SlickRiptide

Maybe it's a question of degree.

For instance:

One of my deeper characters (though at going on six years, I've still played her only to level 25) is a test pilot. Nutshell origin story: She was testing an experimental stratospheric craft and flight suit that were based partly on Rikti tech. Recognizing a familiar energy signature, a Rikti squadron attacked "mission control", killed most of the staff and destroyed most of the equipment. Ellen lost control of the spacecraft, got a dose of radiation from the Van Allen belts (absorbed by the flight suit, which was designed to do just that) and managed to crash land the vehicle.

Due to complex financial shenanigans designed to thwart a hostile takeover, as the sole remaining stockholder she ended up receiving all of the outstanding stock and became the owner of what was left of the company. The flight suit utilized experimental quantum mechanical technology and the radiation exposure changed its properties, letting it both store and emit controlled bursts of energy. (Rad/Rad defender)

With a damaged craft and limited funding, the company's research focuses on the flight suit now. The spacecraft sits in a warehouse in Paragon City acting as a kind of command center.

Despite everything that's happened, Ellen is still just a test pilot. She's not a financial whiz, so she doesn't bother with running the company. She has people for that, and she has overtures from Crey Corp financiers who have been politely rebuffed a couple of times. She isn't a scientist, either. She has people for THAT. Here again, Crey Corp has been quite helpful, supplying computer equipment and information in exchange for some interest in the fruits of the company's research.

She knows that Crey wants to co-opt her company, but it's just business as far as she's concerned. She trusts her people to protect the company and there's a solid defense built up around the company already. She feels horrible for her colleagues that died, but she doesn't feel particularly hateful about the Rikti. She's not looking for vengeance or anything. It's just one of those things that happens, that you can't change and can't predict. A Natural disaster, essentially.

If Paragon City has "gotten under her skin", so to speak, it's more by the fact that it exists at all. I didn't think of it this way when I conceived her, but she's basically Michael Knight, except that she's the boss instead of an employee. She's still the test pilot running around and pushing her limits and the limits of her equipment, but she's able to do it every day out in the real world instead of cooped up in a lab.

Paragon City has affected her by the simple fact of being a place where she can "be all that she can be" and be rewarded for it. It represents freedom and limitless potential and living on the edge all at the same time. While forces like Crey or the Rikti are potential road-bumps, they're not the driving force behind what makes her who she is. That could change, of course, but for the most part she is who she is simply because there is a City of Heroes for her to be herself in.

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Why do you all assume that steampunk technology is the same as steam technology?

Does email use the same technology as mail does?

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<ul type="square">
Steam-powered gun - This gun may be powered by outdated steam technology, but it is otherwise state-of-the-art. Even the bullets are incredibly sophisticated, built for tearing through the tough hide of some of Paragon City's toughest tankers.

Steam-powered robotic part - Other than it's power source, there is nothing archaic about this robot part. The flexibility, strength, and speed of the assembled robots would undoubtedly be top notch.[/list]
The implications over and over again are that the steam engines in question are, in fact, old-fashioned steam engines. It's the machines powered by them that are the clever bits.

The problem is that while it could be any of those things, up to and including steam-catalyzed cold fusion (explaining the "atom rays"), what we're TOLD is that it's good old-fashioned steam engine technology.

As I mentioned before, it's not even like D.A.T.A. is studying the stuff to figure out how it works. Everyone just seems to buy into the idea that Nemesis is just really wacky inventive about ways to use steam power.

The question of "winning", regardless of alignment, is a question of goal-setting and achievement. Heroes are, by definition, interested in the greater good. (Yeah, I'm hand-waving around anti-heroes and selfish people.) That makes them easier to write for, because any threat at all is something that's part of their charter. A hero might have an agenda, but she is generally willing to pursue it "off-screen" if there are more pressing matters currently coming up in the script.

Villains are, generally, self-centered and ALWAYS working for their own agenda. (Again, hand-waving around villains who want the greater good and see themselves as willing to do what nobody else is clever/insightful/brave/whatever/unconventional enough to do.) A villain wants to "feel villainous" by choosing a goal, making a plan to achieve the goal, putting the plan in motion, and making the attempt. Winning or losing isn't really what it's about, though clearly winning is the superior outcome. The Plan and the ability to execute it with some chance of success is really what it's about. While its true that some villains want to taste dead, burnt bodies and veins in their teeth to feel "evil", most prefer a bit more panache with their schemes.

In fact, I'd say that one of the overriding factors in "feeling villainous" is the ability to HAVE a scheme in the first place.

Disagreements?

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you are comparing apples to oranges. each of those changes was either a part of a greater change set up by developers or the focus of an entire issue. we are talking about something that you personally going through content would trigger, we have no evidence about that. Full dynamic content is something i certainly would not say no to, but you drastically downplay how much work it woudl really take. MA are entirely consequence free, heck, you cant even set contacts or missions out of the limited area, having real dynamic content would be a great deal more than that. I would love it myself, but the years have made me a pragmatist.

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Call it grapefruits and oranges. A fully dynamic world, where every action has a consequence, is just a matter of scale. Making the world SO dynamic that you could trash Atlas Park, literally, would probably be poor game design because the people who like Atlas Park the way it is would no longer find it fun to play there.

You're correct that a fully dynamic world, where every action has a consequence would be a lot of work to shoehorn into a static framework. You'd have to have it designed in from the beginning for it to work well.

BUT...

There IS an acceptable level of dynamicism that leaves the world intact while still causing tangible effects upon the community, and that's really what people mean when they say "I want to have an effect on the city."

As a for instance - We already have the city info terminals that track things like who defeated the largest number of skulls this week and thus and such. I presume there's a villainous version that tracks who robs the most banks, etc... I can easily imagine wanted poster hanging on the wall of every train station in Paragon City that changes the name and portrait of this week's most wanted based on the Rougue Isles Tracker. I can imagine a mission with a police contact who opens the dialog with "Thanks to the activities of $Villain we're short-handed. We need you to do this other thing over here while we deal with $Villain."

That's a really basic level of dynamicism that makes notoriety actually valuable.

Mostly, though, I'm talking about simply giving us smaller doses of content and making it episodic. Leave the rest of the world just like it is. Use the developer version of the MA tools to put out some "short stories" that run 2-4 episodes and when they're done, they're DONE. Gone. Replaced by a new story. Let the activities of the players influence the outcomes and the progress. Hold contests on the websites. Invite some of those Guest Writers to contribute a story.

Make the world a living, breathing place instead of having it be frozen in time. Move the story forward and let the players have a hand in influencing the story and maybe getting their own characters their fifteen minutes of fame if they perform really well.

The Mission Architect means that the cost of creating missions has been drastically reduced, especially if the missions do NOT require any special coding or cut scenes by the programming department. The argument that resource cost is prohibitive is no longer valid.

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The problem with evil winning in an mmo is that you can never really change the world in an mmo.

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No. This is a problem with the way a standard MMO is designed. It's not a feature of the genre.

To see the truth of this, you only have to look at CoH and ask yourself, "What are the seminal events of the last few years?"

Manticore and Sister Psyche's marriage, or more generally, anything at all that involves Shalice Tilman: possible because the Calvin Scott task force ENDED and the status quo changed.

The story of the Council. The Mender Lazarus task force. The Imperious Task Force. Issue 15. All possible because of the Fifth Column/Council War.

The Truth About The Villain Known As Faultline - Possible because Overbrook changed.

The resurgence of the Rikti and Vanguard stories, including the return of Hero 1: Possible because the Crash Site changed.

"You can't change the world" is a cop out.

The arguments always boil down to two things:

1) "We don't have the resources to make temporary content and then dispose of it."

2) "Players hate change."


Call me a radical, but to number two I say "Tough noogies. Let 'em deal with it." Heck, make flashback work the way it OUGHT to work and people would use it to go back and play "lost" content like the Calvin Scott Task Force.

The whole point of the Mission Architect is that it was originally designed as a developer tool. Presumably, the devs have a more powerful version (or less limited, at any rate). Being the devs, they don't have to hook their "architect missions" up to Aeon Entertainment. They could just as easily drop a NPC in any zone and hand out missions from that NPC.

The argument that content design is too resource intensive to justify making it disposable for the sake of story advancement is simply no longer true.

I'm not suggesting that the whole game should suddenly become non-static. What we SHOULD have is a good selection of story arcs that are EPISODIC and NOT static. In fact, with the branching dialog options we have now, the ending of each chapter could even be a kind of poll, where the story of the following chapter is influenced by the choices the players make in the final dialog box.

The static world is a design decision, nothing more. It's not an unalterable feature of MMO's, it's just the way that they've always been built because "content design is so expensive". If tools like the MA are available, then the cost of designing content has been reduced accordingly. The world OUGHT to become more dynamic as a result, just as long as the content designers aren't stuck in the rut that says "Static = Good. Dynamic = Unpossible."

For evil to win, you first need a game engine that supports a dynamic world instead of a static one.

As long as we're playing a game in which the Redcaps are still invading Salamanca four years later, we're playing a game in which evil can never win unless that victory is sanctioned by the Powers That Be, and it occurs in some fashion that is repeatable forever by a hundred thousand other villains.

Evil cannot win or even really lose, as long as the world is a static videotape replay that's run over and over and over and over.

As far as inviting Joe and Sean to lunch and hashing over the history with them, I tend to vaccilate between feeling that they're incredibly stingy with backstory on the one hand and on the other believing that they don't actually have any backstory beyond what we already know and they make it up as they go along.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. I'm going to be curious to see how deep the Canon Fodder thread goes. At least I know Dauntless' name now, though the idea of him suffering from unrequited love from his mentor threw me for an unexpected loop.

As for the OP - I don't really have any characters who have some sort of reaction to Paragon City and its world. They're all people who grew up in Paragon City or who came from other places that were similar (if not quite so lousy with costumed vigilantes) and so they feel and behave like members of the community.

The impression I get from your OP, Blue, is that you're asking for a kind of emotional contrast that can only come from someone outside of the system who has something else to compare it to that she thinks of as "normal", "good", "moral", "decent", what have you.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your examples.

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So what you're saying is that we're only allowed to play because Nemesis wants something to win at. Again. Wow, you guys are just pushing back the boundaries of masturbatory self-indulgence here. I don't even think the official Nemesis is actually that bad.

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When you consider that there are multiple dimensions where they had fewer/none/less-effective heroes, Nemesis really did win and those alternate Nemesis are now duking it out for rulership of the multiverse, it isn't all that far-fetched that one of them (ours?) is a world where he just enjoys gaming the heroes instead of outright lording it over everyone.

The problem with Nemesis and his steampunk nature is that they never try to give an answer about how it works. I mean, we have steam-powered androids, steam-powered cybernetics that are apparently superior to what the Freaks typically use, steam-powered blasters, etc...

We're also told that in the forties he was using "atom rays"; in other words, nuclear powered ray guns. Additionally, it's stated that the materials and technology of his devices is very high-tech and modern aside from them being steam-powered.

With the Clockwork King, we get the build-up for awhile about what a terrific robotocist he is, but eventually we learn the truth as we assist our contacts in attempting to understand his creations.

With Nemesis, there's nobody at D.A.T.A. asking "How the heck can this thing operate on steam?" We just take it for granted that it works and that it's "cool". It doesn't help that we have various Jaegars and Fake Nemesi spouting clouds of smoke and giving the impression that they are, in fact, running on some kind of 19th century coal burning furnace.

Heck, if they just waved their hands and did the Steamboy schtick and said "Nemesis discovered a new kind of REALLY POWERFUL steam! *wink* *wink*" then that would be something.

Maybe I'm just tired of everything up to and including the Rikti War being a Nemesis plot. If Nemesis was as cool as he's portrayed, he would have won a long time ago. In fact, I'm starting to believe that the real story is that he HAS won, and we just don't realize that he's really running the world in secret, Illuminati-style, while the heroes of the world run around playing games with the toys he sends to distract them.

If you don't see the fnords they can't eat you...

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How extensive was the Ritki war. Was it focused on Paragon City or was it global?

And how common where superheroes outside of America before the Ritki War? Was there a large population in Soviet Union, Europe and Asia?

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Official Game History Read the whole thing, but specifically check out the entries on the Cold War, Globalism and Alien Invasion.

Sean;

Thanks for the answers and for starting this new canon material thread. We've been starving for this info for years, really. Some of us, anyway. *heh*

If I may;

Who is in charge of Freedom Corp? What positions do the various members of the Cole family (Statesman, Miss Liberty, Ms. Liberty) hold in relation to whatever sort of board of directors it is that runs it? As far as I can tell, the general supposition that Miss Liberty runs Freedom Corp is based pretty much entirely on the fact that she signed the letter announcing the Jingle Jets.

Re: Dauntless

This is digging pretty deep, so I'll understand if it seems like too fine a detail to be covered by the story bible:

Dauntless is described in the Galaxy City backgrounder as "the young man called Dauntless". That always suggested a late teens or very early twenties boy to me. A job delivering sandwiches suggests likewise. I'm realizing, though that Kelly was more like 37'ish when Dauntless died rather than 42'ish as I'd originally imagined, which makes them closer in age than I might have thought.

What was the age difference between them? If he loved her romantically, would the reason for keeping it secret be that she felt paternal towards him?

On a related note, it appears that Kelly never married. Is that right? If so, is there a reason aside from "the right man never came along"?

My thoughts - Why do people keep cutting pieces from the main thread and trying to start new ones with them? It's easier for the devs to track a single thread.

Not to be a complete wet blanket - I think the whole Evil League of Evil idea is a non-starter. I wish they had come up with a different idea entirely.

I do agree that I find a laughable idea that any of those villains even considering an alliance with The Reichsman. Most, if not all of them would be insulted by the idea that they required an alliance with anyone.

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Well... damn. I'd PM'd Manticore a while back to see about the possibility of somehow getting this published as an actual CoH novel. Word finally came back to me, and the word is... no.

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Out of curiosity, was he that succinct or was there more to the question and response? Sean is a bit reticent when it comes to interacting with the forumites, so I wouldn't be awfully surprised if "Sorry, no" was the sum total of the response. It would just be interesting if there was more to it than that.

For instance, "No, NCSoft is not considering any novels presently." is a rather different response than "No, the EULA and copyright law forbid you from publishing any material based on our intellectual property without our express permission."

I'd imagine that your ex(?) has heard horror stories about WoW users getting viruses and key-loggers.

Whe s/he needs to understand is that those stories happen because people are A) downloading cheating programs or B) downloading add-ons that make the game do special stuff like post your auctions and change the way your screen is organized. The person gets malware installed along with, or instead of, the software they expected to get.

The key thing to understand is that it required that someone knowingly go out to the internet, download a program that modified the game in some fashion (or falsely claimed to modify it), and then run that program. It is NOT something that just happens by virtue of running the game client software.

You can play City of Heroes or WoW or any other brand-name online game as much as you want and be perfectly safe by simply never trying to download and run any "third party" programs designed to modify the game.

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This is totally showing my age, I know, but the moment I read your post, I remembered watching "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever" on TV. I might have to go back and see if I can track that down, give it a listen, and see what strikes for BAB.


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Soul Train, baby. Don't settle for anything less than the original. I'll bet you can watch it on the web someplace. *heh*

Accept no substitutes!

*Edit*

In fact, I'm going to nominate Aretha Franklin _Rock Steady_ for BABs.

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Nice... 14 is still a complete mess, and rather than fix that, they go into beta testing with 15. Apparently the devs have learned exactly zero from the Issue 14 debacle.

Shame on them.

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Or Issue 15 is following close on the heels of issue 14 because it contains many of the afore-mentioned fixes or else enhancements (like manually setting the level of your mission) that would render the fix moot anyway.

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You think they're getting free updates over on WoW?


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Bad example. They give free updates in WoW. The most recent was a pretty major new end-game raid, new PvP games, new non-combat content and a major re-tuning of several classes.

Pretty much every MMO that relies on expansions to generate income is one that also hands out plenty of free expansion content as well. CoX is the exception primarily for the lack of paid expansions rather than for the quantity of free expansions.

This is a two-edged sword, given that a paid-expansion is generally much larger by virtue of it costing money. Case in point, CoV - A whole other city, where a free Issue is typically a new game system or a single new zone.

With Praetoria, we pay for it but we get BOTH a whole new city AND new game systems. If it was a free Issue, Praetoria would be a single Portal mission whose only reason for existence would be to act as a lobby for the "going rogue" mission contacts.

Pay expansions aren't evil just by virtue of costing you extra money.

As for the OP, you'd need to come up with a better argument for lowering the monthly fee than "it's old". MMO's don't wear out and break down just because they've hit 100k miles on the odometer.

What we really need is for NCSoft to offer an aggregate account like the SOE Station Access acount. I'd have paid $25 a month to have an account that gave me Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, CoH, Dungeon Runners Premium, and Lineage/Lineage 2.

At the risk of sounding like a forum cop, the Mission Architect Stories and Lore Forum is really where this kind of thread should be.

Not just "because that's the roolz" but because that's where people browsing for new MA story arcs go to find them.

So many responses to criticism end up sounding defensive or like so much hand-waving, that I'm never sure just how much is appropriate.

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defeat the "Central Processor", which was an Igneous named Core Dump.

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The original enemy group was a bunch of custom robots who were way too powerful for the level range. Noted for future editing. Sorry you didn't like Igneous. Hydra were overly powerful in other ways and I wanted something "alien" looking.

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and three copies of The Hood, described only as "a mysterious masked figure attempting to erase Galaxy Girl from history". These are numbered IV, III and II. There are a total of five Clues to find, four of which make it sound as if the real goal of the Hood is to erase Ms. Liberty. The last is from Mystery Letter Writing Guy who once again mocks you for having no freaking idea what you're really doing.

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There was a fourth version of the big bad (number one) whose dialog ought to have offered a slight clue about the Ms. Liberty business. Must have spawned in back or run away before you encountered him. Noted. In any case, it seems mission three was a big failure, story wise, since that's where the plot threads are nominally tied together. The Letter was a bad idea in retrospect. The Letter Writer follows a standard forumula - "I can find you. Here's some useful or interesting information. Here's something to make you suspicious of your handlers. Look for more information." Hard to do in 300 characters. I played an arc recently where the author put a Letter in the mission ending clue (1000 chars) but the trade-off was that the letter became a required objective, ruining the "flavor". Probably better to remove it entirely.

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Fortunately I was able to fly over the map and cherry-pick the objectives, taking out the Hood and Galaxy Girl's keepers with Seeds of Win.

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I don't blame you. The original script for mission four was pretty much tossed out because the only thing more tedious than a bunch of objectives on an outdoor city map was bunch of CHAINED objectives on an outdoor city map. This mission would play much better, IMO, if there was any kind of small two-square block city map that wasn't trashed or didn't have a meteor or a giant landmark statue smack in the middle of it.

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You don't get to find out who the Hood is or why exactly he wanted Ms. Liberty erased.

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You don't know who he is: purposeful. You don't know why he wanted Ms. Liberty erased: unintended. Mission Three failed for you, probably because none of the bosses are required objectives. In any case, you still would have had to extrapolate quite a bit so the point stands - Mission three failed. Out of curiosity, was it at least clear WHY there were multiple versions of the adversary?

Short of re-writing mission three (which might be best) some extrapolation in the mission text of mission four is in order, I guess.

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The arc suffers from the usual Timey Wimey Ball problems and has no closure. Twice in a four-mission Heroic arc you're sent up against law enforcement. You're left with no idea who you were up against, what was going on or even (as usual for Ouroboros) whether or not you're working for the right people. This means it's impossible to criticize the plot; it also means that's because there isn't one.

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I'm aware of what the trope means, but I confess I'm having problems imagining how it applies. Care to elucidate?

The law enforcement criticism surprised me, but that's my Longbow prejudice showing. I don't think of them as "law enforcement". They're a bunch of arrogant, supercilious bastiches acting as Ms. Liberty's private army. They're little better than mercenaries, coming into conflict with villain and hero alike. Depicting them as trigger-happy goons who "shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out" seemed perfectly in character. ;p There ought to have been dialog in which some of them at least questioned what response to give upon registering your hero's presence, but I might have removed it due to the business with $himher and $name not being expanded if the NPC's can't see you when they speak. Point taken, in any case.

Apparently some things were spelled out too much and others too little. So it goes. It's a balancing act trying to supply enough information for people who aren't up to speed on the backstory of Galaxy Girl and/or those who might miss a clue.

Well, thanks for the critique. Interesting to see what worked and what didn't.

Portal Corp mission

Paragon Wiki entry for Blue Steel

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To further cite an example.. even before the Rikti came along, Paragon City was a city of heroes. Afterwards, there were EIGHT.

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Nah, there were many more than eight. That "Surviving Eight" thing was a conceit that should never have made it out past beta.

For minimal proof, consider that every member of the Vindicators lived through the war, and that MS. Liberty is specifically mentioned as fighting in the opening hours. Likewise for Miss Liberty, who is still alive and well and apparently in some sort of position of responsibility at Freedom Corps.

Additionally, all of the current members of Vanguard (excepting the Dark Watcher) and the core membership of The Midnight Squad were alive and, presumably, active during the War. Never mind the international heroes who were busy defending their own countries. Ajax, whatever became of him afterwards, was the only known survivor of Omega Team (until recent events in the RWZ, of course).

I don't know how they rationalize the "Surviving Eight" these days or if they even do. It might be something they hope everyone forgets about. Best I can figure is that the "anomalous" heroes were those who didn't participate in Alpha/Omega day for whatever reason or had duties other than fighting on the front lines. That would make the "Surviving Eight" literally the only surviving members of Alpha Team, or at least the only ones who remained in Paragon City after the War.

Like so much of the backstory, this is one of those areas where canon is obfuscated to the point that nobody knows the real answer except the people in charge of the "story bible" and they aren't telling.

As far as that goes, can the term "Surviving Eight" actually be traced to any current canon game story material? I would find it amusing but not terribly surprising if it turned out to be a holdover from the original pre-alpha Cryptic forums and not a part of the Live game canon at all.

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Shiva, Rularuu, The 5th, Nemesis, whoever's using Kheldians as rocket fuel, all make their bid for world domination/world destruction either all at once or one right after another (while everyone is still recovering from the last crisis) until the universe implodes in a great big ball of DOOOOOMMMM!!!!

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Don't forget the Second Rikti Invasion. Not this namby pamby one we're having now, the one in twenty years that destroyed humanity utterly and chased Holsten Armitage to our time.

I had a piece of fan fic that I ought to finish some day, that had this idea as the foundation. That is, that you could change the nature of the Apocalypse but the Apocalypse itself was inevitable.