Eisenzahn

And, interesting update. I added that specific poster to my ignore list after a brief exchange of private messages, and today spotted an additional parcel of negative reputation from her while updating my signature on the User CP page.

I really don't care that this person is following me around knocking off 20+ points of reputation at a time with her farmed positive rep score. I'm not playing the game any more, so people can feel free to take away as many points as they like. I object to the fact that she has a method available to circumvent the Ignore function. If you put someone on your ignore list, you should not have to recieve communication from them of any sort. I'm prepared to cope with seeing people's messages quoted by another poster, but letting people on your ignore list post private messages directly to your user configuration page is pure unmitigated bullcrap.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning were a part of the regular issue, rather than the paid portion. Access to the new zones and storylines is probably paid only, including the entire process of side switching. I'll bet Going Rogue will see some major revisions of how Patron and Ancillary pools work, which will be for everyone. Beyond that, it's hard to say.

Issue 6's main contributions to people who didn't pick up CoV were hero-side access to the first three PvP zones and.. err.. Enhancement Diversification, correct? I recall Base access being restricted to CoV customers, and a few villain-only costume items, as far as CoV stuff that touched directly on the existence of CoH, unlike the new ATs, PvE zones and storylines.

If it's not satisfactory to everyone involved, it's not a perfect Utopia. Simple as that. What people like that would be unhappy with could only be a failed experiment (if, perhaps, one in an advanced stage).

In the meantime, as a less desireable option to prop up experiments before they achieve perfection, leaving an experiment you find unsatisfactory shouldn't just be permissable, it should be convenient. Neither are the case in Cole's empire, where your choice is to be subject to a vicious, ineffective regime that exists only to perpetuate itself without any possibility of improvement, or to be cast out into an irradiated wilderness overrun with plant monsters. No wonder he has so many "willing" citizens.

Agreed. Glad to hear you're starting to see the light, "citizen".

Revolution for Everybody! But mostly for Praetoria! The New Order may or may not be any better at running things, but at least we won't lie to you about it and require you to applaud our failures.

When it ceases to be possible, it will have ceased to be necessary. Revolution for the sake of evolution. When perfection is achieved, there can be no further progress.

In a "true" Utopia, no one will want to rebel. I'm not talking about mind control, conditioning, propoganda, terrifying people into obedience and tossing dissenters into a pit somewhere so the remaining population looks more happy on average without them. I'm talking about genuine self-realized and most importanly universal contentment. Anything less is a sham, a lie, a pretense at excellence that is all the more profane for claiming to be something holy.

Where revolution can be accomplished within the existing system, let it be so done. This is a sign that the existing system may contain the seeds of true Utopia, and the experiment must continue in an attempt to further refine its virtues until either Utopia is achieved or a systemic obstacle becomes apparent that can not be resolved internally. Where revolution can not be accomplished without violating the precepts of the system, then the system must be eliminated, so that a new experiment can take its place.

Interestingly, revolution is still possible within Cole's power structure without violating its precepts. Advancement in Praetoria is a matter of merit. If one eliminates one's superior and assumes their position, the fault is with the superior for having been insufficiently prepared to prevent their removal. This is how they operate. This is how they encourage their own ranks to prove themselves. When we conspire to eliminate Emperor Cole and his associates, thereby enabling ourselves to replace them and establish a new order, we are playing by their rules. But it only becomes a crime when we aim for the man at the top of the Big White Tower, instead of restricting our ambitions to middle management.

Go hang out under the Atlas Statue on Virtue Server. It's a popular RP spot, sure, but you'll typically see at least a few people just standing around using emotes without interacting with anyone (in or out of character).

If he's eradicated crime, what's up with all these rebels all over? The continued existance of the Resistance proves that a Resistance is necessary, because Emperor Cole is too incompetent at crime prevention to eradicate them. Where a sovereign's sole claim to merit is the alleged elimination of crime, if rebellion is possible then rebellion is obligated.

The longer this Paid Expansion leeches resources away from the Regular Issues, the less enthusiastic I am about giving them an additional payout for what I had understood to already be a part of my subscription fee. If issue 17 is as story-light as issues 13, 14, 15 and 16 have been, it will be a signal to me that the developers priorities and my own are now irreconcilable, and I'll be done with the game.

When issue 12 was released, it was considered "light" enough on Story Content that the developers actually apologized, and promised something big soon. The four isues since then have contributed less total story content combined than issue 12 did. The four issues leading up to City of Villains still saw the addition of Croatoa, Striga, the Hollows, Eden, the Shadow Shard and the Kheldian storylines. The four issues leading up to Going Rogue (which, unlike CoV, apparently isn't meant to contain sufficient content for a completely seperate level 1-50 experience) have contained the addition of... two task forces and four contacts. Barracuda, Dr. Kahn, Daedalus, Sister Airlia, Mercedes Sheldon, and... the Architect Entertainment tutorial guy, for a combined total of 11 story arcs. Of course, this span has also contained the Mission Architect system itself, which is certainly noteworthy. But what it isn't is cannon story progress. It's essentially a delivery system for CoH fanfic. If an actual comic book were taking this long between story updates and someone suggested to me that I could satisfy my craving by reading fanfic instead, I'd pretty quickly eliminate them from my list of people worth talking to about fiction.

This is the problem. I like the official storyline. I'm interested in the official storyline. I want to see more of the official storyline. But I was promised from the beginning that updates to the official storyline would be a part of the Regular Issues. Seeing all the story resources reassigned to a paid expansion for well over a year now has the same feeling as seeing all the really good new costume bits delivered via microtransactions.

tl;dr - I've been waiting more than two years now to see what the Coming Storm is, dammit. There had better be some story updates that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Going Rogue paid expansion in the very near future.

Certainly. But if they're not interested in being included as part of a use of "Man" clearly meant to indicate Mankind, the collective human species taken as a whole, I'd imagine they can cast off their own shackles of oppression without needing my help.

Major's also a great rank for intelligence clearance, from an interesting-as-a-Player-Character perspective. He'll likely be privy to a lot of pretty intense stuff relating to his specific field, which opens up the possibility for his own missions to drift into classified territory. On the other hand, he's not so high rank that getting access to classified info outside of that specialty will be at all likely. So he can stay focused, and also be surprised by sudden revelations that command didn't see fit to brief him on in advance.

This is where the Major as Combatant mostly comes out in fiction. The higher ups go "We need a dude with a pronounced tallent for killing a bunch of other dudes, but who we've also cleared to know the top secret stuff about the specific bunch of dudes we need killed, and can therefore trust to do all that killing without everybody and their dog finding out about it. Call Major Killmonger back from his vacation in an undisclosed part of Southeast Asia murdering drug smugglers, child molesters and rare endangered Giant Venomous Prehistoric Hell-Tigers armed with nothing but his teeth, and optionally assemble a team of suitably distinguished mass murderers to follow him to Hell and Back."

If they can't seek to govern themselves, and they can't leave for some place with a system they're able to function in better, then yeah, that's evil as hell. Unfortunately, the kind of extreme actions necessary to shake up a system like that would almost certainly drift so far into the category of "terrorism" that they'd also be evil as hell.

I don't see the Loyalists and Resistance as Villains and Heroes respectively... they both look like groups with some good strong positive points to make, and almost certainly a lot of shady ways that they can go about making them. I'm really hoping that both sides are presented as being as morally ambiguous as I imagine, and that the the decision making process that influences which side your character ends up on won't be a bunch of simple "Do you help the lost little kid find his mom or MURDER HIM AND EAT HIS TENDER FLESH MUAHAHAHAH" kind of crap. I'm hoping for some decision trees where you won't know until after you choose which side you just pushed yourself towards. But with some way to recover standing with the other faction before the final decision has to be made, if you've really got your heart set on one side.

But in Praetorian Russia... err... I don't... doesn't compute... #$%@... UNIVERSE UNRAVELLING PARADOX! AHHHH!!!

This is good. If you ever actually encounter a Storm Summoner who describes themself as a Healer, and their party contribution therefore as Healing, they need to be fatally beaten. Or sternly scolded. One of the two, I will leave it to your discretion to decide. The healing component in 02 Boost is the least valuable of the tools in a Storm Summoner's arsenal, and that's saying a lot when three of the four ATs that can use the set are forced to take Gale.

Anyway, back to the OP. Most people recruit by AT, and only freak out over Powersets when they've got a very specific goal in mind, or else when they don't know that much about how this game works and convince themselves that Granite Armor or Fulcrum Shift or whatever is the magic key to party success and must always be sought after. The only time one control set is more desired than another in my observation is getting someone who can sleep AVs on the LRSF.

Power suppression around the entrance, perhaps? In fact, if PvP enabling can't be set for only a small portion of the zone, doing it the other way around by placing power-suppression objects that only turn on when Base Dueling is enabled would accomplish pretty much the same thing. That would give a hefty penalty to ATs with pets, though, since everybody else could duck in and out of the neutral area, but power suppression would kill their pets...

One can only hope, but I'd bet on Customization Round 2: Power Pools before we see GR hit the test server.

If we go with the "Darrin Wade = the Dream Doctor" theory as well as my "Rularuu is a Psychic Manifestation that the Dream Doctor cut out of himself" theory, perhaps Darrin is tired of being incomplete. Maybe he cast more of himself out with Rularuu than he intended to. Maybe, in all his illicit occult doodad trade, he's found something that he thinks could help him become the dominant persona if the two were re-integrated, and regain all his reality warping powers.

Personally, I favor the theory that Darrin Wade is actually a mortal cover identity for one of the remaining Aspects of Rularuu that we haven't seen. Uuralur the Mirror and Kuularth the Scavenger seem to be particularly likely candidates. The idea is that somehow one of them slipped loose of the Shadow Shard, and is working to return the whole entity after it (perhaps hoping that the process that draws the whole Ravager back out of the shard would fit all the pieces back together into a coherent whole). Maybe the arcane process it used to do so was so draining that it only has sufficient power left to manifest a basic mortal form. Maybe it found a way out that lets it retain its power, but deliberately avoids using it to keep from making too big of a blip on the radar for other magic users to come after. Or maybe the aspect itself is still within the Shard, but Darrin Wade is a remote manifestation like a homonculus.

Sounds solid to me. The Dream Doctor's comments regarding Rularuu always reminded me of Professor X and Onslaught (although I'd stopped reading X-Men by the time that storyline happened, and my knowledge of it is secondhand, so forgive me if I get the details wrong). A typically comic-bookish (and therefore medically improbable) case of multiple personality disorder occurs in a superbeing with enough mojo to give the split personality its own body. Or maybe it takes over the main body sometimes. Whatever. The Dream Doctor eventually abandons hope of re-integrating his divided self, and figures out a way to purge the split entirely... but at the cost of his own mojo being taken out of him with the split, tied up forever in keeping the psychic manifestation body of the split sealed away. The split, already from a mind apparently prone to fracture, responds to this profoundly intense trauma by shattering into several further subsidiary aspects, who in turn act through a host of custom-built lesser proxies in the form of the actual Soldiers of Rularuu, each of a "breed" subservient to and presumably descended from/created by one of the greater fractures.

Rularuu was the broken part of the Dream Doctor's mind, cut off and cast into a prison dimension (which may or may not be its own inverted psychic landscape), and in response it's continuing to grind itself into dust. At least, that's my take on it.

However it works out in the official version, the Shard has a lot of potential. It and the Rikti Homeworld are the two remaining setting elements I'd really love to see further fleshed out and expanded apon (especially villain side, where we only get a brief glimpse of the Shard), now that GR is covering Praetoria, the alternate dimension frontrunner for my interest.