Grouchybeast

The thing is, though, this *is* just your point of view. For you, powersets are a most important part of the game, and so of course they should be free. Someone else might not care at all about powersets, and see costumes as the central part of CoX. You're willing to pay for costumes, but not for powersets. They think that costumes should all be free, but would pay for powersets.

It's another version of the 'what should be included in Premium content' debate. If everyone gets to have what they think of as a central part of the game for free, then there's virtually nothing left that can be sold in the market and used to fund the extra development and extra releases that you acknowledge are happening.

At the end of the day, what it comes down to is, are you willing to pay extra to get more of some of the things that you feel are fundamental to the game, or do you think that they shouldn't exist for anyone to buy? Because those are the options -- more stuff that we pay for, or the lesser amount of stuff we got under the old system, for free. More stuff for free isn't really going to fly as a business model.

Buying a 'skin' gives the player a new toggle power which is mutually exclusive with others in the group, in exactly the same way as the Prestige Power Sprints work?

That used to be shown, and it was useful. It disappeared in the UI 'upgrade'.

I used to think the updated WW interface was a ridiculously bad piece of design. Since the arrival of the Paragon Market, I'm just thankful that it wasn't much, much worse.

That would be pretty annoying for people who were actually using the test servers to test upcoming content.

That's one of the better things about WW. Okay, dumping everything on the market for 1 inf isn't the most efficient way to make inf, but it does provide a surprisingly reasonable return, and certainly more than enough to pay for SOs and the odd -KB IO.

I'd really hope that any alternate system proposed caters equally as well for those people who want as little to do with the market as possible.

No, it really wouldn't. It would be as empty and dead as all the other PVP zones in the game.

Seriously. I've been playing through the arcs on various characters, and every run I have a sneaking hope that maybe THIS time they won't be so utterly, utterly stupid.

They give practically the entire game away, now. You don't even need to get to 50, and there it is. Free!

Also, I assume that, despite the latest round of AE tweaks, the power-levelling to 50 in significantly less than a day is still pretty trivial. Given that, there is less than a snowflake in hell's chances of them giving away anything of actual value for reaching 50. Giving away 30 days of VIP time for PLing characters would be insane.

The token you got on the 23rd was (most likely) the token that's awarded for making your first Paragon Points purchase of any amount of points, and nothing to do with your VIP subscription token.

As to when the token might show up, I'm afraid I can't help. You can ask customer services about it, but to be honest they seemed to be as confused as the rest of us.

Reward Tokens are only for VIP subs (one per month subbed) and VIPs or Premium players who buy Paragon Points (one RT per 1200 points). No paying, no tokens.

Yeah. Last year I had 'fun' with a WL and his level 50 Frostlings sat on top of a contact in Praetoria.

Apparently, it means 'stuff that teenage boys like to look at'.

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure that I got a bonus reward token the first time I bought extra Paragon Points, and that was a while after Freedom launched, on an account that had been subbed for years.

Rolled up newspaper?

I dunno. Have you tried standing in foot traffic in Atlas? And I've let off Inferno in the middle of a Mayhem mission before now, and those so-called 'civilians' don't even twitch. You should be glad that the Primal civilians are kind enough to leave the supers alone.

Combine the two, and add the Market!

Statesman dies and Marcus Cole gains new powers. Completing the entire arc allows players to buy an AT/power set change on the Market for a bajillion PPs.

Aha! So, was it you who priced the full set of Kinetic Combat at more point than buying all of the set's IOs separately?

But *why* is it bad? That's what I'm not seeing, yet. What are the negative consequences for the game and players of being able to add a supply of ATOs from the cards to the in-game market?

I think one of the issues with video games is that traditionally, the game is released in a more-or-less fixed state, and while there may be a patch or two to clear up particularly horrible bugs, generally the developers will then move on to the next project. No one needs to think about what could be happening ten years down the line, when the whole team has changed, and so have the requirements. The keys are quick development, and code that works, but isn't necessarily easy to change or maintain.

Unfortunately, MMOs are a lot more like enterprise software in that the same code needs to be continuously maintained and developed for years, while it's in use by the customer. I would hope that things have changed now, and new processes have been brought in, but I can understand why an old MMO like CoX might now have a lot of problems.