Megajoule

I was going to post, but you've beaten me to all of the good ones.

My very first character was technically a test character, an MA/SR scrapper who never made it out of the tutorial. A version/reroll of him lives on as my second "real" character.

My first "real" character, first main and first 50 is the defender you can see in my forum avatar. She, in turn, is based on a Champions (paper and dice) character I came up with almost ten years before. The character's powers fit perfectly into FF/Energy, and she was the obvious choice to begin with; however, the name of the Champs character was already taken, and for that and other reasons I had to make the CoH version a different person. Looking back, I'm glad - it allowed me to root her in this game and world rather than just copying what I'd done before.

I stubbornly soloed her through most of the original story arcs, wanting to see them for myself rather than rushing through with a team. Between that and alt-itis, it took me a year and a half to get her to 50. Worth it.
I still bring her out to team with friends (when she's not battling evil in another dimension), but she's not following the Incarnate path; in my mind, she's "just" a person with super-powers, not a demigod.

Heck, I even remember how excited I was when she got to level 6 and picked up Hover.

My reasons:

No map switching.
My squishies don't constantly, constantly die to random IDF like they do in the maze under Lambda Sector.
Once Siege and Nightstar are pulled, it's a relatively straightforward beatdown, with some care to keep them balanced, and they stay put; Marauder jumps all over the place, needs to be kept pacified, and occasionally emits one-hit-kill AoEs.
The cut scene is now skippable, if everyone's already done the BAF at least once. The one with Marauder can't and apparently won't be.

I'm another old-timer who's going to miss Galaxy City, but I was never a part of the Gemini Park crowd - nor do I spend much time at the D. It's probably related to being a stay-at-home anti-social type in RL, who doesn't go to bars and clubs. That said, I've always felt that my characters had better things to do during their unplayed downtime.

Yeah, "we've been victims for years, so now YOU have to put up with X for a while, suck it!" is (a) confrontational, (b) non-productive, and (c) acknowledges that the current situation does suck for a segment of the players.
I really hope that there's a non-zero-sum solution, which doesn't require that for one group to "win", another must "lose."

"bar", in this context, means "except for". It's a slightly fancy usage (says the English major).

re: Keyes - when my manic-depressive, slightly-mad 'troller (yet another parallel of the Clockwork King) listens to your rant and concludes you're "a touch obsessed"...

I agree that the One Good Spider mission is great, if an extended knock-down-drag-out fight and giving Recluse the [obscene gesture] is what you're in the mood for. I understand some people just want to collect their A-Merit and get out. That'd be what Silent Blade and your (usually pathetic) doppleganger are for.

For what it's worth (and the absurdity of an NYC-size metropolis in Rhode Island aside), I always figured that Paragon was "Primal" Earth's Providence.

Very nice buttons, SnowGlobe.
Would it be possible to get a version of Freem with only the two Es?

Last night, I ran into an old buddy (just resubscribed, and didn't know about F2P on the way) who my controller used to run with in the Bad Old Hollows, back around Issue 4 or so. He'd just finished respeccing for inherent Fitness, and I and another friend of his gave him a crash course in the Incarnate system.

You never know who'll pop up out of the blue, I guess.

It's sad, IMO, that this has to be, but it's also true:
Before doing something like this, both devs and players need(ed) to think about how the change could be use to grief people (in this case, with unwanted, distracting, concealing and/or triggering FX).
Especially with all the fine new free players the game is going to be getting soon.

Somewhat related question (that I asked on another thread):

Has anyone else noted that ALL of the IDF Commanders have the same face as Emperor Cole?
Is it a simple case of texture/model re-use, or something... more?

IMO, they should not. Either you were here then, or you weren't.

However, anniversary badges should (IMO) be made account-wide, so that one is not faced with your dilemma.

Actually, Claws, I'm complaining about:

The lack of anything new to do that isn't part of the New Fun;

and even more egregiously, the costume bits, emotes etc that can only very tenuously be justified as "Incarnate" but were gated there specifically as "incentives" for people who would not otherwise run trials (because they just don't like that sort of thing, or have done and stopped because they're bored out of their minds by the grinding, or whyever).
Because, as the Devs themselves admitted, if it was possible to get this stuff any other way, no one would run Trials for their own sake. And then this whole bubble would burst.

New (cosmetic) content that pretty much everyone agrees has nothing really to do with endgame is being held back to prop up said endgame.
Not cool.

Yeah, something similar would be good for two of my Incarnates (the only ones taking Praetorian pets at all).

My heroes are not in the habit of killing people, and even my villain Incarnate doesn't bind or traffic in souls.

"How about every toon I PL to 50 opens a slot for another, without me ever having to pay any real money?"

That's a NO.

What you're seeing in this thread is nothing new for the OP, and the reason why she is the first and only poster to ever make my forum ignore list.

Props to SnowGlobe for some fine work. No props to Miss I-Can't-Be-Bothered-To.

I've had (and expressed) some concerns, but at this time I don't expect to move to the VIP server (and yes, it would be a move; I don't play on multiple servers). My home is on Virtue, my friends are on Virtue, and that's a big part of why I'm still playing.

Also, most of the things I'm worried about are things that people already do. Demonstrations of Sturgeon's Law and/or Gabe's GIFT can be easily found if one takes any time to look, and often when one is not. With more people comes more stupid and/or bad behavior - double the population, (at least) double the idiots, spammers and trolls. We already have these, F2P just means more.

Finally, my biggest piece of evidence that the VIP server isn't going to be some perfect ivory tower of refuge - every single person currently on Freedom (the server) would qualify to play there. So yeah.