Zamuel

Originally Posted by Noble Savage

One thing to consider is that redo-ing the menus and placement of items within them is, in itself, a significant amount of work for the Character and Tech teams. Assume that any menu work will consume 50% of the time available for any redos.

Bottom line, avoiding menu work is preferable and brings us back to Options 1 and 2.

Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade

Don't some criticals have an unressistable component?

Originally Posted by Miuramir

There are two fundamental problems here, and an additional side issue:

* The CoH team has close to a 100% failure rate at delivering on the above promises, and in every such case I can recall players have been basically told to suck it up.

The arrogance level of the art team is viewed as pretty high for a reason, with cryptic pronouncements at widely-spaced intervals rather than communication, inattentiveness to player concerns, a lack of a meaningful feedback process (especially early enough in the process to actually serve any purpose), an unreasonably high error rate (what's the odds that a patch will break a previously-working costume piece?), extreme slowness to fix errors (if a database typo causes something to go missing and it takes more than one patch cycle to fix, your process has serious flow issues), and so on.

You appear to be working to fix a lot of this, and I have hopes... but we've had plenty of people come in with nice-sounding comments who fail to deliver results. Forum talk is cheap, results speak volumes. You are going to have to show us on this one.

* The trend lately seems to be toward more elaborately designed pieces to fit a specific look or set, rather than more useful pieces that can be used for many different things.

If I can draw an analogy, it's conceptually similar to a trend in Lego sets some years ago, where the number of custom oddly-shaped plastic pieces increased dramatically and the number of general-purpose bricks declined sharply. This made building the set pictured on the box easier and faster, but reduced the utility of the set for building anything else.

Personally, I'm a bit conflicted; some of the newer pieces are much crisper looking and that's usually good; however, I find myself frustrated by the "added elements" not matching what I'm trying to go for, or each other, far more often than they help. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've wasted time swearing at the costume creator because some artist decided that one piece "needed" some sort of overlay or blending layer, which changes the color so that it doesn't match some other piece that doesn't have such a layer, and the limited color picker doesn't allow me to match them up. Similar are the pieces that seem to have some element of "Caucasian" peach-ish skintone baked into them, and look really off when used on more ethnically diverse humans let alone the wide variety of colors seen in CoH.

Then there's things like the pieces that have decor elements that limit them to a very narrow range of uses, where the basic piece would be far more widely applicable. To pick just one example I ran into recently, there's a perfectly good bicorne hat model that if done properly could have been used for all sorts of historical concepts; Napoleonics, formal diplomatic dress, naval officers, and of course pirates both realistic and silly. It might even get used for unusual concepts like a hammerhead shark headpiece. However, it's got a giant white skull and crossbones plastered across the front, totally non-removable and non-colorizeable , which limits it to a small subset of silly cartoon pirates with particular color schemes and limited imagination (and the even smaller set of people making deliberate ironic use of the above).

Plus, the trend so far has been to introduce even fewer versions of the higher-resolution pieces. For instance, I have a character that has the "Headband with wings" piece as an essential part of her look. While she enthusiastically adopted the body textures from the Mac Pack Valkyrie set when that came out, the great-looking high-res head wings that came with it don't have a "with headband" option, and due to the somewhat bizarre legacy organization of the costume pieces, can't be combined with the existing headbands; so she's stuck using the old low-res versions.

(As just one example, if the ear-covering side-head pieces such as wings, headphones, earcups with antenna, etc. were placed where they really belong in the "Ear" menu, you could mix and match them with the existing "upper face" details such as headbands any way that was needed; the requirement to even *have* a "headband with wings" option is a failure of the costume organizational system. It should be a naturally emergent case of being able to pick a headband from one menu, and side-head wings from another.)

* The organization of the costume pieces is terrible, and the user interface is poor. There's at least some hope that you might be able to argue for some UI designer time or whatever is required to make better sense of the way costume pieces are presented while doing all this, and the odds of us getting a more flexible interface going forward are increased if you have to consider multiple versions of the existing pieces.

For instance, using your example of the Tank Top piece, if you added a sub-option to it, we could start with the existing piece called "Legacy" and add a "Matte cloth" option based on the medium-light weight white cotton or poly/cotton undershirt you linked. Later on, someone might decide that this same geometry could be used for a filmier, shiny casual party top or more feminine underwear, and we'd get a third or perhaps fourth option, "Shiny cloth" and "Shiny cloth with lace" in a Valentine's pack, perhaps. At some other point, a police-themed pack might give us the distinctive vertically-ribbed undershirt worn for ventilation under body armor ("Ribbed cloth"), and an actual light body armor texture ("Light body armor"). Once you have the structure, being able to add pieces later is much easier; but if you go about replacing pieces haphazardly in situ we loose big in the long run.

Currently, you'd use the existing low-res piece for all of the above; once you start getting specific, you need to have more sub-options so that you don't make things look worse for some uses. For example, anyone currently using the tank top to represent the silk top is going to be seriously upset if you replace it with something that looks less like a sexy piece someone might wear to a nightclub and more like something someone would wear fixing their pickup in a trailer park.

tl;dr: The existing low-res pieces are used for all sorts of things that they plausibly might be; if you pick only one thing to represent in high-res and the new version is clearly that, you eliminate all of the other possibilities of what it might be. The only reasonable option that will not get players justifiably upset is to have the original general-purpose Legacy piece as an option, and add additional high-res options as you have art resources to produce them.

Originally Posted by Eva Destruction

Putting that fix in with GR is THE worst thing they could have done, aside from slapping in that half-**** patch in the first place with no testing after months of ally abuse. Seriously. It's like getting your hair fixed, then walking into the room with three or four swimsuit models and expecting anyone to notice your new improved hair.

Originally Posted by Eva Destruction

Positron's "**** you" post that resulted in no noticeable action being taken and only served to make people paranoid about their joke arcs with animals on a farm

Originally Posted by Haetron

I can only speak for myself, but if Im building something in the AE, Im not responding to anything short of a tell. That screen is huge and blocks out everything.

Originally Posted by twelfth

You know, the next few times I see people in the AE, I going to just ask what they are playing/building.

Originally Posted by firespray

They are all too situational to be really all that useful to most people, and they can't be used to mule any useful sets.