Winterminal

Everyone's brain is wired differently. For some, in terms of mouse movement to direct camera angle, we tend to think in terms of a joystick: pull back on the mouse to look up, push the mouse forward to look down. For others, the mouse movement is akin to if the mouse were placed directly on the screen: you would push the mouse up to look up, move the mouse down to look down. It just depends on what the player finds comfortable.

These two posts together sum things up rather nicely, in my opinion. Jophiel's reasoning, in particular, strikes a chord in my mind, and I think relates back to earlier concerns (upon i20's release) about blurring the lines between ATs. People want to feel like they are making a difference, and believe me, I KNOW how much of a difference support/control ATs can make on a mission team. But in the fast-paced, blow-em-up environment that is the iTrials, the easiest way for someone to feel like they have an impact is to do just that: kill everything, fast. Thus, the gravitation toward damage archetypes.

I agree that insanity would play a good part of it. However, as long as I am quoting his lines in the movie, I would cite his monologue to Harvey Dent in the hospital as a fitting explanation of why he does what he does. I'm not discounting your opinion, as you make a valid point. But, given the right set of circumstances, it is plausible that such a person could exist.

If I were to "pull one over" on a Phalanx member, I would simply find someway to steal something they held dear, then chuckle gleefully in my hideout. If I wanted to ruin them, I would find a way to make them fall from grace, twist the world's view of them, turn them into the villain.

I am not sure if you are making a "Villainous" arc where you beat an NPC, or if you are creating an arc where the player is up against someone truly nefarious. But either way, if I wanted to leave the player or NPC feeling like they had actually lost (which, in and of itself, is strangely enthralling because it fills us with the need for redemption), I would write an arc where the character, upon completion, is left in a lose/lose situation. It is your story, I should not write it for you, so I am purposefully (and with great difficulty) not giving any examples of how to do that, haha.

Then again, later in the movie, Those quotes really capture what "absolutely evil" means to me.

MicroMachine, you are preaching to the choir. I completely agree with you. I could care less how a floating disk/board gets beneath my feet, as long as my character is surfing through the skies on it!

Sadly though, I think our opinion on the matter is the minority. To a good chunk of the player base, an implementation like the version I described may be perceived as rushed and half-done, and there would be a big push for actual animations to be put in for the summoning of a disk/board/boulder/ice slide, etc. I have no problem with the aforementioned method, but based on the past, I think if it was done that way we would end up with the proverbial mouse receiving a cookie and therefore wanting some milk.

Before I postulate: I know nothing about the technicalities of how this works.

That being said, based on what we have in-game, I imagine it would not be overly difficult to design some new emotes and code them in such a way that they could be additional fly poses. I remember when the lotus sitting position was changed to allow it to activate while hovering, so in theory, the Devs know how to make an emote ground-specific, flight-specific, or a hover-capable crossover (such as /em lotus or /em stancehero1).

The issue that I can see arising lies in the formation of these new poses. Rather than just a new position (say, the Iron Man flight pose with your hands down by your sides as part of your propulsion, still a pose I'd like to see in the game) what your talking about is adding another graphic on. Granted, this is probably as easy as most other emotes, where the additional emote graphic is just conjured out of thin air, but I think the issue would be the realism of it. An ice slide animation is easy to justify: you are in flight and you form an ice slide beneath your feet. But for flying on a levitating chunk of earth? That might look a little strange if a big slab of bedrock conjured out of the Steel Canyon sky.

Based on what we see in game, your idea is plausible, and probably quite possible. But if (and hopefully when) the Devs decide to input multiple flight type variations, they probably want it to look somewhat realistic, considering how defining travel powers can be for many characters.

Gold glasses I had as Booster Gold
Blue Guy looks like Nightcrawler to me.

Yes, of course. And I suggest the OP does just that if he is still looking to craft certain abilities. (There is the inf. cost that's involved, but my opinions on that are off topic for this thread.) My point, however, was that if the Devs had decided to keep shards as the universal component while keeping everything else in place and not creating Threads, many players would have had a head-start in the slot-acquisition process and/or power creation process.

An example: Replace "Incarnate Thread" with "Incarnate Shard" in every current conversion that involves Incarnate Threads. Upon i20 going live, there are players who could have unlocked at least the Judgment and Interface slots simply by converting Shards to Incarnate XP. I'll bet there are players out there who would then have enough to craft abilities for those slots too. Within 10 minutes of logging on after i20 going live, you would have people with new Incarnate abilities. (I know people had T4s very soon after because they ground their way through trial after trial, etc. etc.)

Long story short: it seems the Devs simply wanted to place a slight hindrance on the population of players who had amassed a large amount of Shards between i19 and i20.