Lothic

I didn't even know about the "marketeer" vs "marketer" thing.
I was thinking about other classic ones like:

• "Power Liberator" originally being named "Liberator"
• "Fearless" originally being named "Valorious" (which IIRC was confused with Valorous)
• "Back From the Future" originally being named "Time Bandit"

Also IIRC there was a problem with the sequence of invention badges that now go:
Major, Lt.Colonel, Colonel, Major General, General
The order of these ranks were messed up and had to be swapped around.

There were several others like this but I'm just not remembering them at the moment.
Bottomline the Devs mistakenly reusing current badge names for other badges is hardly a new issue.

I wouldn't mind it being just an 8 part mini-series and that's it.
A good solid story with a pre-established beginning, middle and end, period.

Again assuming this new show has any relation to Earth2 then that would be a good thing. Earth2 was actually a pretty good show for like the first 8 or 10 episodes but then it quickly fell apart when the story spun out of control and got silly. Having a predefined ending could save this new show from that fate.

Well that'd be about the tenth badge in the history of this game that's had some kind of name conflict that needed to be dealt with.
Not that I'm counting or anything.

That makes this situation that much more silly. I suppose the Devs could have argued it took them this long to fix the artwork on these badges because they could just never spare the "development time" *cough, cough* it would have taken to slip them in. But to hear that after years of being overlooked that all they ended up doing was dusting off some leftover badge artwork and plugging it in is almost priceless.

I'm more than well aware that in the grand scheme of things this was a relatively trivial and unimportant issue.
But still the fact that it took our Devs like 3+ years to do maybe 10 seconds of work just makes me lol.

Not quite sure what skulls have to do with costumes (other than them being related to the Halloween Event I guess).
But since these badges have been otherwise artwork-less for like 3 years now it's not really that big a deal.

Yeah that 's pretty much what I thought too.
Earth2 started off as an interesting show that kind of went off into the weeds.
Maybe this new show will have a more solid storyline to keep it on track.

You know the fossil records show that dinosaurs were around on this planet for several hundred million years at least. We managed to get people into space after only a few million years of evolution give or take. Do we really know for sure that some dinosaurs didn't get smart enough to figure out a way to get off this planet long before they collectively died off and colonize the stars? The Gorns had to come from somewhere after all...

Isn't Sci-Fi wonderful?

That's ironically a more realistic game design reason than trying to assume there's some kind of hardwired software/hardware limitation preventing them from storing big names in their databases.

Changing this software might be a non-trivial task today. But there's nothing purely software related alone that would have prevented the Devs from giving us 100 character long names from the very beginning.

As I mentioned the choice to limit our names had to be considered in the greater context of GUI formatting and practically from a metagaming point of view. Software, databases and/or network bandwidth didn't drive the choice all by themselves - many subjective design factors got considered in this case as well. I can assure you, as a software engineer with nearly 20 years of professional experience, that the current name size limit of 20 was an arbitrary value derived as a compromise between all the various issues involved.

Don't forget the "flaming hands" on Hasten. It looks fine when I use it for my flame-based characters but it always annoys me when I try to use it for anything else.

My official "guess" is that we'll get these in Issue 19.
Of course that's just my semi-wishful guess based on a tiny bit of Dev post vagueness.

Did you try naming it just "Crimson Temptation" and use the game's title feature to add the "The" in front of it?

The Devs have basically followed a sort of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy with this kind of thing since the beginning of the game.

Back when people first started modding the Devs only real response to it was that they announced they would never provide any customer support in dealing with any problems related to trying to use them. Basically if you somehow "shot yourself in the foot" and broke something you'd be on your own to clean up the mess.

Also the Devs are usually pretty strict here in the forums about silencing any talk related to "how" to mod. They'll let people like us talk about modding in general terms, but if anyone here started detailing exactly how to do it the thread would likely get locked/deleted pretty quickly. In effect they know it's going to happen but they are not going to openly "promote" it in any form or fashion.

If you understand and follow those rules you'll be fine.

The 20 character limit for names really has little to do with database/server limitations. Come on people this is not 1960 here. Server disk space is so cheap and abundant these days that this game could probably allow every character to have names that were 100 characters long each and still only fill up a fraction of a terabyte.

No the reason they currently limit our names to 20 characters has more to do with what _Pine_ and je_saist were talking about. It's more a formatting/GUI thing to make sure the way people's names are displayed is reasonable and tidy. Ultimately yes it was an arbitrary decision, but like many things in software development it was a compromise between satisfying the needs of the majority of players versus making sure the GUI screens were formatted correctly.

I'm not against people having the personal freedom to have huge names, but honestly in teaming situations I find it a PITA to deal with having to invite or chat to people with long names. That's actually part of the reason why most of my characters have relatively short names to begin with. YMMV.

You just have to remember when you use absolute words like "inferior", "practical" and "benefit, not hinder" in relation to powers that you are very much speaking about your own opinion, not a strict fact. Look at it this way: If the Devs thought it was an absolutely worthless power they would not have let it stay untouched for 6 1/2 years. There are plenty of other more obviously "broken" powers that have been fixed already.

Having said that I think most would generally agree that Group Fly has always needed some major QoL improvement. Even so it's pushing it to say it's a completely 0% benefit/100% hindrance situation right now. As people have mentioned in this thread there's at least some of us still using it as it is.

It's not really a question of "not liking things to change".
In this case it's a question of getting an appropriate change.
An improved version of Group Fly would likely be much better for this game than removing the concept completely.

People have been suggesting they "remove/replace" Group Fly for many years now.
Let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath for it to ever happen...

Besides even if everyone could universally agree that Group Fly is the "worst" power in the game there would be another power dubiously named the "worst" power after it got removed. Where would that get us? There's always going to be a "worst" power no matter how much the Devs work on this game. It's easier just to accept that fact.

Removing Group Fly is not the answer. Obviously there are many ways it could be improved and I'd be all for that. But outright removing it after 6 1/2 years would be a major overreaction that would likely cause more trouble than it's worth.

As an FYI most people often suggest replacing Group Fly with some kind of "Supersonic Fly" that would go really fast. But trust me when I say the Devs will never go for that. Fly's speed is set at what it is relative to the other travel powers so that it won't make the other powers pointless. If a version of Fly was as fast as Super Jump or Super Speed why would anyone ever take those powers? The Devs have effectively explained that to us for years now.

So in a nutshell Group Fly needs to be improved to make it more useful, not removed.

P.S. I still use it occasionally to move my Fire Imps around. It's amazing how many people don't bother looking up in this game.

Maybe she's trying to warn us if she considers herself "good" now we wouldn't want to see her get any "eviler". j/k

I'll probably dabble with side-switching for several of my characters sooner or later.

But I have a weird situation with at least one of them as far as that's concerned. When I created my first "main" character Loth back in April 2004 I ironically enough had as her backstory that she was basically an evil demoness that had turned good (almost exactly like Desdemona 6 years before the Devs stole my idea ). Of course that was at a time well before villains existed in the game much less being able to switch sides. Now that sideswitching will be doable I'm going to send her over to become a villain not only for the redside badges but to have her sort of "backasswardly" go though her origin journey of eventually becoming a hero... again.

Or silly bulls...

I know the Devs have to maintain some costume items as "signature NPC only" and that's understandable. But the thing I've always thought was ironic about those awesome fashion show costume items (like the boots and belt from the pic above) was that they were technically generic FASHION SHOW items. Wouldn't the whole idea behind them be that they were always INTENDED to be available to the general public of Paragon City (a.k.a. the players)?