Lothic

I remain firmly convinced that the price point set for the rename tokens in any MMO has almost nothing to do with the company in question making significant money from it. The primary reason for charging so much for them (even if it's a process that's completely automated) is to prevent people from using renames as a method to avoid repercussions for griefing and to otherwise motivate people not to whimsically rename their characters every 5 minutes. The cost is set so that people who really want to rename a character can do so while encouraging them to only do it when it's absolutely necessary.

It can be argued that it's a crude method to enforce that kind of policy. But one must admit it's very effective. Whatever money the company earns from this feature is just a nice little bonus for them. The company can't really expect reliable profits from it because its overall use is completely random month-to-month.

While it would be nice this game doesn't even really need a full-time dedicated proofreader. You could get an intern to spend a few days correcting many if not most of the existing spelling and grammar mistakes and roll them all up into an overall patch that could be applied during a major Issue release so that it could be adequately beta tested. The general risk of introducing new bugs into the code while making simple text changes should be very minimal - if for some reason they aren't trivial then our Devs have done something very wrong with the way they handled things.

After that initial sweep to fix all the current typos it shouldn't be too much to ask that all future text be spell-checked at the very least. The amount of "extra" time it would take the Devs to do this could be measured in seconds. In this day and age to support any application without routine spell-checking is borderline laughable and very unprofessional by any company.

I didn't think the latest Bond films were "boring" but I'd agree they didn't quite seem like "James Bond" films either. It's quite possible that enough has changed over the years that we may never get another new Bond film that has the same "look and feel" as the ones that were made back in the 60's and 70's.

I guess I was naively hoping for a bit more than another rehash of the Swiss Family Robinson / Lost in Space scenario.
I fully realize I only have myself to blame for expecting anything better...

Not sure I would call DS9 the best Trek series but I'd agree that Garak is easily one of the best characters from any Trek series.

I'm guessing you probably never saw the famous last episode of the Newhart show. The last Enterprise epsiode was a worthy Star Trek equivalent to that clever scenario of one show being a mere "dream" of a character from an eariler show. As such I thought it was pretty well done all things considered. I didn't think it did anything to "take away" from or diminish the value of either series. *shrugs*

The costumes you're talking about were available during the various Halloween events. What I'm talking about are the special ones that were only available via the codes they've passed out during conventions or other meet-n-greets. Those codes have never been available any other way.

Based on past years the idea that we should see a Halloween beta on Test sometime this week and the actual Halloween event go live next week both seem like reasonable predictions to me.

It's pretty sad when you could quickly improve a show by instantly removing roughly half of the main characters.
I had my bar set pretty low for this show and it's having a hard time even meeting that.

My TV watching time is usually pretty limited and I catch things when I can recorded on my DVR. My guess is that with the Walking Dead starting back up this week I'm going to be dropping Terra Nova from my season passes. *shrugs*

Thanks to the way it works I can now easily let my brand new characters have up to SEVEN loaded costumes (1 default + 5 extra + 1 Halloween). That's a very cool extra benefit that I think some people aren't considering about this deal.

Well for the record there was several years there where we didn't even have the costume save/load feature.
Swapping out costumes before that was a mini-nightmare.

But even with the save/load feature I was still wasting a lot of time going to the tailors swapping out costumes when I only had 5 slots available. Having 10 slots has now significantly reduced the time and frustration I spent on this. This among other reasons allowed me to justify getting the extra slots.

As always everyone's mileage will vary on this. For you it doesn't sound like extra costume slots would have been that useful to you even if they were free.

Well all I would say to this is that if the new series is set at least 50 to 100 years after Voyager then almost -anything- could happen. I'm quite sure if the makers of the new show want the Ferengi to be viable rivals to the Federation it would be relatively easy to explain a reason why or how it could happen in a future no one has really defined yet. You're forgetting that the Feregni don't really have to "catch-up" too far to the Federation if the Federation itself is also in a decline. Remember the social commentary I mentioned?

Like you it doesn't seem to me like the Feregni -could- get that powerful, but really anything's possible in a new show. *shrugs*

Actually it makes some sense when you consider that Star Trek has always served as a mirror for social commentary. In the last decade America has seen the rise of other economic powers in the world such as China and India. America is having to adjust to the reality that it's no longer the sole superpower in the world at least on an economic level. Likewise the idea that a opportunistic group like the Ferengi have become more powerful in the Star Trek galaxy is a perfect analogy to that. Should be interesting if they handle it well.

Actually there's a very strong rumor that the next series will be in the post-Voyager timeframe and set in the original timeline.
There was a thread talking about it here like a week or two ago. *shrugs*

Actually I would also agree when you consider all Star Trek series' episodes in total there are many Enterprise episodes that were superior to many of the other series' episodes.

I think they were never quite sure what they wanted to do with Enterprise as far as making it purely episodic versus trying to have an ongoing story line. I think many people balked at the whole Xindi war arc and the series suffered in general. But there were many individual episodes that were quite good despite that.

I only hope they've learned from their mistakes and do a better job deciding the direction of the next "rumored" series that's in the works as we speak.

So they managed to make a movie about Rockem Sockem Robots be a fun movie after all.

I'm not exactly sure if Amy Adams fits with my "mental picture" of what Lois Lane should look like, but at least she looks older than about 15 which was the biggest problem I had with Kate Bosworth in the role. I'm sure Adams will do a decent job.

It's an "undocumented feature" of the customization editor.