Jack_NoMind

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Character Origin has always been described as "Where/what they get their powers from."

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To me, the division is how much the character needs the devices...

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Well, I can't argue with both of you -- you're proposing diametrically opposite points of view on what "origin" means. I'm more inclined to accept Bitt_Player's point of view, though -- as I pointed out, you can have two characters, both AR/Dev Blasters, with identical powers and virtually identical sources for those powers (a gun and a tool belt), and a Crab soldier's powers (many/most of which derive from technological devices) do not make them other than Natural. The differences are primarily conceptual.

However:

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Take a Rikti Headman Gunman's armor away, and you have, for combat purposes, a human who looks really weird.

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We don't have any reason to suppose this is true. While we're given "riktified" speech in cutscenes and game, much like how comic books render foreign languages in English with some sort of marker, everything we know about Rikti points to the idea that they almost always use telepathy amongst themselves. Their biology is improved, and dialogue clues from the Lost (talking about books and the stock market) and the high grade of Rikti technology suggest that they may have increased intelligence as well. They also may bear special adaptations that allow them to utilize their weapons and armor more effectively. Lore seems to suggest that even armed with adapted Rikti technology, only super-elite human soldiers backed up with magic stand much of a chance against Rikti forces, while simply 'riktifying' a human makes for an effective shock trooper.

So I think inasmuch as a Crab soldier is a bad-[censored] Natural, a Rikti soldier is a bizzare and powerful Scientific creation, even without their guns and armor.

Offering 'voice set' options has come up a few times. I'm in favor of it.

Besides "Young" sets (and other sets with pitch/emphasis changes), sets with bestial, robotic, and elemental noises would be very nice.

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Rikti Headmen and soldiers would be Technology Origin, because they rely exclusively on weapons, which would work just as well if they'd never undergone any genetic tampering at all.

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By that argument, Crab Spiders would also be Technology. But the origin of their abilities is Natural; anyone can pick up and use one of those mass-produced weapons. Technology indicates there's something unique, something superpowered, about the character's technological devices. (This is true even if the actual granted powers are identical to those a Natural hero would have -- the difference between an AR/Dev Tech blaster and an AR/Dev Natural blaster is purely in how the powers are explained.)

So would Headmen and whatnot be Natural? After all, they're using the same weapons as all the other Rikti. While they may be super-tech by human definition, any other Rikti could pick up and use one. But it doesn't really make sense to call a Headman "Natural"... even though a Natural character could use those weapons, Headmen are not Natural entities. They're genetically altered beings. The only Origin that really makes sense for them is the default for their kind -- Science.

I always thought Heart was Empathy. What we really need to complement it for Controllers is Monkey Control.

Well, it sounds like the OP is slotting single-effect common IOs into her powers. Which might be one of her early mistakes.

In that case, I'm not qualified to answer that objection without knowing more about how the AI is designed and implemented. I'm inclined to suspect that any fix for b, however, would at least partially address c.

I'd think a big magnetic strip would do pretty well...

(Actual kopesh... ii? kopesh... es? ...An actual kopesh would have been sheathed at the belt by its wearer, but the broadsword draw animation uses a back scabbard. If you wanted something "period" for that, you'd need an open-side or box scabbard.)

Sadly, until we can actually have fighting game-level interaction and physics in an MMO, animations will always have to fudge a little. And they just need to track far too much data to be possible in a massive environment (without serious compromises somewhere else).

Foot Stomp is a non-targeted melee PBAoE, so my suggestion as written would not remove rooting from it. Sniper Blast is a sniping attack, and Air Superiority I already agreed is a 'heavy' maneuver.

The cone attacks you mention may require a compromise; forcing a full stop when they begin animation (or in some cases, when they reach the 'strike' point of the animation), but only rooting for a fraction of a second. That should be enough to mitigate the worst of the animation woes.

People want instant gratification. It's the same reason prices always get jacked up in the market.

Also, 10 * 50 != 50K.

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or because it would take too much effort to remove the rooting.

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Well -- yes and no. I pointed out early in the thread that redoing the attack definitions would merely be tedious, not a great challenge. The whole reason it's a lot of work is because of points a, b, and c.

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a. Unrooted animations are often ugly or weird

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There's nothing in particular I can do about that. I would want to say, "simplify melee attacks and then just make the rest root," but that's unbalanced. The most I could do to help is watch a few hours of anime, wuxia, and 80s cartoons and highlight the parts involving moving melee combat. Context sensitive animations are another good answer, and the only one that probably everyone would agree looks good. I don't know how I'd sell that one, though.

I think I'd have to have a more involved discussion with sample video available to identify any specific concerns others have about simple ranged attacks. I don't find many of the games Samuel_Tow mentioned to lack fluidity comparative to CoX; what they lack is the predictable launch position rooting provides for an attack animation, and generally don't compensate appropriately for the barrel vector on fire (often deliberately, as a simplification step for the players). But our grenades already swerve in midair (and may in fact follow you along a horiztonal plane for quite some time), so this would neither be new to CoX nor completely without mitigating factors.

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b. Rooting is a mitigator to kiting

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I can't address that concern, because it's simply a fact. If the concern is, "There must be mitigation for kiting to replace rooting," I did present a suggestion for that.

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c. High-velocity unsuppressed movement buffs plus unrooted combat creates exploitable conditions.

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This seems like an extension of b., unless there's some other exploitable condition besides "being able to strike without being hit back."

Low-level enemy groups don't need to worry about this too much, because the power choices simply aren't available to make a high-damage, high-evasion character. Higher level enemy groups should be coherent, full-spectrum challenges that incorporate buffs and debuffs... and for the most part, I think they are.

So all someone has to do is set up 5-10 bids at 10 inf, buy you out, and resell all your stuff for a 50x profit? ;p Don't think you'll be cornering the market much.

Most melee-primary enemies at higher levels have move speed buffing innate powers.

I would support adding more immobilize and short-duration mezzes even if rooting weren't removed. I think the way mezzes are handled now is entirely out of whack, both for players and for mobs.

/signed for dragons

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In order to pull off this one seemingly simple idea you would push back ANY new development for at least a year, if not more.

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Any new power set and enemy group development. Not any new development at all. Powersets could still be proliferated, zones and TFs created, bases updated -- and taking a little longer to do this, say, four Issues worth of time instead of three -- you could even have a staggered schedule of Basic Content / Content With Animation Work / Basic Content / Complete Animation System Overhaul. And you don't even need to bill that fourth thing as "We've removed rooting!" -- as I and others pointed out, the work done there is also much of the same work necessary to do Power Customization. So if you want a positive player response, there's the shiny label.

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Your definition of "suitable" differs from mine, because while I can see how most single-target blasts COULD BE MADE into running attacks, they are unsuitable in that the result would be butt ugly.

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I think your definition of "butt ugly" differs from mine. Do you think Team Fortress 2 looks "butt ugly"? Because I don't see a massive difference in animation quality between the simple ranged attacks there and the simple ranged attacks here.

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In other words, aggro enemy, back-peddle, never stop firing.

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Oh. We call that "kiting" in other games -- and yeah, it's a consideration, but it's been balanced out before.

This isn't an advocation of removing movement suppression. The enemies would on average still be faster than their attackers. I would also not mind seeing more enemies throwing short-term Immobilizes or extremely brief duration mezzes (a .5 second mag 2 Stun, for instance).

As Weatherby_Goode pointed out, once you get to a certain point, baby steps are no longer possible. You've reached the edge of the first canyon, and it's going to take a pretty big leap to go forwards.

I don't know for certain that this is that point, but I know it's there and that it can't be that far away.

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The marketeers say it's impossible for one person to corner the market - but give me an hour a day with the rates you're suggesting, and I darn well could. Even doubling it doesn't take that much. And I'm not a farmer. Someone with a farm-tweaked character could probably be even *more* efficient, emptying the market and setting their own prices.

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If you drive up prices on an item, everyone who notices will start selling that item. You'd corner it for, oh, maybe half a day, as long as you didn't try to do it at primetime. That's why they say it's impossible for one person to corner the market -- anything you can do, a hundred others can do as well, many of them probably more efficiently.

You know, this is almost certainly not the case, but here's a paranoid spin: What if NCSoft were selling partnerships that RMT companies could buy?

No no, what they really need is a badge that rewards you for earning the "badges earned" badges as soon as you create your character. With AE account-wide badges, it's easier than ever to log in and get "Explorer" right off the bat!

Yeah, but very few people are actually rolling for common salvage, despite the enormous profit margin on it right now. This may be in part because no one can actually store 118 pieces of salvage (something that keeps me from rolling enormous amounts of common salvage instead of reselling moderate amounts of uncommon)... or it may just be because people demand literally instant gratification whenever possible.

So if people can buy up whichever salvage they want directly, they might start buying up dozens of whatever's the most valuable to sell.

I'm pretty sure they could think of a few other things to be added if they were redoing all of the skeletons.

I said it was possible for a game to do. You objected.

There's no reason to suppose this isn't in the future of MMOs, and given that, it seems like something CoX would want to get in on. Character customization is one of its major relative strengths right now, and losing ground on that can only hurt it. Regardless of what the differences between existing studios who have done similar things in video games and Paragon Studios may be.

So, you just replied to my post without reading the preceding discussion -- even the part I quoted directly in my post? That's kinda silly.

Okay, quick recap:

Samuel_Tow said it was impossible. I said it wasn't, and gave an example. You suggested that that example doesn't count, because there was more money invested in it. I replied with a quick theoretical discussion that outlined the absurdity of objecting to the possibility of something via suggesting the conditions under which it is possible are irrelevant. You didn't get it, and I recapped the relevant parts of the thread in a short paragraph for your consumption.

So! We good?

Huh.

"Getting to the moon is impossible!"
"Well, no, you just need a very expensive rocket with some vital equipment..."
"Well, sure, if you get scientists together, and spend more time and money on it. But otherwise, it's impossible!"
"...You keep using that word. ...I do not think it means what you think it means."

It's common salvage. If you're doing any real amount of crafting or selling, you're statistically much better off taking the random roll, even if it's only about twice as much per item to pick what you want.

Make it too expensive and I don't think it would have the effect on the markets and people's paranoia levels I'm hoping for. I'm not sure exactly how much "too expensive" is, but... again, common. Is it really that bad if people generate 60 alchemical silvers at 15 a pop than instead of ~19 alchemical silvers and 93 other pieces of common salvage at 8 a pop?

What? No cries of "DoooooooooOOOOooooooooooooOOOOoooooooooooOOOOoooo oooom!"?