RikOz

What's actually peculiar is this bit of text after completing the mission: Who the hell is "Lord Caernoz", and what freaking portal is it talking about? There was no portal.

Just obtained and ran the mission again. Maelstrom is next to the "Vampyr Commandant" (the Commandant has a minion as well, but I already defeated him before the screenshot):

This is concept, rather than costume design, because this is just the prefab "Stone" costume. But I got this idea to look up a "word of the day" (on dictionary.com, in this case), and create a character with a name and concept based on that word. The first time I tried this, the word of the day was "Xanadu". Alas, there was already a "Xanadude" on my server, so I waited for the next day's word. That word was "orogeny": the process of mountain-making or upheaval. So here is "The Orogenyst" (Fiery Melee/Stone Armor): The next day's word was "cruciverbalist", which is a designer or aficionado of crossword puzzles. Today's word is the adverb, "memoriter", meaning "by heart; by memory". Couldn't think of a superhero idea for either of those, so we'll see what tomorrow suggests :D

So what does a guy have to do to find a non-Freakshow story arc in the early- to mid-30s range? Those guys get very tiresome, very quickly - especially when you have as many alts as I do. It's like no matter which contacts I have, my alts consistently get funneled into "The Freaklympics" or "The Freakshow War". Some contacts are especially annoying, in that their "get to know you" missions involve Nemesis or Crey, and get my hopes up, and then when they finally offer an arc, it's one of those Freakshow arcs. (My blasters are getting irritated because Sniping a Freak just takes them down low enough to trigger their self-heal.)

Mission in which Freaks are trying to use magic to enhance their implants: Sacrificial Victim: If there's anything worse than being sacrificed, it's being sacrificed incompetently.

Just thought this looked cool, about to venture into Crey's Folly: And this is taking "high on drugs" to a ridiculous level:

The latest iteration of Heartbeat of America:

In the hero version of this mission, Maelstrom is always standing next to one particular mob. Alas, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head. It's not a "named" mob, but he's a lieutenant with a title/rank that doesn't appear on any other mob in the mission. I've been where the OP is, though - defeated that mob and ran off without noticing its name, and then had to hunt all over for Maelstrom.

I don't recall (again) if I've posted this guy before: Tom da Bomb (Fiery Melee/Rad Armor brute). This is one of my favorite collections of costumes for a single character, so I'm surprised I don't play him more often. Costumes in order of appearance; he's currently wearing #3: And in his civvies: He's actually unusually short. Here he is fighting some standard Freaks, for scale:

I don't get it. I originally heard the name in the Tim McGraw song, "Live Like You Were Dying". Every copy of the lyrics I've seen says "Fu Manchu", but I swear to God Tim sings "Blue", not "Fu".

That being said, one has to wonder if rooftop solar panels can produce enough juice to power a skyscraper.

Katana/Regen brute, "Blue Manchu", created entirely because the name popped into my head.

Finally got a seventh alt to 50. Here's Fallout Bull (SS/Rad brute), in his full radioactive glory: Fallout Bull is my first "Homecoming Original" character to reach 50. The previous six were all live-resurrections. He started out as "Rad Bull", over on Reunion, and the name was a reference to his origin story, wherein he gained superpowers from consuming too many energy drinks. When I moved him to Everlasting, somebody already had the name, so he became "Roentgen Bull", a name I was never really happy with, but couldn't think of anything else suitable, until fairly recently.

Say what? Or did you mean it's unavailable for females with monstrous legs?

A couple Nemesis soldiers are betting fifty bucks on whether I will show up "here" or not. The winner of the bet: "Woo, looks like it's my lucky day... err... wait... no probably not."

Psimonator and Polar Shift make a good team :) I decided to get a closer look at the controls on a piece of equipment in the sewers: Um, I'm pretty sure that's a control for moving a ship.

The only other MMO I've enjoyed was WoW, and one of my gripes with it was that there were a lot of ways to play the game, but Blizzard has this unfortunate habit of putting most of their focus into only one or two of those ways. And that focus changes from one expansion to the next. They'll come up with something that is fun for more casual players (i.e. non-hardcore raiders) that allows those of us who don't have hours to play every day chip away at rewards at our own pace, and just when you find something you like, they take it away, and suddenly everything is "RAID OR DIE".

Sometimes I have an idea for a bio right off the bat. Sometimes I need to play a character for a while before its bio forms. I never wrote a bio for my main on live, and after recreating her on HC, it was still a year before an idea popped into my head. Then I have some characters whose bio I have in my head, but it would be too difficult to pare it down enough to fit in the limited space.

This cracked me up:

This is one I took on live, and it is literally "live". I had to make two free accounts in addition to my main account, and create each character on a separate account. Then I launched two instances of the game on my Windows laptop, each logged into a different account, and launched another instance of the game on my Mac and logged it into the third account. Loaded all three characters, got them positioned just so, and managed to get the screenshot before the clients on the laptop crashed. I wanted the group shot because these three characters are triplet sisters.

Oh, I like that fine! It just never occurred to me. Doesn't really matter to me what the SG symbol is, since I'm the only one seeing it anyway :) I will implement this suggestion, post haste!

Yeah, in WoW, it didn't take me long to figure out that I was too old for PvP. I mean, I was an "original gamer", going back to when PONG was the state of the art, but I never got into "twitch" games, or any of the fighting games. My first foray into PvP, I found myself getting slaughtered by somebody running circles around me, - II soon figured out that I was not up to competing against 14-year-olds who had much faster reflexes than me.

American Association of Retired Persons

You should be getting that letter from the AARP soon :D (I got mine within a month of turning 50)

Given the fact that most of us here played on live, I wondered, "How old is the Homecoming playerbase?" I'm 55. I was 42 when I joined my first MMO (WoW), and 45 when I first logged in to CoX.