Ok... NOW I'm sad.

I can't imagine them NOT inviting Z back if the game is saved. Dude was very, very good at his job.

And if the game is saved in its current incarnation, then they'll definitely need a community manager again, to get the word spread and bring everyone back after the blackout. (If they end up having to make a "new" game, though, Z said it'd be a couple years before development was far enough along to require his position.)

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Damn.

Someone else mentioned Gravity, but the effect would've been hella' cool as a replacement for KB in Repulsion Field / Sonic Repulsion / Repel.

Damn.

I don't know if this new tech would have been implemented into existing Power Set. My guess is no, but then, I didn't think Dimension Shift was going to be changed either.

I figure I should FPARN at least once in my life...

I know, unlikely ... but still hella' cool.

Seeing any of the toggled "get out of my hair" powers changed to play nice with AoEs would've been a nice buff.

Ah, I just noticed this post.

I suggested this mechanic on the COV Beta boards way back when. It was among a couple more gravitaic attacks I was musing on a thread about powerset suggestions. The only problem was that all the good names for it was in use by existing powers (black hole, singularity, increased density). I imagined it to be a toggle debuff with damage on the anchor while it was on. The effect on the surrounding enemies would be -def, -resist, and -recharge while they were being dragged towards the anchor (slowly). It'd have a high endurance cost, of course.

Guild Wars 2 came out the same week as the cancellation announcement. There's your timing, nothing to do with I24.

(Late response, just got back from vacation in Italy)

Yeah, you should've asked me...

Mids development is one of those things that has always been slow because of my own lack of time (I do have a full time job as well as university courses, and that full time job is managerial, so... no time), but on my official list of things to do when I had the free time were, in order:
- PvP DR
- Entity modeling (e.g. view a pet in a pop-up and see its powers and such)
- Attack Chain generation

Anybody who bothered to look really hard at Mids would've seen the super-secret project I'd been working on, which was to split up the Mids DB from the program itself and provide people with an API for interacting with the DB. It's actually really close to useable (all the pure data itself is already available in MidsBase.dll, but without any power usage and totals and such), and probably would've been done some time around Q1 of next year. Then we could've handed people that in order to make their own random suite of tools.

And then, of course, there was Mids 2.0 aka the Titan Planner, which CodeWalker mentioned above. We never had enough committed resources to make it more than a pipe dream (I've estimated that I could produce it with somewhere between one and two month's work full time). I had actually been contemplating doing a Kickstarter or something for it.

Back to some of the discussion on hand:
One of the things I'd been doing was, in addition to converting Mids from VB.net to C#, to change many of the mechanics to closer match the way they worked in game/in PIGGs. I'd already modified a lot of things, and was almost done with Enhancements, and I'd already altered Grant Power to be slightly more normal (I had to do that because of how heavily it was abused and repeatedly changed in the Incarnate powers). The only real limitation was that Mids doesn't have a time element, so there's no real order to apply things... that would've gone when I'd gotten to doing attack chain modeling.

In the pipe dream in my head, that would've been a stretch goal for the Kickstarter for Mids 2.0.

The Striker AT, from my recollection, was the melee support AT that Synapse/Phil wanted to make for a while. You can think of it as the next step in making something like EAT's, but with newer tech.

The Striker was meant to have burst melee and range dps, and the ability to survive high damage for a short amount of time.

The Striker could start out ranged, and start building up a melee damage buff. Once the buff is maximized, the Striker would then pop into melee range and then begin building up a ranged buff. Take a few alpha strikes, pop out and begin again. There would also be some CC abilities as well in case a breather was needed.

Oh, and one of the melee Power Sets for Strikers would have been a variation of Dark Melee, but.....with a shadow scythe.

Interesting. I would not have been too crazy about that. I know a few people liked the Epic AT model, but I honestly was never too fond of it. The best AT design in this game happened with the original 5 villain ATs, and I always thought a lot of time was being wasted on creating these new VEATs that had such unique structure.

I would have loved to see more unique re-purposing of the exiting power set structure, not unlike what we saw with the launch of CoV.

I made a thread not too long ago where I entertained the idea of 5 new ATs using sets that are rarely used.

I especially liked the idea of the sidekick AT in the list (Assault primary, stalker armor secondary that replaces hide with a pet.) Synapse seemed to like the idea and did mention a in a few times that he would love a ranged/melee hybrid... I guess the Stryker is what he was hinting at.

Here is my fiction post just for the hell of it:

Awesome. I was kinda interested in seeing a melee/support class (paladin-ish) but this is kinda cool.

I'd have preferred more flexibility for our existing ATs.

Lets see

Being able to choose the T1 or T2 for your secondary ability
Some way to actually be able to remove interruptibilty with IOs
Being able to take that 5th pool instead of an patron/epic
Group the pools into T1 and T2 abilities and only require a T1 to access the T2s
Decent status protection in a couple of pools. Something that in principle could be available enough to be worthwhile. Available a quarter of the time at most and has to be pre applied doesn't cut it. If you have a toggle heavy build anything less than all the time doesn't cut it.


Edit: Forcing bad powers down people's throats isn't great game design. Great game design is making people have to choose between things they really want.

Yea.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

I recall Castle saying they had a guy working on it for a month (KB->KD) and they couldn't do it.

If only they would have kept working on the big redraw removal.

I also would have loved to see things like this fixed: Claws/Followup when hovering cycles between both hands but when on the ground there's only the right hand animation. In my mind, EVERY animation that could be done with either hand should have been done. (Yea, I know it means a whole new animation.)

But, alas, such things shall never be seen now.

The dev team did look into that. It would have resulted in fundamental game-breaking issues, unfortunately. Not as in game imbalance. I mean as in it would cause things to explode break-wise, as the game makes fundamental assumptions on how powers are assigned.


You saw that in more of the newer Power Sets. Since the flexibility of choices wasn't something that could be easily granted, the idea was to make the choices as compelling as possible.

Like Hide in the stalker secondary, blaster and tanks first secondary (defiance 2.0 shoot through mez and Bruising). But actually those two were simple to "fix" (make Hide an inherent, and leave the first powers special). Then you would have needed a way to prevent the game from letting the player choose 2 primary or 2 secondary as first powers, and from these two situations, only the one where the player had no offensive power was bad.

One of the more radical ideas was to let players pick 2 primary AND secondary powers at Level 1. This would have given characters more attacks at lower levels, which could have helped certain AT's.

We were all pretty disappointed to find out that it wasn't "just that easy." The dev team probably spent almost 6 months trying to make this work.

That's one of the reasons the Origin Powers were buffed in I24. It was an attempt to balance out low level game play.