SlickRiptide
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Posts
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Joined
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As a long-time player and a card-carrying curmudgeon I have had plenty of complaints over the years, but communication is typically a positive trait of the developers of City of Heroes.
The only time I can say that communication was really poor was during the dark days when it looked like Cryptic was going to put the game in a dark corner and let it wither in favor of working on new projects (and most especially the theoretical Marvel game that never materialized).
It IS true that we don't have as much direct communication with the developers as we once enjoyed. I can remember making a suggestion to Chris Bruce of one of those items that we players always think of as "as good idea that should be easy to implement". He wrote back and didn't just say "No, that won't work." He took the time to give concrete examples of the inner workings of the game engine to say exactly why it wasn't nearly as "easy" as I had imagined it must be. My appreciation for the dev staff and their job of coding the game increased a great deal after that.
These days, upper management (meaning NCSoft) seems to have mandated more insulation between the players and the devs. Despite that, the Community Relations team is quite active and we still get to interact with Matt (Positron) and many of the other development staff via the video chats and the Facebook question/answer sessions.
Honestly, while I wouldn't quite call Paragon Studios an open book, I would put them miles ahead of most other game studios when it comes to keeping communications open between the studio and the players; despite the fact that their parent company has made some efforts to curtail that communication in the past. -
Quote:Fair enough. I value consistency. My mythical conversion of Sea-Tac into Tillicum was stated from the beginning to have no basis in the real world. My conversion of Seattle into Tillicum had an implied basis in the real world by virtue of it being a variation of Seattle.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
This is assuming your own conclusion. The question is why is that more acceptable. The only reason given appears to be because you don't care as much.
When the coastline of Paragon City becomes nonsensical when applied to the real world coastline of Rhode Island in general and of Providence in specific then it violates my sense of consistency. Paragon City has no basis in the real world, despite assertions that it is a variation of a real world place. -
Quote:Ignoring the implied "burn", where do you then draw the line where something is "too important" for "It's. Not. The. Real. World." to apply? Because if there IS a line then it pretty much says that is a bogus excuse, as I've been saying.Originally Posted by Wavicle
There's a real simple difference:
Paris is important.
Providence and Seattle not so much. -
Quote:If you feel curious enough, google up a map of Rhode Island and a map of Paragon City and put the one on top of the other. I'd be curious if the result fits your conception of "close but different". It fails mine, but maybe I'm too stringent.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
I always imagined that in CoH, the state lines were drawn a bit differently, too. And the sea coast isn't exactly the same shape. Close, but different.
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Quote:I see the differences this way:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Why is making up a region of Washington between Seattle and Tacoma ok, but not making up a region of Seattle itself? That line appears purely abitrary.
For the case of converting Sea-Tac into a metropolis in its own right with its own name and its own unique history, it's a given that pretty much everything about it is going to be different. There are no huge geographic features to speak of and because the whole thing is made up out of whole cloth I don't really care much about the fact that I might have to re-route a lot of the real-life roads and suburbs and what-not. I might have to relocate Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but then again, I might just leave it and just rename it Tillicum International Airport.
If I drop in a replacement for Seattle, on the other hand, and I am stating up-front that Tillicum is a version of Seattle that developed along different historical lines, then I am dealing with well-known (To Northwesterners, at any rate) history, freeways, ferry systems, geography like Lake Washington and Puget Sound. I have interesting things to consider like whether "skid row", a term that originated in Seattle, ever was invented or if it was invented differently. I have to consider how nearby (relatively speaking) cities like Portland and Vancouver, BC developed in light of this megalopolis occupying Seattle's position. I might lay out the city in a somewhat different pattern but I wouldn't cut out half of Lake Washington as if it wasn't there, nor would I move Ship Harbor into North Seattle just because I felt like having a harbor there.
If it's a variation, then by definition, some things must be the same or at least have the same origin.
Paragon City has been stated to be a variation of Providence, but the fact is that the geography of the city is nothing like Providence. The people who drew the map of Paragon City did not even pretend to be drawing a map of an alternate Providence.
Which is fine - just don't sell it as an alternate Providence. It's like selling it as an alternate Paris, except, you know it doesn't actually have any of the geographical features of Paris. But that's okay, because "It's. Not. The. Real. World." Right? -
Quote:Aren't you ignoring the fact that Longbow is theoretically a hero organization and therefore held to a higher standard? If they are Ms. Liberty's private army (a nd many of us are of that opinion) then they are mercenaries and should be treated as such rather than as heroes.Originally Posted by Issen
It's hilarious that people get all over Longbow's case when Arachnos is as bad or worse and blatantly gets away with stuff. But Longbow does something and it's immediately unforgivable.
Lovely double standard. -
It's not as obvious now with the revamped newbie game.
If you played through the old Atlas Park and Galaxy City content, there was a progression in the missions. You'd run across a mission appropriate to your origin, where you'd be introduced to a villain group. For instance, the old missions where you'd be asked to get clockwork gears because nobody really knows what the clockworks are or how they work or what they represent. You'd defeat some clockworks, then you'd get a mission where you found a diary of the Clockwork King where he notes that your hero bears watching; that s/he reminds him of himself as a youth.
Then you advance through the various clock work enemies until finally you face the King himself in the Synapse task force and you put him away. Then there are (or were, in the early days) no more clockwork above that level. The exceptions were alt-world missions, like the portal to the world of the Psychic Clockwork King.
Ditto for Vahzilok, and others. Cray corp is treated as an upstanding corporate citizen until you get into the thirties or so and then you know (even if the world at large does not) that they are mercenary. Etc, etc...
This is why all the jokes about the MAGI vault. It really just gets robbed once but everyone plays through it as part of their personal timeline, so it appears that it happens many times.
The new content was more or less forced to abandon that progression, short of raising the level cap every time something new came out. Some exceptions occured - you still can play through the whole Doppelganger story despite the fact that Praetoria was invading every other day there for awhile and Going Rogue has been out for an appreciable time.
Mostly, though, the idea of level progression = time progression has been getting shunted into the past. The removal of the old Atlas Park and Galaxy City content was not quite the final nail in the coffin but it pretty much insured that new players of Freedom would be unlikely to ever develop an association between levels and storyline time progression. -
I don't think it's a red herring. I think it's exactly what, uh, one of the red names who I don't recall now said: Statesman dies in act 5 and acts 6 and 7 are about the repercussions of his death. He's not coming back.
It should be pretty obvious at this point, with Miss Liberty and Malaise dead, Sister Psyche possibly insane and Manticore untrusted that this whole story is about shaking up the status quo and quite possibly eliminating the Freedom Phalanx as a force in Paragon City.
Statesman's death is just one brick in the wall, though I think it's one to which Matt and maybe some other old-timers are happily applying the mortar. -
Nobody said anything about fixing anything. I'm just agreeing with Venture that they didn't do the research.
As for "Fictional world", then make it a fully fictional setting. That's pretty darn easy. Nobody makes a big deal about Metropolis or Gotham City because those places are entirely fictional. If Metropolis was stated to be an analog of New York City,then people would expect it to resemble New York City.
In the greater scheme of things, it's of no consequence. I don't expect the devs or anyone else to ever really care. Heck, I wouldn't really care if I had not gone through the exercise of trying to map Paragon City to Providence and discovering just how badly the two map to each other; which is to say that they pretty much don't map to each other at all. -
I realize that you're treating this as pedantic, and you're welcome to view it that way.
The fact is, you never stated a question at all. Your subject is just your opinion phrased as a question, like a game of Jeopardy.
You don't actually need to give your answer to the "question" because it's implicit in the alleged question.
Now I grant you that there are conceivably some people who hate previewing costume bits before they buy them, but overall I can't see that there's a whole lot to actually say about the topic.
Are you asking people for ideas on how to do it better than it's already being done? -
Quote:You're implying that "or what?" is a question that needs answering?Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
Simple format:
1. state question
2. post my answer to said question
Would it be clearer if I repeated the question after my answer?
The only way I can parse your subject line is like this: "Paragon Market is the best way to buy costume pieces! Who's with me?"
That doesn't strike me as a subject for either discussion or for enlightenment. *shrug*
The fact that you then answer your own "question" pretty much removes any need for a response as far as I can tell...
Maybe I'm missing the point of this thread or the reason for it to be posited as a question in the first place.
****EDIT****
To be more precise, I'm not criticising your choice of format so much as your choice of topic. Unless we're supposed to discuss your feelings and their validity, I can't see much reason to make the post in the first place.
"I like previewing costume bits before I buy them!"
Well, um, more power to you? -
Quote:That's a bogus excuse. If it's "Not. Real. World. Honest." then don't state explicitly that Paragon City is an alternate version of Providence. Make it a completely fictional city in a completely fictional part of the USA.Originally Posted by bpphantom
Not. Real. World. Honest.
If I make a game and create a made-up city called Tillicum and place it between Seattle and Tacoma, stating that it grew up in place of either Seattle or Tacoma, then I can pretty much make up whatever history and geography I want for it, within reason.
If I drop a made up city in place of Seattle and then completely ignore the existence of Lake Washington and completely redraw the coastline of Puget Sound such that surrounding freeways have to be moved and nearby towns are completely obliterated then I'm being careless and lazy, no matter how much I wave my hands and say "Not the real world!" -
The conceit that time progresses as you level up is pretty much just a legacy thing nowadays. It's been a long time since new content was written with that progression in mind. The arrival of the Reichsman and his attempt to create an Evil League of Evil amongst the signature villains of the game is one of the more jarring examples I can think of.
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Is there an actual question or discussion topic here or is this just "Yay, I like the way the market lets me test drive costume pieces"?
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Quote:It's an active invasion. Arachnos troops are battling Longbow troops and people are dying on both sides. The Shivans are, of course, non-particular about who they kill.Originally Posted by DMystic
Is it an active invasion in Galaxy though?
Is he actively attacking Civilians or is he just there laughing at Statesman and the Phalanx?
Likewise, when you play through the new Atlas Park missions, you learn that Arachnos is specifically kidnapping and potentially killing civilians as part of a ploy to take over Paragon City in true moustache-twirling villain fashion.
The newbie-zone Arachnos is based on Saturday-morning cartoons. It doesn't have any sort of basis in real-world consequences of one sovereign nation invading another, especially when the victim is the USA.
Supposedly it's really all about getting hold of the shivan meteors but as far as I can tell it's never explained WHY anyone and everyone up to and including the Praetorians want to have them. -
Quote:Have you actually looked at a map of Providence or of Rhode Island in general?Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Yeah, I know for a fact that our earth has it's own Well of the Furies; Marcus and Steffan just didn't find it and died years ago.
COME ON, VENTURE. SUSPEND YOUR FREAKING DISBELIEF FOR FIVE SECONDS.
It's not a question of suspending disbelief. Paragon City literally could not fit into the area in question. It would have taken all of five seconds for the people who originally mapped out the city to see that if they had bothered to do so.
When you decide that "my city is an alternate version of this real world city" then the logical thing to do is to figure out how your city is analagous to that real world city, not to just make up whatever geography you want and say "but this is a different world with different geography".
Venture is absolutely correct, though I suspect it's less "they didn't do the research" and more that the people who drew up that original map didn't actually care. They just picked Providence because it sounded plausible and ran with it.
Trust me on this. I've written fanfic set during the initial Rikti invasion and I tried to figure out how the freeways into and out of Paragon City would map onto the real city of Providence. The geography of Paragon City is not quite completely bogus for a city that supposedly sits where Providence sits in our world. -
Considering that Ms. Liberty is alive and coaching newb heroes in Atlas Square, it seems a bit overstated to assume that your villain succeeded in killing her in the LRSF. You might as well say that Statesman and the entire Freedom Phalanx are already dead since you defeat all of them in that strike force also.
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The second Rikti invasion hasn't happened yet. Just ask Holsten Armitage.
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"Mary Sue" as a concept is non-gender-specific. People who insist on using the term "Marty Stu" are people who are, themselves, hung up on gender. The concept doesn't change just because you put a male name on it. The name Mary Sue is just a throwback to the earliest reference to the concept, which itself was nothing more than a made-up illustration of that concept; not a reference to an actual story.
BTW - To whichever Powers That Be are supposed to be tasked with reviewing mission text (Assuming that paragon wiki has the correct POI text concerning Alexis Cole): A CONSUL or CONSULAR is a person appointed by a government to represent their interests to foreign powers. A CONSULATE is the offices in which the CONSUL works. Just FYI. -
Croatoa is a zone that's unique in that the zone tells its own story. You get one story from the missions and you get expansion upon that story if you take the time to travel around the zone and watch the NPC's and see how they relate to each other.
Honestly, the Katie Hannon task force is just as random as anything else in the zone. If Croatoa was designed today, it would be built with phasing technology and you would literally save Salamanca from being absorbed by Croatoa. That isn't an option, though, so we get the weird "stuck in time" syndrome instead.
In any case, Croatoa is my favorite zone from a strictly zone-story perspective. If you care about who the factions are and what they want then the zone is designed to reward the people who take the time to explore the zone in search of answers to those questions.
The only thing I truly don't understand is why the Cabal is digging up the magic roots, or at least trying to find a source of them. Otherwise, I feel that it's a model that many other zones could benefit from emulating. -
You know, The Artiste has a few nukes with his own private launch codes orbiting the planet, courtesy of Warburg and its lax security. If Marcus and Megan won't do something about the death of Alexis, I have a feeling that Artiste might be willing to pull the trigger. He thinks Paragon City is just a big dream sequence, anyway...
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Quote:1) Consistency.Originally Posted by CaptainMoodswing
DOES it?
...why?
2) Supportability. Yeah, I made that word up.
Paragon Studios has to maintain the world once they add something to it. That means that they design it to require the minimum amount of upkeep in order to focus their primary effort on future development. A world that is a mish-mash of conflicting timelines is confusing to players and annoying for support staff to maintain.
If it's something that can be expressed via phasing, then sure, it could happen. That's not a case of multiple realities, it's just a case of personalized story progression. A world where Galaxy City is both whole and decimated at the same time is a world with a conflicting reality. A world where Statesman is simultaneously alive and dead is a world with a conflicting reality. A world where I see Matthew Habashy's wife because I rescued her and you don't because you didn't, is a world that is internally consistent; you just haven't progressed through the story as far as I have.
That's the extent to which you can "fudge" the appearance of the world. The game engine is not built to handle the management of inconsistent universes co-existing with each other. -
After reading the chapter three and four spoilers I don't expect to be subscribing in March or any other time just to have access to the story.
The silly thing is that we're "shaking up" the establishment so that we can delete Jack Emmert's Mary Sue and replace him with Matt's Mary Sue. Clearly, that's a better situation than what we have now. (Do I need to put sarcasm tags in?)
What happens the day that Matt gets kicked upstairs or leaves Paragon Studios? Do we start shouting for Positron's blood? I suppose that's when we REALLY shake up the status quo and use Positron's power to blow him up and the entire city along with him. There won't be anyone more powerful or more important than my character after that, and the world will be a better place for it! -
If you looked back to 2004 you'd realize that you're already playing CoH 2.0.
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I suppose it's a safe bet that the whole "Vindicators is about second chances" thing is going to be tossed out now, given how that policy looks to have worked out for Ms. Liberty.