Venture

Nope. Arakhn has been leading the Nictus for centuries at least. She developed the cyst process, and there's been a cyst on earth since circa 475 CE. She was responsible for sending Ridolfo Uzanno to Ravenna to merge with Dirge of Entropy, creating Requiem.

Actually they're not. The redside Circle lore is all in a mess and should probably be ignored. The CoV team either Did Not Do The Research or They Just Didn't Care.

There is, and it's to delete arcs that haven't been accessed by their authors or played in X days. If no one has played an arc in (e.g.) 90 days and even its creator isn't doing anything with it, it clearly won't be missed.

The game's FX are way over the top. As soon as there's more than one or two PCs around it's impossible to see what's going on without turning particles down to the floor (maybe not then either). At something like a mothership or Hamidon raid, forget it. FX design has to take into account the number of PCs and mobs that can be acting at any given time. Baysplosions that look good for a single player are too much in any group action.

More like it's just a bunch of not very interesting stuff that doesn't make much sense.

There is no shortage of arcs in MA that prove otherwise, even counting ones I didn't write myself.

For which the other ATs are extremely fortunate.

And as others have already noted, the VEAT arcs...just...no.

You mean like how over in the Comics etc. forum I posted about liking The A-Team movie?

According to who? The villain arcs make assumptions about the PC's motives that are just as bad as the ones made in the rest of the redside content (who said I want a cloning lab?). The second villain arc throws the Idiot Ball (hey, why don't you let some guys you don't know move troops into your new lab and then check them out! Wait....) Both the hero and villain arcs make the assumption that cloning the PC would accomplish anything, which it would not in three out of five origins and probably wouldn't in a fourth (and might not even be possible at all, e.g. robotic or undead characters). Both sets of arcs ultimately play the PC for a sap as both are eventually revealed to be elaborate plots by Mysterious Letter Writer Guy to get Protean and Ajax under his control.

Whether or not they "flowed better", they were about essentially nothing.

While "literary masterpieces" might be too strong a term, people have been gushing over the stories in them despite the fact that there really isn't one, just a narrative of events.

Watchmen.

Whether or not varieties of the Evil Twin trope have been used in comics (largely in the past, you don't see too much of it these days) is irrelevant. A lot of what has been done in comics, particularly in the past, is cliched trash. A lot of it doesn't really play in interactive fiction where you can't make certain assumptions about the player.

I did. Vibora Bay is fairly large and has a lot of new missions and mobs in it. It's really very well-done graphically, unfortunately the writing is complete garbage. Its precipitating event, the "Crisis" arc that introduces the zone, requires catching a gargantuan Idiot Ball. It just goes downhill from there, devolving into an Idiot Plot revolving around a Jerkass Anti Sue.

Neither do I. I'm not asking for Tolstoy, I'm asking for better than freaking Michael Bay.

This is hilarious. Blizzard is the gold standard for quality -- they take as much time on their projects as they feel they need, refuse to be bullied on release dates, and will kneecap a project if it doesn't meet their standards. They haven't released a game with bad writing ever. I don't like much of it but it's not bad.

Cryptic is selling the exact same kinds of things in their "C-Store" as Paragon is selling in "Booster Packs". They had planned to release Vibora Bay in CO as a paid expansion called "Revelations" (it's about the size of CoV) but a massive negative reaction from the players got that nixed. I expect this to be bad for the game in the long run as the subscriber base has more or less stated it won't pay for new content, which in turn puts a limit on how much the company is going to spend developing it. Personally I didn't have any issues with a paid expansion per se, but it might be for the best in this particular case that VB was released for free because while it's very pretty to look at it has some of the worst writing I've seen in any MMO (it's about as bad as some of the worst MA arcs I've reviewed.)

Paragon Studios isn't doing any better; the writing in City has been on a steady downward spiral since i7. People have been gushing over the silly Evil Twin stories we just got but I honestly can't see why; at best they're a fairly pedestrian demonstration of some new technology. Nor do I expect miracles from GR. The last fluff piece we got appears to have been written by someone who read John Byrne's take on Dr. Doom circa 1980 and thought it was really deep (it isn't) and some kind of bold new direction (no, we read it too, thanks).

It doesn't look to me like there's a lot of credibility in the idea that big companies are pushing out garbage and the little guys are releasing unsung masterpieces.

If I didn't care about the story, I'd be playing Tetris.

Actually it was a mathematical discussion, even if Durakken now says it wasn't. It should be clear by now that he's making this up as he goes along, of course.

Sam has already covered most of this, but to clarify, I said "points", not "atoms". Atoms are countable, and probably not infinite in any given universe since (we think) universes themselves are not infinite. Points are uncountable because any time you say "this is point #1" and "this is point #2" I can stick another point in between them. That's the short version, for the details you need to look at things like Cantor's diagonal argument (it's on Wiki).

Rest of the silliness snippped for brevity. If the game was right and Manticore was wrong, the game would not have been changed because you don't change correct information. When contradictions arise in a continuing series someone with editorial authority will make a decision as to what is correct, and that decision will not be made using some kind of algorithm. It will probably be made to preserve parsimony in some sense, which may still favor external over internal details. As in the provided example sometimes information that is not in conflict with internal details will be judged as incorrect simply because the creators have decided to go in a different direction. I don't expect any of that to sink in, of course, since it should be clear by now that Durakken lives in his own intestinally-based reality.

Yes, we've always been at war with Eastasia.

It isn't. Infinity comes in more than one size in higher math. Frinstance the set of integers is infinite, and so is the set of real numbers, but the infinity of the set of integers (countable) is smaller (has lower cardinality) than the infinity of the set of real numbers (uncountable). It gets even worse later I believe on but that's above my pay grade.

Consider the parallel universe scenario. There are an infinite number of universes but they're countable (probably), and every one of them contains an infinite number of points, which are uncountable. Does your head hurt yet?

He has a point on the convergent/divergent thing. Personally I don't think it matters because I don't want either kind around.

I can see what the author of WoA was trying to do -- basically the same thing Jim Shooter tried to do with the New Universe "white event", establish a point of divergence with real history so that everything before the titular event is unchanged and the author(s) only have to concern themselves with subsequent events. The problem is that the City universe was just way too weird a place well before said event, going back at least 14,000 years in canon.

If I were telling the story, I would explain the "surge in supers after Statesman" as a cultural phenomenon. I'd say that metahumans (etc.) were always present in the population but didn't embrace the flamboyance of superheroes, wearing costumes and deliberately building an image and such. They were rare enough that the average person probably never saw one and didn't believe the "tall tales"...until Statesman deliberately dialed it up to 11 in modern times with mass media. It's been stated too that Paragon City and the Isles have way more supers than most areas so to some extent it's even a localized phenomenon.

You should be used to it by now.

Yes, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to keep continuity hounds off-balance.

Evidently not.

You're new around here, I guess.

Once upon a time, Maria Jenkins' in-game bio said she was Maiden Justice, the female hero who worked alongside Statesman at the beginning of his career. Manticore started posting about Maiden Justice being Monica Richter, Ms. Liberty's grandmother and Statesman's wife, people pointed out the contradiction...and look what changed.

N.B. that this wasn't even a statement made by a character -- it was an out-of-character piece of narration, "Word of God" if you will. It still got thrown under the bus. The official explanation was that the bio was mistaken, but you really have to be pretty simple to think it wasn't a retcon. (Proof here being the Unfortunate Implications that resulted in the Praetorian version of the story. Someone wasn't thinking things all the way through.) If such a narrative statement is subject to revision then it's hard to say that statements made by characters would somehow carry more force, when logically they are even more provisional.

Protip: the GM (or "devs" when they go pro) is never wrong. Even when he is. The guy behind the screen has the first, last and only word about what is or is not true about his creation. Fictional reality is subject to change without notice.

No in-universe character is "an authoritative source of information". Characters can be mistaken about things they believe. They can lie. They can be Nemesis Automatons. It is an ooooolllllddddd GMing trick to only give the players information about the world through NPCs precisely so that any or all of it can be contradicted later if desired.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Do you mean the claim that the box is thousands of years old? If that is false then the entire point in contention is false.

There are too many canonical instances of superhuman activity during historical periods when "the box" was supposedly closed. Cimerora would be one honking huge example.

Web of Arachnos was written several years ago, long before those pages on the signature characters were put up. They appear to have been (very poorly) written by someone who just smashed in everything from the books and comics which was really a bad idea. According to one of the editors the books were written while the game's backstory was being developed, which is why there are so many continuity gaffes in them. They should have been relegated to the dustbin of apocrypha instead of having some ham-handed effort made to wedge them in.

What's there is taken from Web of Arachnos, which is unfortunate because it wasn't a particularly good book and parts of it (including the box) don't jive with the game. But I guess we're stuck with it now.