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Posts
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Quote:Sign me up for the "thought Chase Arcanum's a pretty unique name" club too.
It's not? I actually like your name. I must be missing the joke part...
As for creativity, if anyone's mapping out their character to the point that the name is indispensable before even logging in to reserve that name, they're bound to be disappointed. Creativity is always limited by the medium you're working with, and you can't precisely express an entirely pre-written character who's inflexible in any way through the medium of CoH character building. There are bound to be limitations with the costumes, the faces, the hair styles, how much the powers can be tweaked into the concept, and there's the issue of whether the name's taken. As long as you keep the character's concept a little flexible, it can actually help shape the creative process. Twilight Detective, for instance, wasn't my occult detective character's first, second or third name choice, but I can't even remember what they were now; once I finally grabbed that name, the word twilight made me think of the Celtic otherworld's connection to twilight hours, which reminded me of Croatoa and which then inspired the character's connection to Salamanca and his motives as a hero, so that now the name fits him perfectly.
Also, in many superhero stories, the name of a character isn't something they came up with beforehand: it's the name the media gave them, that the townspeople started calling that mysterious rescuer making the headlines, and it stuck. So a name doesn't always have to be a precise reflection of the character's personality. Maybe the flame guy whose name is "Lord Asbestos" isn't weirdly pretentious: perhaps it's the name that some random crook mockingly called him during his very first mission ("hey look guys, check out Lord Asbestos there! Har har... ow..."), and the hero has a sense of humor and kept the name as kind of a dare for anyone else to try taking him lightly. Creativity isn't just creating in a void, it's also writing around the roadblocks that might spring up between the initial inspiration and the final story. -
Quote:Just think of it as the city generously providing job security for its heroes .Am I the only one who looks at these new, space-warping holes in reality, and thought... "One day, I just know that interdimentional horrors are going to use these things to invade our world..."
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She also talks at the end of her arc about how she's fallen out with the Freedom Phalanx because they don't trust people like her with ties to Preaetoria. I thought at the time that meant she was a heroic Praetorian defector who used to work with Maelstrom on the other side, though Ricochet's existence does make it hard to deny that Twinshot's supposed to be her counterpart.
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We so need those posters for the next login screen!
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Sparkly Soldier Yuki's story revolves around a future war against the Nictus, so any mission that has her fighting the Council, especially the Nictus, is all kinds of appropriate for her. A lot of the dialogue surrounding those arcs ties in smoothly with her own story, from portentous rumors by the Council soldiers about Arakhn and Requiem to just their exasperation with her constantly getting in the way (as one Galaxy Archon said, "Sparkly Soldier Yuki again? Would somebody just shoot her already?"). Plus, the idea of a giddy otaku schoolgirl thwarting their schemes time and again is just so much fun to imagine: I can just see Arakhn burying her face in her hands while Requiem's in the background banging his head against the wall upon receiving the news that a middle-school girl and her talking toy cat just ruined another one of their plans.
Astorian Shade, as her name suggests, has a serious grudge against the Banished Pantheon, and her progress through the game is really the story of her becoming powerful enough to eventually return to Dark Astoria and challenge the newly-awakened Mot as an incarnate to avenge herself, her family and her hometown. Anything involving the Pantheon sends her on the warpath, and her very first fight against the Spirit Masks, by luck of the game mechanics, just happened to perfectly sum up her feelings about them. She was rescuing a hostage from the BP, fought the zombie guards, then drew her axe on one of the Spirits as it approached and began smashing and chopping at the wooden mask. The hostage was freed and tried to run over to thank her, but Shade instead kept swinging at the mask until the hostage finally gave up and ran for the exit. Had that been a written story, she would have kept furiously swinging the axe long after she'd reduced the mask to a pile of kindling.
My other characters aren't driven so much by any particular conflict, though Twilight Detective's an occult noir-style detective from Salamanca trying to get to the bottom of what happened to it and stop the Red Caps once and for all. He also has an uneasy relationship with the Cabal, since they use the same sort of magic he does toward the same goal, just much more powerfully and indiscriminately. -
You would think so, but according to Wikipedia it actually worked.
Quote:In 2002 the Patent Office ruled in favour of the BBC, pointing out that there was no evidence that the Metropolitan Police—or any other police force—had ever registered the image as a trademark. In addition, the BBC had been selling merchandise based on the image for over three decades without complaint by the police. -
I checked it out too and, though he's still available in the missions, I didn't see Statesman on the contact list (the screenshot looks like it's trying to use him as an AE contact). Sister Psyche's still there, but now Statesman's missing and there are two almost identical versions of Ms. Liberty. I'd bet it's a glitch caused by replacing Statesman on the task force: they probably switched Statesman's contact ID with a copy of Ms. Liberty, and it affected the contact roster in MA too.
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Quote:"People assume that time in Paragon City is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a game-playing, character-development viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey... stuff."
I met her in Faultline in March. Now, three months later, she's all grown up and dressing like a B-movie slattern? Whether she was introduced six years ago or not, she shouldn't be the only character in game (or in comics) who ages in real-time. Just my opinion of course.
Characters have changed and evolved as you progress through story missions (like Faultline and Fusionette's careers as heroes), so Penny's just following the same pattern. The fact that she exists as a Faultline delivery girl and a Phalanx member at the same time is indeed pretty timey wimey, but I hope they never "fix" that by removing young Penny: the Faultline story's one of my favorites in the game. -
Quote:I haven't run into it with CoH yet (except that, thanks to this thread, I now picture a low-budget "Girls Gone Wild"-style commercial whenever I'm passing through Blyde Square and hear that twangy guitar theme
Also goes the other way, when I first started playing CoH at release I sometimes almost felt like I was playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall again. (Yes talk about old school). But I always swore the ambient background music you hear inside of a lot of the missions in CoH, particularly office maps, was the same as you'd hear in a Daggerfall dungeon. ), but a PC game called Nocturne used all sorts of unlicensed music that Buffy and Angel went on to use. Every time either show would start a fight scene with what, in my mind, had become "Nocturne's fight music," I'd keep imagining Stranger and Svetlana suddenly leaping in out of nowhere with guns blazing.
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An elephant that never forgets to kill, to round out Beast Mastery?
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If it's a bug, I hope it inspires the devs to really work something like that into the tutorial, with an Arachnos flyer for the heroes to fight too. That just looks all kinds of awesome.
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Quote:Hm, I got the impression that the system monitors the person's vital signs and automatically activates whenever they hit a critical threshold. Though for narrative purposes, I usually just pretend the medi-porters don't exist unless a mission stubbornly insists on talking about them.
I've often wondered about that myself, and thought the same things. i.e. "If I am knocked out, who is pressing my medi-porter?" -
Quote:But you can, by subscribing as a VIP. It's the same price as before.
wish I could return to the CoH before freedom -
I am, and I love it! However...
Quote:That's a fair point, since you end up running support for the pets more than fighting directly against the enemies. It takes some getting used to and it's probably not for everyone's playing style, but the level of sheer, glorious overkill you can bring to a fight makes it more than worth it.I want my character to be the one doing the stuff, not using powers through an NPC. Watching my pets win a fight just is not fun for me.
"Go, go my minions! Leave nothing standing! Mwu ha ha... oh, right, I'm a hero." -
Hey, a free wooden horse! And a bunch of Greek soldiers too! Best gift ever!
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Then it could be the last loyalist contact in the game. Geez, I was just complimenting an idea that I thought sounded interesting... it wasn't even my idea, it was yours.
Edit: Though thinking about it, FW could also be used to end the loyalist storyline. An extra clue could pop up at the end for loyalists saying that, due to your actions (perhaps stealing Diabolique's amulet) and/or just knowing too much, you've now been branded an enemy of the state. That way anyone who plays through First Ward can't help but get moved in-universe to the resistance/Primal side. -
Quote:What brick wall? You can be a loyalist character at level 20. There's even a loyalist justification for going to Primal Earth. First Ward is level 20-29. Praetoria is intact all the way up to the Incarnate trial. For any character in First Ward's level range, the fall of Praetoria is a long way off.
That still runs into the brick wall of the Praetorian war - the loyalists were the losing side even before GR launched, and the higher level the content, the closer it is to the start of the war, and the end of their empty hopes. -
Quote:I'd love to see a smooth transition like that, and it wouldn't be hard to work it into FW's structure. At level 20 a Preaetorian would get two new contacts, one about the portal to Primal Earth and another asking for your help with First Ward: that one-off Praetorian contact would replace Mistress Eva's role for Primals in Talos Island. Either a Resistance contact tells you that the regime is hiding something in FW and they want you to find out what and try to stop it (pretty much exactly what the FW story is now), or a Loyalist contact tells you that Cole's not happy with the situation in FW but doesn't want anything traced back to him (for the public good, of course!), and so he's sending you deep undercover in First Ward to uncover the truth. That could also lend some fun dramatic irony and extra layers of meaning to some of the dialogue in First Ward, with the FW contacts not realizing that you're secretly there on Cole's behalf.
Which really is a shame because all it would've taken is -1- loyalist contact asking you to help out in First Ward then leading you into the regular contact chain to set it up. -
This is one of the things I love about CoH. A mission can have all kinds of equally viable strategies depending on the build, and if you're using concept builds, it really helps blend the character into the setting and make the missions feel like their stories come to life. My flashy energy blaster charges in and spends half the time raining havoc on the enemies and the other half running away from them in a panic, and it makes perfect sense for her character. Meanwhile a more stealthy, secretive character can slip through the shadows without being noticed and quietly take down the enemies one by one without much of a struggle, and that fits their personality too. If it's possible to complete a mission a certain way, then it's definitely okay to do so - and if it makes sense for the character, even better.
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The statement I find most revealing is this one...
Quote:i.e. the only people "worth talking to" are the ones who don't challenge the behavior.The ones really worth talking to ignore the delivery, focus on the content and respond accordingly, perhaps with a good-natured snark or three thrown in just to keep me honest.
By the way...
Quote:Originally Posted by Henry Higgins
You see, the great secret, Eliza, is not a question of good manners or bad manners, or any particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls. The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you've ever heard me treat anyone else better. Pickering treats a flower girl as if she were a princess, but I treat a princess as if she were a flower girl.
Quote:A ha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can't take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. A ha! That's done you, Henry Higgins, it has... Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.
Quote:Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them.
No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. -
Thank you everyone for posting (and though I'd hate to use it on anyone, I didn't notice there was an ignore function - I'll remember that!), and I'll still be here - one frustrating conversation can't begin to outweigh the months of fun before that, and I really appreciate all the replies and encouragement.
To help get things back on topic, Longbow's attitude kinda does make realistic sense to me. They started as Ms. Liberty's idealistic, if legally dubious, "Peace Corps with guns" and went in with the same gung-ho attitude and inexperience. To that extent, I don't think their actions are inherently bad, they just take the implicit comic book question of "what right does one private citizen have to go out, break into a bad guy's warehouse and capture everyone there?" and extends it to a bigger, organizational level, where the question becomes that much more noticeable.
But then they started dying in battle, getting tangled up in quagmire situations like the Rogue Isles and watching major villains like Recluse keep getting away scot-free and, as time passed, the ones who survived, succeeded and so became the experienced leaders of Longbow also became hardened and embittered by their lack of progress, giving them a very myopic "us versus the world" mindset. And so after that initial "we're gonna save the world" enthusiasm wore off, we start seeing things like the tip missions, where this or that rogue, vengeful Longbow unit decides it wants to kill a suspect rather than apprehend them.
None of this reflects very well on Megan, though. I'm not sure if it'd be better to have her character darken to reflect the change in Longbow, or if she needs to hand off Longbow altogether since her idealism and its increasingly vigilante methods have drifted so far apart. As it is, she kinda seems like a public figurehead who really doesn't have much interest in what's going on with them, and I don't think that's what the story's really aiming for (at least, I hope not - I like Ms. Liberty!).
But about the flamethrowers, I'd always thought that was harsh too (and the NPC desc makes it sound even worse), but a few other people made a good point: heroes can have fire powers too and, whatever rationales can be applied for a single fire-blaster hero fighting bad guys without killing them (they can control the temperature to incapacitate rather than kill, they're careful about where they aim, the flames are some special chemical or energy effect that doesn't cause permanent damage and so on), we could guess that Longbow's flamethrower tech can work the same way.
Quote:I wondered about that too. Does that mean parts of the Rogue Isles are under U.S. jurisdiction (and is that reflected in some of the CoV zones?), or does the main island being outside it place the rest of the archipelago outside it too? Maybe they should've been put a little further out to sea, just to be safe.So NE of Bermuda. about 50 miles long, parts of it filter into the US coast line, the others belong to Recluse. -
Quote:So you're describing your own choices as "shrapnel?" No, you chose to act like a belligerent jerk and troll.
You're new around here.
You didn't post anything no one had seen before. We've been over this material many, many times, each time many of us pointing out that the official lore on the Isles is *****. So what really happened is you jumped without looking into a minefield in the middle of a shooting war and were shocked, shocked! when you caught shrapnel and stopped a bullet.
And just in general, can I not post anywhere on the internet without getting hostility and grief for the effort? I came here a few months ago with wide-eyed, gushing enthusiasm about the game. I'm now on the edge of cancelling my subscription and calling my attempt to be part of the CoH fandom a wash. I wonder how many other players who tried the forums made the same decision without saying anything? -
Quote:No, I'm STATING it. You're the one who jumped in and went all Yosemite Sam on a complete stranger for trying to be helpful, just because you don't like the answer. I don't care one way or the other, except that the Rogue Isles not being a part of the U.S. explains why nobody's stormed the place yet.
Because you're defending it. -
Quote:Okay, why are you acting like I WROTE the story?
Dude, do you know where Bermuda is? If the Rogue Isles are anywhere near the 50-mile line they are nowhere near Bermuda. And vice-versa. And if they're "a suburb of Paragon City" then the idea that they're not wholly under US jurisdiction is laughable.
Quote:Geographically, the Rogue Isles are a small chain of islands NW of Bermuda that run in a band 50 to 20 miles off the US coast. Officially known as the Etoile Islands, there are dozens of islands in the chain. The main cluster of the group, home to Spider City, is at the 50 mile marker, outside U.S. jurisdiction. From there the smaller islands string toward the US coast.
http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/game_i...early_year.php
It's apparently closer to Bermuda than anything else, or the description wouldn't have mentioned it, and it's around the 50 mile marker. If you need to reconcile this with real-world geography, tell yourself a teleporting supervillain moved Bermuda or something. Just don't jump down my throat for quoting the site. -
Quote:Official website, "at the 50 mile marker, outside U.S. jurisdiction." I even posted the link.You bring upa good point, Sam. If the devs have changed how they view the isles, they need to let the players know.
If all this fuss is about someone saying "a few miles," then keep in mind that 50 miles isn't very far to most Americans in terms of travel distance. That might be all that was meant. Not to mention that the current, official and publicly available information on the game's site should trump what this or that employee might have said one time off the top of their head. Who's to say they weren't just misremembering?