battlewraith

Yeah I think that's the gist of the disagreement. You're talking about Bond the cartoon character, who faces off against some cartoonish depiction of evil and saves the day. I have little doubt that Amazon will go down that road again, but I think it's been done to death and the further we get away from the 60s the more ridiculous the premises become. Bond as a film character is basically a laundry list of traits that the editors of Playboy might have come up with: knows how to rock a tuxedo, can hold his liquor, bangs lots of hot women, can drive a racecar, shoot guns, save the world if necessary, etc. The point of the movies is to see this character have an adventure and crack one-liners, not actually see espionage. So under those assumptions, it's ok to see Bond coerce his masseuse to have sex with him (which in no way advances the plot or his mission) because the formula demands that he beds a certain number of women per film. I don't want them to change that. I want them to lean in on it. I would just want them to set him in a narrative that doesn't pass off protecting his governments interests as "saving the world."

I don't think the compliant hinges on Bond killing people. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/23/james-bond-no-time-to-die-cary-fukunaga-thunderball "One key scene in Goldfinger features Connery’s Bond apparently forcing himself on Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore in a haybarn. In a 1959 letter concerning the novel from which the film was adapted, Ian Fleming explains that this “laying on of hands” from “the right man” was all which was required to “cure” the lesbian character of “her psycho-pathological malady”. LOL?

That would be better for sure, but I'd like it to be something like Bond meets John La Carre. Something more accurate to what intelligence agencies are actually like. Bond is a loathsome human being who has saved the interests of his loathsome agency in it's conflicts with other loathsome organizations. Will never happen but, that's where I'd like to see it develop.

I don't know what good treatment would look like. Sean Connery's Bond pretty much set the mold and those movies are challenging to watch now. He's a womanizer that comes across as almost a sociopath at times. I loved the Roger Moore films as a kid, but they are pretty damn goofy now. The more recent films seem to try to redeem the character in light of more contemporary sensibilities but meh. I think Bond needs to be this stereotypical drinking, gambling, womanizing, killer and he needs to be set in a world where that makes sense--and I have a hard time picturing anyone, let alone Amazon doing that well.

Yeah you can stop with that. I assume that the majority of suggestions made here will be ignored. People might hope for a change, want to discuss an idea, or just vent. They don't need the world-weary gaggle of naysayers talking about the dead horse, as if they were bound like Alex DeLarge and forced to read repetitive forum posts.

Which is why I said gatekeeping earlier. I don't live on these forums. I specifically don't camp here in suggestions to shoot ideas down. If people keep asking for something again and again, it's an indication of interest. Which is why they are expressing that interest in a place called SUGGESTIONS & FEEDBACK. Your time is your own to waste. Unless you're being coerced to comment, there is no point in you complaining about what other people request. If the devs don't like the request, it will sink off the page like everything else.

"We"? They'll either see it or they won't. In the meantime, you could cut out some of the noise by refraining from beating the horse yourself and then complaining about other people doing it lol.

A very reasonable case has been made, by multiple people, that the AI should be adjusted and that the knockback is a problem. If you have to tax the player with resources and a slot to fix a problem, that's bad design and should be addressed. I couldn't care less what the status of the whole set is with regard to someone's tier ranking. Mainly because this game is very easy to begin with and calling something an S-tier monster doesn't mean that much. On a team with other ATs that are fully slotted with sets and incarnates, that "buffed" phantasm is not going to matter at all. On the other hand, if you're a lowbie and grinding your way up with SOs--seems kind of waste of money to drop a couple million to buy what is basically a QOL improvement because your own pet is putting you at greater risk.

You introduce the notion that the set should not be buffed. Then there is debate about what constitutes a buff. Wavicle said: "Any improvement is a buff. Those suggested changes to Phantasm would improve its damage and survivability, making them buffs. I happen to agree that Phantasm should hang back, and that its attacks should all be knockdown instead of knockback, but I'm not going to deny that those would be buffs. Obviously they are buffs. You were in fact asking for Illusion to be buffed, you were just specific about what exactly you wanted buffed." Nobody is directly defending the current AI, because that would be overtly stupid. Instead, the idea is being dismissed on the grounds of being a buff. A quantifiable sin, so to speak.

I don't see much there other than gatekeeping. There is no substance to this response. The pet is annoying because of knockback and it's AI. I'm playing one right now, it's a moron and sometimes gets me killed by aggroing other groups. Regardless of how strong IC is as a set, addressing these issues is not going to make it suddenly vastly more powerful. It will just make it more enjoyable to use that pet. It's laughable that someone would frame this as a big deal. And you're mischaracterizing this conversation which seems to be divided between "yeah adjust the AI" and "any fix to a problem is a buff, and under no circumstances should this set get a buff."

So the phantasm has to be an annoying moron so that people won't think that illusion is too OP. This is the mentality that, imo drives the game towards mediocrity--the fact that every set follows a formula where it comes across as a tweaked, repackaged version of something else. The concern that illusion would be head and shoulders above other sets (for what?) in a 20 year old game is silly. Particularly, when most vets have at least one 50 sitting on a shelf somewhere. In the age of inventions and incarnates, where damage dealers like blasters can have pets if they want, the thought of a non-stupid phantasm throwing things out of whack is just gatekeeping over the most marginal of concerns.

I said SO FAR. I would say given the controversy and troubled production history, these numbers are pretty good. Definitely better than I expected. I said nothing about it breaking even or anything like that.

Looks like it's doing well at the box office so far. It had a 100 million dollar opening weekend, which has exceeded expectations.

A bit of a tangent here, but I recently watched a video comparing Aragorn to Jon Snow. George R. R. Martin wrote the character of Jon Snow as a sort of rebuttal to Tolkein's version of Aragorn. However, the Peter Jackson movies complicate Aragorn's character in a way that somewhat answers Martin's complaints. But then the tv version of Jon Snow is seemingly influenced by Jackson's version of Aragorn--which actually works to the detriment of what Martin was going for with that character lol.

Snyder is really good at doing a certain kind of visual style. There was a project for one of the Iphones where they had people make short films with their phones and his entry was remarkable for what he was able to accomplish with a phone. It was also pretty recognizable as his work. I liked the Dawn of the Dead movie he did and Watchmen. He's one of those directors that had some good work, but once they had clout, a bigger budget, and more control over every part of the production, things started to go south.