Megajoule

The real answer, from MMO design circa 2004?
To pad/fill/stretch out subscription/play time.
Also, to give you a chance to see more of the city, which was kind of impressive 5 years ago, and to use your spiffy cool superheroic travel powers, which you could get as early as level 14! No waiting until level 40 for a horse!(*)


(*) Sure, now The Other Game is letting people have mounts as early as level 20, because they learned the same lesson our devs did: walking is boring, and players don't like having their time wasted on travel for its own sake.

So God is an evil despot? We've worked our way around to Gnosticism now?

Of course not. They're Crey's.
(It didn't end well when that got out, either.)

It's a game based on comic books. You're surprised?

Plus, Freedom and the French deserve each other. *rimshot*

This explains my confusion with this entire thread. The last time I checked the Name Watch myself, it was as you describe. Sad to hear it's become something else.

When have you ever known me to do that? *innocent blink-blink*

To the rest of your post, however, and somewhat back on topic - yeah, MOST of the Devs' attempted in-game justifications for new features and game mechanics have ranged from clunky to stupid. A part of me thinks they should just not try; it would at least mean less for those of us who want to tell our own stories to ignore.

inf is inf. It's game cash. If the Devs don't want lowbie alts being twinked out by their mains and/or friends... well, it's far too late for that, the horse has not only left the barn but sired a herd of wild mustangs. But they should come out and say so in plain language, instead of hiding behind the kind of story excuse they've trained us to ignore (by being so lame).

Now, it could be that they accept that it happens but they don't want to make it easy; to discourage it without disallowing it. But if so, again, it would be nice if they'd just say so.

It's also possible that, like Power Customization until recently, it's simply about #57 on the list of priorities to be coded. They might get to it sometime before they shut down the servers... maybe.

"It looks like you're trying to produce a rant. What kind of rant would you like?"
* Farmers
* Griefers
* SPORE
* Those kids today and their damn music

Oh, and Forbin Project? Go watch some Baywatch reruns instead. Perv.

Joking aside, it must be admitted that nearly all comic book universes are Earth-centered to a degree not often seen since Copernicus came along. All those sci-fi planets and alien empires, all those alternate dimensions, but for some reason, the one that the heroes live in/on is the one that everything happens to. This is for a simple, obvious reason - all the readers also live on an Earth, which is improbably similar despite the presence/lack of superpowers - but it can lead to absurd situations as the OP and others have noted.

It's even worse in the Marvel U, where New York City is the center of the universe. (Insert famous New Yorker cover here.)

And it has no vowels except Y.

Are you ever gonna stop banging on that particular drum? Just curious.

Years ago, there was a joke character in Champions (the pen and paper version) - the Flying Brick, named for a very common character type (mostly because of the big guy in blue and his once-even-more-popular rival, the big red cheese). It was exactly what it said on the tin: a seemingly ordinary red brick, endowed with intelligence, nigh-invulnerability, and the power of flight. It defeated villains by flying into them at Very High Speed.