Vic Raiden

Reports of her death were greatly exaggerated, it seems.

I happen to have access to the old Titan Icon client, and bizarrely enough, the Sybil dress is listed as a chest detail. Unlike on HC, the dress actually works not only with back parts, but with non-Sybil belts as well. Really, the only problem is the necessity of using the linked colors option to color the front of the dress. Then again, HC itself has a weird loophole in the attachment point system because it lets one use the waistcape version of the Tech Knight belt alongside a back option, or even an actual cape... provided you're not using a chest option from the Armored category, which I always found weird.

I unironically wonder how difficult it would be to add an item section to the character creator, especially without breaking every single costume file already around. Just this last update, a lot of people have reported broken costumes they had to fix, and that's just from adding a couple new parts like the snakeskin mantles. That said, I'm all for giving more love to the Monstrous Legs category because what we have right now is very lackluster.

While this thread is still up, I want to join the question about a suitable grand finale... or more precisely, multiple grand finales, one for each of my characters. I have a heroic demon girl, a villainous cyborg ex-AV and a Praetorian slated to become a hero on Primal Earth. I'd want to provide a suitable ending to each of their stories, and I'd like to have a better idea of what my options are.

Yeah... It's even worse when you give an enemy two different weapons. Only one of them can be animated as holstered, and they tend to revert to default "Legacy" weapons whenever you're not looking.

Oh! That reminds me of a couple older discussions about developing more personal paths for villains:

Yeah... But there's another problem to the villain layer. There's plenty of ways to be a villain, and very few of them are about doing random assholish stuff purely because someone paid you to. I can't really name anyone who would indeed enjoy that, but well, such are the limitations of the contact system. The lack of agency, in my understanding, doesn't refer to being railroaded into evil or roguish acts the player may not be comfortable with so much as to the very fact player villains simply don't get to do much on their own without being explicitly told to, with the exception of newspaper missions, morality tips and a small number of arcs.

Right. I did say I'm not sure if I understood that post correctly. And when you put it like this, I suppose it could be of some help.

Such statistics would only work if every player only got to have one character. But many of us have dozens, some even have hundreds... I suppose statistics should show the total blue-to-red-to-gold character ratio, or the amount of time each player spends playing some character of a given alignment. Unless there's something I don't know about.

Big yes on this one. It'd make discussing lore oddities much easier without clogging General Chat so much.

AFAIK "swimming" is just running a little below the water surface, just with a different animation. To get actual deep-water swimming to work, I think the characters should have their travel powers turned off and substituted for a reskinned version of flight if they dove deeper... but for that to be of any use, the devs would have to model the bottoms of all these bodies of water, which I don't think is ever happening given just how much work it would take. That said, I like the idea and wish it was feasible.

I don't double-post often, but I feel like I need to ask a question relevant to the overarching problem: What arcs in this game, of any alignment, would you say give the greatest sense of player agency?

Going off that, I think we really could use ourselves more arcs which combine considerable character agency seen in Dean's arc with a feeling of doing some genuine, impactful evil. That'd be a start, at least.

Unpopular opinion: I genuinely like the Circle of Thorns temple maps, if only for the aesthetics.

As an avid TV Tropes reader, I really appreciate the effort you put into this. But now we gotta back it up with a primary powerset.

How much more obvious did that How much more obvious did this use to be? Yeah... Fun as the arc was, I too caught myself seething a few times playing it, whenever I ran into something I knew my character wouldn't do. Closest thing to a workaround I found was spelling the character's ACTUAL thoughts, speech pattern and all, out via local chat.

I have made some updates to the mission to make it more lively: - added an intro pop-up and dialogue lines for the boss - added ten patrols wandering the middle portion of the map - added an ambush triggering upon defeating a fixed (but not mandatory) lieutenant in the final room

Haven't ever played WoW, so I can't say much, but I do kinda know there are two main factions the players can belong to that try to be at constant odds with each other even though greater cosmic-level threats keep piling on and neither side is actually all that committed to either good or evil barring the oldest questlines. CoX feels somewhat the same, except all areas are also alignment-locked unless you're one of the two "grey" alignments which are just the basic ones except capable of going wherever they want. It's more than a bit problematic in that blueside gets over twice as many zones as redside, and the two sides don't even get to cross over outside of a handful of instanced missions taking place in an isolated fragment of the opposing side's home turf. That's just not all that fair.

I tend to keep minions basic, with just basic attacks and maybe a shield or non-annoying single-target debuff power on some rare ones. Lieutenants, they're typically either expanding on respective minion types or getting more gimmicky stuff like flight or ally buffs. Bosses, though, that's where I go crazy as long as it suits the faction's overall theme.

The other day, I've used Ouroboros to run some arcs I missed, that being Sondra Costel, Julius the Troll, and Archmage Tarixus. While doing missions for them, I saw their trust gauge go up as expected... but when I completed their respective final missions, I found that none of them are in my Inactive contact tab, and clicking them led to them giving me their "not introduced" lines instead of the "no more missions" ones. I've been told that Ouroboros-ing content is kind of creating an alternate timeline where I did a given thing which still remains not done in the prime timeline, but that just rubs the completionist in me the wrong way. So my suggestion, as given in the topic title, is to have the game flag contacts completed via flashback as already introduced, and thus properly tag them as completed upon completion, regardless of whether the player had been actually introduced to them in normal play.

I'm not going to take a stand in this discussion, I'm just concerned about it getting so out of hand that GMs have to get involved.

Another major problem I noticed is that all interactable objects - doors, glowies and the like - turn solid black when cel-shading is on.

Even then, it feels awkward that there's an entire category with only one item in it. Also looking at the Jet Packs here, because I don't get why the Gold Bricker jet pack gets its own category when the rest are just lumped together with normal backpacks.

There's also a couple Jackets options with long coat tails which likewise block out back details, so... 🤔 Think those should be moved there as well?

Harris also has a mission where you're tasked with clicking three glowies, and then one with destroying some Legacy Chain runes... neither of which disappear upon mission completion, oddly enough. I'd be happy to see that changed as well.