Lothic

Basically I see Praetoria as sort of this game's version of Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" universe where the supposed "good guys" are really the villains and vise-versa.

I'm certainly willing to agree that Paragon Studios could have handled their attempt at it a bit better. But just because it's a cliched comic/sci-fi concept at this point doesn't mean I don't like the idea in general. After all the "Mirror, Mirror" episodes of the various Star Trek series over the years tended to be some of the coolest ones they ever did.

I wouldn't complain about "enhancement tray 3" being the freebie some week either. On the other hand I pretty much expect that will NEVER happen for the same reason you described so I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Yeah if the guy just put the bacon on WITHOUT ASKING YOU then yeah that might be rude on his part. But that's not what's happening here. You are being offered free bacon and you are having to actively ACCEPT the bacon by going to the Market and clicking some buttons. If you don't want the bacon you aren't forced into doing anything.

So in this case the guy making your sub has asked you, "Do you want free bacon on that?" and instead of saying "No, thank you." you have chosen to complain that the guy offered you some free bacon in the first place. That is textbook rude on YOUR part by any stretch of the imagination.

If the guy obviously wasn't prepared to give you free salami then your comment that he ought to be giving you free salami could be considered at the very least obnoxious by the sub maker who was just trying to be nice to you with the free bacon. *shrugs*

Not only was teaming a problem, but the whole presentation of Praetoria came off more like an extended "level 1-20 tutorial" than an actual part of the main game. I understand that they were trying do something interesting with the moral ambiguity and all that, but it ultimately minimized its usefulness. Once you jumped over to the Primal side of the game at level 20 it was almost like "what was the point of Praetoria in the first place"?

I think if they had planned for Praetoria to be its own complete level 1-50 experience from the beginning it would have been more fun. Sure they could have kept the -option- to transfer to Primal Earth at 20, but I would have had more fun with it as a complete third side of the game.

It really takes a certain kind of person to not only be "unimpressed and disappointed" about a company giving you free stuff but then decides that they were "unimpressed and disappointed" enough about it to publicly complain that the free stuff wasn't cool enough.

Did you really seriously believe that a company would willing give their cooler stuff away for free when there are still plenty of people out there willing to pay good money for it? When a grocery store offers up free samples of food it's always little bits of cheese or sausage - when have you ever seen them offer up whole turkeys or sirloin steaks for free like that?

Gods people... put just a tiny bit of thought into this and accept it for what it is.
This isn't rocket science - they were NEVER going to give away their most expensive stuff this way.

If you -paid- for bacon on your sub and didn't get it then complaining about it would be absolutely appropriate.

But if the guy making your sub offers you some free bacon (that he had no obligation to give you) and for some weird reason you hate bacon it'd still be fairly rude to openly complain or quibble about it, even if you're secretly disappointed (or "wistful") you didn't get offered some other free topping you -really- would have wanted instead.

I'm secretly disappointed they didn't give me a Bug Hunter badge for free.
But since it's pretty rude to openly complain about someone giving you free stuff I decided not to whine about it too much. *shrugs*

Here's the thing: in general I'm all for equality in costume items for this game. Generally speaking I think all items should be equally available to all three body models (male, female and huge). So in principle I can agree with what you're suggesting here.

But where you seem to be missing the point is that IN THEMATIC CONTEXT your suggestions really don't make any sense. I understand you want this "retro sci-fi" set to be considered more like a generic "spacesuit" set and you think that means that all these glove and boot options should be in it. But please trust me when I say it really makes no sense for females to have "sensible" space-boot options shoehorned into this set when the very definition of retro sci-fi effectively PROHIBITS it. What you're asking for here is almost like asking for a hockey mask to be included in a football costume set just because you really, really want that football costume set to actually be an "all-sports" costume set. Apples and oranges my friend.

Like I said in the feedback thread if the Devs ever decide to give us a specific "spacesuit/astronaut" costume set then I'll back you on this idea of yours 100%. But since women in retro sci-fi (for better or worse) didn't wear strictly "reasonable" clothing there's sadly no justification for trying to overload that kind of thing here in this costume set.

Of course I could tangentially jump in here to argue that PvP is itself not important enough to this game to be "seriously worked" on by -any- kind of Dev, but I wouldn't want to upset anyone who might think otherwise.

I understand your concern about this and I agree I'd like this kind of thing tested for at least several more years before they even attempt to make it "mainstream".

But it's a sobering fact to realize that most commercial airline flights are already heavily automated like this. It's not just the classic "auto-pilot" used while at altitude - many modern airliners can pretty much take-off and land by themselves too. Every year the human pilots are becoming more and more relegated to an almost secondary babysitter role. If they can now trust automation to planes why not cars?

While it's hard to accept driver-less cars now I suspect in a few decades time it'll seem strange that we worried about it in the first place.

We may occasionally disagree about other topics but I will always respect someone who can wield vorpal-bladed humor as masterfully as you can.

I'll defer to others who've already given you plenty of examples to help you tell the difference between real science and science fiction in this case.

Well for what it's worth your confused insistence that "retro sci-fi" must equate to "astronaut" or "spacesuit" was amusing. I'll certainly agree that some of the items in this costume pack do look relatively spacesuit-like. But that in no way means that this is strictly an Astronaut Pack or that there MUST be female space boots, whatever that really means to you.

The idea that "retro sci-fi" must equal "astronaut" is a lot like trying to convince people that Heavy Metal and Classical music are the same thing just because they're both generally considered forms of music. Sure many elements of retro sci-fi tend to be "spacey" in nature, but I would never be naive enough to insist that a costume pack based on a retro sci-fi theme must possess every costume item you'd need to make an "astronaut" outfit.

Ironically I wouldn't mind having realistic female spacesuit boots in this game at some point. But I'm not going to be upset if the retro sci-fi pack doesn't provide that item because realistic female spacesuit boots aren't typically associated with retro sci-fi.

Last time I checked no one was trying to convince you of that. I wouldn't call her an "astronaut" in the real life science sense either. If anything she's an example of what people might be calling "retro sci-fi" a few decades from now. *shrugs*

LOL I totally forgot about Nova the character from Planet of the Apes. Yeah, if the Internet existed like it does now back in the late 1960s then I'd bet there would have been a bunch of racy tweets about her "butt leather".

You mentioned "real life" when you compared an example of retro sci-fi to an attached pic of a REAL LIFE astronaut in space.

Then you apparently never had your eyes open whenever you watched classic sci-fi. Remember in this context "retro sci-fi" is like the pulp serial stuff from the 30s, 40s and 50s, not anything made in like the last 20 or 30 years.

You're apparently confused as to why SCIENCE FICTION characters don't have the proper foot gear to be in the vacuum of space.
No one said SCIENCE FICTION had to 100% correct or realistic, especially RETRO sci-fi.

hmmmm indeed.

The 8th year Vet badge is not only already in the game but it has been verifed by a player named OV_ohms on his character named Bimble at Badge-Hunter.com. Also Badge-Hunter has the proper badge art for the badge and I don't believe they would have that on their site unless it already existed in the game.

If a Dev told you that the "badge art doesn't exist yet" for it they were either misinformed or outright lied to you.

Since when did "retro sci-fi" have anything to do with real life... well, anything really much less astronauts?
The "fi" in sci-fi stands for 'fiction' after all.

Thanks anyway, I needed a good laugh.

Despite your interesting "Freudian dyslexia" I think it's probably safe to say that "Nova butt tether" and "Nova butt leather" are both phrases that have probably never been written in the English language until this thread.

Basically from what I've read almost no one has gotten any annual Vet badges since CoH:Freedom went live. The Devs have acknowledged the problem and claim to be working on a solution but one has to wonder how many MONTHS we're going to have to wait for that.

I think I've only seen one person with a verified 8th year Vet badge on the main badge tracking websites. It seems the only reason why it triggered for that person was that they've spent a lot of time with customer service having to manually deal with other badges they had problems with. Clearly whatever is supposed to -automatically- give us those badges is not working.

Yeah like I implied before at this point anything "new" for Babylon 5 would pretty much have to be a reboot with an entirely new cast. But unlike something like Star Trek which was mainly episodic in nature the "story" of B5 has already been told so it doesn't really need to be told again.

I suppose at some point someone might try the Battlestar Galactica treatment on it but in some ways I think the new BSG worked only because it had been long enough since the original show from the late 70s for that to finally need an update. Maybe B5 just needs to wait another 10 or 20 years before someone tries it again.

Ironically (for you at least) I do not share the same point of view on The Avengers vis-a-vis Whedon's involvement with it. I think Whedon did a reasonably masterful job producing a movie that sat comfortably within the constraints the "established comic book" based story called for and he deserves all the praise of his financial success. I honestly don't believe The Avengers was the best comic book movie ever made, but it was certainly better than many that have come before and it deserves to make however many hundreds of millions it'll end up making.

As for JJTrek all of your dismissiveness about my position on it is fine and well. It still can't undo the non-subjective fact that all we've gotten from Abrams so far is the obligatory reboot and now a rehash of what was probably the most commercially successful Star Trek movie before Abrams' involvement. Not exactly blazing terribly new or unexpected ground so far. Playing things safe and easy seems to be the mantra so far.

Sure Abrams might make something surprisingly wonderful out of his second stab at the franchise. But even if he does it looks like we're going to have to wait at least until a third movie to see anything genuinely unique and/or non-expected from him.

As I said before I don't think Abrams is incompetent as a film maker in general. I simply believe now more than ever that we're going to have to wait until his involvement in the Star Trek franchise is long over before we can truly assess if he was something good or bad for it. Sure Abrams might prove genius at drawing millions of dollars out of it for his studio bosses, but as with my allusions to Lucas just because you can make something (a dead horse?) generate more profits doesn't necessarily guarantee that every fan must (or will) like what you're doing with it.

Perhaps I'm just waiting for Abrams to give us the Star Trek equivalent of Midichlorians...

I'm not sure I'd say JJTrek was as bad as Bay's "Transformers without the giant robots" but I would definitely agree it was at least closer to that extreme than Roddenberry's vision. Let's just say Abrams let a bit more of the "no attention span MTVism" into the mix than I really cared for. Much like the Devs often do for CoH I think Abrams over-corrected for some of the traditional stuffiness of the franchise and made something a bit too watered down and derivative. Sure it sold tickets for the one movie but that's far from proving Abrams has what it takes to lead the franchise in a meaningful direction. The second Star Wars trilogy sold a lot of tickets too but that didn't really make it "better" than the first trilogy for many, many reasons.

My main concern now is that Abrams is already playing the Kahn card. I thought he was supposed to be this masterful movie maker - is doing a "rehash" right after the obligatory "reboot" really the direction the Star Trek franchise needs to go? When is he going to be brave enough to actually give us something original and/or unexpected that makes sense? Wiping Vulcan off the galactic map was the twistiest twist Abrams could come up with so far and that was basically the jarring equivalent of permanently cutting Superman's right arm off - sure a writer could do that but it'd weirdly crossed a line that should never have been crossed.

Ultimately I'm just left with this strange sensation that I just let Abrams borrow my proverbial car (in this case my affection and understanding of the Star Trek franchise) and he took it for a joyride the same way he imagined young Kirk would have been stupid enough to have driven a car off a cliff. I suppose we'll now have to wait until the third movie to see what Abrams can -really- do with the franchise.

Well in the Capt. America movie there was a scene in an empty bar where he said the "downside to being a super-soldier is that he couldn't get drunk" and then Agent Carter told him that his "metabolism was running 4 times faster than normal".

Not sure how much "super-human healing" he could have from that but at least that's what they established in the movie. I guess we could probably say his ability to recover from wounds is just a tad above normal human maximums. That's probably a simple way to explain why he was able to survive being frozen for 70+ years without any medical assistance.

Pretty sure it was just a parady... of some sort.