Megajoule

Part of the concern, I believe, is that there's currently no convenient way to put the entry of the passcode into a macro, or to save multiple macros as "bookmarks". Also, it introduces more loading screens, which people dislike and/or try to avoid.

*shrug* What I'm saying, or trying to, is that IMO the Trinity is broken and unfun, we're all better off without it, and the Tanker is one of the unfortunate relics of it that we're all trying to find a way to live with, 20 years later. I mean, it's un-comics! I'm sure you can find characters who are durable but not able to deal damage in equal measure, but IMO they are very much the exception. The comic archetype is the Brick (or Brute), who can dish it out as well as standing there and taking it. The ambulatory meatshield with tiny T. rex arms is a game artifact that I can trace directly to the text MUDs that were the evolutionary predecessors of the first MMOs. For what it's worth, I do have skin on this game (so to speak). Two of the live characters I've recreated here are Tankers (one Inv/SS, one Stone/Stone). My love of their concepts has been enough to carry me through despite all the issues with their powers and gameplay, as discussed in this and other threads. Can they be salvaged, improved, made more fun to play, without fundamentally altering them or eliminating their role? Has it already been eliminated by changes in the meta, and we're only now catching up and realizing it? I don't know.

The essential role of the Tanker in the Trinity is a taunt-bot, a giant block of armor and meat that absorbs all attacks for the group while the healer(s) keep pouring water on it to put the fires out. Only the DPS players get to do something different, and that's if their optimal rotation can't be reduced to a macro. It boggles me sometimes that anyone thought this gameplay was fun. Maybe it wasn't, and everyone just accepted it as the way things were and/or what you had to endure to get the shinies. I'm glad CoX broke with so much of the conventional wisdom of the time - consider defenders, in contrast to "healers" - but I'm also aware that a lot of that is because they didn't really know what they were doing and were mostly "winging it". It's sadly ironic that we now have to deal with one of the few places they got it "right" according to the state of the art in 2000-2005.

The role of the Tanker is one of the bits of "the Trinity" (which was extant/the rule in MMO design back in the early 00s) that was changed the least in its implementation in CoX, and thus it shows its age and flaws more than most. Unfortunately, as this thread shows, I'm not sure it can really be fixed without making it superfluous, redundant and/or unrecognizable.

Heck, if all you and your mates want to do is stand around in bases and chat, you don't even need your own server; Paragon Chat is thataway...

Good.

I wrote two AE arcs back in the day, that makes me a developer! Wait, no, it doesn't. You're not a dev. You're a player, who enjoys RP (as I do) and base building. That doesn't mean you or I or anyone hanging out in the D (both the RPers and the AE farmers) are entitled to any sort of special treatment. We are but a few out of thousands, tens of thousands.

Yeah, I'm absolutely not a farmer, and I can tell you that having at least one 50 makes Inf (shortage) problems Go Away. To the point that I'd be willing to drop a couple of million on any character(s) you have that want this power, MVT. (To be honest, I'm a little surprised you haven't found this out yourself. Do you, perhaps, keep making alts and then leveling them only to, say, SO / IO range?)

I'm going to be a stick in the mud and/or a bucket of cold water, here: The administration of a game, or a server, is not and IMO should never be a democracy. Even the idea or expectation that it should be is dubious and IMO dangerous. I've seen too many failures, hurt feelings, and long angry rants about what the devs should be focusing on (and what should be totally easy) to think otherwise.

Constructive would be nice, yes. But honestly: am I wrong?

What I'm seeing in this thread is "Make the click power work just like the slash command."

The mesh-maker / modeler(s) probably had those assets saved on their dev workstations, but that's not how the costume pieces they produced were stored in the game files. And the latter was on a fairly ad-hoc, "get it on the test server by Monday" basis.

The game engine does that, but it makes no distinction between parts, only what the camera is clipping though. The requested functionality would require that the costume creator know which parts of a given mesh are "jacket" and which are "torso", and I don't believe it does or can be reasonably made to. But hey, I could be wrong...

I'm not sure if this is possible. As I understand it, while the costume pieces were of course originally built / modeled this way, in game they're a unit - not layers that can be selectively displayed. A "Jacket" chest, for example, isn't a jacket over a torso, but a jacket-and-torso.

In fairness, I've hunted around for the bartender that actually sells insps and come up empty as well. Not always easy to find even if you know there is one.

This latest round of "suggestions" aren't from people who have or want to play Storm themselves.

IMO: There will not.

Again, at that (hypothetical) point I'd rather see the bonus folded back into the set itself / have the set rebalanced. No crash, no click, no toggle, no-thing to keep track of. It Just Works - not some of the time, all of the time, every time, at whatever numbers the devs decide are fair. Nice and simple.

But they aren't powers, really. That's just a workaround because it's too hard to implement them as options. Right?

Honestly, at this point, I'd almost rather just get rid of the power/mechanic entirely and rebalance the set to work (and be in the range of the other melee sets) without needing/relying on it. I understand both the Cottage Rule and the value of "flavor", but I also note the value of simplicity and (especially these days) a set that "just works" with a minimum of faffing-about-for-its-own-sake. Especially for a set that boils down to "I hit things, real hard."

If the decision has been made, then I submit that leaving the thread open is a mistake, as people will believe they still have a chance to change that decision if they beg and/or complain enough.

Because we have an official answer that makes everything else moot.

They're not taking away base passcodes, just locking down the "port me directly into a base from wherever I'm standing" GM slash command.

Thanks for the official word (again). Can we get this thread closed now?

From other discussions I've seen, opinions of the quality and direction of that storyline (both what we saw, and what's in the notes) are... let's say, sharply divided.