Lothic

Even if we were to accept the idea that this -one- exception to the paradigm would be OK I think you'd find that there would be many people who'd want something like this gliding power that was NOT tied to capes in any form or fashion. I'll raise my obvious example again of wanting this kind of power to work with wings instead of a cape. You do realise it would be incredibly frustrating to have a power like this be locked into a mode that wouldn't fit with a significant portion of the playerbase.

This is why if such a power was introduced it would actually be the most widely useful to the majority if it was not linked to -any- physical object like capes, wings or anything else. This way this generic glide power could be used with ANY costume based cape, wings or anything else.

To accomplish what you specifically want with a glide power that appears to incorporate a cape to make it "work" that could actually be relatively easy to accomplish with new Flight Poses. In fact in conjunction to the suggestion of a generic glide power I often see the co-suggestion of more Flight Poses to make it look cool.

Right now (and hopefully until the end of the game) there is absolutely NO power in the game that requires a specific costume item to function. That's a basic design philosophy that keeps us from having to be FORCED to wear a specific costume items to have access a specific powers.

Now like I said I'd have absolutely no problem with a "Cape Gliding" power that, when activated, provided a cape that would be a part of this power (much like Rocket Board provides a board when it's activated). But I would never want to have a costume item cape have to be the -precondition- for this particular power to activate.

It's a very important distinction and I'm not quite sure the OP was taking it into account.

It's interesting that different players have different opinions on these kind of things.

For instance I have absolutely no problem with the idea of having costume items drop as craftable recipes because the argument that "all items should be available at character creation" is spurious to begin with because there's almost an infinite number of costume items you can't get at character creation ANYWAY. When was the last time you were able to dress your character with a Sybil dress or use animated hair? Since you can't have those examples why are the few others items (available as crafted recipes) actually needed at character creation? We can't have everything to begin with so why is having 99.5% of the total possible items at character creation not good enough? That extra 0.5% doesn't give either of us a Sybil dress - deal with it. *shrugs*

On the other hand the idea of getting "badge titles" as drops sounds totally ridiculous to me. Are you saying we should just randomly get badges as craftable drops? I'm not even really sure what you are actually suggesting with this.

Sure it's certainly one way to make going out into space "attractive" to those who would want to make a profit off of it. I simply see it as a relatively long-term goal and people need to be realistic about that. Without the "infrastructure" I mentioned any material we mined from an asteroid today would literally cost millions of dollars per kilo - it's simply no where near cost-effective to worry about at this point.

Think of this like the California gold rush of the 1840s. Sure there was plenty of opportunity to be had there, but until we started to build the railroads to get lots of people and material out to California it didn't get up to the serious, industrialized level things like that are today.

I agree with all of this. My only concern is that "asteroid mining" really shouldn't be our top space priority when we still don't even have things like 1) a cheap and reliable means to get to orbit on a routine basis 2) a serious space station that can be used to create and port other vehicles 3) a Moon base 4) a landing on Mars, and so on.

Asteroid mining will be important to us someday - we simply have like 20 or 30 other things we need to accomplish first before we worry about collecting extraterrestrial raw materials on an industrial level.

As of right now Rotten Tomatoes has 18 positive reviews and 1 negative one. And ironically after reading the one negative review (I like to focus on the "minority reports") what was said in it makes me want to see this movie even more.

I suspect once all the reviews come in it'll probably hold up at around 80% positive give or take.

I'm not really sure you'd have to restrict a purchase of one of these tokens to people who have Red Stars. I could see a reasonable scenario where a player puchases one of these tokens for future use. When that player finally wants to use it he/she could have a specific character claim the token, and then when that character tries to use the token only then would the "validation check" for red-starness need to be made.

In fact considering your point about the relative difficulty of tying to validate red-star worthiness at the time of token purchase I pretty much assumed it would actually -not- be handled that way anyway.

It all does seem rather... timely... to say the least.
I'm quite sure his passing was purely coincidental, albeit rather ironic given the circumstances.

Yeah it's been a while since I've seen Penny as well. They must have slipped this new shirt in during one of the Issue updates. Who knows how long it's been there but it would be cool if we could get stuff like that.

SG renames -should- be handled as purchasable tokens (just like character renames) that cost say $20 (just so no one will abuse them by using them too often) with the added rule that they can only be used by characters who are currently the "Red Star" superleaders of a SG. What was the point of creating the whole superleader SG rank if it wasn't to create single points of contact to handle things exactly like this?

I'm not saying what I suggested above would be trivial for our Devs to implement. But they've now had -years- to come up with a solution equivalent to this. How long should something like this actually take to figure out?

That's their classic cut-n-paste response to any "suggestion" regardless if they plan to pay attention to it or not.

The idea that you should "mention it in the forums" like it was a brand new idea is borderline patronizing. Sure I could understand that kind of generic, thoughtless response if this acutally was a brand new random idea from out of the blue. But people have been "requesting" SG renames here on the forums constantly FOR YEARS and that GM, unless he/she was totally braindead, fully well knows that.

I'm sorry but I just hate when the Devs/GMs feign ignorance of things we have been almost -screaming- at them about for years.

Turkey bacon is supposedly healthier, and it does taste OK (at least to me anyway). But it's still not super-healthy considering how you have to cook it to taste good and it's certainly not as tasty as "real" bacon. At best it's adequate alternative that's no where near perfect. *shrugs*

I'll take all of this into account and split the difference...
I'll be looking for I23 to go live around the 8th or 15th of May.

"Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL 1970s-era variety show act!"

I find your lack of faith in our ability to wear capes in zero-G disturbing...

Whenever Paragon Studios offer anything that "players have wanted for years" in a form that's gated behind something like the tier 9 VIP thing there will always be some people who dislike it. As you say I'm sure Paragon Studios expect some amount of "backlash" in this case.

On the other hand one could make the case that a significant number of people "who've been waiting for years" for these things are -already- tier 9 VIPs precisely because they've been playing this game for years. Sure it's hard for us to guesstimate how many people are currently tier 9 VIPs but it's probably safe to say there are enough of them around to justify making this a tier 9 VIP award in the first place. The Devs wouldn't spend a huge amount of time and effort on a new costume set only to have a couple of people be able to play with it.

I remember playing this game for around 2.5 years before they released ANY kind of wings for anyone Vet or not. Sure it might be hard to have to wait for these cool things but at least we have the -option- of paying for them right now if you want. This game need long term awards that are worth getting - the Mecha set will now be one of those awards.

As far as the "hype war" goes I actually don't mind that Batman may be losing it because I frankly think the Avengers movie has been way too OVER-HYPED at this point.

I'm not saying that Avengers is going to be a bad movie. I just think that they've released so many trailers and teasers for it that I think we've already collectively seen like half the movie already. It's gotten to the point where I'm almost actively trying NOT to see any more about it because I don't really want to go into the theater with this weird feeling that I've already seen it -before- I've seen it.

There are attempts underway to breed true hypoallergenic cats. The idea is to make them so they don't produce the specific protein that humans are allergic to. But as we all know these "Frankenstein" cats will turn evil somehow because if sci-fi teaches us anything it's that genetic tinkering always has a downside.

It's true that this new aura does look a bit "cartoony" and/or cel-shaded. I tried it out with several of my existing alts and it didn't work well with them. But I have a couple of other concept costumes where it actually worked pretty well so I can't really complain.

No one said every new aura had to perfect for everything. *shrugs*