So, Marauder, Aurora Borealis, and Pendragon walk into Atlas Park...

My first thought went to "oh cool, I wonder if this means Praetorian alignments can visit Hero/Villain zones now"

Or the arcs that reference the Rikti being humans, before you ever find out 'the big secret'.

Story has always been a hodgepodge. I really don't see it being that confusing. They don't have the time or manpower to do a full world revamp the way the 900 lbs gorilla did with it's last expansion. They update bits and pieces and they don't discard much of anything. The reason "it worked" before is that so much was self contained, all of the major plots could be taken in a vacuum because they all had their own characters and stuff never crossed over.

Now we've got characters and plots that are crossing over and moving forward. The story is actually -developing-. And the 1-50 model just doesn't support it in the way people want.

As I see it, the Praetorians are probably joining up to help fight against the Battalion, as they'll be the new big bad. The current roster of iTrials will be 'the past' while newer stuff will be the present.

The wonderful thing is, I don't care if other people can't deal with it. The devs are going to do it how they're going to do it, and it's pretty much tough luck if you disagree. So you either have to learn to hand wave it or sit and sulk.

And I submit that we shouldn't have to pretend, ignore, hand-wave or make do. It should just work. Actually work, not just if we agree to pretend half the content doesn't exist.

The ways of making it work that would appease most people would pretty much involve massive revamps every time some new major event changes thing. That's just not in the cards. Or it would involve major events all being '50+', but we can't move the level cap.

Really. If it were up to the way people want it, galaxy city would still exist as a starting area and at 50 it would be destroyed. Statesman and Psyche would be alive in any 'under 40' mission. Any new low level content would have to conform to 'the past' and 'new' and 'modern' stuff would all be end game content.

Or they could start dating everything and have people complain that 'why can I do something in Atlas and its August 2012 and then go to Faultline where it's June 2009?"

Of all the other Praetors, Marauder actually seems to me to be the only one that might have a shot at redemption. The other Praetors are all driven by self-interest, while Marauder had established an area of peace and safety for a large number of people prior to Cole's arrival. Violent and brutal as he is, his background has consistently been one demonstrating order over chaos. He grew up in a lawless environment, where size, strength, and power were the only rules that mattered to anyone - he used his natural gifts to climb to the top of the food chain, and then crushed anyone that threatened not only him, but anyone that followed him as well. Top Dog, Alpha Dog, however you want to put it, he's still a pack leader - he cares for his pack, tries to do what's best for them the only way he knows how. When Cole came over the mountains and offered him a job, he took it because he thought it was what was best for both himself AND the rest.

And now Cole's been revealed to be both a liar and far weaker than he appears, not only putting every other person in Praetoria at risk, but then throwing a temper tantrum that levelled a huge portion of the city with no regard for any other lives present... I could see that driving Marauder to some pretty dramatically different behavior. We can assume that Back Alley Brawler is "better" because he's a hero, but he was also a guy that became a cop to make a difference, and when it wasn't enough, took to vigilantism in a pretty violent way all in the name of making the world a safer place for people. In a lawless, destroyed place, it's quite possible that Michael White did exactly the same thing in reverse, trying to go from a thug to an officer of the peace in the hopes of something better - only to find that the people he'd been trying to make safer had been put at more risk than ever. Maybe now he's trying to find a way to help them again in their new home.

They could expand on the way Belladonna's arc has a bot at the start telling us that it take splace after the events in DA and the DD Trial - like they could add a bit at the start of the LGTF and the RWZ arcs saying that they took place during the 2nd Rikti invasion.

Who said that's Atlas Park in the picture? Surely even Praetoria had an Atlas and built a statue in his honor.

Praetoria is basically meant to be a world of grey. That is why you can be Resistance for all the wrong reasons, and Loyalist for all the right reasons.