Lothic

I would agree that at 800 points an extra costume slot for one character would be "ridiculously high verging on gouging". But if you plan to have many extra costumes spread over many different characters and plan to have fun with that for potentially years into the future then all of a sudden 800 points doesn't seem ridiculously unreasonable, at least to me anyway.

Obviously you have to decide what you think you'll get out of it and make purchases accordingly.

I'm pretty sure time's going to be on your side for this. Sooner or later all the people who have no problem spending 800 points for costume slots will have them bought and done with. Eventually the game will be forced to permanently lower the price to get people to start buying them again. I wouldn't be surprised to see them go permanently down to 400 or even 200 points in the long run.

The only question about this is how long are you willing to wait for that price drop. If you seriously don't care that it might take 6 months or a year before the price drops to 400 then that's your choice. You'll get to wait your time before you can play with them. You can look at it this way: the people paying 800 for them now are paying a premium to have them right now. It's a "hav-it-now" tax as I like to call it. There's really nothing wrong with that because Paragon Studios is getting the premium money for it now. If there are at least some people willing to pay that much now why wouldn't the game want to get that money from them?

The choice is always yours: either you pay the hav-it-now tax or you wait some random time for the price to drop. No point in complaining too much about it.

Fortunately I find myself in a position where I'm not really going to have to rely on the monthly grant of points to get what I really want from the Market. As long as I get the those points at some point I don't really care if it's today or two weeks from now.

I realize that many people are counting on having and using those points more than I am, but I just want to make it clear that not every VIPer is going to find this situation as critical as others. I trust that the Devs will eventually have these problems squared away and I'm willing to allow them the time to do that before I get too worried about it.

I normally don't nitpick spelling in the forums or chat, but for character bios I make an exception especially when you misspell your own name in it.

Change "devistated" to "devastated" and "Poundkaike" to "Poundkake" and your bio will be very cool.

Yes I was aware that the Babylon 5 pilot aired roughly a year before the show itself managed to take off. The fateful line of dialogue, "There is a hole in your mind" left me that whole year wanting to see more. I had forgotten exactly when DS9 started in relation to that pilot, but my main point that DS9 was on the air before Babylon 5 was still stands.

Again as I implied before I'm one of those relatively weird people who like both shows. I actually had fun watching how they evolved and how at the time they almost seemed to feed off each other. Ultimately as someone who liked both shows I sometimes like to poke fun at people who are of the "loved one and hated the other" variety. It's usually pretty easy to get them riled up.

I'm not against your suggestions per se, but I'm just wondering how you'd make a GUI clean and simple enough to have access to all these various combination options quickly enough during combat to be useful. If it'd take more than a second or two to pull down multiple menus then I'm not sure how much benefit it would be.

The main issue I had with Voyager is that it got to the point where it seemed like every single episode was getting resolved with deus ex machina technobabble. A problem would arise and all they needed to do was use an "anti-quantum flux polaron matrix generator to create a field of hyper-charged photonic neutrinos at the right frequency" to save the day.

Now don't get me wrong - I know perfectly well that technobabble has existed throughout the history of Star Trek and there's nothing technically wrong with it. The point I'm making is that while other shows used it to some degree it just seemed like Voyager fell back on it all the time and it became the main plot device week to week.

I'm quite sure someone who watched more Voyager than I did (I estimate I only watched about 1/3 of all the Voyager eps) would be able to tell me that not every episode turned out to be a guessing game as to what gizmo was going to save them this week. All I'm saying is that the show finally left me with the impression that it had become a one-trick pony storywise.

Related to my technobabble observation I also didn't really like that the ship managed to stay clean and intact despite being isolated from the Federation. I just never got the sense they were desperately "on their own" and that always irked me a bit.

I think a flaw of the show (and a worry I have for the rumored next Star Trek series that would be set in a time after Voyager) is that they've let the technology the Federation has access to in this time period become so pseudo-magical that it's way too easy to let it solve all their problems for them. This is why I actually enjoyed the shows set in the older ENT or TOS eras because the technology at that point didn't seem to overshadow the fundamental stories. The earlier timeframes were less clean and sterile and thus more entertaining for it.

DS9 was not technically a "remake" of Babylon 5 because DS9 actually got started several years before Babylon5 finally did. But the evidence is indisputable that JMS effectively gave Paramount the idea for a show -like- what became DS9 years before either of them got produced.

Ultimately I think both shows had their strengths and weaknesses. I'm actually glad they -both- got made. But it's always going to be an interesting footnote in Sci-fi TV history that one show spawned its own "copy-cat" even before it itself existed.

Well just to state the obvious:
If you like a more detailed combo system then play with Dual Blades.
If you like a less strict combo system then play with Street Justice.

This game has both bases covered now.

I think all of these are fine suggestions and ought to be things the Devs of this game strive for. I would simply fall a bit short in fully agreeing with you that these things are strict "responsibilities" on their part. After all even if they "fully disclosed" everything as you describe they may have to make a last minute change to something and still piss people off. Their EULA is written to cover them for just these kinds of situations.

I feel it's a mistake to assume the average player of this game has no responsibility to accept the consequences of his/her purchases. Players should at least come part way with being knowledgeable on their own about what they are buying. The Devs can't hand-hold us for everything.

If a player can make the case, after analyzing the real numbers, that there's a quantifiable problem with a powerset then at least that player may be deemed to have a "legitimate" reason for a refund. Of course at that point the player may be more in-line to receive a Bug Hunter badge for their efforts rather than getting a few dollars back.

I think people had a similar misconception when Kheldians were first introduced to the game. Many people were upset with Khledians because I think they hyped themselves into believing that any "epic ATs" unlocked at level 50 (at the time) must mean that they had to be godlike Tankmages that could kill anything with an "I win" button". They couldn't get over the fact that they were never meant to be overpowered killing machines. They were simply meant to unique ATs that served as an award for leveling another character to 50.

In the same vein I don't think they'll ever make powersets bought in the Paragon Market more or less powerful than any other DESPITE people's false hopes to the contrary.

But the underlying principle of having the mature responsibility to stand by your decisions and accept the repercussions of your actions still stands. Isn't that amazing?

They already have a refund system in place. It's called "you have to contact customer service and make your case to them". As with any situation you have to convince them of your position and they decide if they're going to refund your money or not. NCsoft will never make that process any easier or more "automatic" than it is right now. No company has any obligation to make refunds a trivial procedure.

Conversely if you want to throw away a 7 year old account and all the fun you've had with the game over a disagreement concerning a few dollars then more power to you.

It's not hearsay - it ACTUALLY happened to me a couple of years ago.

Long story short: I tried to use Paypal to pay for a Booster Pack while I was on a long overseas business trip. Paypal got excited and decided that overseas purchase was suspicious and decided unilaterally to charge back my money in order to "protect" me. Before I knew it NCsoft locked my account because from their point of view I tried to pull my money back from them. It took a better part of a week to get my account unlocked.

So yes it can and will happen.

Not only must be recourse but there already IS methods in place to do this. Your problem is that you really don't have a very strong case to make to the Customer Sevice people. Saying "I want my money back because feature X doesn't work in live the way it worked in beta" is NOT a legitimate excuse and never should be for anything. *shrugs*

And then NCsoft will simply lock your account for your efforts. Trust me when I say they don't take very kindly to people charging back purchases like this. But if you don't believe me go ahead and knock yourself out with that.