SlickRiptide

Again, in the interests of preserving access to lost backstory:

The Paragon Times via The Wayback Machine

How does an upgrade work if you're buying GR on Steam but you've got a pre-existing non-Steam account? Does Steam give you a serial number to apply?

Friendly reminder - Let's not wander into game comparisons and get the thread locked on that basis.

In the interests of promoting said back-story:

Manticore's "Canon Fodder" thread from 2009

If nobody at Paragon Studios has stepped into Sean's shoes, then maybe it's time that somebody did so. It would be very helpful to renew this kind of dialog between the players and the keepers of the Canon.

At a bare minimum, they need to cleanup the website and fix glaring problems like that Frostfire "dossier" that I linked upstream. They need to supply the missing zone backgrounders and any missing "Know your opponents" backgrounders.

Even if the Paragon Times will never be published again, the old pages need to be re-inserted into the current website.

The "nobody reads the mission text anyway" excuse is a dog that won't hunt. If you're going to buy that as a design philosophy then you might as well not even bother with developing a game setting. Just put up a bunch of generic field trainers with ! over their head - One for "kill things missions", one for "deliver things missions" and one for "escort things missions" and call it good.

There is a measurable percentage of players who DO want deep backstory and those people are going to be some of the most passionate about the game - the ambassadors. I don't remember who mentioned "osmosis" earlier but that's WHY osmosis happens. Things spread from the knowledgable passionate people to those connected to them and even the "just give me a bag of hit points to beat up" people eventually end up learning something about the world.

It's extremely frustrating to be told that there is this supposed "story bible" with this wealth of lore in it while outside the castle the peasants scramble for a few crusts that the lords of the manor choose to toss out.

I disagree that there is a conflict between freedom to develop your character's backstory and depth in the established backstory.

Yes, I understand that the your char is the hero of the story. This is why, for instance, Azuria is not really the laughing stock that we make her because of the screen door on the MAGI vault. The vault only gets robbed once, not really a million different times. It just happens that the same events are played out multiple times with a different hero in the starring role. I get that.

I just don't see how knowing the relationships between Ms. Liberty, Miss Liberty, Freedom Corps and Longbow is going to somehow compromise my character concept. In fact, if I'm truly a "bag of hit points basher" then I likely don't even have a character concept to compromise. I took whatever costume looked cool and whatever powers gave me the best bashing for the buck, assuming I didn't just hit the random button on the costume.

If I DO have an extensive concept, then having an extensive BACKGROUND will only enhance it, not limit it, unless my concept is that my character is Statesman's love child or some other Mary Sue.

Did anybody read _The Web of Arachnos_ or _The Freedom Phalanx_ novels and say "Dangit, this totally invalidates my character"? I submit that if any such readers existed that they were a very tiny minority compared to the number of people who were grateful to learn something new about the setting and the signature characters.

If the lack of lore (or lore organization) isn't convincing, then consider examples such as this: http://www.cityofheroes.com/game_inf..._outcasts.html

What does that say about how management feels about the lore of the game?

I'm really not trying to be some kind of anal retentive stickler for detail. These things need to be addressed and improved before Freedom launches if the game is to make the best possible first impression on its new audience.

For the longest time we couldn't even say definitively just what Ms. Liberty's name was. In the end, Manticore chose the same solution that I had chosen myself, that both names were correct; that she was Jessica Megan Duncan.

If you couldn't find that forum posting where Manticore stated such, then you still could not definitively state it as a fact. I'd like to see a new player actually find that posting and cite it.

We still can't say for certain who her father is. It's assumed by many that Patrick Duncan is her father but that's based purely on the coincidence of the name.

A significant amount of the known lore is apocryphal. It's based on forum postings that are lost in the mists of time and the changes in the forum software. It's inferred from tidbits without ever being confirmed or stated outright - Miss Liberty's association with Freedom Corps being a case in point.

Who founded Freedom Corps? What is its purpose? Who runs it now? What position does Ms. Liberty hold in its beauracracy? How does Longbow fit into the management structure of it in comparison to the more normal skill training function of its known offices around the city? What position does Miss Liberty actually hold?

Who were the members of the Freedom Phalanx when the Rikti invaded? What did Statesman and Maiden Justice do during WW2? Were they involved in Korea? Was Miss Liberty involved? Which of the Stateskins were members of Alpha Team? All of them? How did they all survive?

When did Synapse discover Mynx? For that matter, what is the time period for any of the backstory behind the individual members of The Regulators?

Who is the President of the United States? What is the capital of New York? Is it New York City or Empire City? Where is the airport? Is there more than one?

I won't even get into the whole Dark Astoria mess. If you think Ms. Liberty's name was a problem then don't even try to figure out the history of Astoria. Heck, take a stab at trying to figure out just when "Spanky" Rabinowitz was the mayor of Paragon City.

For that matter, what actually happened to Baumton? Can you say what sort of "accident" occurred there? Whatever you think it is that happened to Boomtown, how can you prove it to someone who asks where to find its backstory? Think it's a matter of directing them to the website? Go find the Geography section of the website and then read the Boomtown section and come back and tell me what you learned.

The wiki is useful in many cases, but in many other cases it simply propagates "facts" that can't be shown to be anything but the opinions and deductions of whoever wrote the wiki entry. The real "problem" with the wiki is that it's NOT official, no matter how accurate it is. I shouldn't have to depend on player compendiums in order to learn official lore and history of the setting. I should be able to find that kind of information inside of the game itself, or at least its website.

When NaNoWriMo's goal for a month of writing by an amateur or even first-time author is 50k words, and that is considered a novelette, you'll have to excuse me for being less than impressed by a total of 13k of extant writing by professional writers who are intimately familiar with the backstory.

Most of these questions are not obscure or nitpicky trivia. Some of them strike right at the heart of the city's lore and history and NOBODY can answer them with any degree of certainty.

This is a state of affairs that will make a bunch of newbies feel like the devs don't care enough about their own game to even get the basics right.

It's one thing to excuse it in the beginning as "we have to worry about the game working right" and then excuse it later as "we have to worry about the next expansion; our current subs aren't put off by that".

It's another thing entirely when you're looking at exposing your product to an audience that is easily going to be ten or twenty times larger than your current audience and exposing it to the scrutiny of players and media reviews that have never before been exposed to it. You only get one chance at a first impression. If a new player asks "what's the deal with Freedom Corps?" and all you can say is "well, um, it's just this place with a bunch of contacts in it" then you've lost a chance to make a terrific first impression. Never mind later impressions when those new players begin to take an interest in the lore behind the NPC's and the setting as a matter of simple casual interest.

The really sad thing is that a couple of years worth of the Paragon Times was vaporized along with all of the lore that was published in it. Where is that information now? Is any of it considered "official" any more? Who can say? How many players are there who don't even know there ever was a Paragon Times?

With Freedom presumably landing sometime within the next 3-4 months, I've been thinking about a facet of the game that I often find to be somewhat lacking.

Namely, the backstory.

I get that there's a paucity of lore outside of the game because the devs want the players to discover much of that lore inside of the game via badges, missions, and what-not. I also get that they want the game world's history to be loosely defined such that anyone can fit their characters into it in any way they choose.

Even so, it seems to me that when basic questions cannot be answered without out and out guessing, that there's something wrong with this picture.

It's my feeling that this is a concern at this time because the game is being set to hopefully draw in thousands, maybe millions of new players. (No joke - However many free members play long term or become paying members, a decent free to play game can easily pull in a couple of million short term players in a very short period of time.)

One of the things that will ground those players in the game world is a well written, well indexed,and well-documented history of the game world. The 800 pound gorilla is not the 800 pound gorilla because of its cutting-edge game design. Other companies are not being hailed as the new 800 pound gorilla because of their fantastic reputation as a MMO publishers. In both cases, their games are/were built up on an intellectual property that has a massive amount of backstory that was well known and well documented. The early adopters either were intimately acquainted with it already, or they were able to find it inside of the game world itself.

Paragon City has the disadvantage that the newbies won't be intimately acquainted with its history. In fact, they have the disadvantage that even many veterans aren't acquainted with its history and they seldom entirely agree about the "facts" behind the parts they DO know about.

My feeling is that the time for a drip here and a drip there is past. It's not simply a case of disgruntled veterans wanting more story at this point. It is, or it ought to be, a financial decision based on the ability of a rich history to pull in the new players and convert them to fans of the game and its setting.

I don't pretend to have any special knowledge in this area other than my own years of experience playing many, many different games and talking to other such players like myself.

Backstory and history are investments in the game but more importantly, they are investments in the players of the game. Those thousands of new players need to feel like they are entering a place that is more than a Hollywood back lot if you want them to become attached to the game. Yes, this is my opinion, but I feel it is an educated one.

If players are having to guess the answers to their questions or worse, make them up for themselves, then I believe that Paragon Studios is going to miss a chance to hook them into feeling like they are part of something bigger than themselves.

That's an opportunity that shouldn't be missed. Lore and story are food for the soul and imagination. Deliberately keeping them scarce just isn't a wise plan if you want to turn those free-to-play members into VIP's.

Ultimate Freedom -- Ages ago, I posted in the Suggestions forum that it should be possible to create a "blank" powerset whose sole purpose was to act as a framework in which to slot IO's with procs built-into them that provided the actual power effects.

That would be my "Ultimate" Freedom - Not just design your own powerset but design your own powers.

I'm sure that the website will get a facelift along with the launch of Freedom. However - I know that the website content does sometimes get neglected for periods of time long after the content of those guides has become out of date.

This is a reminder that when new players read the game guides (http://www.cityofheroes.com/game_info/official_guides/) that they should be able to rely on them having current information in them. Likewise, some of the game guides that don't exist but that can be inferred from the structure of the web pages, those guides should be added also.

Eh, just have 'em drop 100 Paragon Points per defeat and you'll be swimming in GM hunting parties in no time.

It occurred to me today that maybe there was a way to make the old "I want a statue" meme less a pipe dream and more of a potential feature and even a revenue generator.

Sure, we don't want a million marble edifices cluttering up the city landscape.

A "statue", however, doesn't have to be made of marble and be 100 feet tall. The recognition value is the true point of the thing, not the building material or the massive scale.

I'm imagining a Star Wars style of hologram that would be "projected" as a tall, not gigantic, "statue" of a player character's costume. As a hologram, the projections have form but are also inherently ephemeral both in substance and lifespan.

I see this having several uses.

One would be as a way to recognize the top performers on the city terminal leaderboards. The "holo-emitters" could be stationed in any spot that makes sense as a public display of honor - The plaza outside of the arena, or inside of it, for instance.

Similarly, for the top performers in arena PvP. Either of these gives an incentive to actively participate in those activities and it gives F2P players some incentive to at least upgrade to Premium if they want a shot at that kind of recognition.

From a revenue generation perspective, the holo-emitters could be sold in the Market, allowing players to purchase holo-emitters to place in their bases. The projected images could either be fixed images or they could be dynamic by virtue of allowing a .costume file to be assigned to the image.

It might also be that holograms could be crafted from salvage and "plugged into" a holo-emitter. This obviously creates the possibility of giving a pathway to allowing everyone access to some no-cost (in dollar terms) generic holograms while personalized or customized holograms would cost some Paragon Points to acquire.

I pulled out a long unfinished story the other day and ran through the portions that were already written. For some unknown reason, I began to get ideas for a chapter that was near the end but otherwise sitting out in the middle of the blank second-half of the story; neither a continuation where I'd left off, nor the conclusion.

I started typing and by the time I was done I had much more than the outline I'd expected; I had a pretty fully fleshed out chapter. Today, I went over it again and tightened it up here and there, and fleshed out a couple of places that were asking for further elucidation.

I read it over again, then, and said, "Shoot, I never saw that coming."

I know that many authors talk about a story writing itself but this is the first time I really felt like it was doing just that. The chapter began where I expected it to begin, and ended where I had originally expected it to end, but the route between those two points took some turns that I had never anticipated, let alone planned out ahead of time.

It will be interesting to see if the rest of the currently missing chapters do likewise.