Doctor Roswell

You may want to clear out your transactions on the consignment house; if you don't log in for sixty days, anything you have there will be deleted.

E-mails expire in the same amount of time (just regular ones, not account/character items), so if there are any attachments you want to keep, grab them before you go.

Other than that, all you have to do is not pay.

Actually, that's a really nice feature, even if the name is a little confusing. I read "focus group" and immediately thought of a person with a clipboard asking what I liked and didn't like about the product I'd just seen (Steve was delicious, by the way). I kind of figured it might be a dev/GM tool that had shown up on my account by mistake, so I didn't mess with it.

Can anyone explain this command? I've never seen it before, have no idea what it might do, and can't find a description of it on the Wiki...

Working As Intended.

The only way I could see this being in any way useful for more than a handful of players (far too few to make it worth spending development time/money on) is in the form of the oft-suggested "Knockback reducer" enhancement -- which I'm still not in favor of, by the way.

Otherwise, this basically amounts to free slots in some builds -- how many tanks/brutes/scrappers take the Fighting pool for Tough and Weave? They have to take Boxing or Kick to get to it... now they can reduce the damage in a power they probably weren't using anyway to make a power they already use even more useful? For a vast majority of players, these would have the same effect as simply handing out more slots, and just giving the things away would be far less complicated.

Where these packs differ from "real" (casino, etc.) gambling isn't that they eliminate a potential return, it's that they guarantee one. It may not be exactly what you wanted, but you always get something. Not so with, say, a roulette wheel or betting on a horse race. There's a reason they keep getting compared to sealed trading-card packs, and it's not just the presentation. Pay your money, you absolutely will get something for it, at least inasmuch as we all get a "thing" for our real money when we buy anything else for this game or pay a monthly fee to play it.

It's gambling, but it's not gambling gambling.

See, this just proves my point. He's so useful for some people, but for the vast, vast majority of players, he's completely worthless, because they don't even know he exists.

Nine times out of ten, what gets me started is a name. I run across an available name I like, and it generally suggests a character. Eight times out of nine times out of ten, by the time I've checked to be sure the name isn't taken on my server, I've already got an AT and powersets picked out, and a costume three-fourths designed in my head. So I guess that qualifies as "concept" first.

Every once in a while I'll get it into my head that I want to play this powerset or that AT... sometimes I'll be able to fit that to a name/concept right away, sometimes it gets back-burnered until I can find something conceptually that works for me. Just for example, right now I want to make an archer and an ice controller, but I don't have ideas beyond "I want to make an archer" and "I want to make an ice controller," so those will wait until I do. I don't sweat it too much; I've got plenty of other characters to keep me busy while I wait for inspiration/opportunity.

I'm another who's wanted an offline SG invitation system forever now (not specifically for alts, either; it'd be really nice to be able to invite a friend who isn't online).

Personally, I'd like to see it done through the mail system.

You can right-click on another player and select "Add Note"; it opens up a window that lets you add a one-to-five star rating and a description.

It attaches to the player, not the character, so in the future, you can see what you thought of the person behind the keyboard, and it's all stored locally, so it's just for your own personal reference (nobody else can see it).

In the options menu, you can even set it to show a person's star rating all the time. I like to turn that on so I can always see who the five-star and one-star people are.

They're also in the emotes menu > Actions > Holiday.

I like this idea; those numbers rarely, if ever, help me -- usually I just tune them out. If I could get rid of them, not only would it clear up my view of the action, it'd be that much less work my video card would have to do and I might not have to turn my graphics settings down to avoid crashing during incarnate trials.

I'd go as far as to say I'd like the option to turn off my own "ION JUDGEMENT JUMP!" text.

Right this moment, I have 33 characters on Virtue and a dozen on Exalted, all of which I play "regularly" -- some much more regularly than others.

Four of the Exalted ones are variations of characters from Virtue.

An hour ago, I deleted two characters from Virtue. I immediately filled one of the open slots.

I think I may have a problem.

This was actually brought up in a Ustream dev chat a few weeks ago; if I'm remembering right, it was sort of a side-note to another discussion. In answering another question, somebody said something about how they were looking into which things they thought people would be willing to pay for on the market as a "time vs. money" issue -- things that normally require in-game effort, but aren't really all that tough, like cape/aura unlocks or extra costume slots -- and Midnighter Club access was one of the first things they mentioned. Nobody really said anything specific about it, but they seemed amicable to the idea if nothing else. I'd say we've got a decent chance of seeing this happen at some point.

Paying to unlock the Alpha slot was also brought up, but they sort of laughed at that one, so I kind of doubt we'll see it any time soon.

...and it's up.

Right now.

I just bought it.

Three fireworks emotes, the Fireworks aura, and a confetti costume change emote, 160pp.

Aside from the occasional Performance Shifter proc in Stamina, I don't usually even start worrying about IOs until one of my characters reaches level 50 -- at that point I figure out a "real" build, burn a respec, and trot off to Wentworth's. I don't tend to have too many problems getting to 50 on just SOs.

Even at 50, IOs usually don't get added to my characters all at once -- I buy what I can afford, play for a while with the rest "filled in" with SOs, then when I get a good drop I can put on the market for a respectable sum, I do that and spend the profits on filling as many holes as I can... lather, rinse, repeat.

Currently I'm about one-third "done" IO'ing my Broadsword/Willpower scrapper, and even before I added a single invention, he never had trouble contributing in incarnate trials. As far as non-incarnate content, he routinely handles +1/x5 (or thereabouts) tip missions solo, even against tougher groups like Carnies and Malta, though I won't pretend they don't give him a pretty good run for his money -- they really make me work for it sometimes. Admittedly his incarnate powers help quite a bit, but even without them, I've been very, very impressed with his performance on mostly SOs, and it's only gotten better as I've added more and more set bonuses.