Eva Destruction

The Origin of Power is where the problem started, as people started saying "how can the CoT steal my powers? I have no powers!" It's where we started having a conflict between the players who said "I have powers because I am awesome!" and the lore that said "You have powers because magic," and later, with the Well being introduced as the source, "you have powers because a crazy puddle lets you."

Then what's the problem? We won, storyline resolved in a satisfactory manner.

Considering that the Rikti were peaceful and friendly before they became victims of a Nemesis plot, I'd consider the outcome we got to be preferable to genocide, at least from the heroes' point of view.

It could have been, but it isn't.

Well, duh. If my villain kills Statesman all the other villains will think I'm cool.

Seriously though, the death of Statesman will be a big win for villains. Can you blame people for wanting their own villains to be at the center of it, instead of playing lackey so someone else can have all the fun?

I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean they'll remove any mention of him from the game, just instances in which he appears "in the here and now." He won't give out the STF or be an enemy in the RSF because he's dead. But he'll still be mentioned on the history plaques, and he should still appear in Mender Silos's arc.
Don't the patch notes specifically say the DA arcs are only available to characters with the Alpha Slot unlocked?

Me, I'm only in a rush to see Statesman die so I can criticize the execution. I actually had a few good things to say about the DA arcs, so I need something to spew unmitigated vitriol about.

And after we showed them that we weren't responsible, the majority of them decided to call off the war. I'd consider that winning.

We are not closing off access based on future Nemesis and Dr. Manhattan's condescending older brother's say-so.

Pretty sure the Well hasn't said jack to us about Praetoria itself, it's been everyone else. But I suppose this is picking nits. What makes it a credible threat, then? Eh, superior technology and psychics, I suppose.

Currently, it only "deigns to notice us" enough to grant higher-level Incarnate powers when we defeat Praetorians. We don't get high-end goodies for defeating Statesman, or Recluse, or Imperious. Only Praetorians.
If the Praetorians had cosmic cubes, we would only have to take the cosmic cubes. I don't recall anyone sucking up to a cosmic cube and essentially saying "don't pay attention to him, pay attention to meeeeeee, I'm cooler!"

This even makes it more stupid. There are two ATs that are only part human. The character creation screen clearly states that a Natural origin character could be an alien with powers native to their race. We have the costume pieces to create a robotic character, including the Preatorian clockwork pieces, which, if you use them all, very clearly imply that you are a clockwork robot and not a cyborg or guy in power armor. In other words, some of us are NOT human, and character creation encourages being not human, but we still somehow get powers from the human well.

What happened to him after the events of the Smoke and Mirrors arc anyway? The DA arcs have already made even more of a mess of CoT lore though, so I'd rather Zoria stay in continuity limbo before someone writes him into an arc while forgetting that that's not actually Zoria.

Seriously dude, put her on ignore, you won't miss anything.

Right, because who wants to buy add-ons for a shoddy product?

Actually the lack of DCs is more likely due to apathy, because THERE'S SOMETHING SHINY OVER THERE!!! Didn't I say, when they started that MA Thrusday thing, that I gave it six months, tops, before they got bored and stopped doing it? How many weeks in a row have they skipped now?

The downside is that if an enemy approaches they will get up and fight.

They could easily have wrapped up all the loose ends in Praetoria by now. They're deliberately stretching it out.

Yeah, so stop quoting her. A lot of people have her on ignore and people quoting her circumvents that.

This is exactly what is happening. Posi pretty much said as much in his blog.

Making them as villains I could see but as heroes...yeah, no.

EXACTLY. I want Swan, Ms. Liberty and Valkyrie, not Swan, Swan and Swan. And incidentally, women have different body types, all of which can be idealized as befits this setting. Right Sam?

I'd exclude the barbarian outfits, because the nature of the source material is that everyone runs around half-naked. But otherwise, yeah.

It's an art style that is rather limiting, especially when a large part of your audience is female.

Yes, and there were players who invited lowbies to team with them and teleported them up to the flight ceiling and let them fall into a bunch of enemies and die. They were RPing villains, don't you know. Nobody bought their "I'm RPing!" excuse either.

Nice Strawman.

By the way, 1) Ghost Widow is fully covered from the neck down, and 2) distracting your enemy by your uber-hotness only works if your enemy is a straight male between the ages of 13 and 18.

See the second post in this thread.

However, the power does actually have a recharge component, unlike Active Defense which has no defense component. You can't know if they'll work until someone tries it.

Already did, again, see second post in this thread. You can still slot them, as AD does have a recharge component, which works. Membranes still work in Divine Avalanche and Defensive Sweep because those powers take defense enhancements.

Share?

No purpose is better than a ham-fisted story written around the mechanics that causes /facepalm at every turn, IMO. Things like the mothership, paper missions, and all the zone repeatable missions are repeatable only because they are pretty insignificant story-wise. It's a limitation of repeatable content. Hami is, in a way, just as bad in the long run. We've been farming that guy for years and nobody has made any progress on figuring out how to put him down for good? Nobody has even tried?

Cutscenes are usually a terrible way to deliver story in an interactive medium.

And there has been no TGIMAT for about a month now.

I hate to say "I told you so," but....

The Elemental Order costume set in i22 has a unisex jacket, unfortunately you have to gamble for it.

Only since Going Rogue. Up until then, we had Swan on one end of the scale and Valkyrie on the other, with most of our female NPCs falling somewhere in between. Now we have Desdemona on one end and Mother Mayhem on the other. So I wouldn't use older NPC designs as examples of women who wear pants, it was a different time when the art lead wasn't a guy notorious for drawing Sister Psyche in a bubble bath. The only signature character who's revamp didn't involve stripping has been Battle Maiden, Nightstar being 1) not technically female and 2) naked.
Again: Valkyrie, Mynx, Numina, Ghost Widow, the Vanguard Sisters, and in the "show some skin but not all of it" middle ground we had Ms. Liberty, Lady Grey, Ice Mistral, Countess Crey, then on the other extreme there was Sister Psyche, Swan, Silver Mantis, and as an added bonus we had "scary half-dressed" NPCs like Clamor, Arakhn, and Barracuda. A nice variety, don't you think?

I'm not aware of NPC costuming being addressed in that thread, only the discrepancy between the male and female costume parts players get. If you can point me to the post where Nakayama even acknowledges that his women tend to all look like pin-up girls, let alone proposes to do something to change that, I'd like to see it.

Because she is being promoted as a big villain of this update, and all the other trial AVs have been featured on the update pages.

She didn't have to do any of that of course, but she's twice as tall because magic, lost her translucency so you can see her assets better and lost her clothing because of some dev decree that women are no longer allowed to wear pants, and her robe was too close to a cool long jacket, which women are also not allowed to have.

If it isn't Diabolique but an incarnation of Mot that's even worse. Mot is big with the scary, not with the skanky.

There is a difference though, between choosing to ignore the narrative in favor of rewards and being forced to do so.

Hamidon: We haven't figured out how to defeat him yet, only contain him for a while. He'll be back. Mothership raid: We got our hospital teleporters from them.

Again, the Mothership raid. We have effectively ended the Rikti war through the RWZ storyarcs and the LGTF, but the last holdouts are still here, and nobody can figure out how to actually get inside the mothership. Still, the main storyline is resolved, and the world is safe. If the arc narrative did make earlier trials obsolete, it would be up to the individual player whether they wanted to keep running them or not.