Thoughts on Pool/Ancillary/Patron Customization

This might be happening sooner than you think. We'll be getting the Sorcery power pool, and in it will have a travel power that's a hybrid of fly and teleport.

It does appear that way, doesn't it?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this.

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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.

UI work was budgeted, but the art wasn't done then. Freedom was a last ditch bid for survival, so there wasn't much point in putting too much work into something that was several issues down the road.

Now the art is done, it's just waiting on the time allocation to set up the interface, then it can go into testing.

Yes it was. Nearly every epic power is a direct draw from an existing power from an existing powerset. Most of those powers already have not just custom effects, but also custom animations. Patron pools don't have custom options, sometimes, but even when we get customization options, we may not get customization for those for the same reason Kheldians didn't get any.

Additionally, doing a from-scratch redesign of a system and not accounting for future development is the height of poor planning.

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.

Yes. Patrons. That's the thing. They had no intention of doing it without Patron Power pools, so if custom sharks where to suddenly appear in game files (that we wouldn't dream of looking at), then that would be a dead giveaway, wouldn't it?

No one said future development wasn't accounted for. But as I said, it doesn't matter if most of the groundwork is done and it's only a matter of a few minutes work. UI work is UI work and can't be done unless the PM says so.

You'll have to provide some source for that claim because this matches nothing at all I've ever heard from the development team on the subject of customization. This is actually the exact opposite of developer comments made at the time, where BABs and team had not made a decision as to whether Patron pools and Epic ATs even SHOULD get customization options, considering these had powers representing specific in-story concepts which had specific in-story visuals attached to them. Ghost Widow's Soul Storm is, they said, not JUST a dark hold, it's Ghost Widow's signature attack and thus should look the part.

No decision was announced as to whether or not Patron powers would receive custom options if/when Epics were customized, but to claim that customization would not move forward without Epics is not justified. As a point of fact, not every powerset in the game received customization options in Issue 16. No weapon set in the game received an option, and the explanation we were given was that weapon sets already had customization options in the form of weapon customization, so to save workload, they were focusing on sets which had no customization options available at the time. The idea, then, was to add customization options to those after the fact.

This shows clear precedent of the team delivering, or at least planning to deliver, power customization in pieces. To claim that they would deliver nothing if they couldn't get customization options for everything, especially when you include powers for which customization might be withheld intentionally, is simply not justified.

But the groundwork WASN'T done with the swapover to the new interface, at least according to official comments. Immediately following Freedom, a number of us repeated requests for power customization and "UI work" was brought up as the problem. Considering they have most of the custom effects required, it makes no sense to swap to a new interface and not account for this.

It's simple common sense to ensure that a new system built from scratch solves all of the problems the old system could not because they interfered with its core structure. When you're building it from scratch anyway, it simply makes sense to enable to functionality, even if you have to leave the actual options empty showing placeholders. There's no indication that this happened, and if it did happen, then whoever was using UI issues as an excuse wasn't giving us a real answer.

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 don't buy that. This game is old enough that the current subscriber rate at the time of Freedom's launch was little more than free money. It survived for a long time on life support (the surviving 15) enough to convince NCSoft to buy the IP, put money into it, and make Paragon Studios a growing business platform.

I really dislike how some folks try to make it look like this game is dead when it continually surpasses it's newer, shinier, competitors.

Anyway, if it's coming, I'm happy to hear it. I just wanted to toss a suggestion that might make it more workable.

Here we go again. Someone please link some info about the Sorcery Pool Power. I haven't heard anything about this. Sounds awesome though!

Fly and Teleport. Awesome enough for a couple sorcerer character respecs!

Because all NCSoft's great new hopes bombed.

Game isn't dead, and wasn't dead. Far from it. But it was a combination of dedication and luck that enabled it to survive NCSoft's, and some of it's original creators, attempts to kill it.

Like pink sharks, there is no "Official" information, and therefore we aren't allowed to talk about it here. I have heard of things called internet search engines though...