CraterLabs

In the "Rescue The Carnival Of Light" mission that you get during (Primal) Provost Marchand's "A New Dimension, A New Team" story arc, you transition from a small Council warehouse to a Council cave midway through the mission by using an elevator. There is no animation when you click the elevator, you just click it and are transported to the cave portion of the map. This isn't the case in reverse, however: if you click the door on the cave-side of the map you get the full animation of the door opening, you running through, screen fades to you entering the warehouse portion of the map again.

So, the Praetorians enemy group is one that makes sense in very, very broad terms, but starts falling apart when you look at the specifics. On the surface it usually looks like it's intended to mean one of two things, narratively: The critter in question is allied with, or associated with, the Praetorian Empire's government or Loyalists or leaders The critter in question comes from the dimension of Praetoria And these are handy, but they get applied inconsistently. Case in point, the solo mission at the end of Praetor Sinclair's story arc in Imperial City gives us a good look at some Phoenixes who are members of Project Phoenix and working for Belladonna Vitrano (herself a former member.) While Belladonna is given her current faction (Resistance) as she is in other missions, the Phoenixes show up as Praetorians. Other Project Phoenix members in Praetor Sinclair's missions (such as Gorgon) are treated similarly. This further confuses things with the Chimera Ninjas group (who don't really show up much outside of AE missions, of course, but the connection between them is pretty clear). The oddity is not that Phoenixes don't belong to the Praetorians group so much as it is that there are other groups that they might easily slot into, and other groups who might easily fit into the Praetorians group (such as, say, the IDF, which is made up of several other groups of Praetorians working together) don't get put in the Praetorians group, instead they get their own group. (And, interestingly, the Project Phoenix members don't get listed with the Praetorians or with the Chimera Ninjas in the homecoming wiki, they get grouped with the Resistance.) This isn't a high priority issue, of course, but it feels like there's room for some more clarity. They definitely *do* have some ties to the Praetorians in the same way that the IDF does, though it feels like they could also get slotted into the Resistance, or Chimera Ninjas, or even their own Project Phoenix group without a lot of difficulty. Dunno if this would be more trouble than it's worth to code in something, but it felt worth mentioning, heh.

In this mission introduction text from Magus Mu'Drakhan, I think he means "quiet his trouble-making" instead of "quite his trouble-making." ...I could *almost* imagine it being "quit his trouble-making", but I don't think it's that, you'd need to be using a pretty archaic version of "quit", and even then it'd be a stretch.

Gender of the Damned is actually what the "Huge" body type refers to themselves as.

Hey, found a minor continuity-style typo in Magus Mu'Drakhan's "A Traitorous History" story arc. My guess is that this mix-up probably happened because of the Who Will Die arc causing some characters to be less available than normal (so I'll hide them behind spoiler tags.) Basically,

In the mission send-off text for the final mission of Scirocco's "A Wind Called Serafina" arc, he says "I would strong suggest" instead of "I would strongly suggest".

In Scirocco's "Rescue Wretch" mission, one of the Malta folks wandering around just says "string" instead of whatever his dialogue string is supposed to be.

Hey, fair enough. I was just suggesting a possible way it could look. I'd be happy with that.

I think that's why making it a casual thing instead of a big overhaul could be the best approach. Don't require mission creators to flag them, but give people who encounter missions the tools to do so. The only concern I can think of with this is that it would create some potential "review bombing" situations, so an arc's creator should get a tell or e-mail in-game to say something like "Your AE mission 'Cool Infamy Farm' was flagged as a resource farming mission, if this is accurate you don't need to do anything, if it's inaccurate please submit a troubleshooting ticket" so that way there's room for the volunteer dev team to look at arcs as needed, but no need for them to look into it whenever the system works as intended

I kinda wish there was some in-game resource for that. Also, if I had the ability to apply tags to missions I played in AE that don't have any of those, I'd likely add a lot since almost none of the good stories I've seen in the last couple years have used those. I think. Maybe they did and I didn't notice, heh.

It's such a classic, dapper look! How many mastermind characters would benefit from the ability hold one in front of themselves while leaning their head on it and appraising whatever they're looking at, or jovially leaning to the side with one while swinging a pocket watch in the other hand? My guess is that number could be as many as seven and other non-mastermind archetypes might have some sort of use for this kind of animation as well! From The Riddler to The Clock King to some other Batman villain I've never heard about, it's an undeniably stylish look that fits for seriously cerebral and cartoonishly capricious tricksters. Sure, you *could* spend the dev resources working on new powers or balancing the game, or revamping many of the enemy groups who've needed it since they first came out (lookin' at you, Outcasts) but why do such sensible things when we could spend the time and expense on a couple of jaunty cane emotes? All joking aside, I think it'd be nifty. 💚

Maybe? I always try to check those boxes when I rate a mission ("Ideal for Teams", "Kid Friendly", "Complex Mechanics", "Canon Related", etc.), I'd definitely check a similar box for "Farm [XP, Inf, Tickets, etc.]" or something. Even if I'm the only one doing it, that'd at least be one or two fewer farms to deal with a week for everyone else, heh-heh

Especially if we can select multiple things, yeah. I actually have a mission called "River Of Fire!" that gets, I think, probably more exposure than it should because of the occasional confused fire farmer who rolls up to it and decides to just play the story instead of dumping it immediately when they realize it's not that, heh. Theoretically -fire would exclude missions like that in ways that -farm wouldn't. Either way, being able to specifically exclude stuff we're not looking for would be awesome. Yeah. Honestly, if players could somehow tag missions as farms in addition to the devs listing them as such, that might be a good step.

Not sure if this counts, but I just manually dropped a thumbtack on the map at this spot on Mercy Island, and the actual arrow guiding me toward where to go is at Fort Darwin. It says a second screenshot would go over the allowed limit for attaching a file, but in the image here I'm at [-483.6 89.7 -1679.5]. If I follow guidance arrow, it takes me right to the door of the Arachnos Flier that the game guides you to click on after you earn the Freedom Cracker badge for the revamped Mercy Island introduction story (at [-4132.9 159.5 -3233.6] ). Clicking the chat-log numbers that came up when I first typed whereami for the screenshot, it puts a thumbtack pretty much right where I was, which is normal behavior but it felt worth mentioning.

Is there any way to do this? Whenever I get a character to a place where I don't have an active contact I like to hit up AE for some missions at my level but there's no way to search for things without pages and pages of "Fire Farms" advertising their "Fast Completion" or "High Ticket Output" or whatever. I can never remember that tag that people use for story-focused missions, and a lot of my favorite story creators don't even know to use that tag anyway so I'm sure that won't find 'em all. A way to say "exclude any results with the phrase "fire farm" in my results" would rock. Thanks, dev team!

Hey, so, this is, without hyperbole, the only Crey mission I've actually enjoyed going through. I'm usually bored fighting Crey, but it really clicked for me this time. Might help that it kept threatening to come really close to a lot of background details from my main hero's backstory, heh. But it was fun. Anyway, some quick notes: In the first mission, if you follow the optional objectives, the final item doesn't have a number in front of it (something I've done too many times in AE missions to count, heh) -I feel like the revelation that Dr. Aeon stole from Crey to make Architect Entertainment is a bit of a retcon. I don't even think it's a necessary one that makes the story go smoother, they more or less worked together on it, didn't they? Or is it a case of Dr. Aeon stealing more than he was given initially? Maybe this is just building off of that idea, but it still felt a little strange to read. I'll have to brush up on my in-game history. -It says that Desert Freeze accepts the teleport tag to return to the chopper, though she instead runs away. A minor nitpick, but thought I'd mention it. -It was so nice to do some simple street sweeping by fighting Trolls. Nothing too complicated, and it happened when I was right by some anyway, so it broke up the activity nicely. Also, I enjoyed having an actual "defeat all" for the first mission; normally those are kind of a drag, but it was fun this time. Not sure why. -Other people have mentioned it, but I was thrown off by the fact that I had to go talk to her in Ouroboros. I'm not sure if it's a glitch that you can't take her missions outside of Ouroboros if you're above level 44, or if that's always what was intended and it was just improperly listed as 41+ in the release notes. Not a big deal, but it was a bit of a disappointing stumbling block out of the gate. On that note, though, more lower-level content is always good, even if "lower" in this case is just six below the level cap, heh. -All of the Paragon Protector fights led to the obvious issue of the ones who would tap their invulnerability power or whatever it's called and become effectively untouchable (at least to me) for a while. I wasn't too thrown off by this, not my first Paragon Protector rodeo, but I want to note that I especially appreciated the fight against SctachingPost because she called for backback during her invulnerability phase, so I at least had other minions to fight during that (one of those minions activated *their* invulnerability, which was kinda funny, but still, heh) Anyway, thanks again for making this, it was a lot of fun. 🙂

Greece and Rome are different, yeah. Having said that, though, I wouldn't mind seeing The Warriors get involved in a Cimeroran plot. Even if the Warriors are stylistically driven by 1980s movie aesthetics first and foremost, they still have that love of ancient texts and documents and such. Just imagine the Warrior from Talos who goes back in time to defeat all the greatest Roman warriors, with no care for what it does to the time stream

For the Writers... 1) Is the outbreak drug from the original tutorial meant to be the same as the Lost virus, just in its earliest stages? Is that why The Lost had it when The Radio asked redside players to steal it? Or did The Lost just have it with a plan to use it in some other mutagenic scheme? (Also, just to clarify: The Radio mission where you steal it happens *after* the Outbreak tutorial, right? Some readings suggest that it happens before, indicating that the redside player might be the cause of the Outbreak, but the Radio saying the drug was "causing an outbreak" sounds like that event's already happened) For Tunnel Rat or other power design folks... 2) There's a pretty nifty elegance to the Time Manipulation powers with the spinning circles going along with clock face designs, were there similar synergies planned to upcoming powers when the game's work had to stop so suddenly? For the Designers or possibly the Writers... 3) We hear a lot about The Devouring Earth in ways that makes it sound almost more like a typical comic book supervillain group, infiltrating energy drink companies to spread mutagen, dealing with the Council to get Quantum Ray Guns to help deal with the influx of Peacebringer and Warshade heroes, using magic to summon evil spirits like Defiler, and things like that. Most of their missions just boiled down to "stop the giant plant creatures", though. Would we have ever seen more of the human proxies that the Devouring Earth works through, or were they mostly taken off the table since it's challenging to put non-powered villains into stories (though not impossible, as the Dirge Of Chaos story demonstrated)? 4) Can you tell us anything about Mihenra, the warlord from the land of the dead who rose in Baumton? Would he have tried coming back in the wake of Mot's defeat since there was a power vacuum caused in the "god of death" domain after that wrapped up, or was his historical footnote story wrapped up in full before the game even started?

This probably falls under "Writers" but might also be a "Powers" question, but... 1) Sister Psyche mentions that she doesn't necessarily see herself as a Mutant so much as she sees herself as a Psychic, and other places in the game talk about different origins rising, fading away, or getting folded into other categories over time. In the general "story" of the game world, would a hypothetical "Psion Origin" character be limited to the psychic power sets? Or would they have the run of anything just like all the other origins? (I suppose a Psychic Assault Rifle or Psychic Street Justice isn't any less weird than a Science Ninja Mastermind or a Tech Sorcery user, heh). 2) Were there plans for other possible "emergent" origins out there? I almost get the vibe that the Devouring Earth is trying to brute force their way into Nature being an origin, with how they seem content to use anything from magic to mutagen. And unrelated to those two, here's one for the designers... 3) Would the "True Rikti" have appeared more or less like the Rikti we know and fear, or would they have looked even more alien?

To the design team: It feels like the Rogue Isles has a specific design where each major island has an Arachnos Marshall there to keep an eye on things, and then a Governor to run things, and the Governor always feels like they fit into a certain "villain archetype" that superheroes might fight without being a straightforward supervillain. Mob boss(es) in Port Oakes, a mad scientist in Cap au Diable, a human rights violating businessman in Sharkhead, and a Spymaster in Grandville are the easy to spot options. Was this intentional, or did it just happen this way? Is Marshall Blitz supposed to be an intentional subversion since he murdered the governor making him both the Arachnos agent and also the villain archetype (paranoid warmongering ruler of an island that has nukes)? And is there a full list of who the governors and marshals are, because you've really gotta go digging to find references to 'em; I think the Marshall of Sharkhead is mentioned maaaaaybe once in one of Operative Vargas' missions? And who was the governor of Mercy Island, I've heard some people swear that it was supposed to be the head of the R.I.P. and others swear that it's supposed to actually be Ghost Widow herself, but I've not found any documentation to support those either way. To Castle, Black Scorpion, and Synapse (and any other "Powers" people): For people interested in game design, a lot of people point out that you don't actually want a perfectly balanced game, because perfect balance stops being fun. But we also kind of intuitively know that you still want to shoot for a "balanced level of imbalance". So for designing powers in City of Heroes (or maybe even other games) is there a certain benchmark you use as a general guide for "the right level of overpowered" when working on a power conceptually before you push it to beta testing? (And on that note: to what degree should a power be built around the "fantasy" (this is the Grenade power set), and to what degree should it be built around the "mechanics" (this is the Knockbacks And Fire Damage set)?

For Black Pebble: when it came to pushing City of Heroes as a "brand", what aspects of the franchise were being leveraged the most? Statesman was definitely the "face" of the game even after the Who Will Die? arc made it a little weird for him to be around, but were there other elements being considered for pushing as the vibe of the game? Would we have gotten a Clockwork Plushy before a Hamidon Plushie?

For the developers and designers: What was the original distinction between Hazard Zones and Trial Zones meant to be? The in-game explanations of the difference between those zones is a little vague. I got the impression that one is meant to focus more on "larger crowds of enemies" and another on "more dangerous enemies" from a mechanical standpoint, and that story-wise one is just "generally dangerous area" while the other is "defining story moment area", but comparing the zones to those definitions doesn't always make it clear. So, is this a thing where the definitions changed over time in response to how the players interacted with it? Was there an endpoint that the zones were going to transition to, or did the definitions stay basically the same, but the distinction between what they meant mechanically was more of a background detail? For the writers and story team: Was Praetoria done for keeps? There's a lot of talk in Number Six's story arc about it being "hopeless", but that talk is also what you'd hear in a lot of other third-act "the supervillain is winning for real now" stories (generally right before heroes turn the tables and pull victory from the jaws of defeat), and I kinda like the idea that maybe the Devouring Earth and nuclear blasts haven't completely wiped it out over there... but I also know that the game was starting to move on, so I'm not sure how final that finality was meant to be.

Some Clockwork questions for the writers: How good of an engineer was the Clockwork King outside of his psychic abilities? Some Clockwork descriptions imply that they actually have functional computer brains and personalities (and some of them even get tossed into the Zig according to the mad-libs-y police scanner missions, which I absolutely take as canon), and he seemed to know enough about robotics to at least get his foot in the door for meetings and interviews, but the nature of his ability makes it tricky to know if that's genuine mad science skill, him creating sub-personalities for the more advanced Clockwork that he starts vicariously living through, or a bit of both depending on the situation. The ability of Bat'Zul to take over the Clockwork in the Rogue Isles combined with the description of the "psionically charged brass" and "clockwork gear" salvage pieces sort of suggest that there's at least a *little* autonomy or self-sustainability for them, but it'd be nice to know for sure, heh. (Oh, and on that note, with the Clockwork getting their higher-level psionic counterparts and the various villain groups slowly getting their own redesigns, would we have eventually seen Clockworks proliferating to the different city zones, with different regional variants? Or were they good as they were?)

Here's three (and a half) questions for the writers and designers, but I could see them touching on the Powers Team too: 1) It's been said in previous Lore Q&As that the Incarnate powers were eventually going to be "trivialized and replaced" with a different set of endgame abilities (something about mystical weapons, like with Excalibur), either as a new "type" of power or as a second wave of Incarnate abilities. Was there a set number of those planned out, or was it going to be developed on an as-needed basis, and would they all be tailored to particular story arcs the way that the Incarnate powers were designed to counter the Praetorian threat? If so, how many story loops would've happened until we swapped our mega endgame powers for mafia-themed abilities to take on Sebastian Frost? 1.5) On the subject of Sebastian Frost, while it's generally assumed that most "street grade" Superadine just grants super strength and durability, some of the lore implies it can kick-start powers. Were there customize Superadine batches that could tailor special powers the don's most trusted lieutenants? Would we have gotten to see Sebastian Frost's personal stash turning him into a giant monster made of ice? Or was its use for other superpowers meant to always be more of a "kickstarting the latent abilities" variety? 2) There's some occasional disagreement about the nature of what constitutes a "Mutant" among fans. Some people think it has to refer to people born into having a special genetic difference (as in the X-Men), other people suggest that it can also apply to creatures who have some sort of mutagenic process applied to them (as in the Ninja Turtles). The game has some in-universe instances of people describing what makes a science power or a mutant power, and the general philosophy seems to be that science is "people who are changed" and mutant is "people who are something new or different". The grey area of "people who are (1) changed into (2) something new or different" seems to be where the disagreement pops up, and this is muddied by characters in-universe mentioning that they're not sure if they've actually been classified properly. Meanwhile, the FBSA secretary at City Hall is probably just shrugging her shoulders and handing the paperwork over to whichever department feels like the best fit to her whenever a new person registers as a hero. Is there a clear-cut answer? Is the overlap intentional? 3) You occasionally find missions that bury references to a tree with multiple branches or roots, or a river with multiple tributaries or streams, usually five or so, or once an image on an urn of five men bowing before a tree with sunlight shining through the branches onto them, with the implication that this was "power" or "the source of origins" or something like that. Was this something specific (possibly tied to the history of the Corax and their ancient war or whatever) that was being built to, or was there just a general encouragement to stick in references to "a source with five things coming out of it" to represent the game's origins? It's cool either way, but it always felt really significant in the moment. Thank you all for all the work you did making such a great world to poke around in, sorry for getting so invested in it. 🙂

Should we register for this in some way that a quick browse of the forums isn't revealing, or is it just a "show up and set up shop somewhere" thing?