Quote from: Hopperorouk on March 21, 2020, 05:10:49 AM

I had this hades division melee focus character idea
His name is Shanzhai (copycat in Chinese) and he looks like this kabuki ninja looking melee fighter

His abilities are his superior procedural and photographic memory that allow him to learn the fighting style of any chatacter just by watching them, he can then detect the opponents next attack

Ability: photographic reflexes : shenzhai can mark an elite or a raider to study them, if the marked target uses melee in line of sight,
shenzhai gains the ability to use their melee style+their movement speed+their finisher animation for 10 seconds

if shanzhai engaged the copied target in CQC within those 10 seconds, he can
 jump out of a grab throw from a copied target once
reduce damage done from copied character strikes by 50%
inflict 50% of the damage from a failed strike to the copied target





Weapons: shanzhai uses a collection of classic flint lock rifles that fire rounds that explode in a small radius and explosion damage falls off over radius distance
headshots won't cause a damage fall off in the explosion radius

What are his downsides? His weapons falls off over distance
And if he copies a council elite or raider he gains reduced movement speed

The target also has to be in line of sight and use his melee once for him to be able to copy the target

I think it's a step in the right direction ( :
The character limitations and risks make him more balanced and you've also better described how his gameplay would work too.

The

I thought of a character trait and backstory for Shanzhai, I based it on his ability of 'photographic reflexes' and how it wears off after 10 seconds; It was also inspired by elements of the character 'Task Master' from Marvel https://www.marvel.com/characters/taskmaster/in-comics under 'photographic reflexes,' last paragraph, and someone by the name of 'Mad Jack'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZRVpYPFOl0

Premise: Shanzhai was a war veteran, like Hans and Lycus, except he had experimental neuro-cybernetics implanted in his body that allowed him to precisely mimic other peoples movements down to their smallest gestures--at first.

Part 1: His origin began when he was orphaned by Lycus Dion: One day, when he was 8, he was on a trip with his mother to surprise his father at work on his birthday. Shanzhai was pretending to be asleep to avoid talking to his mother about his father, because whenever she talked about him, she felt frantic, distressed and was keeping her guard up, this reconvinced Shanzhai that his parents were going to get a divorce a little bit more each time.

They were taking an old train from the early 21st century, she told him that she use to ride it with his grandfather when she was a little girl. The train sloped downward, descending into a tunnel, stopping midway through and creating a shearing noise with bright, flying sparks visible from his closed eyes. Suddenly an explosion destroyed half of the road: the lights turned off, even the backup power wasn't working. Shanzhai looked around to see what was happening, he looked out a window on the left side  of the train and suddenly an explosion burst through the tunnel on his right


There was a side-effect soon after the surgery: When he first activated it as a demonstration to his superior officers, the cybernetic enhancements worked as designed, but he soon experienced muscle spasms and retrograde amnesia. The engineers and doctors stabilized his condition, but failed in treating the newly developed symptoms: he could no longer use this ability automatically and had to concentrate in order to activate it. Every time he activated it, he developed tunnel vision while it was active, afterwards it would trigger a form of short-term, procedural memory loss.

He was considered a failure of the project and stationed to a low-level military base at the South-Eastern coast of Japan: an old nearly abandoned military base first founded after new initiatives were took to protect

ok perfect, now we need an artist to design him
i don't really care if MSE didn't actually consider add him, or even look at this post at all....but this can be the first community made raider...so i'll take my chances

Quote from: Hopperorouk on March 22, 2020, 07:22:01 PM

1. That could be very interesting, and refreshing for the character...especially that it's not actually impossible to have different cultural origins these days

2. Ok let me describe the ability again...what it does is ...you mark one enemy, only one..if they use any melee animation in line of sight, you gain their melee animations+finisher animations+their movement speed, but all these traits are just visual...as CQC rule is basically the same for every character...the animations are just something fancy to look at

The true ability is what you can trick the CQC system with...i told you he gains 50% less damage from the melee strikes he copied...but that's boring and doesn't have any mind games to it...i think the true way to do it is to let Ai play for you if you encouter a strike that you copied...the character(shanzhai) will automatically dodge, if he grabbed, the character will automatically strike

3. His talents will be about different things...mainly focusing on the marked target/copying time/copying speed etc etc

4.what i mean is he managed to get his hands on retro unusable rifles that can still get the job done after he me made some self made modifications to it

• Response to bullet point #2: I dislike the idea that an AI would be in control when using the copycat ability, it doesn't have any strategic merits. It does create mind games when the enemy doesn't know they've been copied, but that's only assuming this ability isn't perceivable to the enemy, which was one of my previously unanswered questions (Reply #3: second bullet point, lines 7-8)
• As previously stated in the fourth bullet point of reply #1, how would these weapons be different from each other?

Realistically speaking, I don't think it would be very fun to have an automatic ability that adds no new mechanical uniqueness to the game; most of the characters, beside some like H.I.V.E., have an ability that's distinguishable from basic character functions and weapons: No one else can turn into a hulking monster like Loaht, no one else can create an summon a high powered gate like Valeria; many abilities can overlap, like Alicia's and Han's or Mikahs's, Doldren's and Shae's; and in some cases like Harec's stalking ability and Iune's 'Blink' weapon.

Automatic CQC doesn't add new mechanics to the game; at least with H.I.V.E. she has to build-up her ability in close quarters with infected enemies before she can use it. The copy cat ability requires more functional elements to be a more well rounded, balanced ability, otherwise it's just an instakill button. The ability needs more manual effort.

In conclusion, each character's ability plays a big part in what their general and derived playstyles are and they should make gameplay more engaging, not less.

i've made some major changes in the original post...please tell me what you think

Quote from: Hopperorouk on March 21, 2020, 05:10:49 AM

I had this hades division melee focus character idea
His name is Shanzhai (copycat in Chinese) and he looks like this kabuki ninja looking melee fighter

His abilities are his superior procedural and photographic memory that allow him to learn the fighting style of any chatacter just by watching them, he can then detect the opponents next attack

Ability: photographic memory : shenzhai can mark an elite or a raider to study them, if the marked target uses melee in line of sight, shenzhai gains the ability to use their melee style+their movement speed+their finisher animation he also gains 50% damage reduction from the melee animation that he copied

Weapons: shanzhai(getting really tired saying that name, but the name doesn't matter) uses a collection of classic flint lock rifles that fire rounds that explode in a small radius and damage falls off over distance

What are his downsides? His weapons falls off over distance
And if he copies a council elite or raider he gains reduced movement speed

The target also has to be in line of sight and use his melee once for him to be able to copy the target

I have a few technical criticisms, and some trivial notes

• First why is his name Chinese instead of Japanese if he looks like a kabuki ninja?
• Part of his ability is predicting enemy attacks, but how would that work mechanically and in real time, especially in CQC? Would this prediction take the form of a visual simulation, like an animation or an image of the enemies next attack? Furthermore, how would it work on players: its possible for the ability to predict the NPC AI's next actions by feeding it the AI's behavioral programming, but I think predicting player actions would require storing a large amount of data on each player's behavioral patterns and a lot of processing power to convert the information in real time
• What do you mean by melee style, is there supposed do be an advantage? Do you mean their melee damage, because for playable characters, unless you've equipped the proper talents, melee damage is the same for all of them, meanwhile grunt and elite melee damage varies based on elite type, faction and level scaling (match difficulty)
• How would the flintlock rifle models be different, and how old would these rifles be? If Spacelords takes place in the future, then what would be considered 'classic,' because both Hans and Lycus have weapons that would probably be considered 'classic' in the present, even though some of them are quite advanced
• Finally, how would his ability be balanced for antagonist matches? If someone plays him as a raider and they can predict what the grunts next attacks will be, then they could potentially know what the antagonists commands are when it's an attack on a raider

In conclusion, I feel some of these ideas could have potential, but right now I think they require some polishing, there are too many gaps that don't explain how these ideas would work in practice.

i'm gonna answer each question respectively in the order you've put :

1.that was an inconsistent error on my part, i was too focused on how his ability works, which i'll get to in a second

2.yeah that's the hard way to do it, i managed to save myself and programmers trouble and say he gains 50% damage reduction from melee attacks that he copied.

3.that depends on what his card are like, maybe he gains 50% extra melee damage to the attack that he copied, but that...again...is the boring part, i want to add cqc mind games to the character like mikah or ayana kwena, where it's not a flat bonus damage to melee and you have to use your ability creatively

4.these flint lock rifles are slow in firing rate very precise, the damage fall off is the shot explosion radius not the shot's travel time damage, and i'm pretty sure we can make an interesting lore out of how flint lock rifles are back again in the future...maybe shanzhai's birth place forbid using weapons so went back to the old ways?

5.again...i want to add mind games to the character but it's difficult for how complicated CQC is from normal melee games,

This game should be 10x more popular than it currently is but it's not because of the random and forced game modes.  It's just as good as warframe but massively less popular for one reason: lack of control, choice, and options.  Balancing a game as complex as this would be difficult for a dev team with massive resources like EA, let alone a little Indie group.  Just stop forcing PvP.  Common sense.   

The wait times for antag will go up in the short term but come down in the long term.

Yeah no one like to have an antag
If they stopped forcing pvp then antagging is 100% dead

That is a horrible idea in my opinion

"When we designed the Epic Properties, we gave them the enough amount of power so they could be the true protagonists of this Epic Forge update. This means we have to cut off some of the damage budget from the old forge properties."

You lowered all basic stats, reduced them to rubble so you can increase the potency and effectiveness of advanced features

The result is no one uses basic features anymore
Caliber is clearly carbage
And critical stats aren't that strong or frequent anymore
Along with other stats like arsenal

The sad truth is i can put 15 points in toxin on a weapon and nothing else and still get an absurdly powerful weapon

Epic forge was supposed to bring balance between basic and advanced features...allowing players to think outside the box and spec their weapons stats differently and creatively

I thought epic forge was going to finally put an end to bland one way builds

But it got even worse where you really only need one stat...toxin

The future? Well i highly expect a toxin nerf and then weapons will feel garbage again...and we'll fall onto this spiral of never ending nerfs and broken updates until the game finally meets it's coffin

This is the beginning of the end of spacelords
Don't say i didn't warn ya

If i see one more Dev telling me to play at a specific time within a specific region then i'm gonna loose it

Can't you MSE find a solution to this messy P2P system?
Make a hybrid network for example, i don't know

Hello there, Lehi!!
Sorry you had a bad experience As you know, Matchmaking times and ping can vary depending on your geographic location and the time of the day you play. Being an antag, you can´t just form a squad with people with good network and close to you. But, what you can actually do is to check our "looking for a game" discord channel :

https://discordapp.com/channels/315765053364109312/543865127213203467

This way you can be in touch with people with a good network that want to play too!

you really need to look for a better solution for this...

I'm not going to give up
I need a decent explanation on to why you removed arsenal from hans' weapons

You need to buff his jetpack in exchange