Nethergoat

as a confirmed alt-o-holic I haven't found this to be the case, mostly because I don't get the urge to make alts that are similar to characters I already have.

A handful of recent-ish alts in no particular order:

Cathode Ray, beam rifle/rad corrupter
Scab Factory, mace/stone brute
Shame Spiral, time/psy controller
SilverRage, street justice/shield brute
Head Fearleader, db/wp stalker
Plasma Noir, dark/dark dominator
Dopplegangster, thugs/time mastermind

There are more, but these are the ones I've played a bit.
All came to me in a flash, got the names first try on either Freedom or Virtue.

I just don't understand "there are no names!" complaints.
I've never had any problems getting ones I liked, and the few times I've had to re-try I ended up coming up with a better one anyway.

this is reasonable.
if you manage to get yourself banned, you forfeit your name rights.

This isn't going to happen for the same reason you can't just 'buy' HBO from a cable company.


If Paragon thought selling stuff ala carte would net them a greater profit, that's what they'd do. It isn't, so they won't.

Hardly a problem for Silver or Golden Age looks, which are 'dated' by definition.

I do have a problem mixing some older and newer stuff due to a resolution difference- old hairstyles with new faces, stuff like that looks jarring.

But for the eras under discussion there isn't a lot of fiddly detail involved- tights are tights, patterns are patterns. As noted Golden Age is underrepresented, but we have a pile of great stuff for Silver Age looks.

Is it going to look "dated" next to, say, the Mecha VIP set?
I guess, but they're not the same thing and I don't see that mattering.

I'm on board with wanting more Golden & Silver Age options and expect we'll be getting them at some point. I don't see the point of haranguing the devs just now, as they've been shoveling out long-sought game improvements and additions as fast as their arms can move.

How so?

merits are comically easy to get these days.
convert them to alignment merits, buy converters, profit.
The Goat is sitting on 8 Amerits right now and hasn't run a tip mission since before my hiatus.
the only alignment missions I've "ground" lately were to reinforce an alignment so I could score a bunch of easy A merits running the SSAs.

Startup costs aren't a big deal either- anyone can scrape together 150m pretty quickly*, and once you've made your first 300m sale you're off and running.


I have to be careful claiming inf on my 'bidder' because the inf cap is a real danger to profits of this magnitude, but that's a small price to pay for basically unlimited wealth.



* if all else fails, buy stacks of off-brand Large inspirations for 20k or so, combine to make large Purples and sell those for 4-500k each. May take a few days, but it's foolproof.

Why, when we already have an infinitude of excellent names to use?

I don't discover any of this stuff, I'm just the guy who drives around town in the milk truck with the giant speakers on the roof telling everyone about it.

=D

yep.

you must not be looking very hard....

You might want to ratchet up your qualifying bar for Well Thought Out a couple of notches.

buy cheap purples (anything that doesn't do damage).

convert to expensive purples (anything that does do damage).

sell expensive purples.


I've abandoned all of my other various schemes over the past couple of weeks because this 'trick' generates BY FAR the largest profit with the least effort of any marketeering I've ever done.

that doesn't really work.

I mean in an ideal world, sure.
But in this world, it's much easier, faster and more reliable to pre-form your squad then join the queue.


If you want that to change, you'll need to talk the devs into makeing some fundamental improvements to the queue system.

In an artistic sense, it's just something that's left unexplored.
It's there, and you can see the results of it, but it's suggested by the character's skills and actions rather than made explicit.


Again sort of off topic but faintly relevant, one of my pals is a writer who spend years writing plays and doing theater before breaking through to paying screenwriting gigs, so he had a lot of full contact engagement with a variety of actors. He likes to play a game game when watching anything with a crowd scene- he scans all the people around the main actors picking out the ones who've worked out the entire personal history of their background character, who may only be on screen for a few seconds. The weird thing is, once he points them out I can totally see what he means.

Yeah, he was good fun.
And I love teaming with archery defenders anyway, it's a terrific set I don't see that often out in the wild.


Here, I think, is my problem with the older TFs:
I have expectations.

I'm looking for them to be appreciably more entertaining than other generic big team leveling options- newspapers, tips, & whatnot. The newer stuff I've run delivers on that front while the older ones generally don't.

And I've noticed that when I pan an older TF I'll get a reply along the lines of "oh, but if you xxxxx the yyyy, and then zzzzz the wwwww, it only takes this long!"

But these kinds of teams are not generally speaking what I run at TF with. I'm mostly hanging out doing something and one pops up and if I have a brick of time available I sign on. Once in a while I'll catch a break and the team will have things figured out, as with that second Manticore a bit ago.

But mostly I end up on Task Force Catherder, doing everything the hard, long, inefficient way. Even last night, when the guy running it knew what was up we still had several times when the team got split & things got really messy.

The newer TFs are better insulated against those kinds of problems by length- they're just a lot shorter & built with an eye toward how long it will take 'the average team' to finish. The older ones it seems like if you know the ins and outs it's "about an hour", but if you don't, or you get unlucky, it's closer to three.

Something that'd be sort of engaging or at least not objectionable over the course of 60 minutes or less develops all sorts of problems when you stretch it out to three times that length.

I just don't run TFs as a part of my 'regular' gaming- I'm still mostly a soloist, this recent run aside. For me they're a special event, like going out to dinner at a fancy joint. The newer ones deliver the full white tablecloth/wine list/amuse bouche dining experience, while with the older ones leave me feeling like I may as well have grabbed a sack of burgers from the drive through.

Whatever problems the content has (and IMHO long chains of samey-same missions on samey-same maps against identical enemies is just bad game design, even if an organized team can short-cut through some of it), my perceptions of it also play a role. I admit having unrealistic expectations for the older stuff.


Even so I'm serious about running Bastion/Citadel...I figure with two down, I might as well run the table and get a thread review post out of it. =P

in the arts the character with 'no past' has a long and storied history and is in fact archetypal.

There is a terrific chapter in one of screenwriter William Goldman's film books, I think Adventures in the Screen Trade, where he goes into detail about what went wrong with the film The Ghost & the Darkness. It was a legendary 'unfilmable' screenplay- everyone loved it, nobody would finance it. Until along came Michael Douglas, and suddenly the money was there. But the character he played was, in the script, an archetype- the Man with No Past, along the lines of Shane. But Douglas, as fine an actor as he can be, is also a movie star, and one who got the finances for the film squared away. As an actor, he wanted to dig into the past of his character, and as one of its backers he had the leverage to make it happen.

The result, in Goldman's eyes, was to destroy the screen effectiveness of the character and undermine the dramatic foundation of the story.


Not much else to say on-topic, but it did trigger that recollection.