Grouchybeast

Really, though, that's the perfect solution. Generic all the characters every so often. People grab the names they want, if they're fast enough, and enjoy them until the next generic-ing. Simple! Include the NPCs, too. Then we can spend a few months getting our training from Mz-L1berty.

It's even weirder than that. Go stand by an elevator, and look at the panel to call the elevator. What do you see? That's right! That's the panel that should be INSIDE the elevator. You can see the buttons for the different floors, the emergency stop, the emergency call button and speaker grill. Does this mean that inside the lift there's just a single call button?

Give the badges high mag mez resistance, set them to be attackable only when mezzed, and FINALLY we have something to make Controllers truly useful in the modern game!

Usenet was great, (I say was, I'm sure it's still out there working, somewhere) but it was very much a product of its time, when its time was extremely limited internet access available to a very select group of people. It was never going to survive more democratic access to the internet -- it was the place that invented the idea of 'Eternal September', after all. What if it did, though?

The experience you get there really is 100% dependent on the community and mods of each particular subreddit. I've always had the best luck with subreddits for narrow topics, like r/fallenlondon for the browser game of the same name, which is a great place. It's not even just the population size -- r/stardewvalley has a couple of million members but it's pretty chill.

Don't hate on blasters just 'cause we're pretty awesome.

I had somehow never noticed that existed. You have changed my costume creation experience forever, thank you!

Welcome to the game! CoH is an old game, and some of the older content is pretty pedestrian by modern standards, so it can be hard to pick out a path with the better stories. But luckily, there's a fantastic guide written by @Gulbasaurcalled The Good Missions Guide: A Heroic Levelling Journey through Story Arcs, which will be a big help in sifting out some of the more, um, historic content.

I'm not sure I found the right thing, but the links I did find seemed to be talking about loot boxes, i.e. items bought with real world currency. I was wondering if you had any examples of what we're talking about in CoH, gambling with pure fake internal currency that was still required to have a gaming license. Otherwise it does seems like worrying you might need to comply with real estate regulations to play Monopoly.

All the instances of that seemed to involve game currencies that had mechanisms to cash in and out to real money, though, making them analogous to casino chips. Given the very large number of video games that have had gambling game elements for decades now, it seems like if it was something worth worrying about in CoH then there would be one single instance you could point to of a game being required to have a gaming license for their fake in-game gambling. I was being slightly silly with the Neopets Scorchy Slots example (although it's true) but really is ubiquitous. Stardew Valley has gambling.

So what is the legal difference between an inf 'slot machine' and using enhancement converters? Would Winter Packs also count as illegal gambling?

Honestly, I think they'd be more fun if they paid out in random buffs, like Mystic Fortune and Secondary Mutation do. Then they'd be a pure inf sink, and the 'prizes' could be anything. Small but common buffs, large but rare buffs, very occasionally turn into a Wailer...

If you buy insps in a SG base, does the money go into an inf pool for the SG? If you pay for a costume update in a base, does the inf go into a pool for the SG? If you buy a recipe from an invention table in a SG base, does the inf go into a pool for the SG? If you sell drops to a vendor in a SG base, do those drops go into a pool for the SG?

The slot machines should definitely be a net loss on average, just like real slot machines. A 25% house take, maybe? Then they're doing their bit as a small inf sink.

I've always been disappointed that the slot machines in the Golden Giza didn't work. I think it would be a fun little addition, if it didn't take too much dev effort. You could have regular slot machines that take inf and pay out inf (with the house taking a cut as an inf sink). Then you could have a VIP supers area where you pay inf and get one of the Mystic Fortune or Secondary Mutation buff. (Gambling regulations don't apply to pretend gambling with pretend currency that can't be converted to real currency. Willie Lovett got sent to prison for running an illegal gambling operation involving real dollars, not because he spent too much time playing Scorchy Slots on Neopets, a pretend gambling game that's existed on a COPPA compliant site for over twenty years.)