Olantern

Brisco, please.

(I'm surprised that Firefly lost anything on a forum devoted to geekdom, but it was a technicality. Personally, I'm not a Whedon fan.)

In my early days (late i3),

- There was no "cooperative mission" completion. If you had the same mission as someone else on the team, the team did it twice.
- There were no villains, no PvP zones, no arenas, no universities, no markets, no Day Jobs, and no flashback system.
- There was a difficulty system, but it had many fewer options than what exists now, all with names that you had to learn like a code.
- Because of the sidekicking rules explained above, it was easy to get stuck in situations where you were routinely fighting +6's, often with suboptimal enhancements. I vividly remember the second Task Force I ever ran, where every single thing on the Task Force was purple, and I did a grand total of 10 damage (as a level 28ish tank) to minions with a fully-slotted attack, the two or three times I managed to connect.
- The i0 task forces, Moonfire, and Hess were the only ones available, aside from the Trials. No one had them memorized, as most people seem to today, making not just today's "speed runs" but even "moderately paced runs" impossible. My first TF ever (Synapse) took six and a half straight hours to complete.
- There was no combining of inspirations, which made the death runs through the Hollows and Perez Park even worse. I remember trying to get one level 6 character to a door in Four Seasons and dying ten times over before giving up.
- Debt seriously and significantly slowed down leveling, especially at high levels. Debt was not halved for dying inside a mission, and there was no such thing as patrol xp.
- Kheldians took extra damage from most attacks. They were supposed to make up for this by teaming. Playing one was considered prestigious (though people still complained about them the way they do today). They didn't have their own story arcs. Those were added in i4 with no fanfare whatsoever.
- Faultline was a hazard zone with DEEP chasms. Some could not be escaped without flight, teleport, or superjumping. The area behind the dam was blocked off but visible; people used to periodically get under the map to try to look at it.
- Arachnos was directly mentioned in only one place in the game (Maestro's bio) and was called SPIDER.
- Supergroup bases (and prestige) didn't exist.
- Some Rikti didn't wear clothes.
- The Council was new. (The Fifth Column had been written out of the game at the beginning of i3.)
- All player character weapons and powers looked the same.
- There were no friendly combat NPC's in missions. (This may be viewed as a positive if you're thinking of Fusionette or Lady Jane.)
- Enemy spawns of mixed factions couldn't fight each other (except in the Council/5th Column "war" that began i3). The most they could do was the "punch each other" emote. (Hostile factions were added in i5, in Croatoa.)
- Moving to i4, once the Global Defense Reduction (yes, they actually called it that) was announced, everyone was certain the game would be either instantly emptied or become unplayably difficult.
- Geko, rather than Castle, ran the devs' Powers team. Geko did not post on the forums, read PM's, or consider player opinions as anything more than the ravings of depraved ape-creatures.
- In fact, I believe Positron, Geko, Archon Voss, and Jack "Statesman" Emmert were the only devs with rednames on the fora at the time.
- Some people still liked Statesman and would praise his ideas.
- Fly gave you a large Accuracy debuff.

Okay, that's all for now.

If you don't get a response here, you might try asking in "The Costume Re-Design Thread" stickied at the top of this sub-forum. (I'd contribute something more directly helpful if I could, but I've been having trouble with image hosting for some time now.)

I heard that in preparation for i18, all players will be required to report to Paragon Studios in person to have their faces slapped.* Having teeth kicked will be optional.

This face-slapping is a slap in the face.













* (Note for the humor-impaired: No, not really. Think of this footnote as a slap in the face.)

Additional notes:

1) Objective: An expansion will be released in just under two weeks (August 17), which will probably bring in at least a few more players, either completely new or returning.

2) Subjective: The attitude that "you can only get teams on Freedom or Virtue" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people believe this, the more people flock there, and the more denuded the other servers become. For what it's worth (not much, I know), I haven't had trouble regularly finding full teams on other servers.

3) Neither: Regardless of where you choose to play, you might find it helpful to introduce yourself in your server's subforum and ask about what global chat channels are used for teaming. There are several on most servers, and they're a much faster, easier, and, these days, more common way of finding teams that just calling out in broadcast or hoping to get picked by someone searching for people in your level range.

I'm beginning to feel sorry for Mr. Nakayama. Already, people are reading his last post as, "We're getting existing enemy costume parts and backpacks!" This is how rumors, then disappointment, then public disaffection and cancelled accounts get started. The recent flap over the Mutant booster pack not consisting of animal parts comes to mind.

I'm not saying that I'm not confident that we'll continue to get excellent costume releases in the months to come. I am advising people, just as a general matter of principle, to rein in their expectations. Just because something good is coming doesn't mean it's the good you expect.

Personally, I try to look forward to good, new developments in general without having any specific expectations in mind. Of course, this is just as hard to do in the context of costume parts or other game features as in any other area of life. I know I often fail at it. However, the serenity it brings you when you can do it is well worth the effort.

You might be able to color Super Reflexes a dark color, and its default graphics are somewhat cloud-like. Those two things together could make the set look a bit like Dark Armor, I suspect.

Neat. Thanks for pointing this out!

I liked Ruse, despite my low opinion of Mark Waid, particularly due to the line, "Really, sir, the bellows alone..."

I can't see how anything new involving CrossGen can end well for fans of the various original series, who are inevitably going to be touchy purists, or Marvel, which is almost certain to upset those fans even if whatever it does with the properties is good (which is itself pretty unlikely).

On the other hand, the metaphorical train wreck may be fun to watch from afar.

The current pet issue for advocates of costume reform seems to be replacement of "color masks" with unique textures. (See Samuel Tow's post above for an explanation of the difference between the two.) If I were the playerbase (which I am, I suppose, in a way), I wouldn't get my hopes up about that.

I do, however, expect to see more and more well-designed individual costume sets, as well as more and more complaints from players that they aren't good enough.

So, no, I don't expect a wholesale costume creator revision unless the game itself is rebuilt from the ground up. That would be a sequel, not a revision.

The DooOOooOOoM! has become so strong in certain areas that I'm seriously considering changing my signature to, "If you hate this game so much, why are you still here? And can I have your stuff? In fact, can I have your stuff even if you stay?"

I know not what others may say, but I've been pronouncing the place as an anglicized "preh(schwa sound)-TOR-ee-uh," the adjective as "preh(soft e)-TOR-ee-an" or, occasionally, "prah-TOR-ee-an," and the title of its officials as the Latin "PREE-tor."