Doctor Roswell

As long as the thread's here....

I got a character to 50 last night! This is significant because:

• It's my first post-Freedom 50, and before Freedom I was gone for the better part of two years.
• It's my first level 50 brute.
• It's the first time I've ever created a character and reached 50 on that character during the same issue (you can tell because her primary is Street Justice). That makes the roughly two months it took me, my fastest trip to 50 ever.

Ladies and gentlemen, da winnah and new champeen... Girl-Fight!



(I tried to get a "top of the steps" shot like that scene in Rocky, but it wan't working out, so I just went with this.)

If we were talking about threads instead of shards, it'd be a lot easier to make a "double rainbow" joke here.

This comes up fairly often. People have been asking for it at least as far back as the announcement of power customization (and I'm paraphrasing here): "But what if some Force Field defender decides to make their bubbles PINK, and I end up on a team with them? Then I'll be in a PINK bubble! What will the rest of my team think of me from inside THEIR pink bubbles?"

Yes, there were really threads about that.

Still, I agree that more options are always good, and while I think some of the arguments for it are fairly ridiculous at times (see above), I support this suggestion. Sometimes I don't want to be on fire. I especially don't want to be on fire because I happened to be next to Ms. Liberty at the same time you trained up to the level when you got the power and you just had to try it out.

/signed.

You know, the government could fix everything if they'd just print more money.

I mean, constantly introducing more and more currency into an economy at a rate exponentially greater than the rate at which it's removed couldn't possibly have any kind of downside, right?

You know, I was at the extreme northern end of Boomtown the other night at 2am, and I stood there spamming "petless MM looking for farm" in local for like a half-hour. Nobody responded.

This game is doomed.

Only the Ascension sets are limited to level 50s. Everything else can be used at level 1, though for some ridiculous reason, they're delivered to your mailbox and have to be claimed, so you can't create a character with, say, the Binary aura (even if you've got auras unlocked at level 1), but you can create a brand-new character, claim the aura, and add it at a trainer right away without fighting so much as a single Hellion.

If you drop to Premium, they remain available on any character that's claimed them or has them in their inbox as claimable. So do Ascension pieces, actually. I'm pretty sure I remember a dev mentioning somewhere that basically, once a costume piece is unlocked on a character, there's no way to "lock" it again even if they wanted to. Once it's yours, it's yours.

I can't confirm for certain whether any newly-created characters will have those auras/emotes sent to their inbox automatically if the account goes Premium, but I think they still do.

Well, there's your next tier 9 VIP set, devs: Robotic anime Lego-lions.

Form blazing sword!

I believe the last word we had on it was something along the lines of, "after issue 22 is released, but not necessarily right after it's released."

This is one of those sets where you can't just dump everything from it onto a character and call that a costume. You use a few parts individually when you design a costume.

People seem to want this:


When what they're getting is this:


Which seems less impressive until you see something like this:


Can't do that with the pre-packaged model. Thumbs up from me.

It sort of depends on how badly I need endurance. Typically, at 50 I'm looking at a standard EndMod IO, a Performance Shifter +End proc, and a Performance Shifter EndMod IO, because I may as well get that set bonus too. On an end-heavy build, I might up things to four slots and drop in another non-set IO, but I'll usually make that up with some of the +Recovery Healing set IOs in Health instead.

That can all change as needed, though.

*Sigh*

This has been gone over, many, many times. So many that I imagine Memphis_Bill has a two-page refutation of it somewhere, ready to copy and paste whenever it comes up like the one about why we'll never get vehicles.

But just to toss a couple of things out there:

Names. They're important in a superhero game, more than in most genres. Aragorn or Han Solo could have different names and it really wouldn't change the characters themselves. Not so with, say, Spider-Man or the Flash. So if you merge servers, what happens if there's a player on both with the same name? Who gets it? The player who's already on that server? The one being forced to move is already dealing with his server closing, now he has to find a different name, too. See how long that guy keeps his VIP subscription active. Maybe you let the guy being moved keep the name as a "consolation prize." Now the one already on the server has just had his name taken away because someone else's server wasn't active enough. See how long that guy keeps his VIP subscription active.

Supergroups. Do they just split up? Are they all forced to move to the same server, even if they don't agree on which one they want to move to? What happens to their prestige? Their base? Their name, if it's taken on the new server?

Which server? Do you just consolidate the two with the lowest populations, thus not giving anybody a choice where they move to? Do you give everyone a server transfer for all their characters and say, "be moved out by Friday or you're getting deleted"? If you do, you'll likely end up with most people jumping ship to a place like Freedom or Virtue, in no small part because they'll see the writing on the wall and not want to have to go through all this again six months later if the devs decide to shut down another "dead" (but not really) server. Which will really just give the high-population servers even higher populations, while the lower-populations ones will stay low, and then someone would be complaining about how they need to shut down Guardian or Champion or Triumph or whatever -- and this part is important -- "like they did with Pinnacle." See, it would create a precedent for shutting down low-population servers, which would create a mass exodus from those servers, which would just make future server shutdowns more likely. It's what called a "death spiral."

What about everyone else? I don't play on Pinnacle, but if the devs are just giving away free server transfers, I don't see why I should be penalized just for playing on a high-population server. Where's my free transfer? Or rather, where are my thirty-four free transfers, one for each character I have on Virtue? And my twelve for the characters I have on Exalted? And my six for Victory, and my three for Infinity?
Now, I don't really feel that way, but I promise you, there are people out there who would. And if even a tenth of the ones who'd threaten to quit paying in outrage over the "unfair treatment" they were getting actually did, you'd see a net drop in subscriptions, not a gain.

As someone who plays almost exclusively on Virtue, generally accepted as the #2 server in population and occasionally busier than the #1, and therefore in no danger of going away even if this "shut down the dead servers" thing were to happen, let me just say...

As far as I know, only the "system" can send things to your character/account items inboxes. Mail from a player, even if that player is you, even if the mail has an attachment, even if that attachment is account-bound, goes to your inbox.

Always.