ClawsandEffect

Well, it IS one letter shorter than how you have it spelled.

It's Quaterfield, no R in it.

Common mistake though, I'm just poking fun

In order to afford the $5 you could:

Skip the Starbucks one day a week for a month.

Bag your lunch for work instead of buying it.....once.

If you smoke, buy one less pack of cigarettes and make them last longer, once.

If you drink, buy cheaper beer when you get it. (If you already drink cheap beer, skip it this week)

There are literally hundreds of other ways you could come up with $5. It really is not a lot of money to pay to have access to more of the game forever. It's not even like you have to pay $5 every month. It's $5 ONE TIME.

The RMT spam really IS that big of a deal. And before you go saying "But I don't see any RMT spam, you're full of it Claws!", stop and think about why you don't see it.

Because the devs' efforts to curb their impact on the game actually worked.

Yeah, it sucks for the free players, and they have my sympathy. But I'd rather some free players get pissed off and quit than have to deal with "BUY STUFF FROM RMTSITE.COM" being spammed into my chat window every 30 freaking seconds, and the same thing being spammed into broadcast to the point that using the channel to communicate is virtually impossible.

And if the free players had to deal with that crap too, do you think they would stick around? Doubtful, they'd start thinking the game is nothing but people trying to sell them crap and bail, making all the attempts to make communication easier for them ultimately futile.

And yes, it really WAS that bad for a while. I was here, on one of the smaller servers, and had broadcast removed from my chat window for almost a year because of the sheer number of spammers in it. I was also permanently hidden from searches for the same length of time, but hiding does not good when the spammer is looking right at you.

I had about 25 issues of Thor from the early 80's from about #280 to #305 or so.

And a bunch of Teen Titans from the same timeframe.

Got them from my uncle. They were in a box in my basement, I'm pretty sure our leakage issues have destroyed them by now, but it's okay, they weren't in very good shape to begin with.

For the record, the Performance Shifter +End is not a unique. You can slot as many of them as you have powers that will accept them.

I'll have to take a look at that build when I have access to Mid's Pine. I have a Street Justice/Invuln brute that could benefit from similar slotting.

I won't have the Glad Armor though, so I might have to settle for 42% defense instead.

The only way the mission design and story arcs are going to please everyone is if they let you type your response in and the story arc adjusts to it on the fly.

That would require ridiculous amounts of computing power in an MMO, so it's probably never going to happen.

You want one more option, what about the other 4,500 people who might want a different option than yours? See where the problem is? There are so many different characters that would do so many different things that writing story arcs to actually fit ALL of their personalities is quite literally completely impossible.

Part I - The Dark Gods

Never trust the Dark Gods.

My story begins in the year 79 A.D. If you're a history buff, that date will sound familiar. That was when Vesuvius blew it's top and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was there.

In my selfishness, I made a pact with the Dark Gods to save my own skin. They made me a deal: For every life I take, they will grant me another. With the sky raining fire and ash, and the magma growing steadily closer, I did not have the luxury of thinking it over for long. The Dark Gods are cruel though.....the only lives close enough to take before I lost my own were those of my own family. I set my conscience aside and did the unthinkable......after telling them it was better to die swiftly by a blade than to burn to death in the hot ash. They believed me.

The cruelty of the gods was even more apparent moments later when the magma reached me. They agreed to grant me another life for each life I took.....but they never promised me I wouldn't die. It was excruciating. I felt my flesh melt under the heat of the molten rock, and my lungs charring with the heat of the air I was inhaling. You'd think it would be a quick death, but I can assure you it was not. I took some small comfort in knowing that my loved ones' deaths actually were merciful compared to my own.

My first resurrection was disorienting. I awoke miles away with the memory of dying still fresh in my mind. Thinking on what I had done, I came to the conclusion that I was well and truly damned for my sins. I knew what awaited me should I die without having taken a life to replace my own, for the gods had shown me upon my first death. I resolved to put that off as long as possible.

Now, I'm not completely without morals. Aside from my initial selfishness, I am a fairly just man. I decided that if I must take lives to prolong my own, I would do so as righteously as I could. To that end I became a professional soldier.

Years passed and turned to decades. Decades in turn became centuries. I lost count of the number of wars, both great and petty, that I took part in. Also impossible to count was the number of lives I had taken. It was entirely possible that I might never truly die. It was not without it's price, however. I also bore with me the memories of hundreds of my own deaths. It seems a part of the curse was to be that I would never forget each and every time I lost my life and was brought back.

(to be continued in Part II, please send any comments to me via PM to avoid interrupting the flow of the story)