Ravenswing

"Only an idiot ignores a source of potential information. Mind you, only an idiot reveals their hand like that. I'm a bit surprised at you, Blinky. You're willing to accept at face value what an avatar claims without even the slightest corroborative evidence?

"While I dislike witch hunts, and think most of the chatter in this room has consisted of wild rumours making little sense in an attempt to smear Longstaff, without corroborating evidence the 'FBSA statement' we just heard makes me more suspicious that Longstaff was involved. That was probably the lousiest, most foolish thing I've seen done in a chatroom in years."

The avatar absently sits down on a blue chair, though hovering on the edge, apparently still somewhat undecided.

A wave of irridescent colour sweeps over the figure's mask, for whatever reason.

"As far as I can gather from the conversation here, Pious was killed by a mercenary, not by Molly Longstaff. The 'conspiracy' put forward thus far is that she hired the merc and that this is being covered up. There's been no suggestion that she litterally pulled the trigger.

"And not all Unity Vigil members provide direct feeds of their activities to BODI. And not telling her things is not always because of a cover up."

Unless you call appendicitus an injury (because four days of pain followed by an operation, blood poisoning, and over a month of recovery beats everything else hands down), I'd have to go for accidentially picking up the wrong end of a soldering iron.

"I'm actually unsure what we are discussing any more. The 'evidence' we have been presented with suggests Pious stuck his nose in the wrong place and people with bigger guns shot it off. While I'd have to consider that evidence to be... dubious, it's the only actual evidence we have been given which is not pure speculation.

"One 'hero' going bad is not exactly the most uncommon thing in the world, or are you suggesting he was influenced? Even then, there seems little connection between his behaviour and his demise."

Unclips the mask and holds it up, there's nothing under the helmet. The mask continues to lipsync as she speaks, however.

"This is an avatar, the 'mask' is it's face. We can make them look like anything, why make it look like me?

"Now, you've already said you believe the government is being kept quiet, what makes you think any investigation would result in real findings? I'd point out that this 'war' could hardly have gone unnoticed. We live in a surveillance society, there are Longbow on every street corner. Do you think we do anything they don't know about, sanction, or arrange?"

(( Putting aside heavy political argument... I didn't get the memo. Pick your favourite flake conspiracy theory and substitute. ))

"Who says I'm opposing anything? I want you to make a case that does not involve pure supposition and paranoid, reationary theory."

The mask smiles. "I can make those up as well. You want greater accountability of 'heroes.' You want them to bound up in even more rules and laws than they already are. This would result in two things: fewer criminals in the Zig and more heroes turning vigilante, thus bringing disrepute to the entire 'hero' concept. Since your actions are clearly designed to reduce the effectiveness of the law enforcement of the US, you must be a villain or a terrorist.

"Pure supposition, absolute speculation, but based on more actual facts than you've put on the table."

I had my first ever phishing email for NCSoft today. Fairly crude, no finesse. Still, isn't it nice to know someone cares?

<< Insert link to anti-phishing advise here >>

Remember, children, your account security is largely down to you.

A slightly transparent book appears out of then air with OED on the cover, several pages flick over rapidly. "'Advocate' and 'representative' appear to be quite far apart in the dictionary. And the owner of a company need not be acting in such a role all the time. Take Bill Gates' charitable works, they have nothing to do with Microsoft. As for the continued conspiracy theories... I'm afraid that's all they are. You'll be telling us next that the CIA planned the 9-11 attacks."

The mask looks toward MrBlinky and the shadow figure and then shrugs. "Neither of you has the slightest idea how actual heroes operate in this city, do you?"

"So, supposition piled upon assumption."

"You can if you really want to come over as a conspiracy nut, sure. You're complaining about a single death in a hard fight? I'd call that good work. You complain about lack of arrests, but targetted arrest is a standard police tactic and if the target's dead..." The mask shakes from side to side. "Still not convincing."

"So, you're making accusations against someone with no real evidence?" The figure shrugs. "And the evidence you have is that your target lead a group of heroes. That seems... weak."

"Surely there's a clear crime committed here. There is no question regarding whether defenestration or murder are acceptable behaviour for a sanctioned hero, they aren't. If you think killing criminals is the right way to deal with things, you hand in your license and hope you can dodge the cops and other heroes. It's always been like that. Where's the debate?"

"What was the motivation for hiring the assassin?" the armoured figure asks. "And would the outcome of a trial have been different? Well, there's no death penalty in Rhode Island, but if the trial had been on the Isles..."

CoH is a memory hog (a lot of games are). The more memory you have, alongside the graphics card, the better, but at least 2GB which may be lacking in a 5 year old PC.

An avatar dressed in stylised (read 'brief') samauri armour including helmet and face mask appears bearing the name Sharp Words. The entry animation features the form being built up in segments, from the ground up and the mask's lips sync when she speaks.

"Don't mind me, just observing. Interesting topic."

(( I wasn't around for the war, but I can't resist a GitS analogy and I love playing Devil's Advocate. ))

Marus Cole is Marcus Cole. Anyone really believe that, given slightly twisted conditions, Statesman wouldn't have taken over the world to save it?

Thing to learn, maybe, is that Praetoria isn't just the flip-side of Earth Prime, it's more complex than that. It's far more of an alternate Earth than a mirror one.

Some know others, some don't. Depends on the characters.

A lot exist within the Galaxy Girl RP group on Union and so have at least heard of each other, but then they've also heard of other people's characters they've never physically met due to newspapers, television, general reputation, etc.

Come GR, one of my characters will be the Praetorian counterpart to my current main, though she'll actually be a fairly significantly different character, and they probably won't meet in the forseeable future.

I think you have some mechanical issues, and some conceptual ones.

Conceptually: You are creating an SG which appears at first glance to exist in order to create a base. The inhabitants of the SG are there for a few days while they get fixed up and then leave.

Mechanically: Bases are not going to be accessible from both sides any more than they were, so you actually need two bases. As far as I'm aware, Praetoria is a new factional area which will not be accessible to 'normal' characters. It can't be used as a faction-neutral location to host cross-faction activities. Two bases, two SGs, too few characters generating revenue.

Also note that Praetorians do not start off as Grey, they need to pick red or blue when created, and they need to pick again before leaving Praetoria at level 20.

I'm not actually sure why GR is required for any of this, btw. There's nothing in this which requires Praetoria and we've been working around the Blue/Red divide for years without having the GR slider mechanism available. You even have two characters in mind to run the two sides of the operation, rather than a true 'grey' (or should it be 'purple' seeing as it's red and blue) character sitting on the fence.