Samuel_Tow

Penelope Yin needs to BE a sidekick.

That said, I like Arachnos, but not directly. I like what they represent, which at this point is "the old guard" of villainy before we went into this extra-dimensional, high-talking malarkey. Recluse and his cronies represent what villains were when they were real villains with real villainous plans, rather than "antagonists" we have right now, who generally deviate between jerkasses and anti-heroes and it's always gods and super monsters and such forcing their hand. Arachnos also represents a time when villains were allowed and indeed expected to be bad, as opposed to rooming with heroes for the greater good.

For all of their factions and infighting and politics and all that, Arachnos is a remarkably uncomplicated, fitting villain group that can serve as both an antagonist and an ally without really suffering villain decay. They just do a good job.

However, I don't like Arachnos from a stylistic point of view. They come across as a fantasy group masquerading as a sci-fi group, like those black leather aliens from the Chronicles of Riddick. Compare them with the Council, for instance - these guys are a paramilitary organisation structured around a industrial era military discipline. Arachnos, by contrast, are structured like the court of Sauron. Their sense of aesthetics doesn't help. Bound and masked mystics, bucket-helmet psychics and soldiers with spider fangs on their helmets, all taking place in the world's most poorly-lit bases that waste more space being suspended in a black void than makes any logical sense. Seriously, does someone dig a square mile of bedrock out of the ground just so he can suspend mesh-walled corridors from the ceiling for the sake of being ominous? What IS outside of those hallways anyway?

Nothing with Arachnos looks like it was designed with function in mind. Their uniforms seem to have been desigend primarily to resemble spiders and to be menacing before they were designed to be functional, their "helicopters" look like giant bugs and land on three spikes which never seem to sink into the ground despite carrying a huge machine's full weight, their robots look like spiders for no reason and the whole thing just comes off like someone sat down and designed the most obviously evil organisation he could think of.

And "survival of the fittest" is a bad way to run a country, because you end up running a slum, as is evident from the isles. Recluse rules his country like a slob, giving me the impression he doesn't want to rule it in the first place, he's just letting it decay for a couple of decades while he has other plans cooking, intending to abandon it as soon as a better option pops up. I guess that's a good motivation for a villain, but it makes him a terrible ruler which takes away from his prestige somewhat. You'd think he'd tidy up the place where he lives a little more, maybe install a few more lights so he doesn't destroy his eyes, cover up some of that exposed wiring so it looks nice. Nope! He lives in a place that looks like it was converted into a conference room while construction on it was only half finished. It's all big ominous towers with spikes and alien-looking tech with wires hanging out, and always so dark I need a flashlight to avoid tripping over the zillions of changes in elevation.

That's their shtick, though. I personally wish Praetoria wasn't in another dimension, but was instead a few more islands in the Rogue Isles chain with cleaner cities and better rulers. CoV-side needs that contrast.

Similar, yes, in the general concept behind the idea. Where we differ is I'm after a fairly conventional type cannon without much advanced technology behind it. It's just a really big gun I don't know why, but conventional and even archaic technology taken to impossible extremes inspires me the most. I suppose that's why I like the Nemesis Army so much. They say the last days of an old technology are far more exciting than the first days of a new one, and I can kind of see why.

That said, yours is not a bad idea, and the concept lends itself well to its gimmick. If I wanted to institute a heating up mechanic, however, we'd end up with the player having to swap barrels

Or you'd need to know about the Darkstalkers character who's essentially Little Red Riding Hood with a basket full of machineguns and grenades who apparently has landmines under her skirt.

I can't comment on the practical power of such a character as I don't really play Dominators (I want to, I just need more hit points ), but that would indeed fit the theme if that's what you're going with. You can interpret this sort of like the Matrix - the girl controls people's minds to think they're in a fairy tail, and when the big bad wolf eats them inside the illusion, they die for real.

I've always had a fascination for taking relatively simple, goofy concepts and playing them straight, trying to figure out what kind of character could this be that fits the concept but still exists in an ostensibly real world. That's why I sort of strayed from the obvious.

We've been told multiple times that moving characters between servers is not trivial. We've never been told why it is not trivial, but at one point the system for moving characters to Test was said to require manual intervention. Moving characters between servers is, itself, not trivial. Character data is saved per server and those servers are hosted on clouds of physically separate machines, the communication between which is not always simple.

Again, you fail to address duplicate name issues. A character is recorded in the server's database using that character's name as a key. You cannot have multiple characters with the same name on the same server because name conflicts are a system problem, not just one of convenience. This is not unsolvable, but requires a fundamental redesign of the naming system and the way in which characters are stored. If they're going to implement something like this, they're not going to do it over cross-server LFG.

You are not the first to come up with the idea of cross-server teaming. It's as old as the game itself, and has come up as a way to solve the problem of low PvP populations many times before. On the rare occasions when developers comment, they have always shot down the idea completely, and always for technical reasons.

A developer - I forget who - once said that he would ideally want the whole game to take place on one giant communal server so people would no longer be divided by server restrictions, but at the same time admitted that this would be the most difficult and expensive thing he could think of for the game.

When making a suggestion, it helps to have a little more than a sentence in backing and a little more forethought than "how hard could it be?" Time and time again it has been proven that people who try to deduce how the system works are wrong and people who think they know how the system works are VERY wrong. There's a reason "Standard Code Rant applies" is a catch phrase around these parts.

Yes, it is as hard as it sounds. Harder, as a point of fact. Server transfers cost money for a reason. At the very least, you need to decide how you deal with name conflicts.

That's not quite what I had in mind, but what you're suggesting is not a bad idea, visually speaking. Let me explain where I was going with this, after a quick Wikipedia search to make sure I have the right terminology

What I'm talking about is a break-action weapon, with the break occurring at the breech of the cannon barrel, almost like a very, VERY large hunting rifle. No magazine, single-shot weapon. I realise my Tier 9 Semi-Auto Fire does kind of fly in the face of this, but I'm willing to make an exception for this one power. Like in a hunting shotgun, I want to see the weapon break open behind the stock, have the spent shell casing auto-eject and have the character manually ram a new one in, then close the weapon back up again.

I want this to have a reason to occur between every two attacks, but I also want the player to have the ability to skip it in some way. One way is to make a power which does this that the player will want to activate, which becomes usable only shortly after a shot is fired, or otherwise I want this to be baked into the animations but let the player skip it with a power of some sort.

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That said, I do actually quite like the bolt action idea, as well. I worry it might be a bit closer to a rifle than a cannon, especially since I'm talking 75-85mm barrel bore. A bolt action mechanism might look weird with a cannon that size. That said, a bolt action animation would take relatively little time in regular attacks, and considerably less than the time Assault Rifle wastes aiming and recovering from a shot, so it might free up the "build up" style power to do something else.

Like that, yes. I worry, however, that this might be that particular kind of balance that's at the same time really awkward to use and far too powerful in practice. If we call the loading animation a second (and that's being generous) and the firing animation a second and a half, you're rooting the player to the ground for 10 seconds. Even ye olde Full Auto didn't go quite that hard. About the slowest I've seen in terms of interrupt time is Time Bomb at 8 seconds and that one feels like an eternity, plus it's interruptible. If we're designing this as a Blast set, we have to expect it to go on a Blaster, and rooting the Blaster down for 10 seconds is actually considerably more than most status effects he's going to come across.

On the flip side, firing the same AoE four times, especially if it's Semi-Auto Fire, could be hugely devastating. One of the reasons AoE damage is not completely broken is not many characters have complete AoE attack chains. By chaining together four of the same AoE, you're essentially making a full AoE chain. Even worse, this can be used to string together four of, say, Heavy Shot, which I'm envisioning as a pretty solid attack balanced by a long recharge and a high endurance cost. Or, hell, I just looked at my powers list and I realise that if you chain four Incendiary Shots one after the other and stack four "ally-damage" auras on the same target, the results could be obscene.

I mean, I like the idea, but I'd rather relocate this to a separate power entirely - hence Semi-Auto Fire - rather than open that Pandora's box. It sounds like it would be awesome, but it ends up being so awesome it has to be balanced by annoyance, and we're back to the Snipe/Crash Nuke debate of "of course it has to such to use, it's too powerful."

I don't actually disagree with the idea of making a power take longer to fire but deal considerably more damage. You'll note that's more or less what I suggested in 4.a) of the Double-Charge power. However, in my case, I'm not sure if I'm not actually reducing the power's DPS or DPA.

Yes, we can. As per Synapse, what Titan Weapons do with Momentum is they call an entirely separate power with everything this entails. While he never explicitly said so, I think it's safe to assume this includes activation sequences, since this attack comes with a separate animation and entirely separate stats, as I understand it.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Speaking of Kheldians, I find they're the wrong way to do shape-changing in this game. Don't get me wrong, having separate powers for each form is a great and versatile way to create shapshifters in any game, but in THIS game that simply becomes a pain in the *** to build for, especially if you want to make a character with four or five forms.

Enter this idea - instead of having each form come with its own set of powers, each form uses the powerset's 8 other powers, just with different stats. That way, you only have one character to slot up. This seems like a solution so clever I'm angry I didn't think of it.

Thank you

I really don't like the Utility power I gave the set, though, in the sense that it seems a bit too... Uninspired. I'm sure it will be useful, but it seems like I could have done more.

I originally wanted this power to be a direct henchman resurrection, a sort of Resuscitate clone that only worked on Future Soldiers. Then I remembered that that's more or less what Soul Extraction is, only not as powerful considering I can just keep reanimating my Infiltrator. That, and if you look carefully, you'll note that a henchman loses all of his upgrades when he dies, at least visually speaking. I'm not convinced that those will come back when the henchman is revived.

I then thought about making this into a clone power, like how Praetorian Duray keeps bringing in clones of himself in the Stutter TF. However, again, that's a considerably stronger version of Soul Extraction when I can clone my Infiltrator and have two of them running around at the same time. Two boss level henchmen, both of them my level, seems overpowered even by my standards.

I considered making this a third upgrade which would grant the henchmen only a single new power depending on the henchman type, but I couldn't figure out what that might be, and I worry it might become too complicated to code. I don't know if it's possible, or what effect it will have on the AI. I'm also not sure if it's possible for this new power to be temporarily granted. I guess it could be coded like the Curse of Weariness temp power, which self-times-out after five minutes, but I can't really say if the temp power is what grants the extra powers.

Then I thought of doing something like Detonator, only without the self-destruction. What I mean is, you'd use the power on a henchman, it would give that henchman some kind of power and the henchman would be instructed to use this power IMMEDIATELY, and he'll do this only once. For instance, the Infiltrator could gain Assassin's Strike, the Heavy Suits could gain some large AoE or something to that effect. Then I realised that's more or less a copy of Smoke Flash from Ninja - give a temp power to a henchman, have him use it, then score a critical hit on the very next attack. I guess having unique powers per henchman might give the Mastermind a better tactical advantage, though...

I considered just having this be some kind of overall protection and offence buff for a short duration, but then I remembered that's not just LIKE Serum from Mercenaries, it IS Serum from Mercenaries. I considered having this be some kind of drop pod reinforcements, but then that's Gang War from Thugs. I considered having my soldiers self-destruct, but that's Detonator from Traps. I considered a whole lot of things, but it constantly felt like I was just retreading old ground. So I picked a pet summon on a tiggle like the vanity pets. I'm pretty sure that's never been done for a combat pet Then again, maybe there's a good reason for it.

Exactly, yes. I expect to be carrying something that's very wise and very long. My rule of thumb measurement is that the weapon should be longer than the character is tall, at least by a little, for the "average" weapon model. Bigger and smaller are obviously acceptable. I would actually quite like the Beam Rifle stance for this, if possible, but that depends on the type of cannon we go for. However, I'd still like most of it to be forward of the shooter's shoulder, with as little of it behind the shooter as we can get away with.

(For the record, I like that Howitzer a lot. It has a fat breech, but it's not THAT much fatter than the barrel and the overall length of the weapon balances this out. The Resistance Heavy Barrel has a thinner, shorter barrel to a wider breech.)

With all of that said, there's only the set's "gimmick" left to pick, which is whatever we come up with to replace Aim. So far, we've established that we either want this to be a Claws -> Follow Up type damage buff, or otherwise a Momentum type animation speed up by removing the manual reload animation from powers. I'm struggling for extra ideas, however. What else can it be, aside from just Aim?

1. Considering any Mastermind set that comes out is going to be paid-for just by virtue of the art workload this involves, I don't believe that's an issue. That's the nature of the F2P model.

2. There are no real fixes that Masterminds "need," strictly speaking. Henchman AI is somewhat wonky, in the sense that ranged henchmen will run into melee sometimes, but it's considerably better than it's ever been, and considering the At is very solid balance-wise (if not somewhat overpowered), I don't find this to be a significant issue.

As well, neither of those two problems nor their solutions really depend on the same people who would potentially be making new set, not as far as I'm aware, so I'd like to focus on the suggested set if we could. It's a set I've wanted to see for a LONG time, because it has the potential to fill in many roles that neither Bots nor Mercs can feel, and it would also constitute literally the second high-tech Mastermind primary in the game. I don't consider Mercs to be high-tech as they're more Veteran era soldiers in terms of visuals, so that really only leaves Bots as an alternative, and those don't work as "soldiers."

One way or another, Masterminds need more primary powersets. The ones they have are too few and don't cover enough possible themes. Granted, because of how specific Mastermind sets tend to be, there are a lot of themes to explore (elemental summons, bugs, etc.), bit that shouldn't be a reason to not have more. The Archetype is not broken.

I would agree with you, yes, though I don't like to think of that as an extreme edge case. I simply tend to have very strong opinions on what I like, and I am VERY aggressive in pursuit of games that fir that pattern. A lot of people tell me that I should adapt and compromise and so forth, but I'd sooner just find a game that's closer to what I want, instead. There's really no way to convince me to approach the game differently because I've tried, and it just ruins the fun of it for me.

One of the reasons I have such a strong opinion is I've been with this game pretty much since it began, so I've had a lot of time to experiment with it, find out what works for me and what doesn't, to the point where I have a very finely-tuned way of playing the game that brings me more satisfaction than quite literally any other game I've ever played. That's why I don't take well to sweeping changes in the design philosophy behind the game. That's not to say they're bad, I just don't believe they should be accepted just because they're different. At the very least, we need to ensure we're suggesting additions to cater to more people, NOT to work on changing the fundamental attitude of the game.

This is, at the end of the day, a primarily instanced game. I really don't mind having more stuff to do outside, but I don't really feel ideas to shift the balance towards it being a comparatively more overworld game will work, or indeed even should work. The best I can offer is a compromise solution I would have no reason to be strictly against.

I want to butt in - what makes Pocket D special is that it was designed with the express purpose of being a gathering spot. Granted, that never actually worked (not on any of the servers I play on), but that was the point of the location first and foremost, and all of its other functions were secondary to that. I can see a Market and a Vault and vendors and whatnot being there, for the convenience of the patrons, but this is a place that people seek out for its social aspect, as there's just about nothing in there that you can't go elsewhere for. Null the Gull is unique, yes, but pretty much everything else has alternatives.

In short, Pocket D is a place that you have to make a choice to go to, and that choice has little else to inform it than social interaction, and the occasional really terrible event.

Slightly off-topic, but this problem is relevant to my argument about "painted-on clothes" vs. entire textures with both skin and clothing combined. The reason I want to retain the "painted-on clothes" is that you can swap the skin and clothes independently, so if you had five skin options and 50 tops options, you wouldn't have to duplicate anything, whereas if they were all baked-in textures, you'd have to have 250 separate costume items.

This is the problem with masks not being face paint - they'd need to be a texture, but if they're a texture, then you can't swap the face underneath, meaning either we need a separate face per face/mask combination (leading to a list of masks*faces in length) or we'd need to create some kind of texture-blending technologies which could apply two different textures to the same costume piece. So far, I don't know of any precedent to suggest this is even possible.

The issue hasn't "devolved" into a no-win situation, it's always been a no-win situation. I literally cannot see a good way to go about this. Make the destruction permanent and you ruin the city for everyone, mostly people who didn't get to witness the event. Make the destruction non-permanent and you have Troll Raids - an encounter with no investment in it. Win and nothing happens. Lose and nothing happens.

This is precisely what turns me off street sweeping itself. To quite Yahtzee: "There are soldiers all over the place, who can't take two shots to the face, but before you fore-scorn, they always respawn, at a pretty disquieting pace." At no point does it feel like anything I'm doing is accomplishing something because the enemies respawn as soon as my back is turned. And yet at the same time, I wouldn't want to be able to make a major difference because then someone ELSE will make it and I'll be left out in the cold.

It's a no-win situation because I'm examining it from the position of a participant AND the position of someone coming in after the fact, and I'm seeing the drawbacks of either. If I'm participating but not achieving anything, that's bad, but if I'm not participating and someone else is changing my world without my interaction, that's also bad.

When designing events, I really don't see a good way to make them have an impact on the wider world. I can somewhat see the other suggestions as working, but not this one.

I think it will be easiest if you just let us know which power you're talking about and how often you use it

Personally, what traumatised me was the pre-Issue-1 game, with the "Hydra teams" and the "Perez Park Trains" and all the people who insisted on following me around and "helping" me and the stupid chat in Atlas Broadcast and the constant blind invites and so on. Yeah, sure, I have a few fun memories from the great outdoors, including meeting a friend of mine when he leapt over a fence and put a bubble around me, but the negatives vastly outshine the positives.

I don't really mind having events take place outside for people who want to take part in them to do so. I only really mind those when they get in my way, such as that confounded Nemesis invasion yesterday which kept me from finishing a hunt, or the numerous suggestions I've seen about how enemies can "take over a neighbourhood" and close up all shops and contacts in there. I've seen quite a few suggestions where people HAVE to band together and keep the city safe, or the game punishes everybody.

Honestly, though, what bugs me the most is outdoor hunting being promoted as somehow "superior" to instances because anything which is social in nature is superior to anything that people can join only by invite. Like I said - that kind of "encouraged" social interaction damn near cost me the game back in 2004, until I realised I didn't HAVE to go out of my way to interact with people when I didn't feel like it. The Praetorian events are pretty good about this - they only involve me if I walk up to the staging area and start hitting things, but if I want to keep on walking by, I lose nothing for it.

You misunderstand. I'm not criticising the Stealth/ExoProto boots. I'm criticising the only "bare feet" we have access to in the game, which is Flat boots with the "Bare" texture selected. The problem is that Flat boots don't look like feet, they look like boots, so putting a skin texture on top of them looks horrid. It looked bad even back in 2004.

What I'm saying is we already have at least three boots with a MUCH more foot-like shape, those being Stealth, ExoProto and ESPECIALLY Zombie. These look like feet, Zombie even has a semi-separate toe and they'd make for much better bare feet, but none of those have the right texture. Stealth and ExoProto only really have their own textures while Zombie does have a skin-like texture, but it's nasty and rotten and doesn't really work well with a Tights With Skin bottom. Plus, I don't think you can put patterns on it.

What I'm saying is "We need better bare feet!"


Don't worry about it, we all have days like this. For what it's worth, I was one of the people who strongly requested that women get gender-neutral costume pieces AND female-only pieces where necessary, so I may be part of the problem. Mostly, though, when I say "female-only," I'm talking about such pieces that male characters CAN'T wear without going into controversial territory and bringing up themes of "cross-dressing." I'm not judging, I'm just saying I'm fine with those being female-only. I can't really think of any costumes that males can wear which females can't, however, with the obvious exception of going topless.

Also, men do get two whole models to female characters' one. I've been campaigning for a muscular female model, but David pretty much killed that dead, so now I'm campaigning for a more muscular texture and more muscular swaps of human arms in the Robotic Arms category. It won't be a new model, but it might be close enough to it.