Lothic

These would likely be the vaguely-mentioned "friends and family" alpha phase people who always get first crack at these things.

IIRC (and according to Paragonwiki) there were no exclusive in-game items related to the CoV Collectors edition. The only exclusive items related to that were the physical items in the box. Regardless I've never heard of them planning to single out CoV items versus any other expansion for this game.

The Paragon Points system will provide a new opportunity for people to buy in-game items that people originally had to pay for anyway (like the items from the Good vs Evil Edition) so I see no good reason why the Devs would avoid offering any/all of these things.

I've mentioned that I wouldn't mind having to pay on an individual basis for costume slots per character. But frankly if I can drop a fixed chuck of money to have them all unlocked on my main account and be done with it I'm all for it. I know that I'll probably want costumes #6-10 on more characters down the line eventually.

Well speaking as a software engineer IRL there's a practical reason why they simply can't let us "go crazy" with something like this. We can talk about what a reasonable character slot limit might be, but no matter what that number is there's always going to be a hard limit. And why is 72 a workable number anyway? I'm sure you could find someone who'd say that wasn't enough either.

Bottomline be happy they are increasing the limit from 36 to 48 in the first place. There's nothing that said they -had- to do that for us, and conversely there's nothing that says they might not increase it again sometime.

I just hope that once I finally decide to quit playing this game it'll be for a reason far more significant than this. *shrugs*

I've read where this launcher wasn't very good a long time ago and that very well may have been the case. But when I started using it a few months ago I could easily access the Live, Test and Beta servers without any difficulty. It updates these clients much better than the old CoH updater ever did. It has basically been nothing but an improvement over what I was using before.

That's great for you and me. But I'm sure the player who starts playing this game say a year from now will appreciate being able to get access to an aura that otherwise would have been pointlessly impossible for them to enjoy otherwise.

Barring any direct confirmation from a Redname I'm guesstimating that there's about a 98% chance that these new costume slots will be account-wide. That's the way that "other" superhero MMO handled them at any rate.

But even if they're not I'll probably still buy a number of slots across several different characters ASAP. I'm one of those crazy people who've been waiting for extra costume slots for many years now so I'll get them pretty much any way they are offered.

The irony here is that the new launcher is clearly better than the old one regardless. That was the only "enticement" I needed to switch to it many months ago.

I suppose when this aura appears in the Paragon Points store there will be people who'll complain that their once "exclusive" aura has been cheapened the same way just about every other exclusive item in this game has been already. People will complain about anything really. *shrugs*

In all the CoH closed betas I've had access to over the years I've been able to play all of them days or even -weeks- before I ever see the email about it. At this point I almost think it's weird they waste time trying to inform people about betas via that method. The emails might be useful for some people, but for me they're the -last- place I go looking for this kind of info.

I switched to the new launcher months ago so I'm not really worried about the aura personally. But for what it's worth if doesn't become something we can eventually buy with Paragon Points I'd be really amazed. I understand it was used as an enticement for the new launcher. But as JayboH says what point would it ultimately serve if it becomes one of the very few unlockables in the game that becomes impossible for any newer player to get?

I know things that used to be "exclusive enticements" (such as the preorder sprints and helmets) have since become available in other ways. But the Devs never made a big deal about stressing their exclusivity right before they made them un-exclusive. The whole idea that the Devs seem to be spinning this thing as the "last chance" to get this aura seems very weird and misguided somehow. They'd be better off not hyping the aura at this point at all and just let it become unceremoniously available with Paragon Points at a later date. *shrugs*

Well we know that the existing badges aren't going to be changed so I don't think any of that will go "bye-bye".

I must admit I also like to look at other people's badges in-game. But I do my best to not assume anything about how well a given player can play the game. I've seen people who only have a few Vet badges play very well and I've also seen 80+ month "vets" who seem semi-clueless. Just don't let yourself tricked into thinking a person's badges mean anything else than how much time a player has "wasted" earning badges.

I always loved that classic Star Trek episode with the aliens who were split into two groups: the ones who were white on the right side and black on the left and the other group who were the reverse of that.



The two groups hated each other for their obvious "difference" but the clear social commentary raised by the episode was that their struggle was ultimately absurd and pointless. Is there nothing that Star Trek can't teach us?

All those other "non-standard" inspirations have existed in the game for years. I agree one might easily ask why they didn't simply make the new Ultimate level shift inspiration one of those extra ones. But for all we know it's no longer just as "simple" as that.

When they decided to cut-n-paste an entire new tier of "standard" inspirations they clearly considered their in-game effects. Somewhere along the line they decided that a tier 4 green pill was redundant and/or unbalanced. I don't know if they avoided including a tier 4 green pill because they also wanted to add the Ultimate inspiration and needed to make room for it somewhere or because they decided not to have one regardless, but either way with the hole left by its absence they were able to slip the new Ultimate pill in without having to worry about including yet another extra one in the market/GUI structures.

Bottomline I can still easily envision how letting the new Ultimate pill take the pre-existing spot of an old inspiration might have been easier to code than dealing with wedging it in as an entirely new type.

This is probably a moot point with CoH:Freedom on the horizon but the original headstart period (April 25-28, 2004) was never supposed to count towards Vet status. Many people over the years have been confused about this but according to the Vet FAQ as well as everything any Redname has always said the official Vet status start date for all players has always been April 28, 2004. Any player who ever got their Vet awards earlier than the 28th of a particular "anniversary month" was benefiting from a bug in the accounting system. Hopefully the upcoming Freedom changes will finally squash that long-standing bug for everyone.

The last couple of Vet Awards have been sneaking in without any of the usual "Badge Earned" announcements. People (like DumpleBerry) have speculated that the Devs haven't bothered to fix that because everything's going to change with CoH:Freedom soon enough anyway. That seems like a reasonable guess to me. *shrugs*

Well for what it's worth I like the upcoming changes to the Paragon/Vet Rewards system, even if it means I'll no longer be able to poke fun at the Devs indirectly by commenting on Turg getting his Vet awards earlier than he was supposed to. In a weird sort of way I'm going to miss that...

I'm sorry but I think you might have read a bit more into my post than I intended. When I used the word "maddening" I meant it in joking manner. If dealing with the two storylines was truly annoying to me I wouldn't have read all those books and watched all those TV shows...

I wasn't really posting negatively against what you said. It was more just acknowledging your idea and expanding on it. For what it's worth I sort of wish the TV version of the Weres was a bit more like the book version too. I was simply saying that I understood why the changes were made, not that they ruined it per se.

Ultimately I can accept the TV version as an "alternate reality" book universe well enough and enjoy both.

My guess (as a software engineer IRL) is that code-wise it was simply easier for them to "replace" the 4th tier green pill in favor of the Ultimate level-shift pill. Had they made room for the new level-shift inspiration then the 4th tier would have had an extra type of inspiration beyond what the first tiers have. This means they would have had to tinker with their data structures a little more drastically than simply overwriting an existing inspiration with the new oddball level-shift one. Thus the total number of inspiration types per tier could remain the same.

Bottomline I think the Devs figured the 4th tier green pill was the most expendable/redundant type of inspiration and decided to have the new level-shift pill take its place. It's not a "good" reason, but from a coding point of view it was probably far easier than the alternative.

I've read the first 11 Stackhouse books -and- seen every episode of True Blood so far. I obviously love both of them but frankly it's maddening trying to keep up with all the differences between the two storylines.

Spolier-ish book comments ahead...




Since the TV show can't be as detailed as the books it's clear they had to simplify/streamline how things are presented. Things like how the Fairies and Weres "work" had to be made much more straightforward. I doubt we'll ever see many of the side characters that helped flesh out the those cultures in the books. Also they had to rework even the main TV characters to make them fit into the abbreviated storyline. For example if they didn't make Bill the new King of Louisiana then there probably wouldn't have been much point keeping the presumably popular Stephen Moyer around as a regular cast member. For those who don't know by the sixth or seventh book Bill became such a minor character that he barely got a few pages per book.

All in all I like the TV show. But for me it's sort of like watching the "Mirror, Mirror" version of the original Sookie Stackhouse universe. I keep expecting to see Bill or Eric on-screen with an "Evil Spock" beard.

I have no idea if this particular story is true or simply some form of Chinese anti-gaming propaganda. But I'm willing to accept the idea that people have sold kids to pay for online debts in some form or fashion somewhere by now. Human trafficking is a sadly widespread activity involving thousands of victims every year. There are all sorts of reasons people do it - the idea of doing it to pay for online games/gambling is just as likely as any other reason at this point.

Does that make online gaming intrinsically bad? Of course not. It just means it has become an accepted form of economics, and like any form of economic activity people eventually find ways to apply morally questionable methods to it. *shrugs*

Too bad you couldn't simulate one of those "freedom of information" government reports that have like 98% of the classified words blacked out so that basically all you get are pages full of solid black squares.

Elegant? Perhaps. But definitely practical/realistic at any rate.

As we all know it'll likely be impossible for the Devs to provide multiple new fully animated travel powers that'll cover all the suggestions that have been mentioned in this thread so far. It's just not going to happen. And even the idea of "power pool customiztion" is problematic at best because once again you're talking about having to create an entire set of animations for each customization. If that were "easy" the Devs would have done that years ago.

But it may be far more possible they'll be able to create a new batch of flypose emotes that'll handle many of these ideas. For example there's really no reason they couldn't create a flypose emote that has a character appear to be riding a broom or standing on an energy disk.

Yes the flypose emotes are a bit cumbersome to use and aren't as cool as fully dedicated powers (with all the associated animations that make them react appropriately in all situations) but as a compromise feature that already exists in-game they're probably our best bet for many of these things.

This is the point I always laugh about whenever anyone gripes about having to pay a few extra dollars for content for this game. Sure no player technically wants to pay additional fees for entertainment. But if I were to compare the total amount I've paid for this game versus the total number of hours of entertainment value I've gotten from it I figure it'd only come out to be about a DIME AN HOUR. To me that's so close to being free that I have no problem whatsoever paying an extra $10 or $20 bucks here or there to keep this great game profitable for the people who make it for us.

Sure it's fun bickering about paying extra for things, but in this case it's not really worth whining about too much.