GlassGoblin

Vanguard put him in a cell with Wade. Budget cuts.

There you go. It's a PVP brag-reward in the new PVP zone, Galaxy City.

I don't know. How can you mend a broken heart?

The whole reason for the promotion is to try to reach people who won't use the forums. Agree with it or not, that's who they are targeting this time. I wish they wouldn't use a unique item for it, but maybe the idea is to track the number of times the aura is used in-game, to get some idea of how many active players were reached? Who knows the actual reason; marketing moves in mysterious ways.

Or when yfrog barfs on the image, and you can only see it in Twitter's small inline viewer.

Sure. That's why I mentioned the much higher cash cost of $10, which would give getting it free more cachet. But again, it might or might not happen, and there's a likelihood that it'll disappear as thoroughly as the /facepalm emote.

Given that right now there are, what? 500 accounts total with Kirby dots? That's so exclusive as to make them effectively invisible to the general population, which reduces their PR value outside of the immediate circle of winners. Maybe I've misjudged the goal of the promotion.

Bundles of consumables aren't permanent visual effects promoting the marketing strategy chosen. Since the goal is to draw eyeballs to the official social media channels, extremely rare costume items are much more effective at achieving it. The only way to get a similar payback is to offer the item for a not-insignificant amount of real money, leading to conversations like: "Oh, cool, you bought the Kirby dots!" "No, I got this $10 aura free in a @CityOfHeroes Twitter giveaway!"

For the record, I'm not upset about the promotion. I -- and the members of my SG -- are disappointed to have another item permanently out of our reach, but it isn't the end of the world. But since professionally I'm not allowed to have a publicly visible Twitter account, I'll just have to live with the exclusion.

Stay indoors and put tinfoil over your windows.

Wait, I'm thinking of lower-case R. Carry on.

That got a laugh out of me.

{tangent} Without thinking, I used that joke to a 10 year old the other day. I had to explain what I meant in detail, because the concept of phone lines was utterly foreign to him. "What's the big deal, the killer's just on his cell phone, right?" Also, he refused to get off my lawn. {/tangent}

And you thought it was rough farming for the Empath badge...

Wait, there are badges for ERP?

One can never have too many...

As a very wise man once said: "Don't dream it, be it."

This may be a way to (ahem) test the waters for the long-awaited Carp Melee set. A Fish-Slap temp power, perhaps?

Also: obligatory.

Not necessarily. You balance the costs of creating and implementing the code and assets against the predicted increase in revenue accrued from the winners and the related splash effect. In other words, it's just using developers to create marketing materiel.

Thank you for those. I won't be able to get a code from Twitter, but maybe some day they'll be available with Astrals or Empyreans, as with other oddball auras. Or cash money, I suppose.

The way to make everyone* happy would be to sell a pool where each power has slightly different effects based on the character's origin, kind of like Blackwand/Nem Staff.

*Obviously it wouldn't make everyone happy. This isn't my first day among either humanity OR gamers.

I took it as more of an acknowledgement that a lot of highly vocal players hate KB, so why not throw them a bone? A limited time offer in a team-forced event requiring farming, though, so it's a very small bone. A kneecap, perhaps.

Same here. This, and seasonal events which require me to find teams willing to try for badges after the first 36 hours of the event.

Popcorn?

I just appreciated that you get a message other than "You cannot enter."