Vic Raiden

Well, he is part of the Power storyline, which is only available to characters who are Loyalist-aligned at the time.

I think it'd check out given Mu Mystics are the only type of human Arachnos soldier not to be playable. Cool as it sounds, though, I doubt it'd be nearly as easy to implement as Spiders and Widows due to being stuck hovering in one fully bandaged pose all the time. Also, that'd call for a third HEAT to even things out.

What is it with some balance suggestions erupting into lengthy flame wars, again?

Me and the boys after raiding Area 51: (actually the second mission in Transmuter's arc. Kinda amazed by how tough Stern, Warrant and Zane are compared to Aria and Riptide)

As stated above, using Beam Rifle as a primary lets me equip nearly any other weapon-based powerset as a secondary. I think I also somehow got Dual Pistols/Titan Weapon to work. All without meddling with the files. ...that said, I did find out that holstered weapons turning invisible is kind of normal both for AE critters and player characters, but it still doesn't really excuse weapons sometimes being forcibly reverted to their respective default models.

I spend a lot of time in the Mission Architect, and wound up noticing a couple strange bugs: - sometimes, when I enter the Register tab on a critter, I find that some of the critter's colors (typically skin or pants) have suddenly changed without my input, forcing me to go back and fix them - enemies using the new Arsenal Assault/Control powersets always revert to default unholstered rifles whenever I load them, no matter what weapon skins I set for them; seems to be related to the costume creator's own oddly persistent issue of refusing to load weapon customizations - speaking of weapons, creating a critter with two different weapon-based powersets (e.g. Beam Rifle/Battle Axe) frequently results in one of those weapons either not showing at all or, again, showing as the respective default model

So happy to see one of the original devs come back!

And now, a couple aesthetically pleasing shots of Talos Island.

Having that option is cool and all, but I hate how the game keeps force-defaulting to the CoH skin instead of keeping the last chosen one whenever one enters character creation.

On the other hand, yeah, gotta be creative with getting at least the simpler things straight. Remnants of Vahzilok's organization can easily still be around - even if in disarray - while the Lost are likely created at such pace that it's gonna take a real lot of effort to cure them all, no matter if the cure exists or not. A bit harder to explain things like, say, Arachnos troops conducting excavations in Faultline even though the psychochronometron, the device they came there for in the first place, no longer exists. Or Council forces on Striga Isle acting like they own the place even long after the base's destruction in the Provost Marchand storyline.

Okay, so things happened, and we're not supposed to be the ones responsible because MMO... So who do we credit for them? Or how do we talk about our involvement, if it even makes sense? Because at this moment it seems like completely made-up RP scenarios are the only things worth talking about ICly without making big contradictions.

I personally only buggered off by accident because I happened to outlevel the second half of the zone, but then I went out of my way to flashback myself through it. Still salty about the contacts ghosting me as if I never met them, but at least the experience itself was fun for the most part. Mob scaling in Atta's lair is wack. I ran it on default settings and found that they range from -2 near the entrance to +1 close to the big dead end rooms. But my personal gripe with the mission is that Atta himself doesn't quite get the fanfare he deserves as the leader of a significant street-level enemy group. He's just an Elite Boss with rather bland dialogue, who doesn't even get an intro cutscene when you trigger his spawn. It's jarring when you consider Frostfire did get one.

See, another problem is that due to the aforementioned MMOness, the "now" is all around the place. Depending on which NPC you ask, the Praetorian War either hasn't broken out yet, is well underway in the background, or has been over for so long that everyone had already managed to profit from it - and all of that is true at the same time. Then there's Statesman and Sister Psyche, who have always been dead until you play the SSA where they die, and even then they somehow manage to still be alive when you're doing the Underground Trial and the Faultline arcs, respectively. Good luck making sense out of any of that. Things pile up so much that one may eventually start losing track of what has or hasn't canonically happened yet... which, of course, makes it harder to actually cement one's characters as existing within the setting.

Being able to dispose of disliked contacts is one thing, another would be having a sort of OOC content warning regarding what kinds of evil each contact is up to or what origin their missions vibe with the most. I'd also say just add more contacts to cherrypick from, but I figure an ongoing tip mission-esque personal master plan system like someone suggested so long ago would be a greater help in actually feeling in control of one's villainy... but then there'd probably have to be some sort of hero equivalent so that nobody complains about unfair treatment, not to mention the sheer work needed for a robust multiple-choice mission chain like in the HC-brand rogue arcs but extended to the entire character progression.

"Grandville" in this case was just uttered as a substitute for Hell in "how the hell". I didn't refer to any particular arc or anything. It was just a general question about how I should talk about story arcs and TFs/SFs I completed when I want to bring them up in character, which you already partially answered and I thank you for that.