Stonehead

Would starting over affect my decision? Depends.

With the onslaught of new powers since Freedom, I've been re-rolling many characters anyway. But losing my vet benefits would hurt, ain't gonna lie. Many of my characters have wings and trenchcoats. And as a solo player, I'm pretty dependent on Sands of Mu & the Blackwand. But would losing those keep me from playing the game? Not really.

Losing all the powers/costumes/etc that I've purchased, however, would be a bigger problem. But that's a bridge I'd cross when I came to it.

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Thanks for trying to do something. I'll be following both here and at The Titan Network, and if you get to the point of kickstarting, I'll be there with whatever support I can afford.

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I have almost no problems with the changes to the Skulls. Probably the best use of the Club Hair yet. I like the new female additions. I'm glad to still see some ethnic diversity, but I don't mind the clearer focus on the Slavic background. I've long thought the Skulls, Hellions, and Outcasts needed to be more distinctive. This goes a long way toward that.

I've not really read the accents much in-game on beta (haven't been on beta much this time 'round), but from the descriptions I've read here, I'm reminded of some advice my favorite creative writing teacher gave me: deliberate misspellings and grammar mistakes meant to convey accents should be used cautiously and sparingly. Instead of informing us about the character, it can quickly pull you out of the story and into the language of the story. Too much and your reader might think you're making fun of the character's background. Choose how you convey accents carefully, and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest. And it sounds like they've already heard this one loud and clear.

So if I had one problem with the revamp, it's the lack of skulls on the back of their jackets. The one time I did run into them in beta, I thought something was off but couldn't place it, and this is it precisely. They didn't look like Skulls from behind, only from the front.

So, overall, nice job (sorry, OP). This is MUCH better than the revamp to the CoT. Dang it, I still miss those generic, robed cult members.

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Apologies if this has already been talked about elsewhere, but I just discovered this and had to share.

In testing out power pool customization over on beta, I discovered a custom option for Peacebringers -- not bright, not dark, but "wispy." It only works for one power, Light Form, and it allows the power to turn you into a little wispy ball of light again.

Later, when I logged back into live, I was even more pleased to see that this change is already in the game! My Peacebringer can now be a ball of light again! When did this happen, and why did no one tell me?

Many, many thanks to whomever made this possible so quickly. You don't know how excited this makes me.

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Very, very excited for this set. My original Plant controller was Plant/Rad... she'll be getting re-rolled as soon possible once this set goes live.

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After checking out the new staff pack on Beta, I thought I'd come here and repost an edited version of my request there.

Staff Requests:

1) a true spear -- The bladed weapon in the new pack on beta is nice, but much too modern for what I want out of a spear. I'd be perfectly happy if you could take the already-existing trident and just remove the two outer points to create a new spear.

2) a natural mystic staff -- While the Mystical staff on beta is nice, I'm still hoping for something more naturally magic, like a slightly gnarled wooden branch with a mystic orb/gem inset at the top. Heck, the blackwand is already in game. Can we get that as a staff?

Let's talk about bubbles.

The Bubbles Path aura drives me crazy. The Bubbles part is great, but it's ruined (for me, anyway) by the Path's "mud pots" ground effect, where the bubbles come from the large patch of bubbling ground all around you. The Dark Matter aura, meanwhile, looks much closer to what I'm hoping for, however they're not bubbles, just Kirby dots.

So what I'd like to request is an full aura that combined the "bubble" effects of the Bubble Path aura with something similar to the look/placement of the Dark Matter (Kirby Dots) aura -- i.e. bubbles coming from me, not bubbling out of some mud-pot ground around me.

Thanks for listening,

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I got my first computer, an Atari 1200XL, back in junior high around 1982 or '83. Instead of a floppy drive, I initially recorded all the BASIC programs I wrote for it on a cassette recorder. When I finally got a 5.25" drive and daisy wheel printer for it, I felt like a high-tech giant.

Ah, the good ol' days.

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Like others, I too am very pleased with the Dark Astoria arcs. Really astounding work from the writers, the artists, everyone involved.

Looking back, in my opinion there's a clear line when the game's mission quality improved significantly: Issue 17. That pre-GR issue included those great clone arcs, our first real glimpse at the more complex and interesting missions we'd get with I18/Going Rogue and beyond.

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My thoughts: I'm sad that we're about to dance this "ultra-rare, non-tradable costume/vanity items" dance again.

I was a critic of the super packs when they came out, but I tried them anyway. I'm primarily motivated in this game by costumes and vanity items, but I did grow to like the consumables & ATOs much more than I thought. Still, I never bought a pack looking for those items. It was the black wolf that drew me in, what I most wanted, and it was the item that kept me buying packs long after I should have stopped. But Lordy, that wolf would have been PERFECT for my vampire character. I bought many more packs than I had intended chasing after the Black Wolf. Between my account and my boyfriend's, I probably spent over $150 on Super Packs. And still no wolf for either of us.

Of course, them's the breaks, and I knew that going in. And it's not the end of the world; I got lots of merits, lots of ATOs, lots of inf from selling everything. But the one thing I wanted -- the wolf -- I still don't have, and at this point, I'm not sure I ever will. I ended up parking my vampire character, because now he just feels incomplete until he gets the black wolf. (If all you care about missions, powers or enhancements, you probably wouldn't understand. But then again, those motivated by power enhancements got their method of getting them in-game. Those of us motivated by aesthetics got squat.)

There's a fine line between incentive and disincentive. I'm sure that line is different for everyone, but for me, the chance at getting the whole costume was decent enough for me to purchase a few packs, but the difficulty of getting the wolf ended up just making me mad -- at the game, at the devs, and yes, at myself for foolishly chasing a near-impossible goal in the first place.

I'm sitting this dance out this time 'round.

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Yes, I've noticed this. The wait while the game retrieves your character list has gotten quite a bit longer recently. And if you back out of it before the character list loads, it asks you if you're sure you want to leave the queue. It seems as if we ARE in a queue of some sort, but the UI isn't reporting that. So we wait, and wait, and wait for a list of our characters to appear.

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed a recurrence of that old problem where the zone loading screen would get hung up around 85-90% loaded, and then seem to get stuck there for a very long time? It's doing that again, at least for me. And if others have noticed this, could it be related to the above?

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The reason I don't play more missions in AE? Lately, it's felt like 3 out of every 5 missions I attempt are invalid. Just won't start. Why does the system not filter out invalid missions from search results? I'd have assumed that should have been basic functionality, no?

The reason I stopped creating AE missions originally? Before I even completed my first attempt at a mission, it was made invalid by an update. Then again. Then again. It got old fast. After a while, I decided to just wait it out until the system was more stable.

The reason I'm still not creating AE missions? The name filter issue. I finally went back and tried to clean up one of those old, still unpublished missions, and it was, of course, invalid. The reason? It was titled "An End to All Things," which of course is forbidden. I'm such a rebel for using one of the most common words in the English language, "thing." Sigh.

These two quotes sum up my feelings pretty closely:

I use 'em, but mostly as described by others. Only some, and more at low levels. My fave is the one that saves me endurance; I use that one a lot.