Bikini Girls With Machine Guns!

Okay, I'm going to just come out and say what I'm sure a lot of players are quietly thinking... when NCSoft finally implements power customization for masterminds, we should have the option to have female mercenaries, ninjas, and thugs. And while I can understand if full customization of every tiny detail of how they are dressed wouldn't be computable with way minion equipment upgrades have a visible effect, I will not accept this as an excuse for female mercenaries to ONLY come dressed in baggy combat fatigues, and so on. If there is a technical reason that there can only be a limited number of different looks, make ONE of those options be... Bikini Girls With Machine Guns!

Let's face it, I'm not the only guy on earth who wants a team of Bikini Girls With Machine Guns following them around. If other guys aren't asking for it, they're just being shy or something. This is seriously a feature that could single-handedly convince a lot of men to buy a year's subscription who might otherwise lose interest during their ten-day trial period. I honestly don't think that's an exaggeration. That's money that could be in your pocket, developers. Look deep in your heart, and you know it's true!

And what do you have to lose? If anyone morally objects to the sight of stripperiffic cartoon females strongly enough to quit the game, surely they've ALREADY been driven out by the way straight guys are already able to dress up their female characters. I mean seriously, have you seen the "witch" costumes come with the expansion pack? You'd have to be blind not to! So don't even try to pretend that you're worried NOW about the potential impact that scantily clad cartoon females might have on the game. That cat is out of the bag, the bridge is burnt, and a million horses have bolted through THAT unlocked barn door.

I'd also like to point out that beyond merely being popular, killer bikini girls are also EXTREMELY genre appropriate. What screams "mastermind super-villain" louder than having a personal army of killer bikini girls? That's as instantly recognizable as their penchant for sitting in giant egg-shaped chairs.

And speaking of which, why aren't there any giant egg-shaped chairs available in the list of purchasable base items? Is my supervillain supposed to sit menacingly in an ordinary office chair? It's embarrassing!

But getting back to the topic at hand, my point is that all of the masterminds who summon human minions should have at least ONE scantily clad female option. Mercenary masterminds should be able to choose Bikini Girls with Machine Guns. Ninja masterminds should also be able to choose bikini girls, but obviously without the machine guns. And female thugs could maybe have more of a "black leather miniskirt" theme, or something.

I think it would just be funny if the option for Thugs were for us to have Hellion Girlfriends, which would actually never fight, but only stand around and gossip and comment on how great it is to be a Hellion Girlfriend.

And I definately loved the egg shaped chair comment.

You know, that is an incredibly well articulated argument for something that would normally have been dismissed by most readers as, well... typical adolescent forum whining.

Well done!

I must say i agree that even just having an option to choose female henchies, regardless of clothing style, would be a step in the right direction, if for no other reason than equal opportunity, at least for role play purposes.

If the rumored demon MM minions ever see the light of day, one would expect the 2nd and 3rd teir pets to include a succubii somewhere in the mix, no?

I want my own personal army of leather clad S&M fembots with built-in breast-lasers a la Aphrodite A

This seems extremely reasonable

The devs don't seem to want masterminds to have any female minions for some reason related to possible abuse, as I recall being mentioned a while ago. But strapping, sweaty, ethnic-looking men following dutifully after spike-heeled leatherclad mistresses is fine.

I don't think that's the reasoning, but that it would be a lot of probably unnecessary work to add female pet models, and given that the pet model is chosen randomly every time you summon them, your pet named 'Charlie' might become a woman next time you summon it.

The title reminds me of Ghost Squad.

I think they'll avoid any more bad PR and unnecesaary reports/articles with the TTP factor in place. Especially since the i14 fiasco is finally starting to cool down.

While the stripperific costume options tend to make me roll my eyes (partly because I like some of them except for the stripperific bits), I do agree on the general topic of minion customization. And I want female minions, too.

You can have your bikini girls, and I can have my military women in fatigues, tattooed gangster women, and so on. I just don't want bikini girls to be the only options (like is already kinda the case with the witch stuff and some other costume details). I don't care what ridiculous things others might want to do with their minions (stuff like the pimp doesn't create outrage in me, just eye-rolling).

Then again, I have some general outfit frustrations. I want female characters to have access to cigars for example... and especially that awesome Baron jacket. That's the one that most grates on me (it's enough to make me begin to consider breaking my habit of playing women, just to have one on one of my characters).

At the very least there should be multiple "pre-set" minions types available as in:

Tier 1:
--Set 1 - Male
--Set 2 - Male
--Set 1 - Female
--Set 2 - Female

This would need to remember which Option you have chosen but as this is already is use for any weapon-based power (ie: As a Stalker I chose Ninja Blade. Whever I use a Nin power it doesnt summon the Fantasy Blade it summons the Ninja Blade) I hope its not too hard to implement.

One thing I know the developers are definitely going to be concerned about as they move forward with mastermind customization is backwards compatibility. No matter what happens, they aren't going to "force" anyone to change to something new. So to expand on the idea of sets, one of the sets should be called the "legacy" minion set, just as we have "legacy" weapons and "legacy" power effects.

But within most legacy sets there are lots of different individual ways a minion can look, and I'd like my thug arsonist named "matches" to always spiky red hair. Is that too much to ask? A lot of people seem to think they are reluctant to do this because the programming is hard... but as a programmer myself, I suspect the biggest obstacle ISN'T purely technical. They already have a data structure for remembering unique properties for each minion slot, as proven by the fact that you can give each of your minions a personal name. Upgrading that structure to store more options is just a programming problem, and they've been bragging lately about how they have lots of programmers now.

But how do you expose all the options you could implement to a mere user without making his head explode? THAT is the real issue!

So the way I imagine the interface could be reasonably powerful without being too complicated, each of the six standard minion slots should have two drop-down lists: one to choose a general set of minion types, and the other to choose an individual member of that set, or a special value called "random" that chooses one randomly. These drop down lists for all the minion slots would default to the "legacy" set and a "random" member, duplicating the current behavior pretty much exactly.

Using this setup, my thug mastermind could keep his arsonist as a legacy model but only the one with spiky red hair, while another minion is set to have a different random appearance every time it's summoned, but out of a set of punk girls.

Each minion slot could also have the two standard customizable color buttons, the exact effects of which depend on the model involved, which probably means no effect at all for the legacy models. Hair color and skin color should probably always get baked into the models, but there should be lots of models with different hair and skin colors to choose from in each set where that's an issue.

I support total character and pet customization. I would support banning a player who hangs out in crowded areas and slaps his female henchmen all the time, though.

I'd happily trade customization for more sets.