Nomme

Anyone else steamed by the fact that this appears to require a Facebook account to even enter? Some of us have no desire to share personal info with a website of questionable integrity - and given their stances on privacy, I'd consider them to be of questionable integrity.

I get that it would seem to help limit the instances of people managing to get second or third codes for the emotes, but so would making it a forum thing since then you'd know that one account won't get multiples (the same person might get codes for multiple accounts though I suppose).

Is the facepalm emote going to be in the store though, that's what I want to know. If it won't, then I may have little choice as I really want it and I might have to sign up for a FB account (to be deleted the second the contest is over). If it will be in the store, I'll just pay the points and be done with it.

I updated my post in at least one place where I thought Ageless was Clarion - I coulda sworn I was all by myself when I hit Ageless the other day and got the effect that is apparently Clarion, apparently I got a drive-by Clarion as I tested Ageless's colors/graphic to see if it needed tweaks to be "Nomme safe" after getting it.

I also wanted to update a bit more on Clarion though - the people I generally team with (and thus have "safe" colors for me for the powers I have really big issues with) opted last night to break from incarnate trials and run an RSF and a BSF. The things that I wasn't sure about I now have confirmation on - Clarion isn't a problem at maximum camera distance but is a HUGE nausea inducer at closer range (such as occlusion forced camera distance in the council caves), Barrier is worse at close range even with my altered color palette but is still better than the default color (a couple of times people used a default colored one - ouch). Part of my trouble could be that Clarion inducing nausea and migraine stacked with my issues with the camera distance in caves putting me too "close" for me to not get motion sickness/nausea is just a double whammy that makes it almost impossible to play.

I'm not sure I'm being clear, so to list it out:
1. RSF, mostly at max camera distance except when it came in due to walls pushing it in towards my character, default and alternative colored Clarion, altered and default Barrier - Clarion wasn't bad unless the camera wasn't at max range then it got worse the closer the camera was to my character, Barrier was more noticable but not really a problem with a "Nomme safe" color scheme, Barrier with default color was extremely "in your face" and almost immediate nausea and low level headache resulted (though both faded a bit when I took a 5 minute "time out" during the 3rd mission - I travelled on to Nerva to be in place to enter the mission early and set off the cutscene while everyone else travelled - and to get a grip on the nausea).

2. BSF - outdoor maps no additional nausea/headache levels from clarion and barrier that I could discern. Indoor maps in council caves I already have issues with, so I cannot be 100% certain but it really felt like my nausea and headache were more severe than my usual levels from the caves alone - particularly since I split off on my own a couple of times to stealth through a bit and the nausea lessened a bit even though I continued to use my barrier (with the safe color for me) while alone in that section of cave - I just closed my eyes when I hit it and used the audio cues that it was "over" before looking at the screen again to avoid the initial flash of the larger bubble.

At the end of both I could not have continued playing - before the incarnate powers were introduced I could have easily run 3 back to back RSFs with no nausea/headache and one BSF would have been safe and I could have continued playing afterwards as long as I avoided caves again for a bit and stuck with things I could pull my camera way back on. I know my issues with camera distance make it a lot harder to detect what they exact nature of my problems with powers are, I always have to question if my camera distance was the cause of the resulting nausea/headache or if it really is thus and such power - but I genuinely think Barrier isn't that bad (for me) beyond the first flash of the larger encompassing bubble - even the default colored smaller bubbles don't bother me to a huge extent - they aren't entirely safe, but they are a lot smaller of a concern for me than the big bubble and the flash that accompanies it when my camera is all the way back, at closer range they become a bigger and bigger problem if they aren't my "safe" color. Clarion isn't bad unless my camera isn't at max distance, then it also gets progressively worse the closer I get to my character with the camera.

Most of the other powers I brought up before are not reliant on camera distance - they are bad at any distance for me. The sonic grenades for example worsened my problems early in the BSF even though generally the longbow base maps themselves aren't a problem for me - the grenades (5-6 at a time sometimes) were bad though.

This is going to be a long post, but I have a number of things to comment on in a thread of this nature. Most of my friends that I team with on a regular basis are willing to work with me and spend the inf needed to re-color their powers to ones I can team with - but we also like to bring in other players and my issues as well as those of a few others in our group can tend to preclude that being possible much at all.

I also hate asking people to change their power colors to ones that I can cope with and I genuinely feel bad when I tell a group that if certain powers are used with certain colors, then they need to find a replacement for me as I will find something else to do as I cannot cope with certain powers. But sometimes it is necessary.

Until powerset customization, I could not play with a force fielder or traps toons with the dispersion bubble gizmo. I could not handle some nebulous "thing" about the soap bubble effects - they would make me nauseous and ultimately I would have a migraine with exposure to small or large bubbles that lasted over about 20 minutes. I LOVE bubbles, particularly on my blasters but I could not team with them - this made me sad. Custom coloring allowed me to find a color I can cope with and now my friends can play bubblers if they use those colors (if they can't or won't use those colors, I generally still have to leave the team or they offer to change to a different toon). For a bit of clarification, through the use of custom colors I think I pinpointed the issue with those as being the sparkly lights in them - I have to have them colored to "dark colors" instead of bright, and specifically a dark blue shade identical for both color selections - black mutes the bright sparkles, but then the swirly patterns and the opaque black spots give me an entirely different set of troubles, so it is a very very fine line on those.

I don't recall having issues with the sonic bubbles in any of their previous incarnations, but I cannot be positive that I would not have had issues with them if I'd been exposed to them more - I didn't know/team with that many people who used sonic bubbles until the latest incarnation of their graphics.

For current or new powers that give me issues:
1. Barrier on default color - I can mitigate it by using the bright color palette with a dark blue or purple shade that makes them almost entirely invisible in most play environments. It seems to be the pulsing/static-y flashes - even the alternate color doesn't help with the application of Barrier though, thankfully it is a short enough "burst" that I can generally cope with it (if I am on the threshold of a migraine, I can generally tell and I will avoid situations with Barrier even if colored to my "this is generally okay" color or will ask the team to give me 3 seconds warning and I will look away while it goes off - it helps that my husband is generally teaming with us and will tell me when it is safe to look back at the screen, thought teamspeak helps immensely there too). The default color and flashing light frequency is the particular issue with this one - other colors that are particularly bright have a similar effect, but the default color is actually the absolute worst for "instant migraine" for me, even a bright yellow that a friend uses isn't as instant of a migraine for me though it isn't better by a while lot, I can still only handle that for about 5 minutes beyond the normal 10 minutes I can cope with the default colored one before I simply have to quit the group and go to bed/dark room. Black or dark colors used from teh dark color palette also do not seem to have a positive effect on my ability to cope with them, the flashing is still obvious though on the opposite end of the "bright" spectrum and still causes me issues.

2. Barrier (yes, again - but this is a different issue) also has a sound that does bother me, though it is a very very low-grade concern as far as issues go - and I generally play with my music on "3" and my sounds on "5" so that I can hear teamspeak over my sounds but I can still play with sound effects ingame turned on (so many years of no audio issues ingame it is really hard at this point for me to play without sound on - I tend to get almost disoriented from the lack of sound, not sure how to explain it). The sound is a problem, but it generally is obscured by the other sounds/powers going off enough that it doesn't cause issues unless I'm sitting around in a zone and a group of people is nearby just randomly activating barrier within sound-range even if I cannot see the graphics as they are offscreen - as has happened a couple times during dev events on test such as the 7th anniversary event where I had to leave after a short while due to so many people in the area in and out of visual range activating barriers for the heck of it.

3. As others have said, the sonic grenades and the trick arrow disruption arrow (I think? They use the same ringed animation - but the trick arrow one is actually worse for me because of the whistling sound that precedes it adding to my issues with it). The frequency of their flashes or something about them is problematic though I can cope with them fairly well, they don't tend to be an all-out severe migraine for me, just a lower level headache with some low-grade nausea after about 20-40 minutes of them - the timeframe being largely dependant on their frequency of use - if I see them once every 10 minutes, I could likely cope with them indefinitely but most TA players tend to use theirs a lot more often than that and with the high pitched whistle that precedes the graphical effect my threshold is lower for that as the sound induces more nausea and the graphics just stack onto it making the overall effect on me a lot more severe.

4. Another that isn't graphics for me is the high pitched orbital lance sounds from the war walkers. Some of the other war works sounds seem to use this same sound as well though as the sound is not /always/ accompanied by the large red targeting circle, though it is the most commom source of it. I'm working on getting the name of that sound and will post it in the sound suppression thread as soon as I have a name on that sound.

5. Clarion - the one that has the ongoing effect that looks similar to the current sonic shields but it is a bit tighter to the toon's body than the sonic shields are - but it has about a double rate on the rotation speed (at least that's what I call it - the rate at which the brighter "outlines" do an outward pulse from body mass to extreme outer edge of the power before disappearing/starting over at body mass again) as well as the circular pulses from a "neck-central" region - since I generally play with my camera zoomed out to max camera distance (and would LOVE to be able to double that distance, particularly in the larger outdoor maps we've gotten for BAF and Lambda, Hamidon, Eden trial indoor map, and similar larger scale maps or larger scal eteam events) this power isn't generally a problem for me unless we're in the lab or warehouse and the camera gets pushed in due to occlusion, so I would say the impact of this one for me is very very small, but it is something that were I using it in indoor maps a lot I could see this one being a larger issue for me - lately all I've been doing is logging in for a couple trials a night, but that is largely because as people unlock destiny they like to pop a barrier into it "right now" and maybe haven't set their colors up yet so I have been encountering more issues lately and my play time has been cut DRASTICALLY as a result. The opening hum of it that fades out is also at a particular level that it can be problematic if there aren't other sounds obscuring it at the time, though it is problematic on the level of mild nausea until it fades.

6. There are two in electric control that I have issues with, the ground placement and a toggle - I have no idea what each one is called but the toggle one is worse for me than the ground placement one, though the combination of both is pretty close to instant "gotta go lie down now" response. They rotate through pulses of light way way too fast, and every last one I've seen has been a very bright color, or black. I have no idea why but a lot of these flashy powers are just as bad for me on a bright color as they are when colored black - "lighter" dark colors generally aren't as bad, but so many people seem to think that black is as "not bright" as you can get and therefore it should be "safe" but it isn't (for me anyway).

7. I don't watch the screen whenever I know in advance that a bunch of people are summoning lore pets. There is a flash effect with lightning bits that goes off as they are summoned that isn't bad when it is just one or two sets of pets, but watching 6-16 people pulling out lore pets at once for buffing up before trying for the Master of Lambda badge (as an example of when this kind of thing happens) tends to be enough flashing to be problematic for me. Generally inducing headache pain almost instantly when on a large enough scale.

8. My latest "Huh, really? This bothers me?" moment of shock came when I levelled up a fire brute - Blazing Aura apparently makes me nauseous and after about 45 minutes will result in a migraine. It could be something where I was particularly close to migraine thresholds for several days but after days of toggling it off anytime I wasn't in combat, I played one day with no audio due to my headset dying on me and not wanting to wake my husband so keeping my speakers off...two hours of playing with no audio and no nausea. I'm still working on testing my theories on this, but so far at least I think this is one I would have blamed on the outward pulses but am now leaning more towards an audio cause for the problems. I mention this one in part because I'm curious if I'm the only one this sort of this has happened to (and/or maybe others have issues with it graphically and not aurally).

Cende responded herself, or I'd have mentioned many of her issues as one of my friends with complaints about these recent powers. She and I have different thresholds and generally different ending result for exposure to these, but our list of powers that give us problems is generally closely related. I have other friends (8-10) that have commented on Barrier in particular, and occasionally the electic powers I mentioned, but most of them haven't voiced any of the other powers I mentioned as being problematic. And know at least as many who have no issues whatsoever with any powers in the game.

It is frustrating to hear "then don't play" when voicing concerns, and for most of us, hearing it in this thread wouldn't be the first (or even the 100th) time we've heard it, but we still love this game and at least I feel that with my years of playing without significant problems to suddenly have a laundry list of powers with graphics and sounds that cause distress it isn't a real solution to simply quit the game. It is more indicative of a trend that is starting with new power creation being too flashy/strobey/high pitched and would be a trend best nipped in the bud early. For me at least, having the ability to put in a color override file for problematic powers similar to how we can override problematic sounds would be at least a step in the right direction - I don't want to have to lower graphics/settings/efx for powers that don't bother me, but having an option to suppress powers one by one (via override file) could be just as useful as a colors override but serving different needs - and likely both are next to impossible to pull off, but we can dream.

Happened to us 2x tonight

1. BAF, was our 2nd attempt.
League was pre-formed from a previous attempt that failed during phase 3.
League was formed in RWZ1 and then we all moved to RWZ2 before beginning the 2nd attempt - we had a couple of people switch toons between attempts.
League was at 24 people at all times from just before queue to kick-bug occurance.
Boot occurred with about 1 minute remaining in prisoner escape phase that had been going extremely well.
Everyone was dropped from team, league and event and put back into RWZ2
(most of the same people went on to do 2 successful BAF runs after this - one of which was completed just as Protector crashed so we all got rolled back to various reward statuses but no one got their completion merits for the later phases and the trial complete)

2. Lambda attempt
League was pre-formed at 13 people and 3 got added by the turnstile according to the "click-in count"
About 30 seconds after zoning into the event and identifying the folks who had been added and starting to do introductory instructions/explanations we all got booted out of the event and back to the zone we'd queued from as a group - not entirely sure what happened to the 3 additional folks (where they zoned out to etc).

That group went on to fill out the league again entirely pre-formed and completed two Lambda trials after the boot-bug.


Not sure if any of that helps, but anything I can do to try to get this resolved - I'm all over it, just ask.

Yeah - Protector has a decent completion rate for these for the day. One teams I've been on:

1 BAF failed due to too many escapees
1 BAF we got the "boot bug" and we all got kicked out on a VERY promising looking run about a minute before the prisoner escape phase ended
1 BAF completed but due to server crash...no rewards for having done any of it for some (and some rewards but not completion for anyone).
1 BAF complete success

1 Lambda completed
1 Lambda attempting to zone in we all arrived and were getting lined up and got the "boot bug" where we all got kicked back to our starting zone
1 Lambda completed...


I can live with these results. Particularly when you throw out the two failed simply because of a bug where everyone gets kicked out for no apparent reason.

Yeah, we mighta caused that...apparently completing a BAF crashes the server...who knew?

So, here's hoping my reward window of rares is still up when I log back in and there hasn't been a rollback...

Okay then, Kid and I called Cat Tales this morning and donated for December as Archiviste's year worth has just run out. So, Cimarron is still ours for December. After that, either we need more donations to Cat Tales or we no longer have Cimmy adopted.

We asked a few questions as well:
1. Regarding the pack of stuff that usually comes with an adoption - the profile, pics, etc. Because of how we've set this up as individuals donating for bits here and there - if you want a photo, you have to ask for one. Normally when someone adopts one of the cats there, they send out one packet - photo, documents, etc - the first year of adoption and if that same person/group donates afterwards, well, they normally would already have the packet from the previous year so Cat Tales doesn't think to send another one each year to save on costs of photo prints, paper, ink, etc. so more money goes towards the cat's care. That said - they did say that even if you donated previously and did not request a photo, call them and they will send you one based on the previous donation etc.

2. They take credit cards - at least, they took ours (US card/residence, so maybe that was the difference - or their CC machine was down for bit last year maybe?) At any rate, they accepted payment via phone today.


So - how do we wish to proceed? We have asked to have this thread re-stickied, but will withdraw that request if there is no further interest in keeping Cimarron adopted by Protector. I'm all for keeping Cimmy adopted, but it's easy to say that once you've donated what your budget allows and know you can't donate again for a while. So I ask you all - shall we keep Cimarron in the Protector family and keep donating for her care?

I've also seen the "this account is currently logged in" issue (unless you're referring to something different that actually requires a password entry, you can generally just hit the login button when you get the error and pop right back in without re-entering the password) just about every time I used the Logout to Character Selection option. A minor annoyance compared to waiting out the countdown whilst unable to alt-tab etc, but I can cope. Still a great feature to finally have available.

Additional bugs found:

During Tin Mage this evening, 3 or 4 players were defeated by Bobcat, followed by Bobcat's defeat by the rest of the team moments later - less than 10-15 seconds from player defeats to AV defeat. The 4-5 members of the team who were alive got the Kitty's Got Claws badge, the defeated ones did not. This in particular annoyed me to no end because I had contributed to the entire fight with Neuron and Bobcat until she smacked me twice in rapid succession with 5k+ damage hits (on my blaster, apparently I managed to steal the aggro from the stone tank...indicates to me I was doing sufficient damage that I would feel my contribution to the kill was enough...apparently if you are dead when the kill happens, you're just outta luck. If this is WAI, I'm surprised and highly disappointed. I'm hoping this is a bug.

Second bug was also with Tin Mage - during the Director 11 fight, we apparently got mines and triggered them because we did not get the Midnight Dodger (?) badge - yet never did any of us see a single mine on the floor. Invisible mines? Also no warnings we could see (invisible warnings for invisible mines?)

Mind you, most of this same group of people ran Tin Mage a LOT (20-30ish times minimum) during beta testing without seeing any of these issues...once the "awards on only one person on team per TF run that qualified for the badge" bug was fixed with Kitty's Got Claws that is. We also never saw this invisible mines issue during beta. If anyone in QA/Development wants more info on exactly what we did during the TF so we can try to nail it down, please PM me and I will be happy to provide all the details I can - and round up any info my teammates can provide as well if desired.

Beyond these minor issues - great issue! I'm gonna be respeccing toons like crazy for the next week, but it's well worth it for inherent fitness (and fixing toons from side switching with GR and expanded powers in epics - I'm a little behind on respecs for the last few issues apparently )

Looking for a sound that I think is a new (instant migraine) addition with i19. The Orbital Lance sounds with the War Walkers (not sure if it is the initial targetting or the attack) I'm not sure if anyone would have an updated list to hunt through since i19 so this may be impossible to locate. It may be other attacks from the War Walkers as well if anyone has those and can provide them I'll test and see how many I gotta kill off

My happy news/moment from the M&G - I'm not sure who all got their characters drawn, but I finally got mine drawn! There were only 5 drawn and I know who 3 of the recipients were: Me (Nomme), Equation/Arbiter Fabulous' "Hero 2" character, and Texas Justice's namesake character.

So, I have a new avatar (slightly cropped version of the drawing) - but here's a copy of the full image (only edits I made were to remove my real name from it for posting and resizing it so it wasn't the full size of the original):



All in all it was a very good evening for me!

1. Are you male or female?
Female

2. What ATs do you mostly play, and for what reason(s)?
Mostly damage types (Blasters, Brutes, Scrappers) with some control and support. When I started the game I was strictly ranged ATs, now I'm more willing to go to melee even with blasters as I've gotten to understand the mechanics better (and gotten braver). I simply don't remember that I have buffs/debuffs to use without being reminded to stop attacking and use my buffs/debuffs so I tend to avoid the support ATs unless I'm on a team that understands that I don't dislike buffing/debuffing I simply get locked into my mindset of ATTACK!!! and they're willing to remind me of debuffs and buffs as needed.

3. Redside, blueside, purpleside, or any combination of the above?
All of the above really.

4. What are your favorite story arcs?
The AV heavy ones in general, until GR and Praetoria I had stopped reading the story text years ago after having seen it all dozens of times. So the AV heavy arcs became my favorites as they offered more challenge without the chaos of "raid" style encounters. Right now I think my favorite redside arc though is Kelly Uqua's arc where failing nets one result and succeeding another - and I'm not as fond of the success result story wise for my characters so I intentionally fail the final mission.

5. What makes you like this game?
That I can solo almost all of it. I come from a background of heavy casual gaming and solo console gaming. I also like that the configuration options allow for my to use a gamepad for movement and attacking. It is more limited than keyboard/mouse only play but I've learned to juggle all three devices very well over the years.

6. What other games do you play?
Casual games - no other MMOs. Plants vs Zombies, Portal, otherwise I'm currently on a time management game kick, but also play match 3, marble popper, word, puzzle, hidden object, etc.

7. How long have you been playing?
69-70 months (2 accounts)

8. How many alts do you have, what is the average level range, and how many are level 50?
60+ alts across all servers, most on Protector (the non-protector ones don't get played as much and are much lower level by comparison) so for a more accurate assessment call it about 36 characters played regularly on Protector. Most of my characters are level 50 on protector, about 30 are over level 45, about 27 of those are 50. The lower level characters average in the teens but are almost exclusively on servers I don't visit as often.

9. Do you bother with softcaps, set bonuses, and all that numerical stuff? What difficulty settings to you normally use?
Some. I don't softcap unless I'm already going to be close with my regular slotting - then I might push it a little by choosing different sets to get the best bonuses to softcap but it isn't required for me. I utilize some set bonuses and the others don't factor into my thinking when setting up builds. I do some number crunching when up for it, but truthfully my husband and I work out most of my builds together - of the two of us he's simply better at the numbers side of it so I tell him what I want the toon to be built strong for and he helps make it happen within my budget for the toon as best he can. Difficulty depends very heavily on the toon - I have some at default and others maxed out on difficulty - I don't tend to try pushing beyond the capabilities for fast defeat rates. For me when playing regular missions - I go for speed instead of difficulty, so I try to find a balance of the two that gets the best return on speed for the difficulty.

Well, we got our codes...and learned that they are only sending 1 mousepad even though we ordered 4 copies (two people in house getting 2 copies of the game on one order). And pretty much "tough luck, we're running low, so you only get 1".

So, grumpy over that.

We're checking with brick and mortar stores to see if anyone has any left that we can get our hands on so we can both have one.

That's the summary for the folks who will see the following "wall o' text" and "tl;dr" it.

For a longer "rant" of sorts...

This was my 2nd chance for Gamestop.com. I didn't want to buy from Gamestop in the first place but I wanted the goodies, so Gamestop it was. With 4 copies to buy, when my husband pointed out a coupon that would get us a little bit of a price break, I bit my tongue on my objections and said we could order from the webstore, but this was their last chance with me, if they screwed this up...that's it, never again. Well...never again.

You see, with CoV - I preordered the standard copy online before the Collector's Edition was announced. Gamestop was my only option if I wanted a female helmet type from the preorder, and I really wanted the female helmet option. So, I called to see about changing my preorder to the Collector's edition. Was told "no can do, you already got the preorder box/code and we can't prove you didn't use the code since you opened the box, so we can't cancel or change your order" I asked about if I could send back an unopened Gamestop preorder box, could they cancel the order - sure they could...but they couldn't put in a Collector's Edition preorder and hold back the preorder box as though it was a return from the original order so they'd be able to cancel the original order. (Little side note here, this may be incorrect now, but at that time, I was told that Gamestop and Gamestop.com are two completely different entities having nothing to do with one another besides the same name and logo - aka the stores can't handle anything regarding web orders and the website can't do anything with store inventory, orders, etc - so no "pickup at store" options for preorders done online, or converting an online order to an in store purchase/pickup etc)

So off to a physical store, preordered Collector's Edition, shipped the preorder box in as though it had come from the original preorder from the webstore. Five days later, UPS delivered the preorder box to Gamestop's location...ten days later, Gamestop still hadn't processed the return despite several phonecalls to customer service alerting them that the preorder box was back in their hands. They finally process the returned preorder box, only to learn that they had shipped the original pre-ordered edition of CoV (basic) earlier that morning so it would arrive in time for launch day. So, they still couldn't cancel the order and I was told to simply refuse delivery from UPS and my credit card would not be charged and the order would be cancelled upon refusal of delivery when they knew the box was on the way back to them. Since I'd also preordered Collector's Ed, I was very clear that my CC must not be charged since I was attempting to cancel the order weeks in advance of shipping date for CoV.

Come release day, I picked up my copy of Collector's Edition at the store. A little bit later, my then boyfriend called me to tell me that while he'd been less than five feet from the front door and on his way to answer the door when UPS arrived, they had nevertheless dropped the package on the porch and headed back to their truck, the driver ignoring his yells to get his attention (and his running after the driver) to drive off.

So, package was marked "delivered" in the UPS system and my CC was charged almost instantly. I contacted UPS and chewed them out for their part in screwing up things (in part because they had been told repeatedly that our area was not a safe area for unattended package drops and ALWAYS require a signature - and we'd had several packages stolen to back up this request), they returned and picked up the package, but Gamestop had already done their bit to charge my CC and wouldn't refund it until the game was firmly back in their hands...again taking over two weeks to process the package once it arrived so my card could be refunded...all at a time when I was nearly broke from a move and had REALLY not been able to afford one copy of CoV comfortably, two was extremely painful. (I know, spending money on a game when already financially strained was my boneheaded move.)

Fastforward to GR.

As stated above, I really didn't want to purchase from Gamestop - particularly their webstore - in large part due to the experience with my CoV preorder. But, also as stated above, 4 copies of GR:CC were expensive, and we had a way to save a couple bucks and get the preorder goodies since it was a Gamestop deal, so, I bit my tongue on my objections and said we'd try them one more time.

This experience has been very different, but in many ways, just as bad or worse - to me. Firstly the preorder box didn't arrive in time for launch day play (nevermind GR being turned on a day early which had nothing to do with Gamestop). That was partly UPS's fault as their delivery time in my area is late afternoon (5-6pm generally), but it wouldn't have been difficult to have sent it to arrive the day before slated launch (it is an MMO and would rely on servers working with the expansion before it would work after all) - but that part I can forgive.

The preorder codes not being sent with the game boxes? How hard would it have been for them to print them and put them with the games in the shipping box? Or email them as CC's were processed? Or work out a way with Paragon and PlayNC that they could have handed the codes out when the orders were placed? Two FULL days after launch? And getting told by Gamestop reps in different calls:
"We'll send them out within 24-48 hours of game launch"
"We're out of codes already"
"We never got the codes, we're still waiting on them from the company"
"They're going out in waves, yours should be there in the next few hours or so"

Firstly - if the stores have codes to put on receipts...then Gamestop as a company got the codes. Out of codes...uhm...yeah I'm not gonna touch that one. Also, I get sending codes in waves - really - but they needed to email these waves closer together or start earlier. Yes, it's digital goodies - but they are goodies that you only get with brand new characters, and when do most people create new characters related to a game expansion launch? Yeah - day one...so they can jump into the new content with a new toon...I have two brand new as of launch toons that won't ever see these goodies...gee, that's also how many character slots we were granted total with GR:CC. But that's another rant.

Then today we learn that, oh, since all 4 copies were on one order, and we're running low on the "desktop skin" things...you only get one. Well then...which of us gets it? Because I'll tell you, we both wanted that, in a big way. We also both have setups where we could use two of em. So, we're trying to work with them to get additonal ones, but we'll only get them "if we have extras, after all, it is a while supplies last offer". If you had one when you shipped ours - and you're still shipping them, you had 4 when you shipped ours...you weren't out then. We didn't preorder at the last minute, we preordered within days of the announcement in case they DID run out, if supplies are limited, shouldn't order date matter? We placed an order for 4 preorders, that's 4 goodie packs - code, desktop skin, and all.


The physical stores? Yeah, they're sympathetic at least (well, some are) and we're picking up a second one at a physical store so we'll at least each have one. For what it's worth, 2 of the 11 stores we called to try to find one that still has a desktop skin that isn't attached to a preorder awaiting pickup (we wanted to make sure we're not taking one from someone else who preordered) had no idea what City of Heroes (or Going Rogue, or City of Villains) was and couldn't even find it in their systems as a game.

Next time Paragon/PlayNC, if you're making preorder goodie deals with a game sales company - can we please skip Gamestop? Or at least give us another option? At the very least I'm not patronizing Gamestop's webstore again, for any reason.

Sorry for the gigant-o-post, but I really needed to get that out of my system and in a place where maybe, someone will read it who can get the negatives of Gamestop experiences through to the folks who decide to make deals with Gamestop for their preorder packs and such.

Aww, thanks everyone! The birthday cake...has yet to be baked (I wanted something other than typical bakery/restaurant offerings for my cake, so I'm making my own birthday cake...eventually).

However, do you know how many places offer free birthday meals and/or desserts? Nomming my way through today - birthday calories don't count, right? >.> Right?

So...here is a question that came up. I've been avoiding participating due to being married to Kid, and he's forbidden from joining on of the teams. Am I eligible? Or would too many people question/get angry if I did participate and the team I was on won?

I'd like to join Sam's team if I'm eligible to participate, but I don't want to step on anyone's feelings/toes/etc.

This is most definitely in game - a group of us got it just now