Speak away to your heart's delight. That's one function that the forums exist for. Just know that the hope for anything to come of it is a fools errand.
One other thing, this is a forum. We make suggestions and have discussions. We pay (at least some of us). People who get paid make the decisions. In short, keep some perspective. You don't get to decide how they spend development money either. lol
I don't think that fully customizable Sidekick models are feasible for technical/financial reasons. However, I'm fairly certain that colors, even if they lock to yours or your base's, would be easy. Full model non-custom skins could implemented too, but even that would require dedicated dev efforts, and some kind of revenue to compensate for it. One major hurdle with Sidekicks vs. Henchmen, is all the animations that Sidekicks can have via weapon choices. So probably the best implementation would be as drops that have one specific texture and set of animations, like we have with Henchmen now.
Yeah, when considering the situation, I had a line of thought that turned into a Trinket post. Mainly because the trinkets have been the "magical" transport item for changes in form and movement mode in the past. Can't lie, it defintely feels like settling when you have to resort to having a single "henchmen." I'd say if we have to settle for this then the push should definitley be greater functionality but either way, I get it a lot of work. so I say... get cracking, we're a decade behind schedule. lol
Sorry, I'm just a little insulted that the paying community has had to look at the potential cool but, honestly, useless eyesore in our generators for over a decade (lol (is it too much just to update the generator interface and take the sidekick line out?)). Please feel free to respond: Would you miss sidekicks if they were gone? My answer: No Would you like them if they were at least as stylish as henchmen? My answer: Yes
To be honest, the entire Lair system is a big ball of meh. Generator mods are minor boosts for the most part. The goodies you can get from the dispenser range from borderline useless to meh. Plus the functional amenities you can put in the lair both cost actual money and have had their utility eroded greatly over the years. The most useful part of the Lair system is armories to have separate DPS/Role/PvP builds. But that system is rather worthless unless you spend money on additional armories. A single armory is rather pointless since you'd have to keep running to the bank and RAD device every time you wanted to change back to the other build. I could hang out in my lair between Raids/Operations/Duos/Solo instances since I have a bank, vendor, and crafting table in it. Oooor I could hang out in the Watchtower/Hall of Doom between runs and chat with others while having access to all those amenities and the shops in the Watchtower/Hall of Doom. So, er, what was the point of getting all those amenities for my lair?
All of that is absolutely correct. I guess the reason I chime in with practical answers to suggestions like these is that I CONSTANTLY see players become cynical and resentful towards the game and developers when they feel their expectations aren't being met. The problem is, they don't realize that the things they are expecting often boil down to a for-profit company spending huge amounts of capital and resources to create something that would only net insignificant revenue gains AT BEST but more often than not would be a loss. What's ironic is that nobody seems to understand this concept yet when I try and offer $10M DC cash for a void material, suddenly EVERYBODY is a cost/benefit ratio expert! Who cares if you benefit enough?!? With my $10M DC cash I'm a paying customer and I want my Void Material!!! (I don't really try do that cause I'm...ya know....not dumb. Just making a point)
So what you're telling me is that the lair system I'm paying for is really just the avoidance of racist, sexist and overall ignorant kids talking s*** to each other through barely decipherable text speak in my chat box? SCORE!!!
I've made this case in the past. I've dabbled in enough graphic design (mostly 2D but some 3D) to know it can easily take all day to do something as simple as scale one imported element to an existing one but I can easily make ten color variations of the finished product in under an hour or two tops. We're mostly talking color sliders here. I know it can possibly mean going back and forth several times between various layers of foreground and background shading, shadows, etc, to get everything correctly matched up in a new color scheme but that's still a fraction of the work that damn near everything else in graphic design takes. I still think the reason the movement styles weren't profitable (by the dev's own admission) was that there weren't enough color variations. IMO a little copy/paste > open > adjust color sliders > save as > smokescreen-black....wash, rinse, repeat...save as > smokescreen-green, etc would have gone a long way. But I could totally be wrong.
I think the tech behind that may be a bit much. I would like to see something like that with just a general trinket you tie your pet skins to. Claim it from your base Dispenser, Select the skin that you want the pet to be. Nightmare bat, paradox tyrant, toy copter, ETC
Why is everyone so desperate to shut down this idea, this technology is already in the game in the League Hall statues and even cutscenes produce a duplicate model of your own character. Essentially it'd be a summonable NPC League Hall statue/armory dummy. On the dev server during live streams in the past we've also seen them produce hundreds of dummy player characters for testing purposes, the tech is there. Customizable sidekicks in 2021 is not a "complex" request and ACTUALLY it was the original intention a decade ago.
Yes, as in speaking for myself as I use them quite frequently. I like them already. I find some henchmen to be nice. I find plenty more to be horrible. They also don't have the same abilities as sidekicks so it depends on what you want with your "support." You probably shouldn't depend on either one, but what you use depends on what you want with your toon. Sure, I would like to have the ability to customize my sidekick, but I'd say the same for henchmen too--as you can't customize those either. Of course, they could possibly just give more options for sidekicks similar to henchmen to cover up the lack of customization and that might suffice.
Honestly, if I'm in the WT/HOD, I almost always have my chat on LFG (which does NOT have shout) but that still won't stop the 'hey can you buy me an aura' asks at the vendor, or ninja duel invites as I try to check my mail. So yeah, amenities in the base....100% better...and worth every penny to buy or minute spent to find that last collection you need to get them.
I with you because in the since that many of the boosts (generator mods, equipment mods, artifacts, proficientcies etc) give small percentage boosts so individually, not having an extra 2% here or 3% there is not a game breaker but, of course, the accumulation of multiple boosts matters. Tbh, although there are alot of things to be fixed, I'm really hoping to stay focused on the topic but thanks.
I hear that and that is kinda the reason I've actually written several posts. I've checked things over the years, I've played and heard many complaints while observing the CONSISTENT theme of cynicism within this game and forum. So, why not try to help although this game has many aspects to it that feel like a cash grab although they at least give us free stuff too. So, to be clear, watch out for the DCUO cash grap pitfalls, hopefully that can help some of the cynicism. lol
I get it, and no offence but after a decade, I'd like to see more than just colors. If that change things and that's what we get, great, I tried, lol. TBH, I may mix in a few "normal" colors is a style but tend to mostly use materials for coloring anyway.
I have a post dealing with a trinket concept realed sidekicks and move modes. Not a bad idea either, its just we have a bunch of pets and henchmen. Practically, it makes no sense in my estimation to use a sidekick if you can have three henchmen and you can't trigger the henchmen and the sidekick at the same time. Practically, i've heard of several players (mainly tanks but others as well) remark on how cluttered the battelfield gets when everyone is popping their henchmen and the tanks end up trapped in a sea of henchmen. At least the henchmen have different functionality based on the set of three they give you. The big ones tend to act like tanks so the purple Hulks (dont remember the exact name) from the Anniversary event make a great "tank" support option. The point is, sidekicks, fix em or kill em? Just trying to offer options for fix.
