Lothic

I agree that the timing of the 2xp weekend was likely calculated to work with the timing of when Issue 22 will be released. But I think you have the order of when these things will happen reversed. Having a 2xp weekend happen immediately after the release of Issue 22 will encourage everyone to play with the new powersets and content that much more.

The only thing we know for certain (from Zwillinger) is that it will not be on the 28th. But that makes dates like March 6th or 13th for Issue 22 even that much more likely. The Issue itself has been in open beta for almost 2 months now and the last set of patch notes were extremely tiny. It's very clear that very little (if anything) is going to change before it's released so they might as well kick it out the door in the next week or two.

This is precisely why I've never gotten too "involved" with the canon of this game. It's always been easier to focus on my own characters and let the rest of the game world shuffle itself out regardless of whether it makes 100% total sense or not.

People were having problems using these tokens on the beta server in the last few weeks. Seems as though they didn't fix all the bugs with them before the released them to the live servers.

Until we know for sure I wouldn't plan on trying to use one of these tokens within like a day (20 hours?) of a recent alignment switch.

Yeah they worked for the first few years of the game. But I don't think they ever lived up to the expectations of what the Devs had in mind for them and as it turned out I don't think many people actually "used" them regardless. Leaderboards probably never had much purpose in a PvE MMO environment anyway.

Like DarkGob said if they are getting updated now it's probably because they are connected to some automated part of the game. I don't think the Devs were planning to revive them anytime soon.

That's cool. I had never even really heard of this show until it was mentioned a few weeks back in this forum. Since then I took a chance with renting the season one DVDs and found it was a pretty funny show. I'm looking forward to catching up to the latest episodes eventually.

This is exactly what the Devs want from this. This was never about offering us something we'd all want to buy 20 of or that the Devs expected to make a ton of money from. This was about a method of control over a feature that the Devs want to make sure is available to us while at the same time remains something that we won't over-use.

Remember if the Devs needed money from alignment switches we would have been paying for them all-along.

I think people such as yourself have the confused idea that the Devs were actually expecting to make a "potential goldmine" from this. If they actually wanted to make a lot of money this way they would have made the ONLY way you could side-switch be via this token method. At the very least they would not have left the "free" way to do it in the game at the same time.

I don't feel that 800 points is strictly "desirable" but it does match the costs of other account services like server transfers and character renames so it's probably more in-line to say that I consider the 800 point cost to be unsurprisingly "on par" with those other services.

Setting the price down to the 80-160 range might be enough to keep you from switching back-n-forth multiple times a day but I suspect that price point would not be high enough for that desired effect on the majority of people which is what the Devs want from this.

I suppose you can simply take comfort in knowing that the original multi-day path to side switching is still an option for you.

... So that's why all my badge hunters got all those "side-switching" badges within a couple of weeks of being able to switch sides in the first place. Not quite sure what your point was here other than if you have less reason to side-switch the traditional way (because you've been done with all the transitional badges for ages) then the Alignment Tokens make even more sense to use for any future switches you want to make.

I doubt they are going to reverse this change anytime soon. They did this not only as a possible means to save load on the servers but also probably to limit our ability to have a whole collection of vanity pets that provide multiple buffs active at the same time.

In case you are not aware there is a brand new vanity pet being tested on the beta server now (a cute little leprechaun actually) that provides a bonus to INF earned while active. This is the first time we've ever gotten a non-Vet vanity pet that provides a buff like this. Clearly this means that the Devs intend to add other new pets over time that will likely provide other new buffs. Ultimately they probably didn't want people running around with 5 or 10 pets each providing multiple buffs all at once.

I don't like the change they made with this. But given the likelihood of where things are going it does sort of make sense.

Well I'm not saying they could not make a train bridge to PI because they can't do it from a technologic point of view. I'm merely suggesting that the cost of doing it (from a city budget point of view) would probably be prohibitive PRECISELY because they are already wasting all their money maintaining the War Walls, gateways to other dimensions and launch pads to the moon.

My guess is that much like many of the Japanese islands for instance it's just far easier (an cheaper) to maintain a ferry for most of the civilian traffic and let the high priority people (like our characters) have the option to take a helicopter there.

Yes one could argue that their effect is "minor". But the cost of these tokens really has nothing to do with their overall perceived value.

Much like server transfers and character renames most MMOs price services like this on the relative expensive side in order to motivate people not to do them whimsically. You see they don't mind if a person wants to switch servers or, in this case, change alignments. They just don't want people doing it any time they want. If nothing else this reduces the impact to the servers and prevents possible exploits.

So long before I had even heard of Alignment Change Tokens I pretty much assumed that if something along those lines ever happened they would be sold for a relatively large amount. *shrugs*

Actually I'm not really sure how "debatable" the alignment token cost really is. To serve its purpose it pretty much had to be a bit expensive.

You see the only real reason the original alignment change system required 10 Tips and several days is because the Devs wanted to prevent people from flip-flopping their alignments every 5 minutes. This stops anyone from being able to figure out any kind of an exploit that might have been possible if you could change alignments at-will.

So with this new alignment change token they had to make it expensive enough to "encourage" people not to use it all the time. You see the Devs don't really mind people switching alignments - they just don't want us doing it constantly.

Sometimes people will want to take several days and play through a bunch of Tip missions to spin around the alignment wheel. Other times they'd be willing to spend some points to save time.

If you want to save money change your alignment with Tip missions.
If you want to save time change your alignment with Alignment tokens.

Seems like a no-brainer why we shouldn't or couldn't have both options.

I don't disagree that the future Super Packs sets could have more types of awards associated with them.

But who said that anything offered by the Paragon Market needs to be things that will be in high demand forever? Basically just about anything new that hits the Market will have a short period of high demand that will taper off as time goes on. Paragon Studios is not relying on any one single thing sold in the Market to be their main source of revenue (unlike WotC whose main business at first was the CCGs directly). In the long run the more things they offer for sale the more they will have a constant revenue stream from the Market in total.

That would work as long as you didn't mind the fact that your "huge person with female faces and fake boobs" would only have male costume options to choose from. Sure there might be a few combinations of costume items that would be "passable" for that. But sadly I think any kind of solution along these lines would be far more involved than your girlfriend is accounting for.

Think of it this way: if there was an easy solution to the "huge female" problem the Devs probably would have handled it years ago. *shrugs*

Sure but in the real world there's a significant difference between running static power lines for miles versus having a long train bridge that would run for miles out into the ocean. There have been attempts that this kind of thing (like the overseas railroad to Key West) but even that real world example only lasted a few years before a hurricane took it out.

There are countless examples of ferries running between islands and mainlands like this today. For the canon of the game there's clearly no obvious justification for having a tram in this situation.

Yeah I think I knew that. But there were people who were saying they were still having weird problems like having newly switched villains stuck in blueside Ouroboros and the like. Figured that in order to solve those problems they might have put a limit on the types of places you could be -before- you used the tokens.

Yeah I have to assume they made it so that you can't be in a mission or a PvP zone while using one of these Tokens. You probably can't be in Ouroboros or a SG base either. But like I said before it might be worth experimenting regardless - I'm sure someone will try all these things soon enough.

The only real reason the Devs originally gave us the "10 Tips to change alignments" system in the first place was to limit our ability to flip-flop between being a hero and villain every 5 minutes anyway.

As Doctor Roswell said the "priceiness" of these alignment change tokens is simply another method to keep people from switching too often. The Devs don't mind us switching - they just don't want us to be able to exploit some kind of game system that quick flipping might allow.