SlickRiptide

The writers who keep producing the Manticore and Friends show seem to think that we love him.

I don't hate him, but I'd sure like to see someone else get the spotlight.

Did I miss something? What mistakes has Wade made? He looks to be firing on all cylinders, to me. Mistakes that he makes off-screen where I never see them are useless from a story-telling standpoint. Why should I grant him a pass because he might have made some mistakes that I don't know about and never will know about?

I, as a player/reader, should not have to invent a second story in order for the first story to become palatable. I shouldn't have to wave my hands and say "Wade did have setbacks but they didn't involve you so you don't know about them." or "Wade did have contingencies and he was forced to use some of them but you don't get to see that he had to do that because it doesn't affect your perspective on the story."

That's the big problem here. Almost everyone who defends the story starts writing their own story to fill in the blanks. Well, the blanks are what I'm complaining about. If I wanted a story full of blanks to fill in, I'd write it myself and tell the story I wanted to tell from start to finish.

This is supposedly the premier super hero team in the world. Instead of working together and having each other's back, they're all working at odds and they have no frigging clue what they're doing most of the time. This is not a team. It's a group of individuals following their individual agendas and behaving like rookies. Frankly, if this is the way that the Freedom Phalanx handles a chain of crises of this magnitude then they deserve to go down in flames like they are currently in the process of doing.

*rimshot*

*passed Dug another beer*

I really don't see how that's relevant when the mechanics were not used in the story. The only two possible endings to that chapter are A) The player quits or 2) Ruladek is defeated. Since A) is not really playing the chapter to its conclusion, the only possible conclusion is 2), which makes any arguments about failure to kill the PC as some kind of failure on Wade's part to be moot. He CAN'T kill the PC. We have script immunity.

No. You're generalizing from one example, which is exactly what the SSA author did. You don't really have any clue how Statesman handles anybody's death because you've only seen him do it once when Monica died, and that was his beloved wife of some fifty years or so.

Even if that IS some kind of repeatable trigger, it's only the catalyst that puts Statesman out in solitude while he deals with his grief. There's simply no way that you can also count on him acting on his grief alone against the perpetrator and doing so without any preparation, never mind counting on him hiding himself so well that a supergroup that included some of the world's leading scientists, psychics and magicians couldn't find him and go to his aid.

It just buggers belief in my opinion.

You make that sound as if there was some possible outcome where he COULD be successful. That's game mechanics.

As it stands, from a pure story standpoint, my Ill/Rad controller was totally mystified as to why Wade buggered out and summoned Ruladek to finish the fight for him. No, seriously. I still don't get it. Wade was winning the fight as far as I could see. One minute he's kicking my hero's butt, the other he's all "Well, ta ta, we'll finish this another time. Meet my friend Ruladek the Ravager."

As far as Ruladek, I didn't quit the task force but if Ruladek was "real" then he'd have won the fight too. I beat him in the end but there were several KO's and couple of trips to the infirmary that took place before he got dispelled back to the Shadow Shard or wherever it is that he normally hangs out. That was game mechanics, not story plotting. I essentially had the same script immunity that Wade has, so it left me scratching my head in puzzlement when my contact told me that I'm clearly the only thing that Wade fears. If he's afraid of me, then it says bad things about the rest of the hero community.

I'm going to agree with Raymond Chandler via Venture on this one. When you strip away everything else, you end up with the climax of Wade's plan hinging on Marcus Cole walking into the trap unaided, unprepared, and unsuspecting.

That's a whole lot of "uns" to be banking on. I read Robin Laws' _The Freedom Phalanx_ novel, so I am well acquainted with the characterization of Statesman as this guy who handles his grief by going off and mooning over it alone (a characterization that is mostly lost on players who did not read the novel). We're supposed to count on that knowledge as some kind of justification for Wade's ability to count on that list of "uns".

I just don't buy it, personally. What I see is that the SSA author(s) took a single plot element from a novel that was tied to a seminal event in Statesman's life and treated it as if it's some kind of deep-seated character flaw that anybody can count on triggering if they reproduce those circumstances.

We're supposed to believe that Wade deliberately killed Alexis when it wasn't really necessary to achieve his ends (he just needed a sample of her blood), because doing so put Marcus exactly into the frame of mind that would lead him to confront Wade alone and unprepared by virtue of letting his passion and his grief override his common sense and decades of experience. We're supposed to believe that Marcus reacted EXACTLY as Wade expected him to right down the line, right up to facing him without any kind of backup and Wade even predicted that any such backup that did exist would be some indie hero who could be distracted into wasting time searching his lair, instead of being the rest of the Phalanx who would be frantically searching for Marcus and doing everything in their considerable power to find and help him in his hour of need.

The whole thing is just patently unbelievable, and it doesn't help that when Marcus does show up that he appears to be calm, cool, and collected; anything BUT storming in with all guns blazing and tricked by his fury and grief into doing something foolish.

Yeah, I just would find it amusing to hear Muttley's actual snicker sound as a triggered audio loop of some kind.

I really think they should have given Muxley (the Lost boss) some kind of ambient snicker sound effect in that mission.

I'm pretty sure CK has a line about protecting Penny "from boys", and it isn't something that suggests a brotherly sort of protective spirit, though I guess it's just vague enough to be open to interpretation.

Of course, that whole bit just reinforces the whole "kid" aspect of things, or maybe it's just CK's own personal insanity that makes him treat her that way instead of treating her as a roughly twenty-year-old woman. (Age guess based on the implied aging that happens to Temblor and Fusionette between Faultline and RWZ.)

As for a "hinted at" pedophile relationship, that just goes back again to the fact that Penny's age was so indeterminate that people assumed she was a kid. Clearly, if she's 18-20 by the time of Lady Grey's Task Force then there's not even a hint of pedophilia in the relationship.

I'd even go so far as to say that one reason that Penny became a "much loved" character (to use the Dev's words from the preview of I-22) is BECAUSE so many people viewed her as a kid. If she had been viewed by everyone from the beginning as a peer of Jim Temblor and Fusionette, I am of the opinion that she would not have become nearly as much of a "much loved" character. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Look - Complaining about the age thing is not some emo attachment to unicorns and glitter, so how about if we just dispense with the desperation and the denial, alright? Consistency is exactly what the complaint is about, though I'm not going to ram it down your throat if you happen to have a different definition of consistency.

Complaining about having to adjust and deal doesn't mean that we're not all just going to adjust and deal. With any luck, someone in the writing staff will look at the complaints and say "Well, maybe we should be more thorough next time." That's the ultimate goal, if there can be said to be a goal. Nobody who is complaining, nor any of the people who have commented WITHOUT complaining, are going to lose sleep over Penny being revealed to really be a young adult instead of a mature teen in the "current" timeline of the game.

LMAO!

Without judging your chosen buzzwords, they pretty much all boil down to the fact that many of us didn't think of her as "child-like", we thought of her as a child, period.

Turning her into a mid-twenties adult is a bit more chaw than we were prepared to chew.

I know better than to argue with Venture about these things, but I'd ask what "it was there" actually means?

If there was a post on the forums by a red name then I'd say "Okay, you're right." If it was simply hearsay then I'd say that they didn't actually do anything to correct the problem. A note sent to a curious player like BlueBattler is not "action" that fixes anything. Adjusting Penny's description to include that information would be taking action, in my mind. Heck, even just putting it in some official place like Manticore's old Canon Fodder thread would at least be something.

My original assertion still stands - the devs follow the forums or they have people to follow the forums, and they knew or should have known that many people believed Penny to be a teen. They took no official action to correct that misconception.

Ironically enough, Google does show me that Bluebattler posted the information given him by Hero 1 in the "sister" thread, "Fodder for the Canon" back in 2009. I guess that puts it in at least one official place, even if it's one I wouldn't normally think to look in, and it's still basically hearsay.

I'm still dissatisfied but I'll concede that the information was floating out there in some form even if it's not the form I would have preferred.

Then it's a good thing that my ego isn't wrapped up in my credibility with you.

Were you around when the RWZ first launched? When Lady Grey's task force first opened there was a lot of snickering, nudging and winking on the forums over the fact that the Clockwork King was depicted as a borderline child molester.

The reason that occurred was that many players with no other information about Penny then her depiction in Faultline had drawn the same conclusion - that she was mid-teenaged, at most.

You can call it "horse blinders" all you want. I call it faulty writing. You know what they did about it back then? Not a thing. They knew years ago about this age problem and they did nothing to correct anyone's assumptions back then. Now, they pop out this factoid and expect everyone to just nod their heads and say "Oh, yeah, alright."

I don't think so. It's indicative of a problem that's endemic to the dev staff that they don't give us any more information than is strictly necessary.

You want another example? A couple of years ago if you looked up Miss Liberty and Freedom Corps in the Paragon Wiki you would have found that Miss Liberty was the founder of Freedom Corps or the leader of it or some other such "nonsense". Except that it wasn't nonsense back then. Miss Liberty wrote on Freedom Corps stationary and awarded Jingle Jets to the community in the name of Freedom Corps. People were left with almost no information about her otherwise or her affiliation, and the devs knew about the questions and chose not to answer them.

Now, we find in just the last few weeks that Miss Liberty gave up heroing years ago to be a consulate(sic). She apparently had nothing to do with Freedom Corps, she considers her hero days to be something semi-frivolous, and one can only speculate on why she was bothering to hand out jingle jets when she had diplomatic crises to be administering.

Once again, the devs had information that would have corrected the impressions people had or that were formed out of thin air in order to make sense of what they DID know, and the devs chose instead to leave everyone in the dark until such time as they burst everyone's bubble for their own purposes.

So, you'll have to forgive me but I do NOT view this as some kind of hard-headed blindness on my part, nor do I see it as an issue where "if you can do as good a job as the devs then either put up and get hired by them or shut up". It's an issue with the game's developers treating us like "shrooms" when it comes to the game's back story and I will protest against that as much as I please. If it annoys you to the point that you find me non-credible, well, the ignore button exists for a reason.

That doesn't explain anything at all, IMO. Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe we've discovered a new way to clone souls, though. You just pinch off a piece and plant it inside the soul of another person and let it take over like a cancer or parasite.