Lothic

Congrats on getting the second badger past 1,200. I wonder if you're the first to manage that?
Anyway I'm not too far behind on that myself. Spent too much time on my main's Partner badge in the last month to work on my second badger enough.

Well for what it's worth my main badgers have already "reinforced" all of the alignments just in case they ever actually release the "reinforce alignment" badges that were discovered lurking in the code back during the I18 beta.

I was probably going to run a bunch of TFs anyway to stock up on Shards but the 50 count badge did add an additional motivation for sure.
Now that my main has finished that badge she's is in fact sitting on a boatload of them.

I understand everyone's going to have different opinions on what they consider "grinding" for badges. But I think trying to claim that having to do the same TF at least twice in one week as "grinding" is really pushing the definition to its logical limit.

Sure I can understand you might not LIKE to do TFs as often as that or maybe don't even have the time in real life to devote to doing TFs that often. But even if you're one of those people I think you'd have a hard timing using the word "grinding" to describe that scenario with a straight face.

If you're going to make a case against grinding for badges that's perfectly fine. But at least use reasonable terms/scales when trying to relate your ideas to others. I'm sure there are some people out there who would consider the idea that 2 TFs a week should be defined as "grinding" to be as laughable as trying to say driving 40 MPH on the Interstate is "speeding".

I "fear" it only because this movie is basically going to hinge on how cheesy (or well done) the "interaction" between the fantasy world and the movie's real world is handled. Frankly I suspect if they let the two merge too freely then the suspension of disbelief in this movie will suffer.

I really have no worries from a "all flash and no substance" standpoint. It really wouldn't have bothered me to have the fantasy parts and the reality parts be strictly separated (in her mind alone?) assuming that would have served the story appropriately.

I'd really be amazingly surprised if they ever (at this point) suddenly decided to say something like "Any character that has remained true to their original alignment will gain X permanent benefit". That would be an unfair "bait and switch" reversal of a colossal size and there would be a huge backlash to it. I believe it's safe to say there will never be PERMENENT ramifications for either switching alignments OR staying true.

Now of course there are -some- ramifications to switching, like losing Alignment merits or powers. But to my knowledge there is nothing that can't be regained upon going back to an original alignment. So it's basically left up to the individual player how/why you justify any alignment decision vis-a-vis badging or anything else.

To use myself as an example my main badger Loth was always RP'd as a "reformed villain" as far back as 2004 so it was easy in my mind to justify her slipping back into her former evil ways to get redside badges. My second badger Ryver was always played as the "Good Girl" hero so for her I just assumed she got turned villainous against her will via some kind of evil mind control or some-such. I even redid some of her normally tidy costumes making them rough/torn to reflect the times when she's "temporarily chaotic/insane" on the redside.

Whatever works.

Eh, I never claimed I've seen every trailer for this movie so far.

But if what you say is the case then my fears that they're going to let the fantasy world bleed into the real world seem justified. I'm still likely going to see this regardless, but like I implied earlier there's still plenty of room for this movie to shoot itself in the proverbial foot.

Everything that has ever been introduced in this game went through a period of "OMG that's too hard! No one will be able to do it!".

Eventually, sooner or later, someone figures out the "trick" to it and it becomes (if not trivial) at least much less "impossible" to do. I'm sure this new badge you're referring to is challeging, and it may never be simple to get. But I have no doubt it'll be earnable by most people eventually.

P.S. I've already earned every directably earnable badge in this game as of today.
I would have no other badge to work on at this point no matter how hard your new uber badge is...

I lost 70+ earned badges during the infamous AE badge purge.
I'll gladly take them back regardless of the Devs' latest policy on "grinding" for badges. *shrugs*

I have no problem with new badges requiring multiple weeks (or even months) of effort to earn. Being able to "instantly" earn badges can be fun sometimes, but having long term goals to achieve is fun as well.

Then again it's not a scenario that was unexpected. I realized this was probably going to be the case several months ago. In fact I've had several of my badging characters parked with all the alignment points ready to go to shift back to the other side at the drop of a hat for weeks now.

I'd agree any variation of a "twist" like this would be cool.

Sadly I'm basically expecting it to go more like this: Using her awesome imagination she somehow "transfers" her fantasy-based virtual ninja-girl powers into the real world and she physically escapes the mental institution in a blaze of Kill Bill styled gunfire and swordfighting to get her revenge on the people who put her there. Because as we all know any cute girl can "imagine" themselves into a ninja killing machine IRL and it'll happen for real.

I see no reason why this thing couldn't be reorganized so that the default Lore pet costumes (however many defaults the game would give us) represented a better mix of Praetorian and non-Praetorian options. Then from there we'd be free to gain/earn any other Lore pets costumes we wanted.

This idea, following the Halloween costume power model, potentially allows there to be literally dozens of Lore pet appearances to choose from that could be "assigned" to our Lore pets.

Well like I said I was just thinking of a cool way this movie could turn out.
Sadly, like you, I'm not really -expecting- it to do anything remotely like this.

*MILD SPOILERS ALERT*






In a nutshell the main character is a girl who's (apparently falsely) imprisoned in a mental institution and she use her "vivid imagination" to cope/escape from reality. It's not clear from the trailers if she ACTUALLY escapes from the nuthouse or if this is all just a fantasy she creates for herself as she goes insane for real.

That's why I think it'd be cool if they handle Sucker Punch like the "Owl Creek Bridge" story I mentioned. In that story a Civil War soldier is about to be hung but somehow escapes the noose and makes a fantastically desperate attempt to get home. Turns out the entire "escape" never actually happened and the whole story was just an instantaneous "life flashing before his eyes" hallucination he experiences seconds before they hang him.

If they apply that kind of twist to this movie it'd be great. Basically she "imagines" that they all become cool ninja warrior-chicks but in reality she's just moments away from a lobotomy that's going to effectively kill her anyway. That'd be tragically cool.

lol, I saw what you did. *golfclap*

Oh well, I still think it's a cool idea in theory.
Too bad someone else already had it and apparently messed it up.

I'm good with it either way. Even if we are "forced" to run 3 more trials just to get 3 more badges I'd rather do that than to have the thing left broken the way it is now. I actually haven't run either side's respec trials in a long time so when I20 finally brings this fix to the live servers it might provide the motivation to run something else that's semi-unusual for a change.

Woohoo! Broadcasts for Incarnate power leveling for teh win!

I'm not going to belittle because you apparently got nothing you like out of this Issue. I'll just point out that there's never been any guarantee that any Issue is supposed to be 100% acceptable to everyone. Better luck next time?

To be reasonable people who like to play solo probably shouldn't demand the other hypothetical extreme that everything in a MMO must be 100% soloable either.

The perfect balance of solo vs. team is probably somewhere in the middle... just like this game happens to be geared for.
Imagine that.

Until someone can produce the law that says "100% of this game must be soloable" I will continue to have relative little sympathy for people who assume everything here must be soloable.

Well to be fair GR wasn't called "Alpha slot 100% certain to be here".

Perhaps my phrase "fringe lunacy" was a tad much. But I think to have overactive concerns we're going to have a repeat of what happened to the Alpha slot it a bit unwarranted as well.