Olantern

Some additional things to keep in mind on the OP's point:

First, the dev staff changes, old projects get shelved, and new ones take the forefront. Just because there was developer interest in a costume set some time back doesn't mean that interest carried through on the team as a whole for something based on it to make it into the game. On the other hand, as others have already pointed out, something that was first mentioned years ago may be on the cusp of appearing in-game now, given the long lead time in development.

Second, the fora develop preoccupations that sometimes either aren't reflected on the dev team or aren't communicated to them. To choose a non-costume example, there is (or maybe was) a player belief that Longbow is an evil, pseudoheroic faction. Based on my own, unscientific survey of the fora, I'd even go so far as to say this is or was a majority opinion among forumites. Yet I've seen little indication that the devs were ever even aware that players thought this way, let alone that they shared this belief. Similarly, I read today something along the lines of, "Why do the devs want to make Radiation Melee when most players on the forums want Thrown Weapons instead?" Even assuming the poster I read was correct, personally, I'd never noticed an overwhelming interest in a Throwing Weapons set, and I imagine the devs and OCR folks could easily be in my position. Things that forumites take as obvious may not be so to developers.

Third, as a corollary of all that, the devs are the developers. They are the ones making the content. They are entitled to play favorites and change their minds just as much as anyone else who produces creative works. If the developers have no interest in making a Golden Age costume set (anymore?) and are interested in making two gritty, futuristic sets, that's their perogative. (I say this as someone who has little interest, in the abstract, in Postapocalyptic and Cyberpunk outfits, though I may change my mind when I see the costume parts themselves.)

With regard to pulp/Golden Age costumes specifically, there's an additional problem. I've seen them mentioned in several threads this weekend, and everyone seems to have a different idea of what "pulp/Golden Age" or related terms mean. (Are "tights" Golden Age? I'd say "no," but some might say "yes," and I can't argue they're totally wrong.) This accounts for the wildly disparate reports on whether we're getting them or not from players.

Both this thread and the Plummet itself reinforced an idea that my brain just keeps stubbornly resisting: the players have some very, very eccentric fixations.

Post-apocalyptic costume set? I'd never been given even the slightest impression that there was anyone interested in this sort of thing, but now we're getting it, according to this thread because it had the best and most popular presenter.

Radiation armor? I might've argued for this, but I'd always had the impression that I was in a very small minority. I'm even more surprised at comments like, "Thrown Weapons allows for so much more." Ultimately, it makes little difference to me. I like new sets, regardless of what they are.

As for zone revamp, while I've found lots of forumites' suggestions both interesting and of limited appeal to the game as a whole, Independence Port really has me scratching my head.

I see the same sort of peculiar, eccentric preoccupations in-game. I have one channel-mate who will complain about the lack of banking animations for flying characters on any pretext and who never takes Fly as a result. I never would have even noticed this "issue," let alone thought of it as a problem.

Those sorts of preoccupations develop naturally in a group this size, but I'm always surprised when one of them, whether it originates with a developer or a player, rises to the level of something that makes it into the game. It always feels as if someone happened to find the Golden Ticket in his Wonka Bar while the rest of us have merely the delicious chocolate. Not so much a complaint here as an observation.

Perhaps I'm not the best choice to comment on this sort of thing. The feature I always wanted (make your own missions) was added to the game several years ago, and while it doesn't always work perfectly, it works well enough. But I remain perpetually surprised at some of the things that other people are looking for to complete their game experience.

How I'd like to see it:

Initial Announcement: Nemesis Macro Assembler deployed in (zone)!

Mechanics: Somewhere in the zone, a strange-looking, scaffold-like thing appears surrounding a building. Like the Paladin Construction, its health starts low and then rises, though more slowly than the Paladin Construction's does. As it does so, the building starts to look more cannibalized as the Macro Assembler converts its structure into various Nemesis machines. Meanwhile, groups of Jaegers and other Nemesis automata spawn to protect the Macro Assembler.

If the zone's populace doesn't bring the Macro Assembler's health down to zero within some timeframe, we get ...

Second Announcement: Nemesis Mega-automaton is ravaging (zone)!

The Mega-automaton (even I could come up with a better name than that, but it's late) is a Giant Monster, like an even more impressive Warhulk, but many times the size. It moves around the zone until the event timer runs out. Periodically, it spawns some powerful or unusual minions, up to some maximum number (to avoid the Paladin zone entity cap issue). For extra added amazingness, make it a Nemesis Zeppelin that lifts off and patrols the zone, like the Arachnos Flier, but hopefully easier to engage and catch.

Badges are awarded for defeating the Macro Assembler, defeating the Mega-automaton, and defeating the minions. After the anniversary event period ends, the zone event still has a chance to trigger based on player completion of some specified task. None of the existing task forces really focus on Nemesis (he's more a story arc character), so I'm not sure what would work well for this.

So, essentially, the Paladin event with the trigger conditions of other zone invasion events.

***

More likely, it'll be something like the zombies or Rikti invasions. While this is fine, and Nemesis remains one of my favorite factions, I have trouble seeing how it could work well unless the devs remove the stackable Vengeance from the Nemesis enemies.

I would think an event this large and heralded in game lore would be spread over many, many issues, much as the Praetorian content has been. I'm not expecting an entire issue of "This is the Storm, and you've dealth with it."

I also expect people to get as tired of the Battalion and related issues as they've gotten of Praetoria.

Not-at-all-related:

If you had to think up a food to represent each of the Seven Kingdoms, what would it be? I ask this because yes, I am considering doing a Game of Thrones diner party.

Thank you to Dr. Aeon and anyone else involved for setting it up that way.

I haven't replied to a PvP-related thread in years, so it might as well be this one. Here's the perspective of a confirmed non-PvPer.

1) PvP relies on randomness. PvP is a situation where the protagonists of the game (my character and my team) get defeated, all other things being equal, about half the time, and nothing ever gets resolved. This is when PvP is working ideally. I don't like randomness. I already experience an environment where results are uncontrollable every day; it's called "real life." I prefer the predictability of the PvE game.

2) PvP is said to require "skill." This is the flipside of the problem of randomness. I simply can't accept the idea that a video game requires skill. To hear PvPers discuss this sort of thing, one would think PvP was like playing sports or doing something artistic. I've never felt like I was defeated by superior skill in PvP. I've been defeated by people playing characters designed with PvP in mind, but that seems a bit different. If you're playing an archetype and sets that do well there and you have a modicum of experience, you win. Again, I don't see how this constitutes "skill," and it actually irritates me when people treat it as such.

PvP is competitive. This is the big one for me, and, I suspect, for a lot of people who don't PvP. Enjoying PvP requires a different mindset from mine. To a PvPer, the game is a "game" in the sense that a football game is a "game." One side's trying to beat the other through a combination of ability and luck. To me, the game is a "game" in the sense of a "game" of let's-pretend or something along those lines. It is a recreational activity where the individual events may not be predictable, but the shape of the play is. It's an experience rather than a contest. This is true in the PvE game as well. I never feel like I'm trying to outbuild the game and rarely seek to exploit the rules to my advantage. On the other hand, for some players, doing just that is the main part of the fun involved. I am just a bad fit for PvP, period.

I hope that helps the data-gathering.

This gets suggested a lot, though this is the first time I remember it being suggested by someone the fora respect. Considering that we have a lot of people complaining that i23 is "too light," despite all the stuff it contains, I have to agree with Zwillinger that something like this wouldn't go over well, despite the fact that absolutely everyone, including me, ends up complaining about QoL things from time to time.

Even beyond that, we have to deal with a problem Samuel Tow brought up: what is "quality of life," anyway? Pool power customization, more costume parts, and a change to the AE filter would all improve my enjoyment of gameplay, but I don't think that makes them "quality of life." I certainly don't think "rewrite the lore so it's consistent with the players' [which players, for one thing?] vision of it" is "quality of life," but someone certainly does. Everyone will draw that line somewhere different, and everyone will complain, "They ignored [X problem]! The devs are lazy!" (They do this now, but they'd feel even more justified in doing so.)

Finally, this sort of idea presupposes that things like bugs and simple errors, whether mathematical or textual, are being intentionally ignored in order to create "new shiny." I just can't believe that's so. Development of Hat Melee being neglected in order to develop Carp Blast and Clown Manipulation? Sure. There's only one set of powerset designers, and they can only do so much at once. Grammatical errors persisting due to development of Clown Manipulation? Not so much.

Most players tend to think of development as a methodical, step-by-step process where individual tasks are completed (or left incomplete) in a particular order, much the way an individual writes a novel or paints a picture. Years of developer and OCR posts have convinced me that isn't the case. While the devs are sitting in meetings with a whiteboard that reads "i26: 1) Battalion attacks 2) New debuff set? 3) Secondary level shift system 4) PvP revamp" or what-have-you, Protean is writing the text of a mission for i24, Positron is holding forth on how big the endgame raid currently in the conceptual stage should be, the Dink is creating the set the players pushed for at the Plummet for release as soon as it finishes, Synapse is creating the new autohit AoE debuff for the Geek Manipulation set scheduled for i25, and two overworked QA checkers are reviewing i23 code. Dozens of balls are in the air at once, and bugs and mistakes and design decisions players don't like can creep in anywhere. They are not leaving those things in to irritate us. They are doing it because they are lost in the shuffle, or fixing them would break something else, or they're not in the code branch that's being developed right now. There will never be a single track of development, and even if it were possible to agree on and then catch every error, without that, there can never be a "totally fixed" game.

That leaves us with an issue totally devoted to "some" fixes. And, while players who haven't worked with large organizations may disagree with me here, I can't see how that would really differ from what we get now.

That was one of the weirder fact patterns I've seen in an opinion out of a court of appeals, and I teach such weird fact patterns for a living. Wow.

Thanks to Clockwork01 for posting here, thus bringing this thread to my attention.

It occurred to me that if the OCR folks pass on all the comments from this thread to the development team, there may be a developer saying something like, "Why would this give them the idea there's going to be a pool power themed around every origin? You know how they'll complain when they don't get one. We spend all this time working on a set to counterbalance that tech-y Medicine pool you OCR people say the players are always complaining about, and then they want more?"

In brief, or perhaps not so danged much brief, I think we may have our usual cycle of high player expectations based on how players would make the game, developer bewilderment, and forum teethgnashing that has been with us since the servers emerged from the primordial ooze.

Dang. And here I was hoping for Fin Fang Foom.

Edit: Though Kingsley certainly could bring a certain gravitas to classic Foomisms like "Fin Fang Foom will put you in his pants."