Thunder Knight

And the problem is that they did a half-***** job of updating that metastory.

When your newly-created character first steps into Atlas Park or Mercy, Statesman and Psyche are already dead, and have been for quite a while. That means that SSA1 already happened, which means that Penny Yin is an adult member of the Freedom Phlanax, and Darrin Wade is a "guest" at Vanguard.

Then you meet Penny as a contact, and she's a teenager. Which means you're running missions for her literally years before Statesman and Psyche died. And yet they're still dead. Somehow.

Or if you're Redside (hypothetically, I know you're never redside), there's Darrin, still standing in place and dreaming his small dreams, and he hasn't even started plotting to kill anyone. Yet Statesman and Psyche are still dead. Somehow.

So the problem is not that they removed Statesman and Psyche from the game world, the problem is that it's the only change they made, even though other things also need to be changed to make the whole thing make sense.

By your numbers, you claim that every single character with every powerset other than Super strength, swords (which is not a power) and guns (which is not a power) represents a grand total of 3% of the total comic book characters in existence.

That also means that you are saying there are literally thirty super-strength characters for each character who doesn't have super-strength, guns, or swords.

So if I name, say, Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Green Lantern, Flash, Black Lightning, and three-quarters of the Fantastic Four (minus the Thing), you can name literally 270 super-strength characters?

.. or perhaps were you engaging in a weeeeeee bit of hyperbole?

The problem with that idea is that power armor is, by virtue of being "armor", defensive as well as offensive. Your typical Power Armor guy can take it as well as dish it out, and that's not something you can easily simulate (or simulate at all) with a Blaster, the squishiest of the squishies.

It'd just have to use similar multipliers to the already-existing VEATs, which are essentially Assault/Armor sets (particularly Crab Spiders), albeit concept-locked ones. (And it's the "concept-locked" part that's the issue)

It's just confusing because Statesman and Psyche are dead and gone from the second you step out of the Tutorial (and apparently have been for quite a while), but Penelope Yin is still a teenager fifteen levels "later" (which means you're at a point in time literally years before Statesman and Psyche died), and over on Redside, Darrin Wade has yet to even start his scheme to kill Statesman when you meet him in your 20's.

Simply removing Statesman and Psyche from the game's "present" has started a domino effect of temporal anomalies (from the players' PoV, at least, if not the characters') that's played havoc with the game's already-shaky timeline.

My mistake, I meant that to read "We were working on ideas for a new AT, and got pretty far in development, but it ultimately didn't work out." or along those lines. That is the sort of thing that would be unambiguous.

And although I said they wouldn't have to name names, that would make things even less ambiguous if they did. "We were working on ideas for a new AT we were going to call the Hamburglar (or "Rhymalist" if you like), but even though we put all the powers in, we couldn't get the cheese to melt over the bun, so we had to abandon it." They could play it off as both announcing it and cancelling it in a single sentence.

Zero ambiguity, zero cause for speculation.

But still ignores known facts and people's experience.

Let me put it this way:

Say you drive by an empty lot every now and then. One day, you notice that the guy who owns the empty lot and a bunch of construction workers on the land, all working on a building that's looking nearly complete. You can't stop and talk to them then for some reason, so you hurry on.

A few weeks later, you're driving by the lot again, and there's a 20' tall fence around the property, so you can't see the building anymore. You bump into the lot owner and ask him about the building and the fence. And he answers "Let me be brutally honest: I'm not building anything on my property."

And that's the only answer you get. You ask "But what about the construction I saw?" or "But then what's behind the fence?", but he refuses to answer that, or even acknowledge that you've asked any further questions.

Would you consider that answer 100% unambiguous? Or would you note the oddly-specific wording and lack of further answers (combined with you seeing him building something with your own two eyes) and go "Hm, something is weird here"?

Well, I'm going "Hm, something is weird here." So are other people. (Players who have been in the game much longer than I have and know Devspeak pretty well. Several in this thread alone, if you care to look)

Especially since the Devs (and Zwill in particular) are usually quite happy to talk about abandoned ideas and failed developments, so this seems like Marketing-speak (followed by Marketing-imposed silence) rather than an actual denial.

I'm afraid I may have put Zwill on a spot here, and I didn't intend to. This isn't actually directed at the Community team, or Devs, or at Marketing, or at the company at all.

I'm just explaining (in more detail than I'd originally intended, but apparently short explanations don't work) why there is still some cause for further speculation here, despite the denial.

The same way that Robotics Mastermind's Drones drop from the sky (inside a cave), or Thugs Mastermind's Enforcers climb out of a manhole (inside a cave).

In other words, "Repeat to yourself 'it's just a game, I should really just relax'."

Mercs does need some help, particularly in their lack of defenses and decent mitigation. (And I definitely agree with renaming it to "Soldiers", because a Mercenary could literally be anything)

As for actual new sets... I'm all for Pirates, with Swabbies (armed with Cutlasses and weak pistols) as the T1, a Boatswain (with mediocre attacks but rope-related holds and immobilizes) and a Gunner (with pistols and a variant of Grant Cover - i.e., they're providing cover fire for the Swabbies) as T2, and the First Mate (Leadership toggles, and powerful pistol attacks) as T3. The MM himself would be the Captain, of course.

I can even see the appeal of a Clown set. Or, possibly a little more generically, Circus Performers. Clowns for T1, Acrobats for T2, and a Strong Man for T3. Possibly a Lion and Lion Tamer combo for T2, but that may be stepping on Beast's toes. The Mastermind himself would be the Ringmaster, with sonic attacks delivered through a megaphone.

I like the idea of Apes thematically (say, T1 Chimps, T2 Orangutans, T3 Gorilla), but I can't really think of what powers they'd have (other than generic Super Strength attacks for the Gorilla), and it'd probably require a new skeleton.

Sure you can. Just say, as I said, "We were trying out a few ideas, but they didn't work out." There, simple enough. You don't have to name AT names, or even directly acknowledge the leaks, just say they were working on something behind-the-scenes which they have since abandoned. Otherwise, instead of shutting it down, you just get more speculation. What kind of speculation, you may ask?

Exactly.

This, with the sole exception of the Summer Blockbuster event. I only got into those by just queueing randomly while I ran missions. (And even that was not a constant thing)

What's awful about it? I only ran it a handful of times (due to nobody else wanting to run it) but it didn't seem to be doing anything DFB wasn't doing. (Or the Magi trial, for that matter)

Only if you consider giving a definitive "It's been canceled" rather than some ambiguously-worded statement (one with at least four different interpretations) to be a "reward for breaking the rules."

But EATs are just a subset of ATs. Excluding the latter also excludes the former.

Using "No new Archetypes at all" to mean "no new regular Archetypes, but here's a new epic Archetype" is like saying "We are not building any new houses. No houses at all. None"... then showing off a new brick house and adding "I meant no new houses made of wood or stone."

If that really is what he meant, then twisting the language like that is about as far from "brutal honesty" as you can get.

As much as I do feel there's something screwy somewhere, I don't think Zwill's the type of guy to do that.