Instead of Pet Customization, how about this ?

Was thinking about the Idea of pet customization the other day as I prepare for the next Issue, and had a thought...instead of being able to customize your pets, which has been shot down to good reason I think, how about like our ability to customize weapons...we do the same with pets?
Something like being able to change your pets look as a particular theme/enemy group.,giving between 3-4 choices per Primary set.

For example:
Robot Primary - Malta, 5th Column, Council
Mercenaries - 5th Column, Goldbricker, Sky Raiders
Thugs - Hellions, Skulls, Carnival of Shadows
Necromany - the group in Dark Astoria, zombie invasions
Ninjas - Circle of Thorns, Knives of Artemis, etc

Using existing models and just changing the pets appearance, it'll allow for more theme/concept ideas and prevent it being abused my less than mature individuals. Just another QoL idea that would seperate and give uniqueness to each individual Mastermind. Any thoughts? Also to plug another individuals idea that had something similar but with the Mastermind's primary attacks sets. Shameless plugging, but he had a good idea.

cot for ninjas? KoA maybe, yeah.
Mercs could get the PPD swat variations
Robots would do good with PPD bots, too, as they are actually kind of similar already.

But that simply gets around the issue. The type of spawn created is based on the programming of the power. It's stiff programming. There's, at the moment, no way insert usable variables for pet spawns.
Another issue is the pets here. They'd have to be custom re-animated in some cases to compensate for new powers that weren't meant for that model.
And then the fact that you will be carrying around NPCs that look like other NPCs. This is very minor, but an issue non the less.

Man, I'd be happy if I could just spec primary/secondary colors for my pets. Red for my /pain, black for my /dark, or hot pink gang colors for my Castro Street Thugs!

The problem is that there is a "hook" in place to allow you to customize your weapon. There is an attachment to your costume that can be modified by the character creator. A slot it taken up by this choice, but in effect it's no different than the costume slot on your arms or your legs. It's just a piece of your costume that appears only when you have drawn your weapon.

Your henchmen, unfortunately, are not attached to you. So there is no way for them to, for instance, inherit a costume piece from you. You might have an invisible costume piece that in some way serves as a placeholder, to identify that you want, say, Council bots instead of the default ones. However, the henchmen don't currently have any way to "read" that costume piece when they are summoned.

It might be possible, but not with the way the game works right now. There would have to be some changes to the underlying code. Which is not so say it might not happen in the future, but it would have to be in the future.

while it might not happen for a while, I do think that if MM pet customization is put in, this is the way to do it.

When I was thinking about each primary...I looked at each enemy group that would fit ...
The reason behind the CoT was the fact that in the Ninja set...the tier 3 pet casts spells, AoEs, etc...KoA do not. As for any of the PPD...well Masterminds are a Villian AT, so the idea involved Villianous enemy types.
Like durning the Halloween event, we were able this year to collect costumes, maybe we could use this to our advantage. Do we know if the programming or idea behind that would work for this idea?
As for the power customization, I was speaking about another that person who makes a Mastermind might not want bow attacks on his Ninja, maybe he wants dark blasts or something else. So it had nothing to do with colors what so ever.

I doubt we'll see this anytime soon.

Pet powers do not summon generic minions that just happen to use bot, zombie, or merc animations/powers.

Pet powers are set up to summon very specific instances of very specific entities. Trying to change these means that the devs would have to develope an entirely new power for both the MM primaries and the powers of the minions themselves.

So let's say you have 3 different variants of mercs. That's three new powers for the primary(One for the minion, LT, and boss summon) and 3 new of sets of powers for the minions. And each minion has at least 3 powers. 3 x 3 x 3 that's 30 powers just for mercs alone!

Plus then you run into enhancement issues when you customize your minions. Your enhancements are in Mercs -> Malta, for example. How do you transfer them to Mercs - > Council powers?

As I understand it, MM minion appearance is actually selected client side, like Propel's random objects. So, for example, different people see a particular Thug differently. You'd need to change that to make the OP's idea possible.

In response, I was only looking at their generaic appearance, not creating whole new powers for them. Only changing their look to different enemy mob appearance. For the RP community, this might be a huge leap in background stories/concepts.
As one other people has said, it might be client side to see different appearances for each pet.
One your last question ToxicEel, the powers the pets have already will be the same, I was just thinking of changing general appearance as a whole. So for example, if you have a Merc Primary and you choose to have Malta pets...then just the appearance of pets would change...not the powers.

As to your reply ObscureGuy, if it is indeed a client-side fix/change...then is their a way to influence it without breaking the EULA. I had to give a specific example and get someone in trouble, but if you are on Villian-side on Virtue and have ever seen a toon by the name of: Baron Von Doffen. He has done an amazing job of creating a concept/look to fit within his 5th Column Mastermind.
I have seen him a couple of times, and always praise him for his unique look and concept. I just wish to give others the ability to create amazing unique characters that the population has been screaming for it would seem.

[ QUOTE ]
As I understand it, MM minion appearance is actually selected client side, like Propel's random objects. So, for example, different people see a particular Thug differently. You'd need to change that to make the OP's idea possible.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't believe this is the case, but it is easy enough to check.

Summoned pets, however, are actual MOBs that appear on the map. Unlike a power which is simply a temporary graphic effect. I would guess that when you see an NPC, someone else playing the game sees the same NPC. Pets should be the same way.

The problem is, as mentioned, your power randomly chooses one of a set of different NPC models to summon. You could make the pool of random choices different, but you couldn't say, "choose from this pool instead of that one".

>.> No one has Covered this but Goldbrickers would be Overpowered in terms of Single Target Damage.

Let me try this again...it's basically only a re-skin of the MM's pets...nothing to do with changing powers of any sort. The same powers they currently have with new Skins to help create new concepts and such.

[ QUOTE ]
In response, I was only looking at their generaic appearance, not creating whole new powers for them. Only changing their look to different enemy mob appearance. For the RP community, this might be a huge leap in background stories/concepts.
As one other people has said, it might be client side to see different appearances for each pet.
One your last question ToxicEel, the powers the pets have already will be the same, I was just thinking of changing general appearance as a whole. So for example, if you have a Merc Primary and you choose to have Malta pets...then just the appearance of pets would change...not the powers.

[/ QUOTE ]

I realize what you're asking for, but the actual mechanics of the power a little more complicated than that.

The way it was explained to me is that your mastermind summon powers are linked to very specific NPC's. These NPCS have hard coded powers, abilities, and appearance. In order to change their appearance you would have to make a new summon ability for each different look you wanted. For example it would be summon minion: Malta or summon LT: Council.

In addition you would have to give all of your summons the powers of the original minions. The task gets very multiplicative very quickly. And then, as I said, enhancements become a problem because you've got them in summon group A, but say you change your costume and now use summon group B, how do those enhancements get transferred over without a respec?

[ QUOTE ]
Let me try this again...it's basically only a re-skin of the MM's pets...nothing to do with changing powers of any sort. The same powers they currently have with new Skins to help create new concepts and such.

[/ QUOTE ]

Don't forget, every single pet has three looks based on upgrades. They look one way freshly summoned, then their appearance changes after the first upgrade, and again with the second upgrade. And of course, what if you do the second but not the first upgrade? That's potentially 4 different looks for every single pet in the game. How is a Skull going to look upgraded? Or a KoA or Malta?

How about just coding the "costume" to be an effect on the pet. That way it only affects the pets that are summoned and you don't have to make multiple copies of anything to do it. So you would just select a pet and use it's individual menu to select the action of activating the effect and presto change-o. I'm sure someone will tell me coding is still an issue and I know nothing of how the mechanics work, but hey, it's just an idea.

Edit:

Just a lowly lvl 20 MM so don't beat me up to much.

[ QUOTE ]

Robot Primary - Malta, 5th Column, Council
Mercenaries - 5th Column, Goldbricker, Sky Raiders
Thugs - Hellions, Skulls, Carnival of Shadows
Necromany - the group in Dark Astoria, zombie invasions
Ninjas - Circle of Thorns, Knives of Artemis, etc

[/ QUOTE ]

put the family/mobsters under thugs and I will love them forever.

[ QUOTE ]
>.> No one has Covered this but Goldbrickers would be Overpowered in terms of Single Target Damage.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think he just means aesthetics.