Venture

I'm a MA architect, not a miracle worker....

With the exception of two pieces (cape and chest emblem), wearing Ascension is a great way to show you are NOT cool. Most of the stuff is *** ugly.

No, you don't, any more than banks need you to sign an agreement not to rob them just in case you try to claim "I forgot armed robbery was illegal!"

Violating an NDA is a breach of contract. Same for showing disassembled game files; it's also against the DMCA. Stalking and harassing are illegal in and of themselves.

We don't need language in the EULA that would allow someone at NC to kick you because they don't like your political opinions.

No, but only because he wasn't bright enough to think of it....

A lame option is still an option, so you've managed to contradict yourself in the space of only two sentences.

The truth is the sub-SO game doesn't need a difficulty increase because it's the only part of the game that works. The game doesn't take a flying leap into munchkinland until SOs and sets show up. You're also forgetting that new players were getting shoved into Praetoria by default if they'd bought into the game with GR. Then they were getting their behinds handed to them with a side of fries repeatedly. GR ended up not doing any real good in adding new players to the game. I can't imagine why.

I would not have made "lowbie groups" for Praetoria. Of course, I wouldn't have made Praetoria, either. Goatee universes are at best a one-off gag, not something you should be centering your product around.

How about making sure mobs aren't effectively immune to controls, when you've got two ATs centered around them, not piling them full of debuffs to be used on players that haven't got stats above base anyway, and keeping their DPS within the established range for low-level characters? It doesn't matter if they're shooting lasers or bullets; what matters are the numbers behind those attacks. The Hollows mobs Sam mentions had nothing on these guys. (I and others argued vehemently to keep them, actually.)

New players wouldn't even have noticed, and the old players weren't complaining about the existing lowbie groups (except, maybe, the Vahzilok, and in that case they weren't complaining in a way that fits your argument).

No, they don't. Praetorian mobs are not some deep tactical challenge requiring the strategic acumen of Sun Tzu to overcome. All of the people you're arguing against have taken multiple characters through Praetoria. It just isn't any FUN.It's slow, as you have to use Stupid Pulling Tricks to separate overlapping spawns and such, and you have to stand around waiting on health/END as you get beat up too often for Rest, and it's aggravating, as one small mistake or a little bad luck can get you splattered before you can do anything about it. Old hands will mitigate this by twinking our characters with low-level sets and/or stocking up on temp powers at the AH, but newbies won't know to do that and don't have the resources anyway. Praetorian mobs didn't challenge me, they annoyed me.

And at the end of the day, the devs abandoned the idea for F2P. The new starting experience is the old starting experience. Overpowered newbie mobs failed; you lose.

So? After deciding to use the high-level mobs as low-level mobs, they had to go back and make new high-level ones. Not rocket science.

Not using goatee-universe characters would be a big help. And now, those characters are out of the newbie game.

We're already there.

Fixing it is easy: eliminate rewards. People just don't want to accept that.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

Jaegers are robots. Warhulks have people inside them. There is one instance in the lore of this being done to someone against their will -- "Scout", in the Numina TF. There is also at least one instance of someone requesting to be put inside a Warhulk, a "Lance Sergeant Lemleigh" in the arc "Mass Duplicity".

There are "Thug" Mastermind pets, those are the only ones I know of.

Not buying it. It's patently obvious that the mobs were designed for the endgame and then scaled down, poorly. Likewise, using the Praetorian setting as both a starting experience and endgame content is insanely dissonant, made worse by the decision to allow Primals to walk over whenever they like. One BAF league should be able to bulldoze Nova Praetoria off the map before Tyrant and his stooges could do anything about it, except you can't because, well, you can't. It's just not allowed. If the Praetorian zones were off-limits to Primals you could at least invoke the "level progression equals story progression" principle (itself becoming increasingly problematic; proof left as an exercise for the reader), claiming they represented a "Praetoria-that-was" that tourists can't get to now.

As for Praetoria per se I don't see how anyone could think it "awesome". Not only is it not particularly original but it invokes a trope that has become so cliche it can no longer be used seriously. It did nothing to "shave off the goatees"; if anything the Praetorian characters are now even more laughably evil then ever before. Despite what a few apologists tried to claim there is nothing "morally ambiguous" about it (and we don't hear that argument much any more, you may notice). It is positively rotten as a starting environment for reasons stated above repeatedly. Even as a long-time player who could effortless twink a starting character I would not even consider starting one in Praetoria; the last possible reason to do so (archetype selection) will be gone in a matter of days. The "multi-faction" storyline went nowhere with all branches inexplicable shoehorned into the same place and is now abandoned in the First Ward content. I suspect the devs have belatedly discovered there are reasons why "choose your own adventure" type stories are only seen in children's books.

There's a great conversation in the Babylon 5 episode "Hunter, Prey" between Franklin and Garibaldi about disappointment. They compare the expectations they had for the future to (paraphrased) "the Christmas present you bug your parents for all year, and when you finally get it it's just not a great as you thought it was, and you just shove it in the closet and never play with it again". That's the vibe I've been getting from the devs ever since GR. It's like they feel the "old world" content is such a hopeless morass of design mistakes, continuity errors, bad writing and worse cliches that even they don't want to deal with it any more, that Praetoria represented some kind of opportunity to "start over". I think they expected we'd all stampede over to Praetoria, demanding more and more of it, and can't understand why we didn't and why so many people are so tired of Praetoria being at the center of everything. They don't (or maybe can't) see that they're just making the same mistakes all over again, only with a shinier coat of ultra-mode paint.

No, I'm not Whedon...unless that's what I want you to think...no, I'm not Nemesis either.

Maybe after Freedom launches I'll go through this and update the customs a bit, at least costume-wise. Of course, if I really cared about improving the entertainment value of the arc, I'd delete it.