Rocket Boards?

So that's three non-Iceman examples of Iceman-style ice sliding - one from Pixar, another from DC and a third from Mattel; and to be honest ice powers are pretty rare in the world of comics.

I'm sure there'll be no problem to have one from Paragon Studios.

Its also a question of existing tech. When CoH was being designed, most of the MMO's had combat where the characters' movement during attacks was severely limited. This wasn't done because it looked good... it was done because the ability to reliably track movement and communicate it with other players in a timely manner was rather limited. Back then, these games were designed to handle relatively long intervals between getting mapserver updates. The faster and more frequently you can move, the more challenge the path-prediction models had in keeping things looking good.

The lockdown-during-attacks and similar behavior masked this rather well... and even gave them time to nudge things back to accurate representation.

Fast travel, on the other hand, complicated matters because there was a much larger range of possibilities as you moved faster (and in 3 dimensions). By discouraging combat activity while moving this fast, though, you hid the fact that positioning as seen by the server, the player, and the other players may be grossly different. You can see that artifacting even today- Flight (generally used for noncombat activity) seems to be communicated at a broader margin of error than hover. When I have my character fly past my wife's character close enough to collide with her on my screen, I'm often not anywhere near her on her screen... and vice versa.

That was one of the real problems with PvP jousting. It wasn't just that you came into my screen from so far away and then left before I had a chance to react, it was that my game client often didn't even RENDER you as close enough to be a threat until after you attacked and were moving away.

Then why do so many videos/comics/games without Iceman have ice powered heroes using it?

Ice slide is intimately and definitively linked to ice powers. Not ice man. Any case against Ice Slide being in this game would be a case also against ice powers of any kind.

Planking seems to be the 'in' thing... why not be able to coast on some random planked out NPC?

I wouldn't mind seeing a UI modification that made this more feasible:




[Aura]

*Head Options (Including None - for all listed options)
*Chest Options
*<-L-<Arm Options>-R->
*<-L-<Leg Options>-R->

Effect 1
2
3
4...


[Combat Aura]

*Options

1
2
3
4...


[Travel Aura]

1
2
3
4...


[Path Aura]

Every now and then I'll be using Fly and wind up stuck in a vertical position that's not quite the one now used for hover ... hopefully the copter pack could default you into that position.

...and your solution to make your idea for that working in a game is what?

As long as our Ice platform doesn't look like Cryptics (which is a frozen surfboard) we should be golden. If the devs add the platforms as choices to customize Hover Board they can just call it element: ice.

The platform could look like a jagged circular chunk of ice with a flat top to stand on.

Also going with the concept of Element Platforms they could have several options like they did with shields. Like platforms of Fire, Earth, Ice, Electricity, Shadow, Twister (wind) . . .

Isn't that inside an AE building?

Again, no one's saying we couldn't do an iceslide. But I'll have to respectfully disagree with you about where the idea originates. Forming a persistant slide of ice and then sliding around on its leading edge is quite closely associated with Iceman. Have there been other iceslides since? Sure, but Iceman came first. Is that a problem? No. Superman was the first flying hero, but he's far from the only one these days. Could we make our own, significantly different iceslide in COH? Sure, I think so. I'm sure we could dream up something unique on the concept side, and I'm sure Tunnelrat could bring it to life beautifully in 3D. Could we make an iceslide EXACTLY like Iceman's? Probably, but I'd personally rather come up with a new spin on it.

The most interesting thing for me, reading all of this talk about iceslides, is that the idea seems to have a surprising amount of support. Would all of you really want an iceslide before, say, other flying platforms, some kind of mount, etc.? Let us know what you're dying to see in game!

I would love to see animal mounts (horses, fiery horse, unicorns, sabertooth tigers, lions, bears, and raptors) Then there's vehicles (motorcycles, unicycles, rocket bikes, hover bikes, a flaming bike) Things you can fly on (a cloud, swarm of insects, chunk of rock/earth, pegasus, glowing energy disk, a metal disk) These are some of the things I would love to see thrown into the game for additional travel options.

I'd like to see a variation with rocks, except as I say that it occurs to me that it would be hard to pretend you're not destroying Paragon's roads.

I want a motorcycle, and have since release.

But I won't buy it if it's going to shut off all my defensive powers and result in me being slaughtered by the mobs I drive by. I don't mind not being able to activate new powers, but shutting off toggles and passives is a deal breaker. I know the tech for allowing this probably doesn't currently exist, but I think it would be a good idea to create it.

I know that's not your area, but I want the others to know that this is important if they want to make money off of selling vehicle powers.

How about running on stupidly long stilts of ice extended from the bottom of the your feet?

Depends. For instance, if Nemesis Ponies are even a possibility I'd say they should trump any sort of fancy ice movement power.

I personally care little for iceslide specifically. I suspect that it would get used about as often as power slide currently does, which is to say "Not much".

If we take a step back from iceslide and examine what makes it different from super jump, what we have is a power with a travel aura that stretches both ahead and behind, that offers 100% control over your maneuverability on all three axes, and whose gameplay experience from a first-person perspective would be very similar to that of riding a roller coaster.

A mine car that magically lays down its own track would be substantially the same power as iceslide.

I would much rather see mounts and flying platforms of various sorts (carpets, the Army experimental machines I posted upthread, Dick Tracy style hover vehicles, rocket packs, gyro packs, birds, pegasi) before iceslide. Then again, I'd like to see real animal companions finally added to the game, but that's a whole other topic.

I personally think that low hanging fruit (or close enough) should be taken care of first and then things that need more work, such as Ice Slide, come afterwards... But not too far afterwards.

(Emphasis added.)

Now that we have rocket-board flight, I really, really want motorcycle and Vespa superspeed. No matter what disads come with them. Come on, you already have the motorcycle model in-game, the Thugs bruiser uses it as part of his summoning animation.

For myself... would want to see some sort of mount - motorcycle, winged horse, war dog, segue scooter - WAY before I'd be interested in an ice slide.

Having said that, the way I see it, an ice slide would almost just be a special effect of superspeed.

What I'd really like is a Flying platform power with a nice selection of different platforms to choose from. I think we'd get more flexibility out of them as costume/power customization rather than individual powers.

I envision several categories like Tech, Magic, Elemental with further options to choose from.

Vehicles and mounts would be nice but may require more work because of having to sit. So I can understand if they would be a separate power.


And costume/power customizations might be something that could sell well to F2p and premium accounts.

I think people are very interested in a variety of travel power pool customizations as a way of thematically flavoring their heroes and villains. Ice slide just got a little more attention in this thread because some people considered its intimate connection to Iceman debatable. The focus was on that claim – I don’t think we should take from it that an Ice Slide is the Numero Uno travel customization request. However, redname thread polling players specifically about this subject might just help us identify what is most desired. /toggleoff_Subtle Hint

The ideas are out there (Magic Carpets, Broomsticks, Floating Chunks of Earth, Ice Slides, Metal Disks, Sci-Fi Platforms, Burrowing, Swinging, etc.) and most come from other media and are public domain in spite of the other game doing them too. I have actually been working on a more comprehensive pitch for travel power customization but for the short version, I would just beg the devs that we make this true power customization and not just to a series of Walk-style one-offs that gray you out while in use. Travel powers certainly can make you feel more super but being completely vulnerable while using them really has the opposite effect. We need to be able to protect ourselves and attack.

My pitch for ice slide specifically would be to make it less like Iceman’s static and boring pose and more like Frozone’s dynamic skating maneuver with the arms pumping and the hands tossing ice slightly ahead on the topography to form the skating surface. I’d make it an alternate of Super Speed and have it more or less conform to the limitations of that power – as cool as it would be to build ice ramps to the ceiling of the sky, it would also mean that the omni-directional aspect of the power would have the devs wanting to limit it in some other way and that way would likely be speed. Ice slide should be fast!

Lastly, I’d like to say that if a variety of animated costume piece jetpacks for the new backpack slot aren’t available in the game soon after the release of i21, I will hold my breath until I turn blue. This is probably the last arena where I really get frustrated with development, triply so whenever I see a redname paraphrasing the “give players what they want” dictum from years back. Players have wanted these as costume pieces since beta. They’ve been requested thousands of times. It is long overdue.

See, that's just awesome.

I honestly don't have an answer for this, as I feel equally about either/or and/or anything else I can come up with.
I do want to see FX options for all forms of travel (hopefully through power customization): Flight using Dark Energy, Electricity, Light Energy, etc. just representing the different powers in the game and using those sorts of FX instead of just the default/current effect.

Anyway... not your territory...

I will say this... The Prestige Slide (and ice/snow sliding) is awesome and should be used elsewhere and in more ways.
I want a color-customizable cloud for the Prestige Slide... And I think you guys should absolutely come up with more ways to use that animation (even Power Customization for Super Speed and Flight). Heck, I can already use the slide animation with Super Speed and it is AWESOME. Let us get rid of the FX of Super Speed and the FX of the Prestige Slide and add ice or whatever other energy you want and you already have quite an awesome option in game!!

Yeah... I can't seem to talk about this stuff without reverting back to Power Customization, haha...

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We've definitely looked at it. There are some animation challenges to overcome, but I understand it's not impossible.