TyrantMikey

Evard's Spiked Tentacles of Forced Intrusion.

Oh, well, okay, so I don't have that one. But if I could, I would. /em evilgrinwithhandwringing

In the meanwhile, Foot Stomp takes the cake, and quite handily, for all my tanks.

For my fire blaster, it's Fire Breath, the boss melter.

Hm. This comes down to, "What do you think you can reasonably accomplish in a single day?"

Tough one. It would eliminate any sweeping code changes, or coding projects that would exceed 24 hours. Anything requiring artwork changes taking longer than 24 hours are a no-go. Anything that has to be run through QA is a no-go (since it has to be done over several weeks or months).

So, I'd negotiate with everyone to allow users to extend the user interface with skins and plugins. Lift the ban on viewing internal resources, and publish whatever docs were required for creating new skins, plugins and whatnot.

One I forgot to mention earlier:

Every list in the UI should be sorted alphabetically, be it powers, enhancements, BADGES, inspirations, whatever. Badges are a particular pet peeve. When I'm looking for a badge to determine whether or not I've earned it, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

And another: Every number should include comma separators (or whatever separator is appropriate to your culture) so that 987654321 is properly formatted as 987,654,321. I'm tired of my eyes bleeding when I try to figure out how much XP remains to the next level or inf I have in the monitor window.

1. Give detectives cellphones, and have them give them to heroes as soon as you talk to them. None of this silliness of having to cross town to talk to a detective because there's a bank robbery in progress RIGHT NOW! and you need to deal with it, but he wants to check out your costume before you handle it.

2. Eliminate blue caves. Replace them with something that isn't designed to annoy and frustrate players by blocking their view, impeding their movement, and significantly enhancing the possibility that enemies will become trapped in the geometry.

3. Merge all the different types of currency down into influence. Influence, infamy, prestige, merits, vanguard merits, blah, blah blah. Make it all inf. Establish an initial exchange rate, and convert it all. Done. The market currently treats influence = infamy = influence, so we could just assume that it's the same. Now just get rid of all this other crap floating around and we'll be good. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

I suppose that I would want to go to places that differ radically from any place we've been so far. Atlantis. On the moon. In an asteroid belt. An orbital space station. Inside a volcano. Deep under the earth's crust, in a chasm full of lava and ash vents. In a jungle filled with velociraptors and other dinosaurs. In ancient Egypt. At one of the earth's poles, fighting on a glacier as it splits and breaks off from the mainland and drifts into the sea due to a nefarious plot to increase global warming. The Rikti home world. Mars.

All of these could be fascinating and exciting places we could go that would not be the same old thing, done ad nauseum and would vastly expand our sense of the size of the universe in which this game takes place.

Oh, where to begin?

1. One release devoted entirely to nothing but bug fixes. Fix every outstanding defect, no matter how major or minor, or how old. Fix them NAO.
2. Give Paragon zones the Praetorian treatment. This includes reworking missions, eliminating magical-mystery-doors, and adding fixed landmarks. Redo the first 20 levels of content entirely so that there's an actual story to follow (particularly in the first 5 levels). Rebuild Boomtown into something useful.
3. Upgrade all the old costume pieces so that they match the quality of the newer ones. Leave the older ones in place, so that noone's current costume is borked, but make sure that incomplete older sets have new, full sets with all the detail we've grown accustomed to in sets like Alpha: boots, gloves, shoulder pieces, chest, legs, belt, helmet, and goggles (if appropriate). Don't discriminate between males and females. In particular, fix the issue where certain female patterns don't work because they end at mid-calf and there's no matching boot that makes them feasible.
4. Hire someone who can design epic-looking caves to replace every cave map we have in the game. We should never encounter groups of Behemoth Lords in the tight confines of blue caves. Underground caves should allow creatures of their size to move freely, and in large numbers. Need an explanation? Magic, baby. Need inspiration? Look at the caves in Guild Wars, DDO, and other games. They're massive, vault-like caverns, with ledges that follow the wall, and narrow bridges crossing chasms. Certain caves we have now capture that feel, but most now are just pointless mazes (like our nonsensical office buildings, designed by someone who, I'm sure, was on LSD when he designed them).
5. Add more variety to missions, and eliminate the pointless timesinks. Even with the new GR content, everything comes down to either: click a glowie, beat the crap out of all the bad guys, beat down the boss, rescue the hapless citizen, escort the hapless citizen out of the mission, or run an errand for your contact. Fedex missions are a pointless waste of time. They all have cellphones. Is there any reason they can't use them, rather than having me do all the running around?

For variety, consider some sort of puzzle solving. Trap avoidance. Intelligent (and careful) use of proximity triggers.

Those are my top 5. In a perfect world, I'd also open up the UI to skinning, and fix the power monitor window so that it displayed influence, XP, debt, and other information with commas.

And space combat. In an asteroid belt. Epic. So epic.

As an American who loves British shows, I wholeheartedly approve of this thread.

We're in for a thrill ride, and more laughs than you can shake a stick at.

Yeah, this would be a HUGE boon to many an alt-only supergroup. And it's been on the Request List™ for so long it's fallen into radioactive decay.

I suggest one additional server, where everyone can play together.

UNITED EARTH.

I have to say, this is a thought-provoking question.

But for me, the question can't be answered without also asking, "How far out of our comfort zones are we being taken?"

It's all relative. If we're talking about a small nudge, it might be tolerable. A vast leap, on the other hand, is a different story altogether.

Consider, for example, ED. I'd say that pushed many, many people out of their established comfort zones. The initial uproar was nearly apocalyptic in its proportions.

On the other hand, Incarnate abilities lead us, in fairly small steps, to ever increasing abilities. But they require trials and taskforces to obtain. Nonetheless, they require you to step out of your established comfort zone.

Granted, this might be an apples and oranges comparison, but it's the best I could come up with at 8:50 AM before having downed ample quantities of caffeine. My point (which I am probably making very badly) is that it's probably acceptable for a game to push you outside of your comfort zone so long as it does so with your consent and so long as there's a compelling reason to do so and a tangible reward at the end.

Then again, I'm half asleep, and probably shouldn't be posting.

"M? This is J. We've got a Rikti Anal Probe situation here. I'm gonna need some pliers and a flashy thing. Wait...make that lots of flashy things."

5th Column outpost strewn across multiple asteroids in the asteroid belt.

• I still, on occasion, log in my tank and enter a mission without toggling up.
• All my fliers seem to have a sick fascination with smashing their faces into the corners of buildings en route to a mission.
• Until I19, I was never able to make a blaster that wasn't able to suck endurance through a firehose at 500 meters. With end reduction enhancements and stamina. Without sprinting or flying in combat.
• I obsessively arrange *COLUMN* 5 of my inspiration tray to be a rez chain: Wakie on the bottom, Break Free above that, CAB above that, Green above that. That way, when I die (which I frequently do on my rise to godhood), I just press F5 until I'm up, healed, and charged. Then I run as fast as I can while screaming like a three-year-old girl on a playground.
• I double-tap my powers so that I'll immediately get a new target in case someone else kills mine. Twitchy, that habit; and it's gotten some inadvertent aggro on more than one occasion.

I like to keep an eye peeled for costume contests. If I see a spectacular costume that didn't win, I dump a couple million on them.

I've run through the sewers as well, healing and buffing.

My favorite pasttime, however, is to hang in Atlas and look for awesome characters with no vet badges. Then I drop a ton of influence on them. Especially if their costume or bio makes me wish I'd done a better job.

From Second Measure's intro post:

Now that many of you have begun your ascension to Incarnate, we’ll be releasing the Rare and Very Rare tiers of the Alpha Slot in just a few short weeks to help you get a leg up on the launch of Issue 20.

Looks like Rares and Very Rares are in 19.5.