Eva Destruction

1) I'm afraid to ask but...the Shadow Shard. What is Rularuu? What is the Shard itself? Is it a piece of an alternate dimension Paragon City, a pocket dimension, was it made by Rularuu, is it Rularuu? Where did the Soldiers of Rularuu come from, and what are they? What are the Shadow Shard reflections?

2) What is Crimson, Viridian and Indigo's backstory?

3) What's up with Infernal and Infernal? What is his dimension/their dimension exactly? Does he come from the Primal "hell" while Praetorian Infernal is from the Praetorian "hell"?

4) Battleworld. How did the Praetorians find it?

5) Please to be explaining how the CoH multiverse works.

6) Who is Mender Tesseract?

7) What happened with the Rikti homeworld? The war's been over for 14 issues now, how are they doing?

I'll probably think of more later, and of course I will be nitpicking all answers for plot holes and continuity errors, just for nostalgia's sake.

Solo all the AVs I never got around to. Without Incarnate powers.
Duo MoITF with my husband.
Get staff Brute to 50 (made him yesterday). Finally run through First Ward and Night Ward.
Finish as many rooms in my bases as possible.
Finish my 1-50 in AE project.
Write a commemorative arc for my SG.
Run a Mothership raid with my all-Scrapper static team.
Get as many of my characters as possible to 50 in the time I have left.

CoH...IN SPAAAAACE!!! You're the captain of a starship with a ragtag crew including a purple-skinned space babe, a robot engineer, and a tribute to Zapp Branagan. With the aid of a thinly-veiled future!Crimson and future!Indigo you fight a Malta-like conspiracy that has infiltrated the heart of the Terran Empire.

A Malta plot in the Shadow Shard. Based on the premise that a god is just a meta they haven't figured out how to beat yet, they sent operatives to the Shard to figure out how. It was going to include pet supers with dimension-transcending powers (born out of the original Superdyne experiments) and some vague theories on the nature of the Shadow Shard reflections.

The Second Coming of the Megamech v2.0. Basically a three-way war between Arachnos, the Council and the Sky Raiders, and the Cult of the MegaMech. It was going to be level 25-30, with an epic battle on the Striga bridge map and lots of explosions.

I might go outside.

Who am I kidding, I'll probably get Minecraft, which I'm avoiding like a plague because the CoH base editor is bad enough. Maybe when I get the new computer I'll try out STO, but aside from that, no more MMOs for me.

Like a lot of other posters, I won't be giving NCSoft any more of my money. I hope they implode.

Fun fact: Back when we had rep, I got half of mine for arguing with Venture. And the other half for arguing with people who were arguing with Venture.

And Talen, it was Star Control 3. Which is generally considered crap, but I liked it, dammit. It's available on various abandonware sites, but without the voice files, and it's just not the same.

******* it, now I wanna play Star Control. But I lost the disk a long time ago. You're still the only person other than my husband to get that reference.

And now I have one more thing on my "to do before the lights go out" list: Finally get my AE baby to 50. She's been sitting at 47 while I grind Incarnate crap, but not much point in grinding anymore. Hopefully my arcs still work, cause now I'm getting all nostalgic and I want to play them. Hell, maybe I'll dredge up the old Mega Mech arc and republish it. Just because it was my first.

Eva Destruction will be in the Storm Palace. Standing right on top of my badge. That's right, my badge. They named it after me.

Darkfire Avenger will be in the RWZ, staring down a pylon, as she has many times in her relentless pursuit of 300 DPS (before Incarnates). Apocalyptika will be right there with her, pointing and laughing because she cracked it first.

NCSoft can go **** itself and Guild Wars and Aion and all their other crappy games can die in a fire. I have Ignite and Flamethrower and Burn and a buttload of global recharge, I'll set it myself.

In case they're still banning, I'm gonna miss you guys. That includes everybody I've ever argued with, except for that one person whom I won't miss at all

At this point the only way to salvage the Freedom Phalanx is to have them admit that their glory days are behind them and stick to giving out task forces. They're an important part of the game's backstory, but holding them up as the city's premiere hero team just doesn't work, no matter how they try. If they keep needing my help, then why are they there in the first place?

Then again, if they really want my help they should listen to my advice to kick Penny out and have her spend some time as a sidekick until she grows up a little. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon since someone on the writing team really loves their bratty, ditzy female characters.

Design-wise, stuff like Dark Astoria, the ITF and the level 1-20 Preatorian arcs have a good mix of text and action, fancy and simple mechanics, decent arc and mission length, and they avoid a lot of stuff that just annoys players (except for the constant ambushes in Praetoria.)

Storywise, I'm going to pretend every bit of text just says "click here to fight mobs" until I see evidence of a total turn-around in the development team's philosophy toward storytelling and world-building.

There's nothing specific in the lore I want to know. Or to be more accurate, there's nothing specific I want the devs to try to explain. I mean I'd love to know more about Rularuu: what is he, what are his minions, what are the reflections, etc, but if they actually did a Shadow Shard arc he'd probably turn out to be some alternate reality Marcus Cole who ate someone's Well and became a Well or some stupid crap. So I'm fine with them just creating shiny new two-dimensional enemy groups out of thin air and leaving stuff I actually like the hell alone.

That said, there are a few things I do want to know, just because I think the writers don't even know, even though they keep using the concepts:

1) How exactly does the CoH multiverse work? What is the nature of, say, Infernal's dimension, and is it the same one Envoy of Shadows comes from? What about Croatoa's spirit world, or the Netherworld?
2) How exactly does time travel work in the CoH universe?
3) What exactly is the definition of a god? For a world with so much basis in mythology, that term is getting thrown around a lot lately, and the only thing we have to separate an actual god from a very powerful metahuman is War Witch's little blurb in the Origin of Power storyline, which is suspect due to narrator's bias.
4) Do they not know ParagonWiki exists? I'm not even talking about ***-pulls and inconsistencies, or trying to shoehorn established ideas into new storylines where they don't really fit, or "but I had a better idea." I'm talking about blatant cases of Did Not Do The Research such as "you'll be piloting a Zeus Titan."

The quality of writing has been going downhill for years. Nobody proofreads this stuff, most of the contacts sound the same, and the storylines are pretty forgettable. Dark Astoria used to be creepy, even with the old-school tech, now it's a high-budget movie with a b-movie script.

Gameplay-wise, I can't see a freaking thing half the time while I'm playing. Graphics effects are becoming flashier and more obscuring with every new powerset and enemy group, and would it kill them to turn the lights up in some of the mission maps?

I also would like to repeat this, because it can't be repeated enough: content that is designed to be farmed (in other words, any Incarnate content) needs to lose the cutscenes and the long-winded conversations between NPCs.

I thought it was pretty obvious that Pendragon was the Preatorian Hero 1, as soon as he mentioned Excalibur.