Lemur Lad

Exactly. I pay for the game in 6month increments and take advantage of the 6+1 free option whenever I can. Those 2 free months a year essentially pay for any boosters they put out and keep me within budget. They give me a cut rate for my continued support, and I give it right back to them for taking the extra time to make something nice enough that I'm willing to buy.

Even in the case of pre-orders they gave people value for money by giving early access to features as they were completed.

Even then, they don't take pre-orders on things until they know they're going to be able to get a product out the door. In the case of VEATs, whether added funds made them earlier or not, there was a very definite sense in developer comments that they weren't sure they'd be able to come up with something different enough and compelling enough to go Live with. Even then, they dropped the ball when it came to content though from a technical/gameplay standpoint the AT design is strong.

Actually you're not paying for continued development. It's not in the EULA like some have claimed, but it has been in more than one developer statement over the years, that continued development costs are absorbed in order to grow the subscriber base and reduce subscriber churn, not as a figured cost in the game's overhead.

As for the trend you keep trying to maintain is there, you or someone else should really make a concerted effort to go look and count. Because while it's indisputable that they've done more paid for additions to the game over the years, I have serious doubts that there has been a legitimate decline in the number of free things added.

Extra character slots don't give you an advantage over anyone else. You can still only play one character from one account at a time. One character may be more useful in a given situation than another, but that's no different than someone who has time to level up 5 different 50s vs someone who only has time to get one. Besides, character slots are given out free often enough that unless you're a confirmed alt-oholic who only likes to play on one server, there's no real pressure to buy more slots anyway.

Paying for special powers? Take a look at all of them. At best they're time savers and in one instance a slight build changer that lets you opt out of a travel power in favor of something else. Saving a minute or two here and there is not a big gameplay advantage either.

"and so on" is nice and vague. It's a good way to make it sound like your case is a lot bigger than it is. I think in this case it really means you can't be bothered to think of more actual ways people get paid advantages, but you're kinda sure they're out there. Well I can tell you, they're really not.

People pay for added convenience all the time. Pizza delivery charges, unlimited cell phone minutes, better parking spots, more comfortable furniture, etc, etc.

There's nothing you have to pay for here besides access to the game to have a good time and get access to the same major features everyone else gets access to.

Because it makes more sense to sell something you have in stock than to sell something you won't have done for months. Duh.

Why not? They've made a lot of costume decisions based on the bandwidth limits they operate under in the past. They have a budget, and they can't go over it. I love me my costumes, but I'd rather have the budget spent on things that make them better than things that save a few seconds here and there.

Yes. Player characters are by far the most complex objects ingame. It's already easy to create lag just from too many players in one area just doing emotes, much less firing off powers.

Think of a costume change as essentially multiplying the number of players in a given area by how quickly they can be executed. For the most part when someone changes costume, it's for all intents and purposes a whole new person entering the area, in terms of instructions your computer and the servers have to send back and forth. To a computer, it doesn't really matter that the costume someone changes to may be the same one they had on 5 seconds ago, it's a whole new model to draw and animate.

The race has been engineered and altered through technology, but on the Rikti Homeworld, they breed true. Think of it as like if Hitler's selective breeding programs for the "Aryan Race" had continued for decades. Even so, the implication of Mutation origin that a Mutant is not the norm of his species nullifies that origin (kind of like how Marvel for a long time distinguished between Mutants and Mutates).

We haven't been given more than vague hints about the source of their advanced technology. I still lean toward Natural as the origin of most Rikti, since the species as a whole is mostly similar.

'Riktified' humans though are another story. In their case the the process is definitely that of Science, compressing generations of changes into one relatively short process that mutates a human body and makes them part of the psionic network.

Sarah Connor passed from damsel in distress to ******* crazy to rabid momma bear. She was either victimized or an aggressor. At no time did she demonstrate more than two dimensions of subtlety and at no time was much more than a caricature of whatever role she was in at the moment.

I'm not disputing that she had moments of awesomeness and was worth rooting for, but she was not complex and was much closer to "strong" female character than a legitimate strong female character.

I love the logic chopping and context people some people do to corner the devs into breaking promises.

In the grand scheme of things, do you really expect Posi to know exactly how every bit of content is going to be delivered? He knew new dance emotes were part of the code tree for that phase of development, and he made a mistake about how they were going to be given to us. That's kind of like expecting Castle's answers about City Vault to be written in stone correct.

It was a live chat. Allow for the fact that sometimes they might get things wrong before you build a house of cards out of broken promises.

I agree. Subscribing is cheap. Buying boosters of sufficient quality is cheap. I have no qualms with doing either one, as long as like I said, the quality is there.

As for the OP, do you really think one way or another what people say in response to an idea is going to have an effect on the dev's final decision about how to deliver the idea?

Saying "I'd pay money for that" in one form or another is just an idiomatic way of expressing approval.

All the times and ways people said they'd pay for the ability to custom color powers didn't automatically mean the devs made it that way when they finally delivered.

Were I to vote, it would be for one of the Shadow Shard TFs, because that would almost force them to re-do them all.

Other than that, pretty much every TF generation 2 (striga) and onward is fine, and they would end up working through the Freedom Phalanx TFs.

Limited to one of those, I'd argue back and forth with myself about Synapse or Citadel.

They almost never do.

True story, my second month in the game I and a friend got roped into what turned out to be a 6hour Posi run. The leader who got us together didn't even last past the 4th mission. I didn't run another TF for about 6months after that, until I made some friends who knew a lot more about the better TFs and took my on a Hess (which is a hell of a lot of fun, and still one of the better TFs).

Wrong. They know we want them to. They've admitted they know we want them to. They've never said they were going to.

As for what you said about War Witch, that's not entirely correct either. She was in charge of environments and open zone stuff for a long time, but that's not the same thing as being for it and liking it and pushing it to be a priority.

She's been proud of the work she and her team has done on the minor cosmetic revamps they've done to some zones already, but she has also been pretty specific about saying the same things Posi has said in the past about knowing that redesigning an old zone is just as much work as making a new one (in some ways more) and when given the choice between the two they're going to add new stuff.

Nearly every time I read one of your posts. Oh wait, that wasn't what you meant.

could be worse. Could be WoW. Their maintenance takes 8 hours, and isn't unusual to tack an hour or two onto that.

When they actually patch, it's even longer.

They almost never put exploit fixes in open patch notes. Doing so only feeds the cycle of hunting the next one. They flat out nearly never acknowledge publicly that an exploit of any type exists.

I'm sure he felt bad about losing the job, but my understand is he's not hung up or angry about it (like Crispin Glover was/is).

Eric Stoltz is not an unfunny guy, but he would have been a much mellower and laid back Marty, and while they thought they could have worked through that when they cast him, the more daily footage they saw the more they realized it wasn't going to happen.