story ending with an alternate universe Hero version of Wade showing up to take down Villain Wade.

Too expensive, even for my Leperchaun villain character.

On another note, am I the only old-timer who reads "800pp" and translates into "800 plat" in his head?

Well, now.

It seems to me that the answer to this conundrum is not to invent new game mechanics or more scaling. The proper answer is to invent multiple battle groups and tailor them to the size and/or composition of the player team (which is conceptually what scaling is doing, just by dynamically modifying some fixed set of enemy assets).

How do we do that? By employing that nifty new phasing tech that lets you see Atlas Park on fire at one moment in time and serenely at peace and Arachnos-free the next time you stop by.

I would even go so far as to say that small groups should end up with a slightly different (or even majorly different) story than a large group gets. In effect, the small group gets a small group tailored mission and the large group gets a mission tailored to their greater firepower, perhaps even with variations in the mission goals. A solo player might have stealth options that a full team would not.

The only new game engine code is a function that runs during mission initialization that looks at the team size and drops an appropriate phase marker onto the team leader.

Don't focus so much on the market if you are VIP?

The month of March brought Darkness Control, Olympian Guard, and a Dark Astoria revamp, amongst other things.

Seems like things are pretty well balanced to me. The important stuff (or what I infer the OP to consider to be "the important stuff") is free and the fluff is sold on the market for dollars.

That seems like the "right" way to do things, does it not?

In any case, stuff like the Imperial Dynasty costume set is more than just "fluff", if you happen to miss spending $10 on one of the old booster packs and you really must have something non-fluffy to purchase in the market.

Personally, if people like me who buy the fluff because it's fluffy are subsidizing stuff like the Olympian Guard costume set then I'm okay with that. Everyone finds their own level of value for what the game provides.