Quinch

Hmm; that's actually the good point. Offline activities {for lack of a better term} like auction house transactions... hold on, let me try to trace this.

1. I have a transcendent character on the Protector server named, oh, Bob the Protector. I decide to activate him on the Guardian server. That name is already taken on that server, so I name him Bob the Guardian instead.
2. I log into Bob the Protector and play him for a while. In that time, he gains three levels, five thousand influence, a handful of badges etc. I also score a Pancreas of Vecna which I put on the auction house.
3. I proceed to log out. The moment I finish logging out, Bob the Guardian is basically deleted and a copy of Bob the Protector is created in his place. Costume, influence, badges, personal inventory, the works - all except the auction house inventory, to prevent duplication of items. The game also remembers which version of Bob was last played - this will come into play in a moment.
4. While I'm offline, my Pancreas of Vecna is bought by Joe the Triumphant. Joe is now its proud owner and three million influence lighter. Because the auction house inventory was not synchronized with the recently {re}created Bob the Guardian, there is no second Pancreas on the auction block to be bought.
5. I log back in. The game looks up which Bob I played last and synchronizes his auction inventory across both instances of that character. That means that each Bob now has the profits from the sale in his auction house inventory, but since logging either guarantees that the other will be overwritten, it's a moot point.

That, in theory should be how the whole thing would flow - did I miss anything?

So in answer to my question....?

Found this in the I16 patch notes;

"Flashback Missions now use combat level instead of security level."

Can someone explain to me what this means, exactly? I'm hoping for a confirmation of whether or not you can now bring sidekicks lower than the arc's range, but if that's not the case {as my one experiment showed}, what does it mean?

What, then, is the value to those transactions? And from a business perspective, what is the value of enacting such a thing? (Which dramatically limits future income for said transactions)

See point 3; it wouldn't be free, though how much is well, undefined. But definitely not free, thus hopefully justifying the work involved.

While I support that idea, it... doesn't seem to have much to do with the original suggestion.

Can you be a bit more specific?

A short suggestion.

Issue 15 introduced a serverwide channel named Architect Chat. That's... all that's really known of it, since it's not present in the interface and for the most part, knowledge of its existence is only spread by word-of-mouth.

Given the lack of need for an Architect-specific channel {even if it doesn't have an officially stated purpose} and the potential usefulness of a serverwide general chat channel, I propose that "Architect Chat" channel be renamed into "General" and be automatically added to the first tab that already receives Local or Broadcast channels.

Any thoughts on this?

Figured I'd take a pot shot at the whole "empty servers vs. full servers" thing in a way that'd use the best of both worlds. For the oft-explained reasons, merging the servers isn't an option, so I am not going rehash that old idea, but instead, I'll try to approach it from a different angle.

Individual freedom and versatility are good things. This is not to be contested - it seems logical enough. The ability to choose your environment, more or less populated, for example, can only appeal to a player, and in this post, I'll attempt to present a workable concept of creating such a mechanic.

As things stand, each character is locked to his individual server - usually the one he was created on. What I propose is the ability to make a character "transcendent" - essentially playable on every server, though a more accurate description would be that of not being bound to any server, much like a global name isn't bound to a character but an account. Of course, this approach is not as simple as it sounds, and there would be several hurdles that would need to be overcome;

1. Character representation on the server: Each server has a limited number of available character slots - how to deal with that limited resource? If a player's roster on a certain server is full, it would be unfair to grant another slot for free when additional character slots are a paid-for commodity. On the other hand, creating a mirror of the transcendent character on each server might tie up spots which the player might wish to use for non-transcendent characters. One way of dealing with this problem would be to show the transcendent character on each server, whether or not there is an available slot for them, but to have them "locked" by default. When the player decides to "activate" the transcendent character on the specific server and there is no available slot to do so, the player will be unable to do so until they have either purchased an additional character slot or deleted a character on that server, thus freeing up a slot.
2. Duplicate names: A character named SpiderWolfBatHulk may be available on Guardian, but someone already snagged it on Protector, and names must be unique to each character. The solution is simple - when activating a transcendent character on a server and its original name is not available, the character will need to be renamed into an available name before it can be unlocked. Whether or not a character rename token should be bought for that or not might be a more fluid issue.
3. Why would the devs bother?: SCR aside, I doubt this would be a simple system to implement and since it already infringes on some bought commodities {character transfer, for example}, it would need to be worth the devs' while to implement. That, in turn, begs the question of what exactly we would be buying and how much it would cost; would transcendence be applied to a single character and would expire when that character is deleted, thus removing it from all servers? Would deleting a transcendent character make it available to be applied to another?

What does everyone think?

Well, the US/Canada restriction is a pain in the Spartuchis, but I guess I can understand the legal complications. On the other hand, if the legal problem stems from the material rewards for winning the contest, can the contest be arranged so that, if a non-US/C resident wins the contest, the material gains are awarded to the eligible individual of their choice? That way the actual winner gets the game and flory and can give the swag to their friend?

Since my last tongue-in-cheek rant about the Fifth Column got mistaken for one about actual killstealers {which, for the record, I've never had trouble with}, I figured I'd ask again, this time without the satire - given the battles between the Council and the Column, is there an effective way of hitting the streets for Council hunts? The spawns seem to appear with a 2:3 ratio in the 5th's favor and most of what's left of the Council tends to get vaporized in the initial salvo. Given that these battles tend to appear before the player that spawned them even notices them, are there any viable ways of taking down what's left of the Council before the 5th wipes them out?

I've noticed something when flying over a skirmish.

Raserei Ubermenschen Fire: You think Striga Isle is a base of operations? Our headquarters is in the middle of Paragon City!

Is history about to repeat itself?

/target_custom_near Lant$$powexec_name Cookie Launcher

Not... quite what I meant either, and I think it might be bad form to name names in the forums...

Ahhhhh. Not quite what I meant.

What can I say, I'm a completionist.

You know the type, the kind that just swoops in the moment they see you eying a particular mob and just swarm over it before you can so much as blink, let alone get a hit in before pounding them into oblivion and denying you the XP, influence, drops and most importantly credit for the kill for the endless stream of hunts my contacts seem to have prepared for me. They're showing up wherever I go, whatever zone I'm in or neighborhood and it's starting to tick me off. It's not enough they had to kill Atlas, oh no, now they have to mess with my hunts too.

Jerks.

Well, Meg Mason in Hollows, Borea in RWZ and most contacts in the Firebase {I think} have those.

Let's see, some hostages now animate differently while captured, Vahz zombies now do the Frankenstein shuffle and mobs carrying orange body bags now toss them on the floor before attacking.

I agree that the Info Terminals are... terminally useless, but this kind of trivia wouldn't make them much more useful, functional or otherwise.

Why not repurpose them into bulletin boards? Like an in-game version of the forum calendar? They could become a place to announce forming teams, task forces and other events, set them to expire either after a set amount of time or until the player logs out or whenever the player or character is logged in {"For a good time team PST Team Leader Man!"}

Edit: Aw, strikethrough don't work.