Venture

Doesn't follow. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Yes, and your post is nothing but a bad impersonation of Baghdad Bob. Wrong Number, Eva and PW have already spelled this out very clearly. If you don't get it at this point, it's because you don't want to get it.

Edit: The "FTP cousin" is miles away from terrible.

That just kicks the question up a level. The name filter wasn't broken so it didn't need to be "fixed". This game hasn't had a "clone character" problem in ages. Or really, ever. Even at its worst, back near launch, there weren't that many and they got dimed out by other players quickly.

I don't give a damn.

My oldest friend once told me a story about another mutual old friend, let's call him "Fred". Fred had a habit of tinkering with his car, screwing it up, and then getting my friend and another guy, "Barney", to fix it. One day, on the nth iteration, Barney asked Fred "what was wrong with the car in the first place?", to which Fred replied "nothing". Barney finally lost his patience and screamed "THEN WHAT DID YOU MESS WITH IT FOR?!?!?".

He didn't say "mess".

So, WHAT DID THEY MESS WITH IT FOR? I don't remember hearing anything about this on Test, to the best of my knowledge it never appeared in any patch note on Test or Live, we just logged in one day and found our stories mangled. Someone, somewhere, screwed the pooch and until it gets fixed the developers deserve nothing but derision. And "gets fixed" does not just mean repairing the damage but also correcting whatever flaw in their management process that allowed a disaster like this to sail through QA and Test without so much as documentation, never mind pre-emption.

Yes, you can: you just do it. You set the rules and then you play by them.

Of course, that requires that you be the one running the show. The best a fanfic author can do is decide for himself which characters are stronger than which and then keep that assessment consistent within his own works.

As it happens, this and "Psychophage" are the only of my arcs that aren't plagued by the recent name-filter stupidity.

I suggest you get used to the idea now that everything you "earned" in this game is going to go away for good some day.

No, because the moment you have to do something whether or not you feel up to it the activity ceases to be fun and becomes work.

Yeah, I didn't have time to post about it, but when I read that I thought "Of course! What could possibly go wrong!"....

I'd love to see a cite for that, since I can't think of a single one myself and it never works that way in games.

We only have Ghost Widow's word for that. She may be in extreme denial about her situation. Or maybe her writer just liked Kai on Lexx.

Entirely too many people do set out to be evil. There are sick, twisted, just plain evil psychos out there who will cut you just to watch you bleed.

ahahahaa no. To mangle a line from Galactica, it's entirely possible that Lenin might have believed in the dream of a perfect society, but Stalin only believed in the dream of Josef Stalin. He didn't seize power for anyone's "greater good" but his own. Right now, today, there are any number of petty tyrants in third-world countries only interested in themselves.

As for Tyrant, his motivations aren't clear from the material. If Word of God says he started with good intentions then that's that, but I'd have to argue the material doesn't convincingly portray that. (The material actually suggests that Praetorian society was corrupt long before the Tyrant-Hamidon hoedown.)

It's also a pretty common one: Follow the Leader.

In your example, the second TV show isn't ripping off the earlier one in the purely technical sense that they are not plagiarizing, but they are attempting to capitalize on the success of the earlier product.

When the first Battlestar Galactica came out everyone and his dog immediately pegged it as ripping off Star Wars. This despite the fact that Star Wars was not exactly the most original thing to come down the pike, and the fact that Larson had actually pitched the idea back in 1968. The respective studios even sued each other over it (the cases were dismissed, AFAIK). Nevertheless the only reason Galactica was made was to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, so while there may not have been any actionable "ripping off" going on, ABC and Universal didn't exactly have clean hands either.

City has been guilty of this too. Issue 9 gave us a villain who plotted to steal everyone's superpowers, who gave a badge entitled "Save the World" when thwarted, and parked a familiar-looking young lady outside the Steel Canyon university. Issue 12 gave us Cimerora, with a familiar-sounding name that certainly had nothing to do with a recently-launched competitor. Mission goals to defeat 300 ancient warriors and certain lines of dialog of course bore no resemblance to any movies released about that time, either. And then there's Going Rogue itself.

As others have pointed out the whole goatee universe thing (and please, let's call it that, despite both companies and their respective kneepad brigades trying to claim otherwise) is trite in any case. To me that just makes the offense worse. Couldn't they have found something more valuable to steal?

It matters in the same sense that "Microsoft and Apple ripped off Xerox PARC" matters, i.e., it is factually true but useless. I ran a game shop back in the 80s. I sold (and bought for myself) Warhammer products looooooong before they were cool. I knew Blizzard was biting off of Warhammer (and by extension LoTR) as soon as I saw Orcs and Humans. Blizzard got there first as far as this market is concerned.

Check out the video for the competition's "Rainbow Flight" powers.

As far as I can tell, Loyalists (particularly Power ones) leave for Primal because they've run out of script.

I have done their missions and I did read the dialog and both men are rotten to the core. So are almost all the other Contacts in Praetoria. The Warden ones are slightly better, but they're no heroes. At best they're deep in denial about their involvement with terrorists.

No, they don't. Washington is a thug with a badge. This is made clear repeatedly in his arc as he is always described as behaving like a vicious animal. Kang may say he is protecting the people of Praetoria and he might even believe it -- putting us back at that river in Egypt -- but he's just propping up a fascist state. The man throws his own daughter to the wolves.

That's supposed to be the point where he realizes the true nature of what he's doing and turns to the path of righteousness yadda yadda yadda. It's hollow and hamhanded. The only way anyone working in the law enforcement arm of a police state can be unaware of the atrocities such states commit on a daily basis is by being willfully blind to them.

There is no difference. Anyone working in the apparatus of the State is working to keep Tyrant in power, regardless of what they've snowed themselves into believing. Anyone who thinks they're "working within the system" to effect positive change in Praetoria is so deep in denial they can have tea and scones with Stanley and Livingstone.

No, not really. The only thing GG is wrong about is her blind insistence that the Wardens are "the good guys". Not everyone working for the Loyalists is a complete monster who deserves to be shoved against a wall when the revolution comes, but none of them are anywhere even close to being good people.