TonyV

No, $45 to get decent chat capability and a crapton of other stuff. I would actually fork over an extra $5 to snag the bonus 600 Paragon Points (4600 total), which would provide a pretty durn big bucket of points to permanently add access to powersets, costumes, "perk powers" (rocketboard, jump jet, ...), unlocked character slots, and so on. So yeah, framing it as "I've got to pay $45 just to get chat channels!" is a gross misrepresentation and an extremely cynical presumption that that is the only thing one would want to obtain.

No, it's not pathetic. With your first purchase, even if it's just the lowest $5 tier, you get a token that will unlock level two. That gives you access to tells, supergroup, and coalition chat. While still not as ideal as unfettered access to global channels, it certainly isn't "pathetic," and should allow free players a pretty good degree of access to other people.

Having said that, I do agree that free players need access to a server-wide chat channel that is preferably not the help channel so that they can solicit invitations to teams, trials, etc. I think that's a reasonable compromise between locking them out almost completely and giving them access to broadcast and/or global channels.

Okay, apologies in advance because I know I'm being pedantic and I usually keep that under control, but you happened to stumble upon one of my pet peeves.

The correct word you're looking for here is moot, not mute. Moot means insignificant or inconsequential; mute means silent. Just remember what the mute button on your remote control does. If it were a "mute" subject, it would be one that you literally could not hear. I suppose one could contrive a context in which the phrase "mute subject" would make sense ("The curricula was well represented in applied sciences and mathematics; literature was more of a mute subject with no references at all."), but it almost always doesn't.

The two words are not pronounced the same, either. Moot rhymes with boot and loot and hoot. Mute rhymes with cute and compute and refute.

Well, you know what they say. You can't make a fear pudding in an Easy Bake Skull.

Actually, I was just thinking, "Man, my hair is getting long." The game time, I don't mind paying for. Can I just be flown to Paragon Studios and get the haircut?

"What, is that supposed to be a bad thing?"

*raises hand...

Guilty.

That should be 1.25 cents and 1 cent, respectively. You had me thinking for a minute, "That would be $80 for a costume slot. What is this, E** Online?"

I just usually do the conversion in my head, at 400 points for $5. 1000 points is two and a half times 400, so that would make whatever 2.5 x $5, or $10.00. So then I think, "Is this worth $10?"

The thing that catches me, though, isn't the dollar amount, it's the fact that a lot of this stuff (including costume slots) is account-wide and forever. I know that if I spend that $10 today, I will have that costume slot available on every character, past and future, from now on, even if I stop playing as a VIP. That tends to inflate the value of what I'm buying versus the money I'm spending in my head, and I'm more likely to be like, "Well, in that case, I'll go ahead and get it."

..And thus the need for NCsoft to figure out some way for us to gift things to other players. Given that we've had two people volunteer to acquire the hardware, I'd be willing to chip in for two or three months of VIP status to help out, except that NCsoft has made it almost impossible to do so.

We're hoping by the end of this month to have enough money raised to send you complimentary copies of Old Yeller, Love Story, Marley & Me, Titanic, Beaches, and Somewhere in Time.

Congratulations!

Wait, who's this John guy? I don't know about him, but I'd be nervous about being so close to someone married for nine years to a guy named BloodSpeaker. Sounds to me like he's just asking for an ***-kickin'.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who read this and thought, "These things are not mutually exclusive."

Hey all, before folks go rehosting it, our site does regularly scheduled maintenance from 6:00am ET until 7:00am ET every day (10:00am UTC - 11:00am UTC). It shuts down the webserver while a full backup of all of our live databases are created, then brings everything back up. Every once in a blue moon, our database service gets borked up, so the first thing I do most mornings (including this morning) is to check the server to make sure everything is up.

We actually have the ability to do real-time replication of the databases so that we could perform offline backups without bringing down the production server, but it requires a second server, preferably at the same location due to the data load of replication. Given the hosting costs for one, I haven't implemented that at this time.

Maybe one of these days we'll look into a content delivery service like Amazon's CloudFront or the new CDN that Google is working on for our downloads, but for now, those are still too expensive even with the relatively low volume we have compared to media-centric sites.

The reason is simple: Because there are a lot of folks who think they've struck a pretty good balance with the Paragon Store between giving enough of the game away that free players should be satisfied, but holding enough back to be an incentive to fork over some dough.

The thing is, no matter what Paragon Studios locks behind payment, someone is going to complain. And what I'm sick of seeing is complaint threads about every single aspect of the game that is locked. Every. Single. One.

If everyone were clamoring, for example, that Controllers should be free, then it wouldn't bother me so much. And I don't think there's animosity towards Nyx specifically. It's just that after 10 threads and hundreds of posts of everyone complaining about their particular cause, it gets really old. If they had picked locking the color green behind payment, or names with the letter Z, or the brain exposed head style, or the ledgesit emote, we'd still have threads complaining about how it's essential for someone's enjoyment of the game.

It's gotten to the point where no one really cares any more about what specifically someone is complaining about, which is why I say it's not animosity towards Nyx specifically. Nyx's post wasn't even particularly whiny. It's just that at some point, folks have got to accept what is locked, accept what the prices are, understand that they probably won't get 100% of what they want for free, and enjoy what they do have access to.

Speaking of which, is a heck of a lot. It's not like Paragon Studios has gimped the game to be unplayable for free players, which is why folks like me get irritated at what we perceive as entitlement mania. It's a LOT of game, and even if there's something specific you want, that you feel you have to have such as the Controller archetype, we feel that forking over $15 as a one-time purchase really ain't so bad.

We computer nerds call it a "bang," sometimes part of the expression "shebang," which is the #! sequence. Goes along with "splat" for the * symbol. All of those long multisyllabic words are hell on lexical compression.

No, but here are a few more sources:

Amazon.com page for Going Rogue
Gamestop page for Going Rogue

Edit:
Of course, I don't know why I'm even putting this out there. It seems to me that there is compelling evidence that the Incarnate System is not part of the marketing of Going Rogue. Was it ever a part of the marketing? Well, it's damn near impossible to prove a negative assertion like that, so really, the onus is on you to prove the positive assertion that it was. The ball is in your court to find evidence now, not us.

Also, this whole argument is silly, based upon the initial premise that the "if you've paid for it, you'll still have access to it" rule-of-thumb was, in fact, some sort of legal guarantee. It wasn't. It was exactly that--a rule-of-thumb that mostly holds true. It's really disgusting to me that, even if the Incarnate System were part of Going Rogue (which, for the record, I'm not stipulating), people are taking one exception to the rule out of a hundred and using that one thing to say that premium players "got screwed."

I'm sorry, but that's stupid. Premium players get to play the game for free and get access to damn near everything in it. Regardless of any one or two things in the game that they don't get access to, to say that they're getting "screwed" is the height of entitlement and arrogance.

I'm thinking of it as... well... a "gamma."

I ran over six people, looted four stores, and set twelve car fires. Damn man, what else do you want me to do? I only have money enough for so many Molotov cocktails, you know.

You people should really go see a doctor.