Lothic

Basically my original main alt was never complete until wings and animated tails happened. When I think back on it now it's weird that I even tried to "pretend" that she had wings when there were none there at first.

Just wanted to say that's a very cool outfit. Kudos.

That's the same thing I kept saying every time I tried to watch an episode of Voyager.

This is great news for a lot of reasons. Maybe this will finally motivate the Warner Brothers/DC folks to awake up and realize that a good Justice League movie might actually be possible if they put some effort into it.

This is precisely why it is so frustrating that they have still not taken that one last baby step to make SG rename tokens happen.

They set the stage to allow for a single top ranked player to effectively have full control over the fate of an entire SG and then don't take the next logical step to allow that player to rename it. The super-leader of a SG can already single-handedly completely gut and destroy a SG - just how bad is being able to -rename- it compared to that?

The Devs refusal to finish what they started here seriously calls into question all the time and effort they already put into creating the super-leader rank in the first place.

You seem to think that my position on this keeps changing when in fact I'm simply exploring related reasons why there's a fundamental disconnect about the workings of the Wall in general.

It simply does not seem plausible (without an arbitrary literary excuse) that a Wall manned by a group like the Night's Watch could be maintained in a status quo situation for roughly 8,000 years for MULTIPLE reasons. First of all the "enemy" they are supposedly guarding against (magical critter or otherwise) has not seriously advanced around the Wall and/or even tried to threaten anything in the south for millennia. Surely anything that required a 700 foot magical wall to stop was apparently motivated enough at one point to have found a way -around- it within 8,000 years. We aren't just talking about a bunch of kitty-cats or bunny-rabbits here. But even if you accept that apparent non sequitur there's always the mystery that given nothing had actually happened for centuries why there would still be the political, sociological or economic will to support the expense of such a frontier defense force for that long without apparent need or benefit to anyone. Surely it would eventually become cheaper to just imprison or execute anyone you might have otherwise thought about banishing to the Wall.

It was a historical miracle that the Romans maintained the thousands of miles of frontier they had against their "wildlings" (the proto-viking types from northern/eastern Europe) for roughly 500 years and the inevitable breakdown of that defense directly lead to the fall of the Roman Empire. The parallels between the Roman frontier legions and the Night's Watch are just too close to readily accept that this pseudo-Maginot Line situation could possibly last 16 times as long under any circumstances fantasy or otherwise. Even the Soviets only managed to afford their half of the Cold War for 50 years before they had to give up on it and in their case they were dealing with an actual viable threat at the time (the United States) not a threatless boondoggle that the Wall had been representing for centuries.

Yes, yes I understand that by the beginning of Game of Thrones things are -finally- changing and we see that the wildlings are -finally- stirring right at the point when the Night's Watch is -finally- showing signs of weakness. I have no problem with that relatively immediate bit of drama. I simply have a hard time believing that nothing significantly changed on EITHER side of the Wall for thousands of years before that.

Like I said at the beginning this is just a nitpick criticism of mine. I realize that Martin probably tossed out "8,000 years" for the timespan of the Wall just because it sounded cool and exotic for the purposes of his fantasy world. All I'm suggesting is that seemingly random number of years doesn't really fit very well with the circumstances he tried to apply them to. I suppose one could make the case that the presence of magic coupled with the variable winter/summer cycles has collectively caused EVERYTHING on this planet to advance up to a certain technological level and then just stop dead for millennia, but then one could ask why did everything stop at this pseudo-medieval level - why not stay as cavemen or get to a space-faring level before the status quo set in?

Maybe the "gimmick" they'll use is to release it on December, 21st 2012.

Then you probably don't want to know that Spike was originally supposed to be killed off after like only a few episodes.
He lasted for -many- seasons longer than he was initially supposed to.

In Buffy's case she was the only one with serious superpowers amongst the human characters on the show.
Kind of hard to not be better than the rest of them combined, at least for the fighting bits. *shrugs*

Actually from that distance that thing on its back could be a saddle...
Not that there've been people asking for rideable mounts in this game since Day One or anything.

Why did I suddenly get a mental image of Zwill riding around in a backpack being carried by Wretch?

Pics or it didn't happen...

Note the irony of demanding pics of something you legally couldn't record in the first place.

I'm sorry but even "fantasy" worlds like this usually tend to follow -some- kind of logic, or at least offer some kind of explanation for why logic should be disregarded if necessary. If the books explain -why- nothing's changed in thousands of years I might be more willing to accept the scenario in question.

The Han Dynasties of China weren't -that- static. But even if you could successfully demonstrate this point that'd only be at most 1/8 the time the people in this book supposedly managed their sociological miracle.

Instead of "dug in" I would probably use the phrase "accepted certain immutable truths about human nature". *shrugs*

I suppose I'll just conclude this line of discussion by saying I'd more readily believe that things like dragons and/or magic could actually be real on some planet in some universe than to believe a human (or at least human-like) race of people could remain -that- static for 8,000+ years. It's not going to stop me from watching this show, or maybe even eventually reading these books someday, but it will leave me with a certain bitter pill I'll just have to stomach to get past. *shrugs*

P.S. Ironically enough tonight's episode of South Park had Mr. Garrison trying to teach the class about "World History" and he starts off by saying, "What we start to see in world history is a pattern much like the Greeks and Romans. Remember that there were seven families fighting for the control of the kingdoms of Westeros..." and as he goes on it's clear that all he's talking about is Game of Thrones as if it was -actual- world history.

Either this or they'll just use this art for the gay pron version of the Avengers that you know someone, somewhere will eventually make.

Or at least the ever important "flotation devices" every comic book heroine is usually drawn with too much of.

Yeah I haven't really used the Barbarian Bra all by itself but I've got a few outfits where I've used it underneath other chest coverings just because it provides a slightly nicer cleavage than the standard model.

What? There's a snip of this movie that's -not- allowed to be on youtube yet?

I would still argue that the need for things like "manual verification" or "90 day probation periods" would be pointless given the system of automated control that's ALREADY in place. If someone somehow managed to get a hold of the superleader rank against the will of anyone else in a SG that person/people can already petition for CS to handle those unfortunate situations regardless if there was a malicious SG rename involved or not. Restoring a SG name back to its original name in those cases would be the least of the GMs' worries because they already have the -manual- commands to accomplish that.

SG rename tokens could not make the jobs of the GMs any HARDER than it is now. If anything they could only make GM jobs EASIER because they would no longer be bombarded by player asking for SG renames.

Are you actually trying to have us believe that the character with the red star superleader rank is NOT the de facto "SG Holder" of a SG? What is a "SG Holder" anyway? Does the game somehow keep track of the original founder of a SG and if so why can't that character be the PERMANENT superleader of a SG?

I understand your concern here. You want to make sure someone doesn't do something sneaky, grabs the superleader rank of a SG without consent and somehow does something naughty with it. But don't you trust your own superleader auto promotion/demotion code? If a legitimate superleader allows someone else to grab that rank from him/her because they haven't logged in frequently enough that's not YOUR problem Zwill, that's the fault of the player who didn't log in enough.

As Memphis_Bill said you established the red star superleader rank PRECISELY in order to allow a single player to be directly responsible for the fate of a SG. This person has sole control over the SG so there's very little justification you can offer for -not- allowing this person to rename the SG.

A very common scenario these days is that the current superleader of SG "inherited" the SG from a former player (SG Holder?) who no longer plays and got demoted. Why should the new current player of the game not be able to revitalize a SG to make it his/her own with his/her own name?

It saddens me to continue to see how little regard you and the other Devs give this issue. Frankly not being able to rename old SGs is a -major- factor for why SGs are seen as being no where near as important as they used to be.

Back before character rename tokens existed the only way the GMs had to change character's names was via the manual database commands available to the GMs. Then somehow, perhaps by magic, someone came along and created character rename tokens that allowed the system to give players the ability to change their own character names without GM intervention.

Your desperate attempt to try to convince us that SG renames couldn't follow the same path of development is just that, desperate and borderline patronizing. Obviously the Devs have their own priorities and reasonings for doing things. But it's pretty obvious that if the Devs ever decided to provide SG rename tokens as a much desired QoL improvement it would be something that COULD be done. It's hardly the impossibility you're trying to make it out to be.

I simply think the crumminess factor of the Three Stooges movie compares about as well to Highlander 2 as a hand grenade compares to a tactical nuclear device. Neither are very "good" if they drop into your foxhole, but one is still much better than the other.

Fractal pizza for teh win!