TheBlindGirl

I don't usually like to determine the results of someone else's power, even when invited to, but it seems pretty clear the thread's gonna stall if I don't, so I gave it a shot.

The fountain water surged outwards, directly towards Violetta and her unwitting accomplice. Her phone was dead and useless anyway - God, of all the days to have no battery - so Violetta sprang sideways towards the camera guy. Her body slammed into his just before the water crashed into him and his delicate electronics, spinning herself around him so that her back caught the wave, shielding the camera from damage. Violetta's foot and knee slammed into the concrete, she winced at the scrape, then half-dropped the camera guy so she could check the camera. Not a drop of water on the equipment. Violetta dropped the camera guy the rest of the way to the ground and stood straight, shouting a triumphant "bam!" as her spare foot hit the concrete, her heels together and her arms outstretched like a gymnast sticking a landing. A split second after that, pizza cat's blasted-off pants wrapped themselves around her face with a wet "thwack." With a sigh, Violetta peeled the soaked pants off and dropped them on the floor before spinning around to face the catgirl. "Are you getting all this?" Violetta asked the camera guy, with a gesture of her head towards the shredded remains of the catgirl's outfit, "'cause this whole fiasco is a viral video gold mine. Hey!" She cupped her hands to make sure her voice carried to the cat, "say something dumb and endearing!"

"Ooh, that's a good idea," Violetta said, pretending to tap at her phone, "I was just gonna put the first part on YouTube, and then if my luck with the frailties of your wardrobe holds, have a link to the bigger, longer, and uncut version on RedTube. I'll probably get more hits if I doublepost to a specialty site, though. "We haven't even gotten your pants to fall down yet," Violetta said, following after as pizza cat headed towards the apartment. "Help me workshop a title. 'Naughty Cat Bath?' 'Hot Cat Girl With Soaked Panties?' I feel like these are too obvious, help me out here. Hey, don't go, I haven't posted anything yet. You're walking away from your last chance to talk me out of it."

Pizza cat had set herself on fire and dove into a fountain, so of course today was the day Violetta's phone was out of power. That video would've gotten literal millions of views. On top of that misfortune, the gambit to have Flambot provoke the cape into spilling the details on their outstanding debt hadn't worked, and Violetta was now fighting the urge to smack the cat girl upside the head for whining about "rich bitches" in the same breath as she demanded five hundred fucking million dollars. A couple of these names rang a bell - weren't some of these guys Carnies? The cape's nemeses, probably. That 'Insane Mary Zane' stray was probably either a Carnie Violetta didn't know about or else just some other random villain. Christ, with a working cell phone, Violetta could be crawling through Wiki pages and news articles looking for any heroes known to have fought them and start narrowing down who this cape might be. That could provide a lead on how she and Flambeaux had crossed paths. No phone, though, and Flambot's instructions had run their course, which means it was about to start glitching out. It would be kind of funny to watch the cape react to a Flambot meltdown, but it wouldn't make the job any easier. Violetta pushed off from the wall and started walking towards the cat girl, holding her phone up as though she were recording. Just how attention seeking was she, anyway, Violetta wondered? That inspiring speech punctuated by being set on fire and diving into an apartment fountain could stay meme-relevant for weeks and this cape would be the butt of the joke, but would she actually take that as a threat? Or would she feign anger for the drama and secretly be elated that she'd blundered into another few weeks of relevance? She'd apparently spun her internet fame into hundreds of millions of dollars that she could toss at - for some damn reason - Flambeaux, but so far as Violetta knew, it was mostly in the "adorkable cat girl" genre rather than "diva meltdown YouTube drama." With that kind of money on the line, the smart thing to do in response to a threat of posting a massive YouTube video would be to laugh all the way to the bank, but Violetta didn't have any other leverage, so it was time to take a shot in the dark. The metaphorical dark. Violetta could see perfectly fine in the literal dark. It's a good thing she had the mask, or everyone could've seen her opening and closing her mouth three times while she stumbled over a metaphor in her internal monologue. Finally, she shut her mouth and kept it shut, just holding up the dead phone as though to film what was going on. If the cat girl freaked out, Violetta had her hook. If she didn't, at least she hadn't embarrassed herself with a failed gambit.

Teenage characters created in 2019 go through the exact same tutorial and then play through follow-up events that heavily rely on Galaxy City having happened no more than a few weeks ago, maximum. If they're sixteen now, they would have been a maximum of nine during Galaxy City, and yet initial blueside missions clearly connect them temporally to that event. Not only that, but one such early mission directly referencing Galaxy City involves fighting a difficult Skulls boss, which pushes them strongly towards asking for help with it. Teenage heroes are not just able but encouraged to interact with a villain whose motivation is directly based on a recent devastation of Galaxy City in such a way that makes it plainly obvious that it happened no more than maybe a year ago at an absolute maximum. It's also a direct follow-up to the Matthew Habashy arc, which is clearly even more recent. That tutorial is official game content offered to every single character without exception, and 80% of all characters are heroes who are offered the Matthew and Veles arcs. Not only that, but Veles in particular is a really good arc, and most people will want to run it in character, particularly since it was part of the tragically aborted attempt to make arcs with more story meat to them, which really gives characters something to care about and interact with. You cannot invalidate that with a reference to a community discussion held nearly a decade ago. Your answer is wrong because every answer is wrong because the CoH timeline is an impossible paradox. If you cannot accept that and work with it, you are bad at roleplaying in CoH.

I live! Backed up a bit trying to get some stuff out on a deadline, but should be here more regularly in a day or two.

Hard pass on opening up about potential vulnerabilities to the guys who used other villains' minions as trophy gimps. "I found it in a Halloween shop I hit first night out and thought it brought the look together," Violetta said, which was technically true, "never did like the manager of that place," she added, which was a bald-faced lie to hopefully distract anyone from asking why she decided her first ever crime should be robbing a Halloween shop. Violetta's instructors at the Initiative had always told her to avoid incarnates. One of them had even threatened to make memorizing a complete list of them - hundreds of supers long at this point - a pre-requisite for graduation. They had also told her not to avoid getting on Longbow's radar, though, and blowing up their secret office over in the Etoiles had worked out great. Ultimately. Things were kind of touch and go, admittedly. The point here is that the Initiative instructors' advice was hit or miss and Violetta wanted the power in her apartment on bad enough to risk throwing down with an incarnate. She should probably demand more money for it, though. That's what Boba Fett would do. Oh. That would also work. "Alright, Flambot, try not to fuck this up," Violetta said. "Hey! Don't you - ERROR: STRING-RETORT NOT FOUND." "Attagirl," Violetta said, emerging from the limo with Hidreon, Vankbliss, and the glitching bot. "Alright," Violetta said to the bot, "find the cape you owe, demand to know why you should have to pay so much, and try to keep the conversation within a hundred yards or so. I can only hear the Motley Crue for so far." Even someone who'd seen Hellsing Abridged probably wouldn't catch that reference, Violetta thought as she walked away to find a wall to lean against, but goddammit, it was funny in her heart, and that's what mattered. A sudden scent stopped her dead in her tracks for a half-second, before she started walking again. Someone was bleeding nearby, but it didn't smell like it was all that much. So someone had cut themselves on something, whatever, Violetta told herself, job first, eat later. Even so, after she found a wall to lean against, popping out her dead phone to start at its blank screen and pretend it was holding her attention, she stole a sidelong glance towards the source of the scent. Hang on, was that the one cat girl from the pizza ads? Fuck the mission, Violetta thought to herself, she needed to get a selfie with- Wait. God fucking dammit.

Why would you think I want that? But you said that I was the one doing the blocking. Are you even keeping track of what you're saying? No. That's just not what the post says. He suggested an alternative. My response to that is "yes, do that, the story arcs idea is unimplementably difficult and thus not worth serious consideration." No. Certainly you are not decreasing my confidence in my assessment that you are a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing narcissist.

Are you offering to code in the proposed origin-centered story arcs yourself? The code is out there. You could've gotten started days ago. No one seems to have been blocked from discussing any of the other possibilities that have since come up. For that matter, only one person bothered addressing the actual concern that I raised.

I don't think a fear of having too many powers to slot is particularly sensible in any context. If the new powers don't need slots, you don't give them new slots. If the new powers do need slots, then it's because that's a better use of slots than your previous build. If there's anything to worry about, it's that giving out new inherent powers might make characters tend more towards being overpowered. City of Heroes was never particularly aimed at min-maxers, though. We can trade off on that for a long time before it becomes a problem.

Hitler ate sugar. This is not an indictment of sugar. This could work, but if origins can't be respecced, a lot of people are going to be faced with a character who would've made more sense as a different origin had they known in advance which powers would be associated to what, and now have to rebuild the character from level 1. Nothing will make a system unpopular more quickly than inconvenience.

Digging a canal from California to Virginia would require people to have a willingness to act. Most people are not digging a canal from California to Virginia. Do you think they're lazy? You're putting an awful lot of effort into it. Despite their lingering bitterness - to their own insistence on having a hostile argument on the subject, I guess - everyone has silently conceded that my assessment of the plausibility of creating new story arcs is accurate and moved on to talking about other possibilities. Even you aren't actually discussing the creation of new story arcs anymore. So, no, actually. The opposite of that.

It is not clear how you could have missed that this is the point. Do you not know what subservient means? Because it sounds a lot like you don't know what subservient means. You're trying very hard to sound aloof and superior. It isn't working.

Everlasting usually has a more even hero:villain ratio than other servers, and it's probably not a coincidence that it's also the unofficial RP server, where more of the population is likely to care about the quality of the writing.

It wasn't just to taunt players. It was also to get their money.

If you're really worried about American culture somehow going from global juggernaut to utterly stamped out in the course of a single generation, a good step 1 would be to stop trying to defend it. You are not very good at it.

Yes, yes. Your opinion has been noted. Thanks. It turns out that directly asking someone a question usually prompts them to respond.

Despite claims to the contrary, everyone has demonstrated through action, not words, that the task is too enormous to be worth the trouble. Something you probably could've divined if you were actually reading my posts:

So what? It's still not celebrated in the nation of origin for the majority of players, and it still did not facilitate the subversion of anyone's culture. If City of Heroes was going to be an ambiguously international game, that ship sailed when Paragon City was located in Rhode Island instead of being an ambiguously international location (like the Rogue Isles are).

I was gonna have Violetta ask the Flambot a question and write some dialogue in response, but I can't make it nearly as good as Terminal's, so I decided not to mar the beauty of this character.

Violetta nearly fell out of the chair as the man hammered on her door, one hand gripping the armrest for stability while the other flailed around her desk for her fucking creepy-ass mask. She managed to grab hold of the desk before she tipped the wheels up and fell down, pulling her mask down as she pulled the chair back flat on the floor. "Yeah, coming!" she shouted, realized that this didn't sound very villainous at all, and added "uh, make sure the money's good!" Make sure the money's good? Maybe with the right swagger that could've come off like, 'hey, punk, people have tried to stiff me before, and you don't wanna be one of them people, capisce?' Violetta was pretty sure she was landing closer to 'please pretend I am a real grown up villain and not a little babby criminal.' And this was specifically a job where she was supposed to be intimidating! At this rate, by the time the job was done these guys were gonna try and beat her up for her lunch money. Well, joke's on them. --- She was good at looking relaxed. Given a few minutes to psych herself up for it, at least. One leg crossed over the other, an arm stretched across the back of the seat, tapping her gloved claws along the leather, nodding along to a song she couldn't get out of her head and desperately wanted to listen to on some real headphones, and watching a failing robot freak the fuck out. "Who the Hell programmed this thing with existential poetry?" she asked, "that can't have been a necessary spec for imitating Flambeaux. Does every Nemesis bot have these? Can we uncover Nemesis plots by asking anyone suspicious to sololiquize about the finite nature of existence?"

Guild Wars celebrates Chinese New Year because it has a psuedo-Chinese culture. No one seems to consider this the thin edge of Chinese cultural domination over the west. Paragon City is located in America. It would make sense for them to celebrate Independence Day.

It's a counterintuitive but omnipresent fact of MMORPGs that most people playing them prefer to play alone. Is that because they don't want to play with other people in this genre whose defining feature is having other people around? Or because grouping is a hassle and they don't want to wait in queue instead of playing a video game? The first is more likely than it might seem at first glance. Some number of people like to have a crowd present just so they can make the choice not to join it. It's not clear how many people redside are like that. It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to have extra merit rewards for specific strike forces (and task forces, for that matter) on certain days of the week, in order to draw the redside population from being scattered all across the Isles to focus on rotating through specific content.

Redside players want to play group content and often can't. That said, there are hundreds of redside players per server. The matchmaking infrastructure is just insufficient to get them playing together.

A major problem with redside content is that it takes place in the Rogue Isles, an authoritarian dystopia run by a sinister super villain Hellbent on world domination. The only good guys around are invaders or subversives like Longbow, the Legacy Chain, and Wyvern. Even if we drastically multiplied the number of such heroic antagonists, people who want to play City of Villains want to be super villains, and most super villains are criminals, not dictators. There's plenty of room in a villain story for infighting and gang wars, but so long as the action takes place mainly in the Isles, you have to have a sudden, drastic location switch in order to cap off a gang war with a battle against the police and a super hero. City of Villains would have a much harder time selling itself as an expansialone upon release if it took place in tweaked copies of Paragon City zones, but it probably would've been much better for the long term health of the game. Unfortunately, it's way too late to fix this.