Opt-Out of Incarnate

[Megajoule]

(Note: if such a thing already exists in game, please let me know!)

 

So I know some of you will think this is an odd request - why would anyone not want to be an Incarnate?  Well, for me, it was a combination of concept/roleplaying and reducing my grind/workload.  Of my characters, both back on live and these servers, there are some that I can imagine ascending to demigod levels of power (or even higher), while others are "merely" "ordinary" super-beings, or even exceptional but unpowered normals.  On a purely practical/mechanical level, deciding that some characters would not take part in the Incarnate grind meant that I didn't have to do the Mender Ramiel arc to unlock that status for them, or craft and slot those abilities for them; I could focus just on the ones who did.

 

Here, however, I don't (seem to) have that option.  All characters here automatically start earning Incarnate xp and receiving Shards and Threads as soon as they turn 50.  Even disabling xp entirely doesn't keep this from happening.  At least if I ignore it long enough, I'll end up unlocking all of my slots and then the messages that I've earned xp toward doing so will stop.  I'll still be left with an ever-growing pile of Threads sitting uselessly on that character, though.  The best case (for me) would be some way of conveniently transferring those rewards to one of my other characters, who I do choose to participate in Incarnate gameplay and content with; but if that's not practical, or considered fair, I would simply like a way for some of my characters to completely opt out.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Megajoule

[GM Sijin]

Threads aren't completely useless, as you can buy super inspirations with them.

 

That said, this functionality doesn't currently exist to my knowledge, and this is not the first time I've seen it brought up. Though, given there's no possible harm done to a character for getting incarnate XP or threads they don't intend to use, I don't imagine adding a toggle of some sort would be high on the priority list.

 

Any empyrean merits you earn, however, can be transferred.

[Vanden]

You already opt out of incarnate content by not crafting any incarnate skills. A setting to disable drops and incarnate XP would only have the effect of you not seeing some otherwise harmless messages, which doesn't seem like a worthwhile addition.

[Megajoule]

Harmless except to my obsessive tendencies and/or MUH IMMERSION, you mean...  😉

 

I figured that this would be the response, but that by the same token, it wouldn't hurt to ask.

[Hyperstrike]

42 minutes ago, Megajoule said:

Harmless except to my obsessive tendencies and/or MUH IMMERSION, you mean...  😉

 

I figured that this would be the response, but that by the same token, it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Agh!  My liver!  My liver!

No...lower dude...

Uh...okay...

AGH!  MY LIVER!  MY LIVER!

 

See!  It hurts!

🙂

[Steampunkette]

Honestly... Incarnates were a bad idea from day 1.

 

Not because more power isn't great or anything. Just the way they designed it, narratively.

 

Superheroes inhabit different narrative power levels. Whether they're Cosmic Silver Surfer types or more a neighborhood guardian Daredevil sort. And City of Heroes has never respected that both those characters inhabit the same world. Instead everyone starts street level and then grows to cosmic through the same kind of ridiculous and arbitrary method...

 

In a perfect CoH2, characters would have different methods of getting to "End Game Content" that support different concepts, y'know? There'd also be different narrative end-games. Sure a Cosmic hero could do the Street Level end game content, or vice versa, but they wouldn't be forced to do it.

[Jeneki]

To be fair, we get messages about picking up salvage / recipes all the time, and I don't consider my heroes are looting bad guys for their stuff.

 

[PaxArcana]

4 hours ago, Steampunkette said:

Superheroes inhabit different narrative power levels. Whether they're Cosmic Silver Surfer types or more a neighborhood guardian Daredevil sort. And City of Heroes has never respected that both those characters inhabit the same world. Instead everyone starts street level and then grows to cosmic through the same kind of ridiculous and arbitrary method...

The realities of GAME over STORY.

 

In the comics, Squirrel-Girl can be absolutely far less powerful than, say, Thor or the Hulk.  Because the writers don't have to worry about making sure that Squirrel Girl's player is having as much fun, and feeling as much like a hero, as Hulk's and Thor's players are.  Even when they're on the same team, facing the same opponents.

 

But in a game, we absolutely do need to be sure of that.  And so, all the heroes need to be on the same power-curve, from start to finish.

 

And no, having multiple different end-game scenarios isn't feasible.  Each of them takes a certain amount of man-hours to craft ... and then, you need to spend more time building ways to make sure your players know which one they are heading for.  You don't want someone to wind up in an end-game state and find out it's not the one they hoped for, after all.

 

...

 

honestly, if you want to stay a street-level hero, whose biggest challenge is the thug who brought an automatic weapon to the bank robbery today ... turn off XP around level 15 or 20.  Poof, there you go.  You'll probably never see "end-game" stuff, but then, you'll never be able to handle "end-game" level threats either.

[Mr. Vee]

1 hour ago, PaxArcana said:

The realities of GAME over STORY.

 

In the comics, Squirrel-Girl can be absolutely far less powerful than, say, Thor or the Hulk.  Because the writers don't have to worry about making sure that Squirrel Girl's player is having as much fun, and feeling as much like a hero, as Hulk's and Thor's players are.  Even when they're on the same team, facing the same opponents.

 

 

You're not much of a Squirrel-Girl follower I assume. She solos Marvel equivalents of Hami.

[Steampunkette]

1 hour ago, PaxArcana said:

The realities of GAME over STORY.

 

In the comics, Squirrel-Girl can be absolutely far less powerful than, say, Thor or the Hulk.  Because the writers don't have to worry about making sure that Squirrel Girl's player is having as much fun, and feeling as much like a hero, as Hulk's and Thor's players are.  Even when they're on the same team, facing the same opponents.

 

But in a game, we absolutely do need to be sure of that.  And so, all the heroes need to be on the same power-curve, from start to finish.

 

And no, having multiple different end-game scenarios isn't feasible.  Each of them takes a certain amount of man-hours to craft ... and then, you need to spend more time building ways to make sure your players know which one they are heading for.  You don't want someone to wind up in an end-game state and find out it's not the one they hoped for, after all.

 

...

 

honestly, if you want to stay a street-level hero, whose biggest challenge is the thug who brought an automatic weapon to the bank robbery today ... turn off XP around level 15 or 20.  Poof, there you go.  You'll probably never see "end-game" stuff, but then, you'll never be able to handle "end-game" level threats either.

You completely misunderstood my statement...

 

You can have two level 50 characters who represent completely different levels of super heroing by having street thugs that go all the way up to level 50 for the "street-level hero" to fight rather than just having a whole bunch of aliens and super psychics at max level.

 

I'm not talking about the individual power level as regards game mechanics I'm referring to narrative power level. how's the game world describes your strength compared to the strength of another character or to the world itself. A level 50 blaster will have their tier 9 nuke whether they are street level or cosmic, it's just the story that would be different.

 

And yes having multiple endgame scenarios is possible! It just means doing different writing. kind of like the entirety of City of Heroes but it's multiple different zones which have different storylines in them. You just have some storylines stay street-level and some storylines go cosmic. Hell you could start the game with cosmic storylines and instead of Atlas Park have Atlas station where your cosmic heroes are working for alien cops beating up whatever street gang works on the space station.

 

The game has different story lines for people who follow magic tech science mutants and natural enemies. Just carry that forward into cosmic and local I guess would be the easiest way to describe it.

 

As to the end game system itself using incarnate threads and such? Do that same system for the street level hero and just change the writing so that it's not about The Well of Furies picking the biggest and the baddest. Let them take that secret stuff twosome scientist who explains it all in more human terms and helps them to build stuff for their powers.

 

It is all dependent on what the studio decides to do with their time... They decided to handle the entire game as an advancement from street level to cosmic while acknowledging character origins as one of five things, when instead they could have gone from low-level to high-level while instead of acknowledging characters motivations or relative power levels or any number of other things.

 

In short: levels are in abstraction of advancement for game mechanic purposes but do not automatically have to define the story being told.

 

I apologize for the grammatical errors and random misplaced words, I'm on my cell phone at work using speech to text and it sucks.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Steampunkette

[Steampunkette]

One more note?

 

I was not suggesting the devs rewrite this game with that post.

 

You actually cut out the part where I was commenting that in a perfect City of Heroes 2 such narrative distinctions would be included and then you suggested to me, like I was some kind of idiot, that I should just turn off XP at level 15 to 20. which is also hilarious in the fact that it would be more appropriate to cut off the XP somewhere around level 36 when you're still fighting the warriors and the tsoo who are both very street-level enemy groups... I mean the character I used in the example was Daredevil and you're basically suggesting barely getting high enough in level to fight The Hand or a gang from a 1970s movie.

 

Quite humorous in retrospect!

Edited August 14, 2019 by Steampunkette

[Yoru-hime]

I always thought CoH was actually pretty good about keeping things open to character concepts up to a point. Crey's corporate skulduggery, Malta's conspiracies and the Carnies' chaotic mischief are all still in the wheelhouse of a street level hero. Better organized and stronger than Sky Raiders or the Family, sure, but that's what you'd expect. You're past the flunkies and working your way up the food chain to the core threats to your city.

 

CoV isn't so good about it, kinda ramming Arachnos and Project Destiny down your throat, but I've got issues with the early City of Minions writing there.

 

Incarnate content does leave street heroes and their villainous counterparts behind though, both in terms of power and story. Both in game through Prometheus and in the AMAs, the pathway toward "City of Demigods" was being laid out for us. I agree, the farther down the road that goes, the less there's really a place for Spiderman or Daredevil in the story (without some gratuitous plot device usage).

 

So I guess my question is, what does "street level end-game" look like? What would keep you feeling like you're moving forward past 50 without getting too far away from your character concepts? Or is one needed? Are these characters, like Megajoule originally suggested, fine just stopping at 50 and ignoring the Incarnate content altogether? As long as there's new content regularly coming out across the level spectrum that is aimed at the non-Incarnate populace and they don't feel pushed into becoming something they're not just to participate, do we need a separate "City of Mortals" track beyond 50?

 

Honestly, I'm not arguing yes or no as the answer to any of these questions. I'm genuinely curious how people feel about it and what they want going forward.

[Steampunkette]

Personally I just like to see more endgame content that isn't fighting off Rularuu or Hamidon or whatever.

 

Lemme fight against the Family and Tsoo and such, just on a grander scale. Introduce some Kingpin style characters who are trying to manipulate the whole city, make Supervillain freaks like Rhino, and who are overall presented as real threats. 

 

if you're going to have an incarnate system for characters it needs to be accessible to all of them, though. Maybe introduce different ways to opt into the system. They could have used origins for that with magic people getting super awesome spells and mutants exposing themselves to something that mutates them further without it all being tied to Greco-Roman myth in a singular narrative that excludes all variation.

 

Same drops, same recipes, same crafting method, different narrative.

[darkgob]

Can't you use Incarnate Rewards to unlock account-level unlock vouchers for other characters to unlock Incarnate slots?  (Might be conflating with Star Trek Online, but I definitely remember Alpha Slot vouchers were a thing.)  The unique Incarnate merits (Empyrean et al.) can be converted into regular Reward Merits...there are other things you can do with these rewards.  That said I do agree that none of this should be happening until after Ramiel's arc is run...but that's my recollection of my first Homecoming Incarnate last week, so I don't really recognize what you're describing.  But if I'm wrong about that (entirely possible), it might be a technical consequence of expanding the rewards to non-Incarnate content.

 

Even just having a different narrative for each origin takes additional work -- especially maintaining that narrative in a consistent way going forward.  What they ended up doing is effectively the same thing anyway -- yes, it's tied in with Greco-Roman mythology, but even before Incarnates the devs had started using Handwavium to explain how all powers ultimately come from the same source, regardless of origin.  (Stop looking at me like that, Mr. Wayne and Mr. Castle.  You too, Mr. Sinclair.)  Given that origins were more complex and had more of an impact during the initial design of the game before they were simplified, it's not too surprising that there was little interest in maintaining separate Incarnate narrative paths for each origin.  They also removed the separate origin story arcs in the redesign of Atlas Park.

 

I would also submit that they *did* actually go to some effort to decouple Incarnates from the mythology-based lore that gives Marcus Cole and Stefan Richter their powers.  The Well they encountered was just one of many, which just happened to take the form of the mythological Well.  Player Incarnates are tapping into something else entirely, something beyond Greco-Roman myth, indeed something that seems to be from another dimension entirely.  (MISTERS WAYNE, CASTLE, AND SINCLAIR: IF YOU KEEP MAKING THAT EXPRESSION YOUR FACE IS GOING TO FREEZE THAT WAY)

 

Also want to respond to something specifically:

Quote

Introduce some Kingpin style characters who are trying to manipulate the whole city, make Supervillain freaks like Rhino, and who are overall presented as real threats. 

...Have you even played this game?  We've had this since day 1.  There is literally a villain group called the Freakshow whose bosses wear/are massive cybernetic suits of armor (lol on Rhino being a "real threat" though).  There's even an entire meta-joke about how Nemesis is responsible for everything that happens (something a friend and I also joked about regarding the Kingpin in Spider-Man: TAS since he pretty much *was* behind everything).  The entire premise for the game world's recent history is a massive alien invasion which is later followed by a second invasion in-game.  Task Forces are the grander scale you're looking for, and you can encounter this as early as Posi 1 with the fight against the Shadow Simulacrum in City Hall.

 

The unfortunate truth is that you can't really provide power increases to Natural-origin characters on par with what we get in Incarnates while remaining faithful to their narrative -- they don't scale in the same way ("peak human physical performance...but more so").  For the other origins, there are plenty of ways to explain how the Well has enhanced your abilities, which may very well include a secondary mutation, the Eye of Agamotto, enhanced  performance of cybernetic components, whatever -- that's your story to tell though, not the devs.

[Steampunkette]

One more time... This is in regards to a hypothetical City of Heroes 2.

 

In such a game you could design this stuff from the ground up to accommodate different concepts while learning from the mistakes that City of Heroes made. 

 

Nemesis being behind everything is a great meme! But until I can arrest him it doesn't really mean a thing. It's the Xanatos Gambit which works great in TV shows for kids but terribly in video games. 

 

Meanwhile I can punch both Nazi and Conflicted Emperor versions of Statesman... And used to punch real Statesman and can even punch a Statesman Stunt Double...

Edited August 14, 2019 by Steampunkette

[ZeeHero]

I was never a fan of street level heroes so a game in which most content is narratively geared towards them would be a hard pass for me. I'm a fan of world class to cosmic. always have been and always will be. even my "Street level" characters may if I so decide, upgrade to global.

[Steampunkette]

21 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:

I was never a fan of street level heroes so a game in which most content is narratively geared towards them would be a hard pass for me. I'm a fan of world class to cosmic. always have been and always will be. even my "Street level" characters may if I so decide, upgrade to global.

Why not have all three? therein lies the conundrum that I'm having here is that no one understands that you can have more than one. You can have more than three! If you wanted to create a national level hero or some similar thing that would be cool, too! 

 

But they would all kind of have to be built for from day one.

[ZeeHero]

The way I see it a heroes level is defined only by the writer. Powers can grow with events or experience and theres no hard limit unless the writer sets one and even then they can change their mind.

[Steampunkette]

Oh, absolutely! If you're writing.

 

But if you're in a shared world with other people who did the writing before you ever arrived then you are limited by that world's writing. 

 

As PaxArcana noted previously I could just stop playing the game after a certain point, or only play it within certain limitations. I could also rewrite the narrative for my personal character however I wanted to do it. But as far as everyone else is concerned my character is still in incarnate chosen by The Well of Furies. My fire blast still does fire damage instead of hellfire damage. Etc.

 

It's up to the writer of the world to create the structures that we exist within and in many cases strain against.

 

 

[Megajoule]

59 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:

 I'm a fan of world class to cosmic. always have been and always will be.

... unless you change your mind.

[darkgob]

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

Nemesis being behind everything is a great meme! But until I can arrest him it doesn't really mean a thing.

 

Have you actually played this game?

[Yoru-hime]

I think the issue I see is that you're basically trying to get around the limits to the world's writing by throwing more writers at it and assuming one of them will give you what you want. That answer doesn't scale very well compared to the expanse of our imagination in creating characters. We could list off power levels and specific heroic idioms all day and never have to touch the villain side doing it. All these paths sound great, but the raw man-hours it'd take to design, implement and test all this content for quality, interweaving it all into a coherent world in the process are going to be extraordinary.

 

CoH tried to address this problem with AE, basically open-sourcing writing of story arcs (with really remarkable amounts of flexibility for the time), though the results of that are open to interpretation.

 

Again, I hope I'm not coming across as disrespectful. I'm very interested in talking about how we can address the content gap.

[ZeeHero]

21 minutes ago, Megajoule said:

... unless you change your mind.

I agree but I dont think its likely. I do enjoy starting my characters as street level, everyone has to start somewhere. but they eventually progress to those higher levels. 

[krj12]

I honestly wish they hadn't implemented the incarnate system.   Like Neverwinter and other games, they could have created campaigns that gave your heroes incremental changes, rather than drastic changes which amp your characters to extremely high levels of power.

  End Game doesn't necessarily have to mean "I'm now at Thor level of power".   It could be Fantastic Four levels,  who routinely fight villains like Galactus. 

 

 

[Megajoule]

13 minutes ago, krj12 said:

I honestly wish they hadn't implemented the incarnate system.   Like Neverwinter and other games, they could have created campaigns that gave your heroes incremental changes, rather than drastic changes which amp your characters to extremely high levels of power.

  End Game doesn't necessarily have to mean "I'm now at Thor level of power".   It could be Fantastic Four levels,  who routinely fight villains like Galactus. 

 

 

For some characters (e.g. Thor), that sort of power level is appropriate.  For others, it is not.  On live, we were able to make that decision ourselves, and opt in to that progression if we wished. Here, we are inducted into it automatically and unavoidably; our only option is to try to ignore it.