srmalloy

The "rescue homeless people from the sewers" mission is one I've taken up a variation on that, at least for my ranged characters. I work my way in, whacking the hostage guards, but keeping away from the hostages themselves so they don't trigger their follow. Then, once I'm at the back of the mission, I'll hook the rearmost hostage and drag them with me toward the entrance, picking up the other two. If the map cooperates, I'll drag everyone off to the side in a big room so that the ambush runs past me to the back of the mission, giving me an easy run to the entrance.

Now if we could get 'door diversification' for the city zones — there are clickable doors all through each zone, but my characters keep getting sent to the same ones. For example, the fifth mission of the Synapse Task Force (after the first patrol mission) seems to be virtually certain to be at the west side of the skyscraper just west of the Siren's Call gate, and the Positron I mission right before the "jump into Oranbega" mission is always at the building just north of the Siren's Call gate. There are many other examples — Rick Davies' first mission, to retrieve the Clockwork sprocket, is always the same two doors in AP.

Also a more extended display of the power animations on the power customization screen; as it is, there are a number of powers where the display in the customization screen loops too quickly for you to get a good idea of the visuals, and it's only after paying for the change and taking the character out into the city to actually use the powers that you say "That doesn't look like what I thought it would from the tailor" and go back to do it over.

And just because it's hard doesn't mean it won't be taken for development. In the short run, is it more likely to be done as an animal-transformation travel power like Panther Run? Yes. As a 'character assumes an avian form, but can still use their powers' travel power? I think it would be too much work for just a special travel power. As a basis for an aviform body type? That has more potential, although the one example of a fully non-android body type — nova-form Kheldians — and they have an extremely limited number of power animations. Is there enough presence of aviform individuals (or the desire to have aviform characters) to make the development effort worthwhile compared to putting that effort elsewhere? I don't know; they seem to be a niche character type.

That would depend heavily on the details of the Avilan design — whether they were to have been humans with wings (from a hexapod ancestor, like centaurs) or like pterosaurs, where the hands are part of the wing structure. If the former, as we got winged characters in game, then any residual animations left in the data files aren't likely to be much use; if the latter, they still might not be usable, but would take some examination to make the determination.

No, we're giving you a list of reasons why it's hard to do as a regular travel power that still allows you to use all your attacks while the power is active. Your response is "well, we'll just make it so half the playerbase can't use attacks while it's active", and don't seem to see how suggesting a new ability that can't be used equally and fairly by all characters is inherently divisive and gets downgraded for consideration. As Rudra says, and as I noted in my original reply, there's nothing (except maybe having the bat, bird, and other meshes to use for it -- I'm not sure whether the existing meshes from various powers are detailed enough to be used easily, but that's a much smaller issue) preventing it from being another animal-transformation travel power, where it suppresses your ability to use attacks while active.

Yes, but what I'm seeing is that he's continuing to argue for the power while excluding entire powersets from being able to use it -- AR, Dual Pistols, Archery -- an Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster might as well have all their powers suppressed by Bird Form Flight. When you have to presuppose gimping a significant fraction of the playerbase -- all melee powersets, all ranged powersets using a weapon -- to use the power, it's feeling more and more like an "I want this how I want it, and I don't care how many other players are inconvenienced when they use it" suggestion. As Coyotedancer says, it's much easier conceptually to make it work like Rocket Board or the other prestige flight powers.

So the existing 'one arm extended' snipe stance works how in bird form? Or the double-arm-forward animation from Fire Blast? You still have to animate the character mesh doing something to have a visible animation; it doesn't just magically transfer to the new mesh. And the flying animation for a bird form is going to be considerably different from the existing hover/flight animations, so attacks from those postures don't simply transfer across.

So you only have to create new animations for all the ranged attacks, then?

I already do this for all of my female characters, the standard 'NHTSA 5-mph safety bumper' size looking out of place (see "Most Common Superpower").

Two options. Make it a cosmetic variation for Fly and Mystic Flight... and then come up with new animations for every single power in the game that can be used while flying. Or make it a separate power like Rocket Board that suppresses all your powers while using it. I can see enough downsides to the latter than I expect it would get much less use than you might think, and the former involves enough work to make it prohibitive for the minor upside of the visual change.

I don't even have a hundred characters yet; and with up to ten costumes per character, I'm certain that I'm not even close to having the biggest closet of costumes/power customizations.

With 1000 character slots available, and ten costume slots per character, it's far too easy to build up a sizeable list of costumes and power customizations to pick from loading an existing set at a tailor. Would it be possible to get a small change to the list of costumes/customizations so that when the list is up, you could type a character and have the list scroll to the first entry starting with that character? For example, with the list below, if I typed 'S', the list would scroll to put 'Shallkinetiisch.powercust' at the top of the window:

While I agree that they are annoying to have to remember to convert to threads once you've got your T4 Alpha, remember that they don't exist in isolation; you would need to come up with a disposition for the Notice of the Well reward for a WTF as well. Simply upscaling the shard reward — it takes five times as many threads as shards to make a common component, so changing shard drops to threads, making them five times as likely (for a single thread), then merging that drop chance into the existing thread drop chance would give a single base drop. Notices, though, are more complex. For crafting an incarnate boost, they're the equivalent of a rare component, but just giving a choice of rare component for a WTF may be giving too much, since the rare can be used to craft boosts for the other slots, making the T3 boosts easier to get, but changing the Notice to the same random-tier component pick that the incarnate trials have could be biased the other way; there will be a need to examine the balance of rewards.

Incarnate Threads were originally a subscription-only drop. As shards were not usable for crafting Incarnate boosts for anything but the Alpha slot, this made an effective gatekeeper for incarnate abilities — the devs didn't have to block off earning incarnate XP after the Alpha slot was unlocked, as nonsubscribers wouldn't be able to craft anything to go in them. Shards existed to give the freeps a taste of the incarnate system to encourage them to subscribe.

Along with "unhiding" animations for the gem and rock DE mobs, unfolding from a rock or crystal formation on the ground or embedded in a cave wall. Throw in 'static' versions of hidden DE, and you could up the suspense factor a fair bit.

More anonymous, and evolved over time, but from 1878: "Don’t argue with a fool, or the listeners will say there is a pair of you."

Himbos don't have any visible characteristics — at least, game-visible ones — that would make them notgame-safe; just clean up the male minion Outcast mobs a bit, take off any chest logos, a wider variety of clothing colors, and give some of them jackets, and you would be good.

I've got one character that had an idiosyncratic reaction to Superadine and got the physical changes without the mental ones, along with a couple of other effects that formed the basis for his background. I'm not sure that it qualifies as 'head canon', but way back on Live, I saw someone say 'для' in chat — I remember that I was standing near Ghost Falcon in PI at the time — and decided to make a character with a Russian background and use chat binds to say things in Russian, taking advantage of the fact that Paragon City had little history outside the city itself. Over time, I created more characters with Russian backgrounds, building up a collection of Soviet state-sponsored supergroups like Народная Армия, individual heroes and villains, and looked up actual Soviet research institutions to use in backgrounds, creating a loose shared history so that the characters I'd created had a mostly-coherent environment they were from. I've gotten quite a bit of use from Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии им. И. М. Сеченова — the 'I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry'; it just seemed like a wonderful place to have Science origins come from.

The problem is that you can't simply kick them out of the league/team and ignore them. They can park in the Murder Motel and go AFK, and there's nothing you can do to prevent them from leaving their pets on Aggressive to attack any mobs spawned by other people in the courtyard, draining XP. They don't have to be in a league with active players; they just have to stay in range of the spawns.

"No, Flashburn, we're not accusing you of using excessive force; we're just noting that all the criminals you apprehend are brought in by the police transporters with third- and fourth-degree burns covering more than half their bodies."

And to have the slot for the power in the powerset changed to an additional attack All your protestations about how you aren't suggesting that Ice Patch be removed can't hide the fact that you want it folded into another power so you can have another damaging attack replacing it in the powerset.

One of my character names would be a 'deep cut',then, being a play on the title of a 45-year-old song — Rolande, the headless Trollkin Gunner...

When you create a character with the Bioluminescence texture for both the head and chest, you come up against a jarring texture discontinuity: The head texture has a 'glow' patch at the back of the neck, but it doesn't wrap around to the front of the neck, so you get a hard discontinuity where the chest color cuts over to the skin color on the head. If the 'color 2' patch at the back of the neck were to be extended to wrap around the neck, this would be eliminated.

I don't have OCD issues... I have OCD subscriptions.