Arctic Man

If the boots were your only hint, you're not looking close enough..

Still don't get the Ouroboros initiation arc until level 25 though...

Yes, and probably longer than you think. The third arc is at level 15 from what I recall..

Or /ah for short...

Always nice to find out where people go. The other day, I was wondering why 7deCoeur wasn't posting anymore, and had to dig up one of his last posts (through community tracker) and then use Google translator to translate it into English and then seeing that it was a goodbye post.

It makes me think of the movie Goldfinger.

Yes, but consider *why* the bow is needed. Even a gold/silver-age style hero might have an issue with dying as a result of someone (Red Widow in this case) getting killed. Extreme situations call for extreme measures. And maybe they returned the bow afterwards?

You've been RPing a guy in coma?

Well then you've obviously missed something happening in another game the same year (and only weeks after issue 6 launched here I think). Three letters... N, G & E

How is that different from the Top Cow series with Freedom Phalanx?

I'm fairly sure that dark melee and dark armor existed long before issue 7...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Brickstown one of few hero city zones (Independence Port was another - and Croatoa, but that doesnt' count), that didn't have rikti ships flying in and dropping bombs and troops? Sounds like Ghaly wasn't where the worst battles were fought then...

When (as of late) has that been the case? The issues with the servers really only started after the first downtime for "hardware upgrade"? Then (after emergency maintenance) it was fine for a week or so, until the next maintenance for "upgrade" caused more issues, and it's been unstable on and off after that...

Seems to me that Paragon messing with the servers is the very cause of it, not the solution...

But that's more or less just what they are doing right now. On top of the server issues, there's more bugs in the game right now than I think there's been for years. A lot of them are minor, but still...

I kind of doubt it. What we will get is more emergency maintenance shortly after the servers are back, and then on and off for the next 1-2 weeks. If we're "lucky", they might even do a Saturday one again.

Like that Friday when we were told that the servers were expected to be back up no later than 12:15pm CEST, and it took 2-3 hours longer?

That downtime, and a number of others occured after previous hardware upgrades went less than smooth, to say the least, pretty much killing the whole day for EU players with the combination of the downtime, and aftermath. I'm pretty much expecting it to be no different this time, and preparing for lost hours on Friday as well...

One of the things that annoy me most (and others have said the same thing), is that it's the paying customers who have to suffer through this, just so the freebie players who might never pay a cent can have a smoother experience.

My patience is wearing thin...

Keep it up with these day-long downtimes for us EU players and you won't have my support for much longer.

Question is: Will it be before or after the official Freedom launch. In my opinion, low level characters don't do too well in mass combat like that. They don't have all that many powers, and the powers they do have aren't anywhere near their full potential due to lack of good enhancements, or enough slots to put them into in the first place. I have some personal experience with fighting in rikti and/or zombie invasion with lowbies. Even if they do scale to your level, it's *a lot* harder as a lowbie. On top of that, players that are new to the game might not have gotten hang of it properly yet.

I can easily see the post-Freedom invasions degenerate into utter chaos with new player lowbies dying left and right and not contribute to much except lag. That in turn could give them a bad impression of the game too, if they die over and over before they even get somewhere.

So either hold invasions on all servers before launching officially, or hold off a bit until the new players get the hang of it (and gain some levels) so they won't get butchered, get sick of the game, quit and not look back.

So, three out of four of the (former) EU servers (plus Freedom and Virtue) get invasions, but not the one I play on. Oh well, guess I won't have to worry about lag and such then. Not that it's a common concern anyway - during the last double xp weekend it was the only English speaking server I didn't see hit two yellow dots. Between around 20 established characters and a decent size SG base I've worked hard for, it doesn't look like I'm going anywhere anytime soon either.

Followed by an emergency maintenance shortly after the servers come back, and then more of the same on and off for a few weeks as is standard now?

To be honest, I'd rather all current subscribers (future V.I.P.s) get some extra paragon points instead. Costume codes doesn't interest me in the slightest. I prefer to make my own looks, not look like an NPC. Plus they are messing with stealth powers, so they aren't even viable on several of my characters..

Paragon Points to all players affected seem like a better compensation, if that is what you're striving for.

Same here. The frequent and long downtimes (and we're told to expect more), and even more so the problems in their wake, can't be good for attracting players to the game when they hear about how much it's down. I expect the first few days of Freedom to be messy too, if the first day of VIP beta is any indication.

You mean Gamma, Delta, Epsilon etc through Omega, right? The B in the NATO phonetic alphabet is "bravo", not beta...

I think it's measured in minutes:seconds