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I've made a few posts discussing how selling packages for "reskinning" powersets would sell like hotcakes. Themed sets like holidays, sports, etc. would be especially desirable to Hard Light players. Ultimately the goal would be able to mix/match the effects from any packages (ie: if someone has Boxing and Strafing Run on their bar they could use the Boxing fx from one theme while using the Strafing Run fx from another).

As long as it's done equally across all power sets I'd have no problems with it. As I've said in other threads on the topic, something cosmetic like that shouldn't have any exceptions.

<3 You're my hero.

I swear to Zod, my first character in beta was inspired by Justice League's Fire. I spent an hour looking through the UI trying to figure out how to make her flames blue until I finally accepted there was no way. I threw out that character and never played the fire powerset again outside testing btw. I offer this as a point of how the lack of customization can (and almost for sure does) limit the lack of investment players can have in a powerset because of how it looks or doesn't fit their concept.

And I was dumbfounded that something like this feature was omitted -- and when Spytle finally gave us an official reply to the few (at the time) threads we made about this, and explained messaging was his concern ... I was really disappointed to say the least. Considering all the vfx pollution and the obvious upcoming new powersets that would eventually be added to the game. It was just a really frustrating answer.

Anyhow. Thanks for championing this internally. I can't stress how important this is to the community even if many don't realize how much versatility and options and subsequent investment in the playerbase it would create.

Would love green atomic

I don’t wanna speak for this person but I believe they were talking about Poweset styles as in the style you are wearing. Like if I’m earth there can be a style that incorporates rocks etc, ice would have some kind of ice inspired style etc

Not sure if that’s what they meant but it reads that way to me. I know there are some styles in the game that kinda cover this but I think some want styles specific like how the weapons in the market place were.

However I too think allowing people to change the color of their powers is a step in the right direction. This would also help with people wanting more lantern colors they can change rage and hard light to what ever they want it to look like.

It’s funny I remember reading once that we were supposed to get two armory’s in the beginning pretty sure spytle himself said so but we ended up not getting two because people cried about the price for additional ones (the initial prices were gonna be higher) so they lowered the price and just gave us one ….

Wait until you see the graphics pollution from the new Allies system.

Yea, to be honest I think any power color customization needs to be within reason, otherwise I agree with what Spytle said all those years ago about being concerned about 'messaging' and avoiding color confusion within instances.

If a boss for example has red fire AOE's it's going to become a real pain if that gets washed away by others spamming red power moves over the top of it, as a lot of boss animations and effects are even shared with those used by players, some are already close enough in color to be a problem.

Not to mention the potential for it to create a problem with purposefully trolling, oh that boss has red fire effects, let me just purposefully change all my effects to match that shade of red just to be a #$%^.

Any color customization in my opinion needs to be very considered and probably somewhat limited still to avoid that sort of nonsense, no matter how much the players might like to have access to the full RBG spectrum.

Does WB need to be involved for power customization implementation to be possible?

I think Light and Rage would be the most likely to cause some intervention from DC/WB. The rest? *shrug*

Hero Light characters could green/blue constructs like Kyle Rayner, Rage characters could get green/red constructs like Guy Gardner.

That does bring up an interesting question about Light in particular that I hadn't thought of before. Would being able to change colors on your power set automatically change the colors of the constructs, or are those separated somehow? I only wonder because we do have some different constructs used for the same powers on the hero and villain versions of Light.

If the constructs would automatically change, then I stick by my stance: equal treatment among the power sets. No special rules or playing favorites. Creating special rules or circumstances for Light and Rage would just cause a lot of avoidable drama, especially since players have to pay to play those powers.

I don't think you would have freedom to personalize the colors too much. Powerset skins would have mostly color locked animations.
Edit: for example Atlantean skin for Sorcery would replace Sorcery's red/purple color scheme with the Atlantean gold/turquoise color scheme. Sorcery pets would be reskinned as Atlantean creatures.

I guess it would come down to how it might work here. CO's system was pretty much the same as how we select and set our colors for costumes. As an example, I had a character there who used a combination of fire and ice powers, and to keep a similar look between the powers I set and used the same icy blue color for both her ice and fire powers.

So if power set recoloring could be made to work like our costume/character coloring it'd be one thing. But if it's a situation where the tech they set up long long ago means replacements/substitutes have to be used (i.e. movement mode skins) then we'd probably be looking at what you described.

Either way there's the shadow of DC's protective nature of the IP looming over what could be done with Light and Rage. LOL

Hmm.. true. It's even more annoying when an entire guild customizes their power colors to be the same as a raid boss' power effects so that the entire fight is near color washed; difficult to see any boss tells unless you know the mechanics of that boss.

Suggestions:
I think the devs can control the power colors by limiting the brightness and tones of those colors so they never truly match the NPC boss power color effects. The devs can also limit the color picker of certain powers; for example, no solid red shading for water powers so it looks like blood. If the devs put Brother Blood's power set in the game, then the power color shading of those powers (altered of course) could be included with it.

The saving grace the devs have at the moment is that players do not have a "brightness/shading" slider in the color picker. I would love that option myself, but I can see how far south things would go in the hands of 'trollers.

The argument of messaging wasn't valid then and is less valid now because of exactly what I pointed out -- new powers were always going to be added with their own colours anyhow, and new NPCs too. And now PVP isn't a defining development factor so we don't have to worry about players playing against each other. And plus it's common to the genre to have different colours for damage types of things so a player in a superhero game understands that fire might sometimes be purple or green. In another game the context is different so it's a fair concern but not in a superhero game -- this was a tell that Spytle wasn't a strong enough fan of the genre to understand its importance to it. He came from StarTrek games before DCUO.

Look at any MCU movie -- it's not an accident that Scarlet Witch's powers are a different colour from Agatha Harkness' or one of the infinity stones. Or that the colours are the same sometimes -- because it's intended to be a subtle queue that they're related to eachother. Like with Captain Marvel's powers being coloured the same as an infinity stone's powers. "Messaging" doesn't just mean make all fire red so people know it's fire, it also communicates differences and relationships between characters and this is why it's needed here.

The fact that we don't have powerset styles of some kind already actually contributes to problems around messaging because powers of players can't always be distinguished from each other or NPCs. Tala's fire vs player fire is a good example of this. If her fire spells were visually distinct because they used VFX styles for her magical flames, this wouldn't be an issue though. If you've ever done Tala fights with fire players in your team, you understand how stressful this can be. It would be much easier to have multiple fire players in a group if one had blackfire and the other had red fire for example. And this is in addition to the extra layers of customization that it adds for players to get more invested in their characters. And an MMO wants its players to be invested in their characters.

There are easy ways to deal with some players concerns. The easiest would be to make an option that disables custom colours or vfx styles for a player in the UI so that someone else can use them if they want but you can turn that off in your UI if you don't want to see them.

Not liking or agreeing with someone else's reasons doesn't necessarily make those reasons invalid. And there's a very good chance that carryover of ideas between games in the studio contributed to the combat messaging train of thought.

Both Galaxies and DCUO were developed in the Austin studio, with some of the SWG devs coming to work on this game (Chris Cao and Millbarge come to mind immediately). During SWG's run they introduced an elemental damage aspect to the game, concentrating on acidic, heat, cold and electrical damage. To better help players who participated in PvP adjust or prepare for certain attacks, colors were added to weapon attack effects. So green blaster bolts would inflict acidic damage, blue cold and so on. It even extended to lightsaber colors having elemental damage, so unless someone was using one of the rare named lightsaber crystals (those wouldn't always follow the coloring rules) you'd know that someone with a red saber was going to be dealing heat damage.

It also has the advantage of giving your teammates an idea of what powers they are playing with. Unless someone's using Light or Rage, there's all kinds of way of hiding what powers you are using if you don't want them to show. Beyond the powers themselves, the color effects linked to them that show in weapon attacks will show what someone is using.

When they said combat messaging was one of the big reasons for not allowing power recoloring, I wasn't too terribly surprised because I had seen it before in Galaxies. Besides, with most player powers coming from exobytes there's a bit of a storyline reason as to why they'd look the same within a given power set. If it's coming from standardized data then it'd make sense that it'd all look the same.

Yeah another idea is each power class having a few options, where it seems reasonable/applicable.

i.e. the lanterns have each potential lantern color, fire has maybe white, blue, orange and yellow, atomic has yellow, orange, green, that sorta thing, where there's still locks in place but they're based a little on what you'd expect not just open day where you get even "pink fire" if that makes sense

But yeah alternatively I agree, shading and tones will be important if a full spectrum customization is adopted.