SlickRiptide

Before you can address a request like this, we need to understand why they made the decision to limit everyone to one non-combat pet at a time. If there are server resource issues, then it may be that it's simply infeasible for the door to be left open for every character in the game to have a combat pet alongside a non-combat pet.

The second hurdle is that they'd be a lot more amenable to having a single pet pool with customizable pet than to have a dozen pet pools customized to a dozen different pets. That suggests that power pool customization has to come online before a power like this comes online.

Assuming that those issues are addressed satisfactorily,then sure, I'd pay for a battle pet power pool.

Alternatively, I'd settle for craftable pet powers along the lines of the vet pets and the leprechauns; non-combat pets that offer a buff or debuff of some kind instead of participating directly in the battle.

If the costume pack dropped at approximately the same time as a space zone that featured Monsters From The Id, I would be reduced to such drooling levels of fanboyism that I'd be unable to criticize anything done by Paragon Studios for at least a month.

Oh and I LOL'ed thoracic birthing. :-p

I want to marry this costume pack and have its babies.

Put another way, badges are flavor. The fact that you can scan my character to see what badges he or she has earned is a game mechanic, not some statement about my hero or villain's personal characteristics. The only badge that matters to my character is the one that is currently listed under his or her name, assuming that one is listed at all.

None of my heroes or villains would portray themselves as if they had literally been awarded medals by some authority figure or organization, nor would they treat the badge flavor text as if it was some sort of definitive statement about his or her character. It's a title, nothing more.

I generally treat badges as a secondary title or as a "mood" thing. There have been a few characters where I deliberately sought out a particular badge that I felt enhanced the character concept. I don't even really see it as RP so much as just a variation on the titles that we get to add to our names at certain milestone levels.

I've actually been advocating for a few years now for the ability to display badge art as costume emblems. Some of the badges are pretty nifty looking.

I'm not in a position to check at the moment - Did the story arc award a souvenir at the end?

The story arc is titled _The Freakshow War_ (going by Red Tomax, it's been too long ago since I last ran it for me to remember it), in the level 30ish range.

I'd like to visit the Ouroboros mission that lets us see this (and maybe explains just what happened to Jacaranda Vista):



This is a photo of a street in Praetoria, South Africa lined with Jacaranda trees.

Hopefully, this SSA is a learning experience for Paragon Studios, both in how to write this kind of material and in how to publicize it.

My personal feeling about the death of Statesman is that it was unnecessary and it was done for reasons that had much less to do with the game and its back story than it had to do with the feelings of the real-life people who run the game. The problems here with offing Statesman because he represents the old regime run deeper than just getting rid of Jack Emmert. They go to the heart of the neglect that the game has been suffering the last few years in the lore department.

It is my belief at this point that the people in charge could really have their way, they'd just ditch this world entirely and remake it according to their own desires. This goes all the way back to Arctic Sun leaving and the Paragon Times vanishing and half of the lore just vaporizing. This goes to the heart of Matt's decision that he'd be a poor leader if he required current-day employees to stay beholden to eight-year-old lore instead of telling the stories that they want to tell. The "problem", if you see it as such, is not that Matt saw Statesman as a reminder of bad times (which he probably does) but that he saw Statesman and the Phalanx and all of it as old crap (my words, not his) that needs to be swept out to make way for newer crap. Matt doesn't respect the old game; he wants to demolish it and replace it with a new game and that attitude filters down to the rest of the company.

That's how I see the current situation at Paragon Studios, correctly or incorrectly as it may be.

The story itself was alright, but only because they unexpectedly managed to pull a somewhat satisfying final chapter out of their hat. It's a bit telling, however, that the thing that people comment most on is the visuals of chapter seven, not the writing. If you ran the same story without those visuals, I suspect the response to chapter seven would be rather more critical.

My bottom line is based on the $35 price tag of the story. This is a sub-par product, especially if you primarily play as a hero. They put so much effort into making a satisfying and relevant villain story that they made an eminently dissatisfying hero story. My hero is directly involved in the death of THREE signature heroes, and indirectly with a fourth who is arguably having a psychotic break. Why Manticore is loose on the streets instead of in jail or in a mental ward is beyond me. I guess that Justin Sinclair has the best lawyers that money can buy.

In any case, when I compare this story to Going Rogue or Architect, or even any of the booster packs, that $35 price tag just makes me scratch my head in disbelief. I might buy chapter one for the weekly hero merit and I might buy chapter seven just for the cool visuals, but I will never buy the rest unless it's offered as a $10 package for the whole story.

I hope that SSA-2 is a better product.

Thanks, I guess I needed to be hit over the head with a cartoon mallet to click through. :-p

I rescind my previous grade.(I also laughed at the vanity pet.)

Ah, so that's why. I wasn't patient enough to watch the whole market slideshow.

Cute, but I have to give it a C for effort, unless there really IS a clown summoning powerset in the market today...

Did they decide that there was no way to top Visual Sounds and just give up this year?

He's only Mostly Dead.

Look, here's the problem with the way Matt and some other developers got interviewed about the SSA's - They made it appear as if the story was created to serve the goal of killing Statesman instead of making it appear that Statesman's death was decided upon as the most effective way to serve the goals of the story. This is only compounded by the fact that the in-game environment isn't actually prepped to acknowledge the deaths of either of the murdered signature characters.

THAT is why there has been any question regarding "propriety" or "spite" or what-have-you.

There are so many different ways to take Statesman out of the picture that I simply can't agree with the players who say "NO! He had to DIE! That's the only way that he could be permanently removed so that he'd never threaten my hero's pre-eminence! A retired/depowered/amnesiac/disembodied/fallen/lost-in-time/etc... Statesman could COME BACK!"

As if, in comic book world, a dead Statesman could never come back...

If Thomas Magnum found a reason to come back, Statesman could find a reason to stop resisting all of those resurrection attempts and come back.

In any case, it's done with and it's clear that the company policy is that he's gone and good riddance. It doesn't matter if it's good riddance because he's the last vestige of the Old Republic or if it's because they were convinced that it truly was good business to remove any suggestion that there could be a NPC that was more powerful than a top-tier player character. He's gone. Sister Psyche is gone. The Phalanx will continue to be portrayed as bumblers who can't hope to outshine the player characters.

Eventually we'll get a story in which Prometheus gets killed because HE's limiting somebody's character concept, but we need to get through the battle with Batallion first. Until then, its probably best to just move on to whatever constitutes the next chapter.

I'd like to see the text of this "crazy, nasty" rant. Any links?

I'd been asking for something akin to the SSA since the game launched and Calvin Scott made his one abortive test of the feasibility of doing episodic content.

I'm in favor of getting both SSA's and DA-like content. I'm even willing to buy SSA's or other self-contained stories as booster packs, if they're done well and they give better rewards than SSA1 was designed with. A hero merit once a week! Whee! Give me a badge or a costume piece and/or a new power for completing the arc in addition to the weekly hero merit and then we're talking. If the chapters are up for individual purchase, then there'd better be rewards for EACH CHAPTER and they'd better be reasonably priced and not priced artificially high as an effort to promote them as VIP perks.

"Spite" is possibly too strong a word to describe the motivations of the dev team. There's no question at all that some of them felt that Statesman was a symbol of an administration that they were well shot of, and that publicly removing him from the game environment was a way of removing the last remaining symbol of the old regime.

If you feel inclined to verify that conclusion, you're welcome to search through my posts for the last couple of months. You'll find the links to the interviews that I've posted in the past, with the words from Matt Miller's mouth. I feel no strong incentive to dig them up again myself when they've been gone over thoroughly already in other threads.

By the end of SSA1, we are presented with at least a hand-wave explanation for Darren Wade targeting Statesman and Sister Psyche. Story-wise, we have to be content with that. Do I ever want to see this happen this way again? No. They'd better have gotten it out of their systems at this point, because as a player who regularly either subscribes or tends to spend $15 or more per month on purchases I won't stand for this kind of shenanigans a second time.

I don't need to know all of the insider information in the company's operation to know that I disliked where this story went and the path it traveled to get there. I expect the management to treat the game's environment and back story with respect rather than treating it as a throw-away construct that can be tinkered with whenever someone feels that they have to "leave their mark", or treating individual characters as if they "belong" to some individual developer, acquiring that developer's baggage, instead belonging to the game and its players.

I don't want to see that any future SSA's even have a question of "spite", whether it's an appropriate label or not.

Hero 1 is Britain's analog of Statesman. He'd be a lot more likely to go home if he was cured. I could sort of see him joining Vanguard, for obvious reasons, though.

Here's what I don't get about blueside - Why is it perceived so frequently as a situation where "That guy is standing in the shoes that rightfully belong to me?"

When you hear complaints about redside, you really don't often hear complaints about how Lord Recluse is so limiting and you wish he'd be just dead. In fact, most players who play to the end of the overarching story, where you hand Recluse his broken mask and say "FYI - This is what the future holds if you mess with me", are reasonably satisifed with that situation. They may still have to live with Recluse being the top of the villain power structure, but they seldom say "I am really pissed that I can't just kill Lord Recluse and take his place."

Despite arguing with VoodooGirl's position, I understand what she's saying and I have a certain amount of sympathy for that take on things. Given the above, though, I believe that the lesson of redside is that the perception of a void is managable by allowing the player to earn the respect and acknowledgement of the top dogs rather than by destroying them and then allowing the player to pretend that the PC is the replacement for the NPC.

For my tastes, I would have been perfectly validated with a situation where my PC hero fought alongside Statesman and Lord Recluse, where the press conference asked Statesman "How did you save the world?" and Statesman replied "I didn't. It was %PLAYER% and I think you should direct the rest of your questions to him.", and where that hallway of soldiers honoring my hero with a mass salute included a Statesman shaking my hero's hand then leading that salute with one of his own.

I believe that all that anybody really required was for the game to have the pre-eminent blue characters acknowledge the PC's as equal or greater, just as the redside story finally has Lord Recluse grudgingly acknowledge that the PC villain has become someone worthy of respect equal to Recluse himself.

Instead of making the player character into a bigger fish, the designers instead chose to shrink the size of the pond so that the PC would FEEL bigger.