Samuel_Tow

Aside from animated tails and a ripoff of Beast from Beauty and the Beast, it isn't actually all that much better. Trust me, I tried, and the only half-way decent canine face I could find was bald, with a large snout and sabertooth fangs, which didn't allow you to have hair on it. That right there put a stop on my pink, winged bunny girl, which works pretty well here. That, and their monster feet are WORSE than ours, hard as it may be to imagine. They look more like your tibia and fibula have a right angle in them.

Then again, I heard somewhere that Paragon Studios were hiring an artist to deal with animalistic costume pieces specifically. That gives me a lot of hope for some movement on that front.

OK, that actually made me like the idea less. I mean, it's good in principle... Until you realise that it puts value on overriding concept. Even if I go with, say, a regular sword in one costume slot, it would be actually detrimental to my performance if I did NOT pick a variety of different swords for my other slots and stuck with the one that the concept demanded.

Sure, that happens to an extent even now, but at least what powerset you pick, you stick with it through thick and through thin. That, and the developers (I think it was Castle) were very clear on why there was a timer on switching alternate builds and why that was not going to change. This is a much more minor variant, but I still don't see it happening with that kind of on-the-fly utility.

If only, if only.

Well, to play devil's advocate for a minute, there is merit to be found in picking a name and being able to use it immediately. Not everyone is interested in having good, original names (as all the Wolverines will attest), and I can certainly see how someone might just be turned off a character if he can't get the name that pulls it all together.

I can see that, but within the current system, it's still not as big a problem as people make it out to be. It's certainly not a non-issue, but it is definitely not a showstopper, and I have so far not seen a solution to it that doesn't lead to a dozen other problems, all of which will then plague ME when I have no problems with the naming system now.

Still, let's not chastise people over unoriginality and stubbornness just because they want a specific name. Wanting that is very understandable. I'm not sure there's a good solution to it, though.

The thing, though is that it's not just secondary effects, it's the whole set's design that revolves around the central concept. Easy comparison - let's look at a Fire/Fire Blaster and an Ice/Ice Baby, err... Blaster. Most Blast sets have a control power in them, but Fire Blast gets Rain of Fire, instead. Most Manipulation sets have support and/or control powers, yet Fire Manipulation has still more damage. Essentially, Fire/Fire has very little support, but a lot of damage output over a large area. By comparison, Ice Blast lacks a Snipe and has not one but TWO holds, and Ice Manipulation has a hold, a sleep, a slow power and knockdown patch, containing relatively little damage otherwise.

I'm not sure how well that applies to non-elemental weapons, but I'm also not sure changing their design would really work. The different sets have a different dependence on their secondary effects. Broadsword, for instance, tends to cascade-kill defence, which leads to good damage output, but few things have much defence to begin with. On the other hand, Battle Axe does a lot of knockback, providing some serious mitigation. Then there's the problem of switching, say, Broadsword to fire. Not only would it deal more damage overall, and exactly where it's needed (e.i. to the many things resistant to lethal damage), but the extra DoT component could pose a serious problem. For one, Fire sets usually don't include the DoT in DPS and EPS calculations, which tends to boost their output and efficiency significantly when the effect does occur. And at 80% chance, it occurs fairly often.

Again, it's a mix of keeping things under static balance to give all choices relatively equal merit, and still retaining SOME theme to the weapons, themselves. Because, honestly, the weapon sets are already kind of similar. It's something we went over in the Scythe thread.

I don't know, either. That's why I'm asking. It's someone straightforward with weapons, mainly because they're separated by weapon type. But basic punches? If you take Super Strength and make it use fire, you pretty much have Fiery Melee. The balance is a little different and things may not look exactly the same, but you still end up with a redundant set. And if you turn it into Darkness, you have a faux Dark Melee. Turning it into Energy would make it a lot like Energy Melee.

And then you have things like Assault Rifle, which wouldn't really make sense to be any other element. Sure, you could alter the bullets and say they're cryo bullets somehow, but what do you do about Flamethrower and Ignite? Or Archery's Explosive Arrow or Blazing Arrow?

I can kind of see where you're coming from. From what I hear, the original Champions P&P game does things kind of like that - you pick an attack type, and then put an element on it. And, to be honest, if that's how it was designed from the get-go, it might have worked. But right now, we're talking about a very, very serious redesign of the entire system that would render many things obsolete and require a LOT of new art. I'm not sure I could support such a venture just based on how big it is, but even if I did, it seems unlikely you could budge the developers to do such a reimagining.

And again, I WANT elemental weapons of all kinds. It's not that I don't want this. It just seems to me, though, that just having cosmetic elemental weapons for the existing weapon sets as a compromise is about as far as that'd go.

People were "late to the party" exactly 5 minutes after the game launched. Five years later, nothing has changed. I tried a whole bunch of fairly obvious names back in May of 2004 and they were all taken. Little has changed.

And, really, you consistently fail to address the problems of usability related to using non-unique names. Forget originality - it's simple utility where this idea utterly fails, and Champions Online is a shining beacon of that failure. I couldn't stand to look at my name in chat, nor read other people's names, because the system they picked to differentiate between same-name players (and you NEED one) sucked. Frankly, I can't imagine one that DOESN'T suck.

How is that a spoiler? It's more a philosophical idea.

Oh, well. At least we have an answer. Something DID change about spawn rules. I guess I'll have to re-learn what spawns under which conditions. Well, as long as they vary and don't get stuck repeating the same make-up, I'm good either way.

That'd be an interesting path to take, given how many players have a "Troll Girl" character or two. I'm hoping for some more masculine costume options for women in Going Rogue, and that would be a good way to fit that into the game. And if I can make a Troll and an Orc female in WoW look presentable, I'm sure Jay and his minions can do the same here.

Good point. What, are only the men of Paragon City prone to poverty or is there some special social fund restricted to only women? Female Scroungers would be a good call.

While I'm with you on Guards and Scientists, but Tanks? The Power, Voltaic and Cryo tank suits (while obviously using the male model meta-game) are actually androgynous and bulky enough to fit both a male and a female frame. The same goes for the Crey Protector troops, as their armour is even more bulky.

Have you SEEN Clamour?

I'm not quite sold on the Tsoo, but everything else, yeah, very much so.

Well, really, the sticking point for me is keeping thing balanced. I like the idea itself, so as long as things can be kept from flying too far out of wack, creating anything that trumps everything else, or anything that is spectacularly bad, then I say go for it. I don't really have an argument why the idea itself is wrong.

There is something to be said about uniqueness of theme, though. Powersets are generally designed to have both a visual theme and a practical theme -fire sets deal extra damage, cold sets slow things down, dark sets debuff and so forth. Whether that's important enough to hold back a more customizable system (and indeed, if more customization in this respect is merited) isn't an argument I feel confident enough to to discuss, however.

Let me pose this question, then - if we give elements to weapons, what do we do to non-weapon sets such as Martial Arts or Radiation Blast?

That... Is a very strange way to think. Now, I do know Germans have this tendency to dub and translate EVERYTHING, so having something NOT be in German may be jarring for them, but as the citizen of a country which almost never gets anything localised except by local translators, I cannot even begin to imagine why having an American game ship in English could be seen as anything but perfectly normal. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but it seems to me that is the status quo.

Figures I'd take heat for posting what I did, but I'm afraid I still stand by what I said - there is no shortage of good names, there is a shortage of obvious names. There will never be a shortage of good names with the player base we have even if the game lives to be 100 years old. Changes to the game's underlying infrastructure aside, you can choose to view this as a problem, throw your hands in the air and give up, or you can choose to view it as a limitation to work around.

The fact is some of the greatest works of fiction have come about exactly because creators didn't have complete freedom. The scary, tension-building first part of Jaws where you don't see the shark is a good example, brought about not as an artistic statement, but because the mechanical shark wasn't working and they had to keep filming. The teleporter pads in Star Trek are another example. Originally, they were supposed to use a shuttle, but because of budget constraints, a cheesy effect would have to do, ending up becoming a cult symbol.

Names are a lot like that. Yes, sometimes it's easiest and most convenient to just pick the first name you come up with, but oftentimes NOT having the name and looking for a different, sometimes even more creative alternative leads to a superior character overall.

And before people line up to jump on my head, I'm not really interested in uniqueness, and certainly wouldn't want to keep all my names to myself so other people can't use them. On the contrary - abuse aside, let people use my names if they want, long as I get to keep them. It's the fact that you need SOMETHING to identify different characters by, and all of the suggestions for this that I've seen over the years are both ugly as sin and STILL highly impractical. Champions' misbegotten practice of appending your global name to every character's name is NOT something I want to see here, nor are all the different "phone number" appendix identifiers suggested otherwise. You need to tell the different players using the same name apart, and there is simply no way to make this both convenient and not ugly.

The quote he said that about had you saying people hate getting knocked back at one point, then later suggest a system where everyone would get knocked back. I think that was his point.

Huh? If I'd known about this, I might have tried Age of Conan. Care to elaborate?

Indeed, that is why its unintended ability to do so was embraced and worked into the game philosophy with such verve and so expanded upon.

...

No, wait. I'm reading off the wrong cue card.

What, again? How long has it been since the last time finding a good name was getting hard?

Over the years, I've been consistently unconvinced this is a problem, and this kind of explains why. If you want a unique character, then you really ought to go out of your way to give him a unique name. If all the ones you're trying have already been taken, then they are not unique by sheer definition of what the word "unique" means. Even if we examined this as different degrees of uniqueness (even though "unique" is a binary state - either it is or it isn't), there are still plenty of "mostly unique" names left available. I snagged Bodyshop about a month ago, and everyone I've shared this with was amazed it was free. Well, it was, and I didn't exactly go out of my way to think of it. I heard it on TV in reference to a car repair shop.

What is largely unavailable are obvious names. Super Man is a given, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that Fire Man and Flame Woman are both taken. I did see a Miss Blaster running around a few years back, so people obvious use these names, but if it's obvious, it's obviously taken. It's how it goes. Try for something a little less obvious that people wouldn't have been as likely to have made already. You're after a unique character, after all.

And to head off an argument, no, names like Qwerty are not all that's left (in fact, I'm pretty sure Qwerty would have been taken). There ARE good names left still, even good classic super hero names if you think hard enough. Unless your want is so specific as to boil down to wanting a specific name (as these threads usually do), you are really best served by just trying more names and putting more work into coming up with a good, available one.

I realise this whole thing makes me come out as a jerk, but I see one of these threads roughly once a month and the results are usually the same. The problem inherent in all of them is almost always solve by just trying a different name until you find one you like that you can use. I'm sure people will offer (and may well have) various tools for finding or making one. The bottom line is that people are already using these names, and yanking them from paying customers is bad business. Yanking them from inactive accounts proved fruitless (which is why name purges occur at level 6 and below these days). Really, short of allowing duplicate names, there is no good solution, and I do NOT want to walk around as Samuel Tow@Super Dude everywhere I go.

It's not the fact that people are using my name that bothers me. It's the fact that my name is approximately ten miles long in chat, ugly as sin and difficulty to read that bothers me.

I was thinking to give out the whole set for a lower price than the sum total. I can get a full set of Roman gear for doing a TF that rarely runs over two hours these days, yet I can bust my butt for a full week and I still won't be near to the whole vanguard set. So price it at 200-300 and leave it alone. It's stupidly expensive as it is, and I feel that's a good way to reduce the cost without compromising the size of the task TOO much.