Ironik

They usually take them down around 9 am Eastern US time / 6 am Pacific.

In the early days the servers came down every single day, so it's much better these days.

They always announce it in-game -- you probably just logged in after the last announcement.

Maintenance window is always 2 hours, but they're rarely down that long.

I think a lot of people would trade xp for story if the story is astounding. But almost no stories are.

Holy ****, that is ******* horrible. What the hell?

I actually have a level 29 silver robot named Soundbyte, so I'm in.

I noticed that one of my characters hasn't been logged in for 2,153 days. That's 5.9 years. Now I *can't* log her in or delete her.

I received Taser Dart!

One of my all-time favorite names, solidly in the "Man-I-Wish-I'd-Thought-Of-That!" category, a character I saw way back during the headstart and ran across again last week:

Punchin' Judy --> Why it's punny.

I hear what you're saying, and it does depend on how much work you want to invest in it, but I think with some planning you can keep the complicated and labor-intensive modifications to a minimum.

Using Photoshop would be easiest for me, because although I'm a rank amateur, I do it enough that it's a fairly quick process at this point.

I did some simple demoedits to show turnarounds of my characters or to put all of my SG into one shot, which became easier as I did it a couple times. I think that, like anything, it becomes easier with practice. One thing I found was setting up a shot with Random Character and then just dropping in the info for the character I wanted to have there. Once I figured out how to do it, it was a fairly quick process.


Here I just dropped in Minotaurus next to Minotaur X, the only way to get two of my toons side by side:



Simple turn-around of my Brute:



Some random members of my and my friends' villains as a practice demoedit:

I think you've made a decent first effort, and we all walk before we run.

There are two ways around the screenshot problem:

The one with the steeper learning curve is to do demoedits. However, you can really do some amazing things once you get a handle on it.

The second is to utilize Photoshop or the free equivalent, GIMP. For pulling the tail, for instance, just take a screenshot of her tail, then combine that with a screenshot of someone pulling. If there isn't a decent emote in the game, you can just cut the screenshot into its constituent parts and move them to where you want them. It's a bit of work, but not a huge amount.

Edit: As I think about it, maybe the sniping animation can be repurposed to tail-pulling.

Since you asked... this critique is meant to be helpful above all else. I appreciate the effort but am not keen on the result.

Minor nitpick is spelling, using "your" instead of "you're," "per say" instead of "per se," etc. But I think it needs a complete overhaul, frankly.

Dialogue:

It comes across as stilted, and Hunter Blue's just isn't believable. Is he Cajun? French? I'm just not buying his speech pattern. Also, there are far too many infodumps. It's better to hint at things and let the reader draw their own conclusions rather than say it outright. Instead of saying they have contacts throughout the city, show Justice Force getting info from various sources.

Plot:

Sending Lady Meow to a special school at 18 doesn't make sense, frankly. She's an adult and can do what she wants at that point. Seems to me that her mom would send her away much earlier.

The fact that she doesn't know what she's capable of doesn't wash, either. She changed at age 9, and every kid runs and jumps, so it wouldn't take long before she discovered her abilities far outstripped those of her friends.

Instead of *saying* that the kids were mean to her, *show* it. This would also have the effect of allowing her to discover her abilities.

When she changes, have her classmates tease her. Have one pull her tail, and in response she lashes out at the kid, spinning, pouncing and clawing him before anyone can react. And THAT reaction gets her kicked out of school, forcing her mom to send her to a special school. SHOW the special school being hard on her. To keep the headmaster from seeming like a total dick, have a scene where he's telling a teacher they have to be hard on the kids in order to toughen them up. Lady Meow doesn't know this, so in reaction she runs away.

On the streets she falls in with a gang (which is what happens to runaways in our world), but is essentially good. When the gang decides to rob someone, she resists, because she sees it as the same as when her friends tormented her. The gang leader agrees and says that's the way of the world. "They picked on us. They hate us. We're just doing it to them before they can do it again."

Have the guy they rob be someone who is kind to others, perhaps even kind to her, thus fueling her resistance to the gang. She goes along because of peer pressure but at the last minute balks.

The Justice Force, responding to the alarm, sees her fighting her own gang and decides to recruit her.

This will take longer to get her to the "joining the team" part of the story, but it lays the groundwork for the follow-on stories.

"Removed from circulation" doesn't really apply, since there's an infinite amount of any in-game items. While it would be nice to be able to get some recipes without having to pay tens of millions of Influence, as a casual player I've long since given up getting any of those. There's no way to get the kind of money needed without farming, so what's the point?

I need a nap. Hmm... I can get in an hour still. I'm off! I'll be back, but I'm off!

I go for the stories, not the rewards. My problem is that even highly-regarded AE missions (which is entirely different from highly-rated missions) often leave me going, "Um, what was so great about that?" I haven't done any recently since my arcs got broken. Just not interested in plowing through the clunky interface again, so the whole thing has been tainted for me.

Reason I ask is because his background given in-game is MY current age and location. Just wondering if that's just a coincidence or if the game is datamining our info for it. (Which would be a cool idea.)

Okay, I have greenified Monster Child, ready to rumble jadely!