macskull

How so? Do you mean removing badges? Or do you mean reducing badges to near insignificance and making them account-wide?

Honestly I don't expect either of those to happen (I mean, I'd love it if something like Field Crafter were account-wide, but that won't happen). At most I'd just like to see a few of the "harder to get" badges have their requirements lowered, especially if they're tied into an accolade.

First welcome to the game and enjoy your stay. Second, any guide for Mind/Kin will still be applicable to today's gameplay with one major exception - inventions. As far as power picks and slotting go, an older guide will do you just fine as a beginning player, but when you hit a higher level and are looking for better performance, you might want to start taking a look into inventions. The system is somewhat complicated and you can spent a lot of influence on fully putting together an IO build, but it's worth it if you're looking to improve your character once you have a basic grasp of how things work. A good player resource to use is a website called ParagonWiki.

No. Mind is indisputably one of the best control sets in the game and the lack of a pet doesn't hurt it one bit - it just makes it different. Mind is still probably the top PvP Controller primary, though Kinetics isn't the best PvP set (Rad, Storm, Cold, or Therm are better). A word of advice though: learn to fully utilize your character in PvE before taking it into PvP. Thanks to some changes a few issues back, your powers work very differently in PvP than they do in PvE and that alone is enough to frustrate many people.

It's workable, but it's also reliant on consistently hitting targets with Siphon Speed, and it's not good for those long stretches where you don't have targets, or the enemies are all high level. Fly is a decent travel choice - while it's the slowest travel power, it's also the most convenient because it's the only one that gives you complete control of your motion in all three dimensions (Super Jump comes close but it takes work to get good at the micro-control aspect of it).

The first 8 or so levels can be done fairly quickly by jumping onto a sewer team (you can just yell out in Atlas Park broadcast that you're looking for a sewer team, and with luck you'll find one). If you get on a good team you could make it all the way through the sewers to Kings Row, where you can talk to a detective (who should be in your contacts list). The detective will give you a police radio, which you can use to pick up random filler missions. Once you've done enough of those (3 or 5, I don't remember) the detective will offer you a safeguard mission. Complete that mission and you'll get a temporary travel power (either Raptor Pack or Zero-G Pack) as well as the ability to pick a new story arc contact.

You should be able to level normally just by running missions from those contacts. Once you're level 10 you can start running task forces (the first is given out by Positron, in the middle of Steel Canyon, and is for levels 10-15), although the Positron task force is notorious for being a pretty poor introduction to task forces in general for lowbies and new players (it's long, grindy, and is actually more difficult with a larger team). In short, just go where your contacts and your radio missions take you.

Freedom's fine. It's the highest-population server and you shouldn't have a problem finding a team. Server stability is usually excellent except for some off times or special event weeks/weekends where population gets very high. Another suggestion is to join one of Freedom's many global channels, which will allow you to communicate with more than just the zone you're in. The main global channel on Freedom is called RF2009 - to join it, just type "/chanjoin RF2009" into your chatbox (without the quotes, of course).

Something around 50 on Justice, for me. Probably 100 total across Freedom, Virtue, Justice, Infinity, Protector, and Pinnacle.

Custom mobs with fire-based powers work well, otherwise go with the old redside standby of Nemesis and/or Freakshow.

I am wishing I'd been in RV the last few nights, I hear it was epic.

Currently there's a bug where if someone gets mezzed, their toggle knockback protection will suppress and they'll get KB'd (to test this, just have someone hit you with KO Blow when you're running your melee toggle mez protection). I've filed numerous bug reports on this and have sent PMs to the appropriate rednames, so we can only hope it's been fixed in I16.

Side effect of that is Acrobatics suppresses as well, so even if you get 40 points of KB protection, Acro will still be making up about 10 of that - if someone mezzes you and then hits you with Levitate, you'll still get KB'd even though you should have enough KB protection to stop that.

If you're running Liberate on a Brute and not doing it spawned for 8, you're doing it wrong. Even if you're only running for 6, after a few mobs the Brute will be at a high Fury level and he'll be riding that most of the rest of the map.