A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Return of community news
There's quite a bit to crow about in the City of Heroes community of late. Since the last time we've taken a look at the community, we've had a huge amount of new information about the next expansion, a double XP weekend, and the usual regimen of alien invasions and parallel universes. (July's release of Going Rogue will greatly increase the parallel universe portion.) And if you live on the east coast, you also have the opportunity to meet the Paragon Studios crew without traveling to the other side of the country!
Have I mentioned that I live on the east coast?
So next week, expect a very weary me to be dishing out a whole bunch of news from PAX East, as I'm going to be following the crew around like a forlorn puppy. But that's then and this is now. Today, we're going to be looking at some of the interesting community threads that have popped up over the last month, from the serious to the amusing.
"Walk the line between good and evil..."
Having an expansion whose main tagline is the above sort of lends itself to asking questions about the overall validity of moral compasses. It's possible for someone to mean to do evil and wind up doing good, or vice versa. It's also astonishingly easy and popular at this point to paint subjective evil in the same universe as absolute evil -- for a prime example, take a look at Dragon Age: Origins. (The absolute evil of Darkspawn versus the subjective evil of, well, pretty much anyone you decide to side against over the course of the game.) So this thread asks the logical question: where do you draw the line? What makes someone with selfish and "evil" motives wind up being good? Is it intent?
The answer, of course, is that there's no absolute answer one way or the other. City of Heroes has always existed in a very black-and-white universe -- while evil can be redeemed, there's no room for subjective thought when it comes to most villain groups. Heck, most villain groups in the game don't even have a motive that could be ascribed as anything other than evil, requiring you to really dig deep to do something like paint the Hellions as a victim of social conditioning. Introducing more shades of gray is interesting, to say the least, and we'll have to see how well the content in the expansion supports it.
With great power comes great opportunities to abuse that power
You have Melissa Bianco's job. You have unlimited resources to throw at CoH. What do you do?
Simple "what if" scenarios are always fun to crunch on in your mind. The resultant answers run the gamut, from fixing things that are seen by individual players as broken to adding features they would like to see. Sure, it's ultimately a pipe dream, since Paragon doesn't have unlimited resources, but it's nice to speculate about what a beloved game could become if it did.
Character concepts that you'd play but you can't
There's something about Dual Pistols and Dual Blades that feels as if it should go together, like peanut butter and chocolate. (Or dual chocolate, if you prefer.) Not that you can make a character like this in the game, since the two sets don't coexist in any archetype. It's not that they can't, just that they don't. After all, Blasters have hybrid melee/ranged secondaries, and there's certainly space in there for paired blades with a few Aim and Build Up powers scattered in the distribution...
Because of the somewhat modular nature of powersets, CoH lends itself to a fair bit of speculation about what could be done with the right mix of sets. This thread is devoted to all sorts of combinations that can't currently be made, but would be fun if they were in the game, either because they'd be pretty darned powerful (someone mentions Empathy/Kinetics at one point, which would basically be an instant group at all times) or just thematically fun (again, Dual Blades/Dual Pistols).
The infinite canvas is a rough ride
Posting the strangest comments from the Mission Architect system.
What can I say? I like strange comments. (Yes, I know what I'm going to be reading in response to this column. I've made my peace.)
Economic madness and the aftermath
While the Double XP weekend was a pretty good ride... there were some side effects. Some pretty notable ones, in fact, that put a lot of unintended money into the game's economy where it didn't exist before. In a game like EVE Online, of course, everyone's ready for economic turmoil as part and parcel of the gameplay. But it's a bit more unexpected in CoH, and has a few people pretty angry about what it means for sought-after IO sets.
Personally? I'm not terribly worried. As several people in the thread point out, you don't need the high-end enhancements to play the game. They're nice to max your character out, but we've discussed how endgame concerns really aren't a major element of CoH. Distorting the market probably won't have too many long-term repercussions, especially if making the enhancements harder to get makes them even less expected.
Giving Doug Ramsey a run for his money
There are some powers that sound cool but aren't as nifty in execution. Then there are the powers that are just plain useless. Either they don't work as intended, they don't work at all, or they work just fine to provide an effect that's totally useless. While some of the old favorites show up (hi there, Group Fly!) there are nominations for one or two powers from nearly every archetype. Proof that while the game doesn't really have a power set that's totally worthless any longer, there are still... dead spots, for lack of a better term.
There's also a thread running about the best powers in the game, but that's honestly not quite as interesting. Good powers are usually far more conditional and tied to both playstyle and preference. Furthermore, it's always a question -- do you choose solid workhorse powers like Hasten which are only useful with good stuff to follow them up, or flashy powers like Neutron Bomb that do a lot but only actually get used infrequently? Bad powers, on the flip side, are usually bad without any context.
That's the batch of notable threads for this column. Next week? Yes, PAX. As always, comments, questions, threads, corrections, or offers to sell me college degrees can be whisked along to Eliot at Massively dot com.
