Ice has too few color choices

It doesn't make the 'concept won't work' standpoint any less valid. Fudging stuff is one thing, but having to put up with a character that you cannot make look right is a whole other beasty. And, in a game that is so good with customisation usually, also a tad annoying at times.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I must have misunderstood his post, then. To be honest, with how many people are asking for a redesign of the basic ice armours (the blocky snowman looks IS a bit passé), I'd say we may be due for a redesign of ice and snow powers in general into something that would look less "bad" when coloured in brighter shades.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I didn't make that argument. I only said lets stay away from yellow snow.

But I want to look like a giant popsicle. My blaster's snow cone abilities can only come in grape, lime, blueberry, and bubblegum!

Isn't it up to the players if the color is over the top?

I am completely for player choice as to play-style and such and completely against "developer vision" or any other "should" being imposed.

BUT...

Having said that, there is a certain minimum standard of production that a professional has to adhere to if they want to be considered a professional. If BAB thought it looked like junk and wasn't worthy of release, I'm willing to defer to his judgment in that instance. It only would have reflected badly upon him if something cr@ppy looking had gone live.

I was bummed when I couldn't make a blood red or sulfur yellow rain. =/ One of my stormies is a DS/Storm who calls upon Abyssal storms. Was looking forward to the color selection being greater than it was.

While I agree with you on the notion of having standards of quality and not just slapping anything in even if it looks like my *** in a funhouse mirror, there is a flip side to this "Kain's coin theory" - holding something back because it doesn't look good enough against popular request instead of redesigning it to look better AND feature the requests made is not a very good solution.

To put it in less of a run-on sentence: If brightly-coloured ice powers look bad, then redesign the visuals for the custom powers into alternatives that don't look bad with custom colours. Yes, it's understandable that at the time of power customization's original creation, there probably wasn't a lot of time and opportunity to be making brand new effects for entire powersets. I get that. But it's been what? A year now? Sooner or later, better, less cartoony effects SHOULD be introduced.

I'm fine with waiting as long as it takes. What I'm not fine with is the developers looking at the half-***** customization options and going "Welp! We did all we could, so it's working as intended. Too bad so sad!" and declaring the customization of ice sets finished. It's not. What we have for ice power is nothing more than a placeholder. As such, it works about as well as one can expect, if one were to expect a real, actual version of said power customization to be added at a later date.

If certain powers look "wrong" with certain colours, then the solution is not to slash and burn the colour palette. It's to introduce additional FX that do look good with said colours.

Example: Original powers use "bright" sprites that look good in bright, whitish colours, but look terrible in darker colours and in black, because they become almost invisible. The solution wasn't to take black out of power customization, but rather to include both Bright and Dark custom options so that both bright and dark colours could be used for customization. If Ice powers look like cartoony gems when coloured in less pale tones, then put in new effects that look better in said colours.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I was wrong initially. BABs was talking about "cartoony gems" indeed, which implies that it looks bad more so than that it looks unrealistic. I actually rather doubt that, myself, but he is (was) the graphics designer in the house. Hence my response - if it looks bad, make a better version, instead of limiting colour selection.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

When I was shown what they looked like I thought they were kinda cool myself.

Ah, I see what the problem might have been. When given bright colours, the adorably crude ice effects start looking like the Holtzman effect from dune, which is to say they look like energy fields... Very blocky, ill-shapen energy fields.

Then again, does Dark Blue fire really look like fire? Because on my screen it looks like ink. And Stone Armour was even given the ability to not actually consist of "stone," but instead of pure crustal.

I keep thinking that ice effects ought to stop looking like glass and be made a lot less transparent, like glacial ice, instead, which is opaque. That way, we may be able to recolour the things without making them look like something TOO far removed from ice.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah, I like those, actually. Sure, they might not looks like Ice, and look more like Energy fields, but I'd still use them, maybe just for that effect.

And I'd be fine if they gave us other forms of Ice that would get more colors (and had the effects changed more to Stone's effects, where they only cover portions of the body), if it meant we got to make it different colors.

And the Blasts and Swords becoming those colors makes them look more energy-ish, too, which means that they could be used to create something akin to Jubilee in addition to the ice effects. I'd be all for it.


Edit -> Actually, even if we didn't get those colors for Ice, I'd say that it would also be nice if we could get those as additional animations for Energy Armor.

Those look fine.

It sounds like the objection was not that they look bad, but that they look like crystals more than ice.

Which is silly. Ice can be a type of crystal, but beyond that, people RP their powers as other things often and a major use of customization has been to make them represent different concepts than what the set is intended to be. And that can be a huge asset as a way to add "more sets" without developing more sets.

It's just railroady.

Much like how you could not have an emp villain just because it had a word in its name that was considered inappropriate. And of course it is moot now.

Indeed.

When I made my Spines/Fire scrapper I used Thorns for the spines and colored all the fire effects Green/Brown and play them as Pollen effects.

Blazing Aura becomes Infectious Spores, for instance. Lets me have a dryad themed scrapper.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

These... PEOPLE are creating what they want... in a GAME!

Whenever I see a person who made a power another concept I am amused and often compliment them.

RuntimeException, my Ice/Psi Domi techbot isn't using "Ice" at all. Instead it's a hijacked Crey bot running a buggy and hacked homebrewed operating system which was juryrigged with a Clockwork Psi Eminator.

So all the mez effects are actually foes getting confused / running slowly / freezing in place due to the constant waves of psychic spam, DDOS attacks and other malware attacks being projected by RTX.

I'd love more flexibilty in terms of recolouring ice so it's not so "icy" (ideally for RTX I'd love the ability to give much more minimal effects to ice altogether a la Grav but that's not going to happen and it's totally an edge case)

Yes, like the others said above, please tell this to my BS/DA Dervish Scrapper who uses Dark Armor to represent sand, or any number of characters that use sets with customization to represent something that they're not "supposed" to be. My Dark/Psi Defender who colored his powers as white as possible to make them resemble the ghosts that he controls. My /Ice Dominator that already colors her powers to be crystals instead of ice to the best of her abilities. There are a number of ways to do what you're describing already. Why shouldn't Ice powers be able to do the same?

Here's a practical experiment for you: Take Fiery Melee's Fire Breath power, pick Dark Fire, then colour it blue/blue (and I mean 0,0,255 blue). Have a good look at what comes out of your characters' mouth and tell me it doesn't look like blue ink. Even if it doesn't look like that to you, I dare you to claim it looks anything like fire. Because it doesn't.

I'm generally an opponent to using one powerset to represent another powerset, or to represent something it's clearly not (like Dark = Sand), but even I have to admit that precedent exists. If you can explain why your sand deals Negative Energy damage, then more power to you. If someone's powers revolve around cold, but around a chemical which freezes emerald green or ruby red, then I see no reason not to let them.

After all, if the argument is that green ice doesn't look like ice, then I dare say black fire doesn't look like fire, and red radiation doesn't look like radiation. Wait... Wait, no, that doesn't work.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

If I can imagine Dark = Sand then the same thing applies to the type of damage it does.