Friggin_Taser

Definitely was issue 2. It brought with it a weekend of the game being almost unplayable due to crashes AND a way too overpowered Rularuu Invasion happening at the same time.

Uh, what? Making accusations like that is not the same as horseshoes or grenades: "pretty close" doesn't count.

If my local grocery store is having a sale that only their VIP card members can take part in, I can't call it bait and switch and throw a hissy fit in the produce isle.

There is no bait and switch here because there is no switch: even if the devs aren't calling it Free2Play, the game is free2play. The game is not free2MinMax or free2PowerGame. But a casual player would most likely never notice any of the things past tier 1 that are locked out.

Threads like these are the bait and switch of forum threads. You click them thinking that maybe, just maybe, the overly entitled meatheads would finally see logic posted by any one of us. But nope, switch time as the meathead just digs in their heels further and comes up with even wilder accusations about how Freedom is just a veiled attempt to replace your car's muffler with Cambodian babies.

No, it segregates the player base into the "pays" and "doesn't pay."

In your case, the "haves" are actually the free/premium players who get to play for free. The "have nots" are those people, like us, who are now without 15 bucks a month.

If you really want to ragequit because they are giving people who are paying the game a fraction of the game for themselves, by all means. But it'd be the stupidest horse one could die on.

So your solution would be... give free users access to Incarnates?

I know you are posting in snark, but if you have a team of 3 other people who really are in it just to get Strike Target assists, it's possible to do a Treespec in under 13 minutes. Less if everyone is level 50 and Incarnate'd.

Chaining Team Teleports and Mission Teleporters plus ghosting to the spirit thorn tree = win.

Let's not forget a few other facts:

With the bonus of a reward token for each anniversary badge and one for buying a box, you might be able to get rewards you couldn't unlock yet in the current Veteran Reward system.

Also: badge hunters now get all the old badges plus the new badges. Which means, if badges were money, we could fill a vault with them and backstroke through them ala Scrooge McDuck.

Also: the devs are removing all VIP players' shift keys.

You can no longer talk in the first person in global channels if you have a premium account.

And Flight will only be reserved for Canadian City of Heroes players. All other countries MUST take Superspeed and Superjump only or face being Generic'd.

There, I completed this chain of absolutely wrong and misinformed statements that you started.

So we we just going to make love or are we going to let this Moonlighting-esque Love To Hate sexual tension continue to build?

It sucks that you need surgery.

Here the problem: We've been playing this game for years. We've seen the features locked behind VIP status or later tiers added and become integral parts of the game.

New players? Haven't. They would most likely download the game after hearing it's now free from Kotaku or Destructoid and launch in and start fighting some Skuls or Shivans. Free players, especially those who want to solo, most likely will not come across anything that needs to be paid for for quite a while. Teams of new players trying the game at the same time should have no problem organizing on AIM or Ventrilo or Teamspeak. And, if they like it, they are very likely to just upgrade to Premium or hop on Amazon to buy a 1.57 copy of the Architect addition.

New players are going to be busy with learning the absolute basics of the game. By the time they discover they might need Inventions or would like to try out AE, they are past the point of trying to entice someone to try the game and are most likely already committed to buying it.

Not to mention the fact that all it takes is one tier to get tells, so any returning premium player who bought even 1 box in the past has access to it from the start.

What was great back in the issue 1-3 days was having a long conversation with a friend on F-chat only to have someone else, about 30 minutes later, ask why you are talking to yourself since they were only friends with one side of the conversation.

Or misguided entitlement.

"Your freedom's not free of dumb."

Friend chat was also the "Oops, sent that last tell to the wrong chat" option for players pre-global chat.

I think Praetoria side steps this in a really creative way.

It might just be me, but around the time of GR beta and release, I was big into cyberpunk movies (after being big into those trains for all these years). So Praetoria feels way more like being able to pick sides in a cyberpunk sci-fi world: you can be the deadly and corrupt police force or the plucky yet bloodthirsty resistance. The fact that there are visual cues to everything from Judge Dredd to the Matrix to AI, etc, helps this.

That part I really liked and wished they actually finished the story to a satisfying conclusion. If they did, I might use it more as a starting point for new alts.

They did say that Freedom has been in the making for quite a long time, for years.

Around the time, internally, that they decided to go F2P and began plotting out Freedom, knowing full well that it would require a redesign of Atlas and Mercy as well as other changes that took devs away from Praetoria zone/story arc making?

I can see that being in place so they can tell us about it before hand, but I can't believe they sat down and decided to design 20 levels of new starting game, which is hardly aching for content that ends with you just returning to old content.

My 2 influence (infamy or information) says that one of two things happened: 1. Praetoria was designed to be end game level 35-50+ content but was changed due to Marketing wanting a new start point or 2. Praetoria was originally designed to be just like the Isles with content from 1-40 at launch but the story arc writers and zone designers needed for this were taken from them early on and put into the development teams for Incarnate Trials or what we're seeing in Freedom. So they cut their losses and go with level 1-20 only with the lame "Choose your side" ending. We'll slowly see them getting up to level 50 Goldside, but the new zones will act more like co-op villain/hero zones than anything like the First Ward already does.

I can't help you if you honestly believe that.

The fact that we only got 20 levels and then a lame plot device to send us to old content?

Only a few new power sets.

No Praetorian TFs. No ability to make Praetorian SGs. The fact that just about every mission with an ambush in Praetoria becomes a death march where a small team or solo-ers have absolutely no chance to survive. Every villain group being horribly overpowered as compared to low level Praetorians.

Plenty of little things like that all over Gold-side.