Doctor Roswell

Nobody ever does.

I can't speak to how often it happens on other servers, but my experience on Virtue lately has been acing that part on somewhere around one in three attempts, possibly a little more (but not one in two -- 5/12, maybe?). I can't count on it every time, but it happens often enough that it's a "nice surprise" and not a "total shock."

No... we don't "all" want them. I, for one, want to feel less like a second banana to the signature characters, not more. I want to be Batman, not Robin. Captain America, not Bucky.

Yes.
Yes.

Is the change a big deal? Not really. But it is irritating and pointless.

Since it was implemented, I've seen a number of people, myself included, complain about the change. I've seen even more people offer up a quick, simple solution. What I haven't seen, though, is even one single person who's defended it as an improvement. The closest I've encountered has been people saying, "it's not so bad; at least it's easy to go back to how it was before."

And already I find it more annoying than helpful.

I have a character named Great Caesar's Ghost. I had to camp the name for over four months until the Valentine's event just to be able to get him clothing and a hairstyle that made sense. Then I had to get to level 35+ and do what was at the time considered one of the toughest task forces in the game to make him "battle-ready." Could I have "faked it" without doing any of that? Sure. But the name would have basically been meaningless. Also, I made him pre-Shields. I'd like to re-make him so I can take advantage of those, but there's no way I'm going to go through all that again to get things I already earned because they're not account-wide unlocks. I would, however, be willing to shell out five bucks for the privilege.

I recently made a character named Butterfly Knife. The "Knife" part I could do in character generation. The "Butterfly" part not so much; I had to mail myself influence, log onto the new character wingless, collect the inf, buy the materials, craft them, then add the wings to the character. Is it that big a deal? Not really. But I could have used that time to play the game. And if I decide a week from now that I'd rather use this other secondary over here, or maybe make the character a different AT, the hassle makes me a lot less likely to do that. What's probably going to happen is that the character will sit unplayed for months as every time I log on, I'll look at that character, say, "oh, right, I wanted to make that change," then tell myself I've got other things I'd rather be doing right now than deal with all that crafting and installation again and I'll worry about it tomorrow.

If it's worth a couple of bucks to me to have those two characters work visually "out of the box" without actually affecting their capabilities, who does it hurt?

Touché.

And apparently yours are "name them whatever the hell you want, because how hard is it to check what's in there, 'just, you know, remember,' and click the other tab if you're wrong?"

Which I suppose is a valid strategy, just less than optimal -- given that the whole purpose of labeling anything in the first place is to avoid confusion and make it easy to identify at a glance. I could label the salt and pepper with a "1" and a "2" and just remember which was which, but isn't that missing the point?

If it were totally up to me? Drop the number of inboxes from three to two -- a "character" inbox and a "global" inbox.

Each character has their own inbox, accessible only to that character, and anything sent to that character, whether by another player or by the system, goes into that inbox. So if you send a mail to my rad/rad defender "Doctor Roswell" on Virtue, I'd have to log onto that specific character to see it. Likewise, when that character gets mailed some new reward (let's say Sands of Mu) by the system, that's where it goes, because that's his copy of it. If I claim it, only that copy gets claimed. If I delete it, only that copy gets deleted. And because that stuff is all addressed to the character of "Doctor Roswell" specifically, I'd know that all the identical items sitting in the inboxes of all my other characters would be safe and sound, because I hadn't claimed/deleted the ones addressed to those characters.

Similarly, my global account "@Doctor Roswell" would have a global inbox accessible by any character on the account. If you, or the system, sent a mail to my global name, I could see it and claim anything attached to it when logged onto any character on the account. And since those are for (i.e, "addressed to") my whole account, I'd know that if I claimed anything attached to a mail in my global inbox, it would be claimed globally. If I deleted a message there, it would be deleted globally. Kind of like how no matter which computer I log onto my Gmail account from, if I delete an email from it, it's still deleted even if I use a different computer to access the account later.

It's a mail system. Address the mail to where and who it's supposed to go to.

Or if that's too much of a broad, sweeping change, how about just adding a disclaimer to the stuff you only get once per account? Let people know that once they claim the reward, that's it, just to avoid confusion and mistakes. Either an "Are You Sure?" pop-up when someone tries to claim a reward, or just a line in the email itself that says, "WARNING! This item is awarded to your account as a whole. If you claim it now, it will not be available to any of the other characters on this account."

When you're lying face-down in the dirt, every AT's DPS is zero.

Those things used to be called "Orange" and "Green," and people complained. So they changed them to "Salty" and "Sweet," and people STILL complain? IS THERE NO SATISFYING YOU VULTURES?

People were complaining before because "Certificates" and "Vouchers" were ambiguous, nearly-identical, essentially-meaningless terms -- quick, which was which? And more importantly, how was someone who's never seen them before supposed to tell which was which?

Just because they were changed from that, to something a not-insignificant number of players find counter-intuitive and confusing instead, doesn't mean the complaints will (or should) stop. A problem wasn't solved here, it was just turned into a different kind of problem.