StarkWhite

"This comic book superhero game is too much like a superhero comic book!" Also, didn't you make a big drama queen announcement about how you were quitting once or twice already?

IIRC Penelope Mayhem becomes a particularly big hammer in the player-villain's potential toolbox.

Willpower and Force of Will are different things. Sorcery and Willpower work just fine together.

Every time someone raises a fuss over "OMG Thing changed!" I have to wonder if they *really* think that if Paragon had kept developing this game for all these years, they wouldn't have modernized it as the gaming ecosystem evolved. And probably been a LOT less nice about giving options to keep doing things the old way. It certainly wasn't the same at shutdown as it was in 2004. This isn't a relic preserved in amber like a museum piece. It's a living game.

Periodic reminder that "ninjitsu" is still a misspelling of "ninjutsu."

I'll ask the same thing I always ask when people come up with these categorizations: what can I *do* with this? A theory is useless without applications. How can I use your system to improve my gaming experience and the experiences of those around me? Right now it reads as "Here is this profound thing!" but...so what? What do you plan to do with this model? What does it change or add?

This would be a nonissue if people didn't react to the suggestion "if it's too hard/slow/whatever, turn your difficulty down" as if you'd suggested they eat their firstborn child.

On my first day I was exploring Galaxy City with my little level 2 fresh-out-of-Outbreak experimental character, doing a decent job of avoiding Hellions and Clockwork, and happened to discover Gemini Park. I was like "oh, that looks cool!" and ran in to explore, somehow completely failing to notice the small crowd of zombies milling about. Pretty sure I was in the midst of trying to escape when one exploded and sent me to the hospital. My situational awareness is, theoretically, much better these days, even if my manual reflexes are definitely not.

Yeah, there's a fairly visible line between "we want more people to engage with Giant Monsters" and "we want people to mindlessly farm the lowest-effort Giant Monsters."

Back in the day, I mostly equated Warden = Hero Responsibility = Vigilante Power = Rogue Crusader = Villain It's not an exact match and wasn't intended to be, of course.

My daughter just turned twelve; she plays with me or her mom occasionally.

I think OP's issue is expecting to get a complete view of something from a single story arc or contact. By design, the game spreads this kind of information over a ton of arcs and contacts, across a wide spread of levels and alignments. This is meant to simulate superhero comics, where getting a complete picture of even one character might involve reading many years worth of stories in a variety of different titles by a collection of different creators. In short, all your questions have in-game answers, but you may not find them all on a single character unless you go out of your way to do so.

While an acronym starts with a phrase (like "North Atlantic Treaty Organization") and condenses it into a word ("NATO"), a backronym is when you start with the word and then retroactively come up with a phrase to fit into it (Marvel Comics' "SHIELD" is a good example here).

From what I understand, they have an answer for that internally, but they're not sharing it yet in case someone in the community comes up with a better backronym than the one they have in mind.

Personally when I want to farm I play Coral Island.