#tf2005

Once every year or two we normally run a sort of intergalactic Olympics (inspired by an episode of the old cartoon) as one of our global plots, and we're trying to squeak in this year's Monacus-funded Summer Olympics before winter this year. Consequently there haven't been very many apps in the inbox lately- everyone is busy being Olympic! Which is good for me as it gives me time to help run Olympic matches, plus join in myself with a few of my characters.

There are still some character staff things to report on, though:

- Kenya Momesa was one of the characters from an ancient global plot which introduced two new factions. The strange invaders with their futuristic technology turned out to be not from another planet, but were actually humans from an alternate-timeline Earth! In order to sustain the plot, characters were made by the staff and made available to players for application as if they were Feature Characters; what we used to call "Original Feature Characters," or OFCs.

Eventually their time passed and the OFCs were removed from the FC list, but the ones being played were made available to their players for "adoption" as OCs. Kenya Momesa is one of these, but he was never actually reclassified  from a TP character (created for a plot and handed out for the duration of that plot, like Alpha Trion, Thunderwing or Pharma would be) to an OC.

Kenya was asking me about his status because he needed to know how many "character slots" he had left; we limit players to a certain number of slots at a time. FCs and live OCs normally occupy one, humans none, major FCs like Kup or Ultra Magnus more. He was still classified as a TP character, not something that normally occupies a slot, and while nearly-human, has a few stat differences, mainly in his natural size being a point larger. I reclassified him as an OC, then updated the relevant wiki file while I was at it: http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/GettingCharacters#Character_Slots

Updating the wiki file actually took a lot longer than fixing Kenya's classification, but that's something I've been meaning to do and it remains a big ongoing job. That's where the relative quiet in the inbox really comes in handy, in that it gives me time to pore over application procedures and help files and such. Our Buildstaff have been working very hard on the wiki lately and it behooves me to keep up!

Spoke too soon: an app for Ultra Magnus just landed in the box! It'll be fun (For definitions of "fun" which can be applied to Ultra Magnus, that is) having him around.

By popular request Windcharger has returned to the fold! For those who don't remember (totally understandable), Windcharger is the mostly-grey minibot who is basically Hyperactive Good Guy Magneto and yet somehow never got used for much in the canon. got killed off-screen in the movie and then showed up again next season anyway, which is pretty much par for the course.

Since Wheeljack was brought back to the game last year (He died off-screen at the same time and presumably in the same manner Windcharger did, except in Japan where he remained perfectly fine by changing his own timeline with the Kronosphere.) and Windcharger and his "magic arms" have received some attention for once in MTMTE, I had a couple requests for Windcharger to be added to the list. Considering how unimportant Windcharger was to the canon in life and how trivial his death was, this was an easy fix. When we brought back Wheeljack there was a complicated time-travel plot (as in his Japanese survival) to explain his revival, obliged by the simple fact that everyone noticed he was gone. If Wheeljack hadn't been dead, then he would've been doing things all the time. Windcharger, on the other hand, never did much of anything in the first place, and his absence wasn't much more challenging than questions like "why have we never seen your OC before its creation" or "where has Outback been for the six years that he hasn't had a player?"

Except for that one time he killed Starscream, I guess: 

That said, I did want to provide Windcharger with some minor backstory as to where he's been, so I decided that he was only stasis-locked, that is, inoperable but not unrepairable, the normal state of "death" previous to the movie, which established both that Transformers could mysteriously die and that they changed color when they did. After being eventually repaired he felt that being taken out so early in the battle due to some impulsive choice which turned out to be a wrong move, made him somewhat responsible for the subsequent disaster and the death of Optimus Prime. Crippled by immobilizing self-doubt, Windcharger was unable to use his reflexive abilities, useless as a combatant. He went into self-exile and presently became a compulsive gambler, playing progressively worse odds in hopes of receiving some sign that his hunches and impulses were reliable. When Swerve won the Autobot Free For All in the Olympics, Windcharger was the only one who had bet on him (at one million to one odds) and decided that he had received his unmistakable sign. With his confidence restored and the funds to pay his debts and repair his battered body, Windcharger finally returned to the Autobot fold.

The Daniel we decided on is described like so:

Species: HUMAN Faction: TERRAN Function: TROUBLESHOOTER Rank: 3/Sergeant - Inactive

Quote: "I make your business my business."

Note: Brought up as much by the Autobots as his parents, DANIEL WITWICKY has been involved in the Cybertronian war for as long as he can remember. As an adult has ventured out to the stars to explore, giving wings to his innate curiosity and getting into all sorts of new trouble along the way. An experienced pilot of both exo-suits and shuttlecraft. Possesses his own Exo-Suit, a slick update of previous EDC transforming Exos. In robot mode it is capable of operating in most environments, and gives Daniel new ways to get into more trouble with the benefit of its stealth systems. In hovercraft mode assists allies on the battlefield by harassing enemies with a variety of weapons. Daniel can often get himself into situation beyond his control as a result of his curiousity, however as he has grown up he has learnt to improvise far more.

Skills: Computer Use: Intrusion, Diplomacy, Disable Device (Electronic Security), Xenoculture: Autobots, and Xenoculture: Aliens

His exo-suit is a unique exploratory model, a much-improved version of the original ones the Autobots made for the Witwickies, Although suits like these aren't normally armed, Daniel's is fitted with launch tubes for various improvised rockets used to bewilder and hinder attackers. It's not terribly formidable but it's small, stealthy, can go anywhere, and is very maneuverable when transformed into its vehicle mode.

In the meantime we also got a new player for Jazz, whom I rebuilt using references from Marvel Jazz, and the 1984 and 2011 releases.

I've been working on a new Rating policy with some of the other staff, as our current one, "PG13 in public and R in private," has proved too vague to be useful. It turns out that PG13 and R cover a vast spectrum and are applied with practically no consistency (and a lot of shady sexism and classism and such) by the MPAA themselves, and in light of complaints by some of the players we're going to have to hammer down a more specific rating, not based on movie ratings.

Since last I wrote we got a player back for Hound, that's cool.

I lowered the price of Long Range Radio from 2 points to 1 and gave a refund to whoever bought it at the higher price, plus made generally available the new abilities the Code Head wrote a while back, Reinforce and Recalibrate, I'd set them out here and there to see how they behaved in play in a limited way, what people thought of them, sort of a beta-test, and they seemed to be fine, so it was time to let them fly and be free!

I'm planning some new attack effects, one of which the Code Head is working on now, and reviewing the list of rare/restricted effects, attack types and abilities, with an eye to unrestrict some things that aren't really very exploitable, and add restriction to other things that weren't recognized as being so in the past.

No new Daniel Witwicky reveal quite yet, although I can tell you he's working on a compromise we're calling "Space Veteran Daniel." Instead I'd like to talk a bit about mode-adjustment.

On TF2005 there are portions of one's character sheet which remain the same when you transform, like the Intelligence or Leadership stats, and other parts that are capable of changing, like whether you currently have access to your Repair ability or what size you are. We've always* had some stats that changed between modes, like Velocity and Armor. Some years ago we made it possible for applicants to give OCs a bonus "mode-adjustment," moving up to 2.0 points around their Firepower, Strength, Agility and Accuracy when they transform.

http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/UpgradingCharacters#FC_Mode-Adjustment

Doing this for FCs wasn't really practical though, because FCs change hands fairly often and keeping track of what each player wanted would be a lot of bookkeeping. I wanted to, but I didn't have a clear rendition of the rule until the Code Head wrote a proposal which answered most of the questions, and I didn't have a clear way to track the changes until I started making progress on the Player Record Database. (More on that another time.)

Anyway, FCs can now get mode-adjustments too, that's the point of all that. :)

Labor day was nice! Dragon*Con looked like fun. I don't usually go to D*Con myself since I went to it enough in the past, but it was cool hanging out with Victory Leo for a few hours, I had not met her in person before. Fusillade gave her a satsuma on behalf of Blueshift. I can't remember how long it's been since I last saw the other half of Primus, Hazard. I think he and I and Fusillade had enchiladas that time. I wish he would get into Borderlands 2 or something so we could hang out more (We invested in Borderlands 1 back when everybody else was getting into L4D, and went through the whole game by ourselves because everyone else we knew were running from zombies.) but he's got a baby and a busy job, so there you go.

Anyway, back to the character mines!

Since last I wrote we got a new Slag(UK readers might know him as Slug?), Overkill, and Skydive, unfortunately breaking the dinosaur combo early. I retired Galvatron since I hadn't had time or energy to play him in quite a while, and that means it's time to give someone else a crack at the big bad. No new Galvatron apps have arrived yet, but it'll be all right, because we just got a new Cyclonus to hold down the fort.

Of course, since our timeline is an original one which started with the 1986 animated movie (After including most of Sunbow season 1 and 2.), our Cyclonus has both ears/horns/spikes. Swag! Also, since we introduced the Nebulans a few years back, he's finally upgrading to Targetmaster Cyclonus. Double swag! So I guess more like this, actually:

Just imagine a little dude going through the robo-wallets of the fallen, off to the side somewhere.

I've also been working on updating our !combatinfo files. !combatinfo is an in-game help file, although unlike most help files it's not just a big chunk of text displayed to whoever requests it. !combatinfo is actually assembled like a chart out of a lot of smaller bits of data which are themselves stored elsewhere in the system. This means it's very convenient, once you know where everything is and what it means, to change one or two pieces of the chart at a time. It also means it's a lot of work to change all of it, which needed doing. The reason I'm updating !combatinfo is in preparation to release a brace of features we've been sitting on for a while, trying out in a limited way. And here they are!

New Abilities

Recalibrate: Recalibrate lets you patch systems damage, the way that Repair lets you patch health. !recalibrate sets its own "RECALIBRATED" flag, so you can only !recalibrate someone once per combat, but you can still !patch, !refuel, !inspire, and so on. Like the patch function of Repair, !recalibrate consumes 4e and ends your turn. Recalibrate costs 4cp, but is half price if you already have Repair.

http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/Recalibrate

Reinforce: Reinforce is exactly like Recalibrate in every respect, including pricing, but its command, !reinforce, patches armor instead of systems or health, and sets the "REINFORCED" flag accordingly. 

http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/Reinforce

Hide: Hide is at-will like Cloak, but doesn't grant the sneak attack when you reveal yourself. It's meant to provide a more-accessable "mini-Cloak" for players who want a stealthy character but for whom a sneak attack isn't affordable/approvable/appropriate. Hide costs 5cp and is half price if you already have it in one mode. If you already have Cloak or Sneak and think that Hide would've been more appropriate if it had been available before, drop a retrofit request in the app box and we'll see what we can do.

http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/Hide

Repriced Abilities

LR_Radio: Price reduced from 2cp to 1cp. If you're an OC who bought LR_Radio at the higher price let me know and I'll give you an AP refund.

http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/LR_Radio

So that's those! Still trying to work out with the other wizards whether we're going to need to vote on hiring more charstaff or if I should just consult them on it but retain the final decision myself or neither or what, but hopefully that will get resolved sooner or later and then I can start training other folks to do this sort of data entry thing.

Well, that's my 9 hours done for the day. I'm trying to keep my charstaff shifts under twelve hours, and I need to go get dinner started, anyway. Next time we'll talk about what the new Daniel player decided on for Daniel's FINAL FORM.

Daniel Witwicky was the son of Spike and Carly Witwicky in the old animated Transformers movie, intended to be the new child sidekick for the Autobots as Spike had gotten too old with the time-jump from the 1980s to 2005.

Now it's 2034 on the game, and clearly he's grown up... but how, exactly? The new Daniel has requested that Daniel's currently-inadequate +finger and never-converted build be redone, but apart from wanting to change his "Fibs" skill for something less childish, he's open to suggestions.

Thanks to Daniel's complete lack of canon appearances at this age, the length of time he's gone unplayed, the changes to the Earth Defense Corps (which he was once a part of) and how much rewriting his quote and note would need in any case, his new player and I have a very free hand with his portrayal. This morning I came up with a set of suggestions for four different concepts for the new Daniel which I hope will inspire him. I'm posting them here in case they give ideas to other potential Human applicants! And to post what I've been up to today, of course.

(Mass Effect players will recognize these as being a Renegade/Paragon/Class set of choices.)

Don't have too much time to work on character staff jobs today because I'm going off in a while to have lunch with Primus (or half of Primus, anyway), who's in town for Dragon*Con. Looking forward to it!

Civilian Rebel Daniel -- This Daniel has been through enough in his youth that he really doesn't want to have anything to do with the robot race war. He probably knows the Autobots better than any living human, and he's proud to call some of them friends, but his eyes are opened to their often-disastrous flaws as well. He's not sure if the Earth is better off for them being here. They seem to be the only thing that can stop the Decepticons, but the Decepticons follow them everywhere, and people still die.

He hates the Decepticons and knows both how murderous and how dopey they are. He's stayed alive as long as he has not by hiding behind the guns of the EDC; he knows that can't protect you (proven during the Long Night global plot where the Decepticons shut down everything electrical on Earth for about 72 hours and killed almost all the EDC personnel), nor through clinging to Rodimus' skirts, but by being cunning and stealthy and never letting anyone know where he sleeps. 

Civilian Rebel Daniel's exo-vehicle mode is what appears to be a normal car, but which he has tricked out with hidden weapons  and armor and other Cybertronian tech gifted to him by the Autobots and salvaged from a thousand battlefields. He doesn't go to the fight, but his inability to turn his back entirely on his friends in the Autobots keeps getting him caught up in their war.

Civilian Sidekick Daniel -- Sidekick Daniel is the movie's Daniel, just older. He's basically a cheerful and optimistic guy, tries to do the right thing, very loyal to his buddies (who happen to all be Autobots because he never really developed normal human relationships) and helpful whenever he can be. He believes in the Autobot Way of Life and tries to live up to the standard set by Optimus Prime, whom he remembers fondly as a sort of wise father figure. 

Sidekick Daniel has no fear of the Decepticons and is prone to taunt most of them, like a kid poking a mean dog through a chainlink fence with a stick. He's confident in his ability to dodge and outwit them in any circumstance, and besides, his friends, the Autobots, will be by his side!

Sidekick Daniel's exo-vehicle mode is an updated version of the old EDC transforming exo-suit, a small robot/car. It is equipped to make battlefield repairs to the Autobots and has some combat ability, but it is most useful in frustrating and outfoxing the Decepticons.

EDC Veteran Daniel -- This Daniel has fought in the Machine War since he was basically drafted into it as a child through a combination of his father's Autobot sympathies and Hot Rod's irresponsibility. Having been a child soldier marks you, and Veteran Daniel has seen some shit... he wouldn't recommend it. He is possibly the Earth's most experienced soldier in what seems to have become an eternal conflict, and his expertise is highly valued by his superiors at the UN Special Peacekeeping Detachment: the Earth Defense Corps. Although he has not sought promotion in the EDC and remains an NCO, even generals seek his advice, and when he speaks everyone listens. He knows that if the Decepticons are ever going to be thrown off of Earth, the humans are going to have to be as fierce and self-sacrificing as the Autobots to do it. If anything, more so. He wishes some of the Autobots would take the struggle more seriously. 

EDC Veteran Daniel hates the Decepticons with every fiber of his being, and he hates them all the more because he knows them so well. He knows that they could get all the energy they want from the sun, all the raw materials they want from dead planets, but Decepticons are cruel, and lazy, and wantonly destructive by nature. Each one of them is a walking gun, and they interact with the world by shooting it in the face. Mass murder is their idea of a fun night out. The other Earthlings need to wake up and act accordingly.

Veteran Daniel's exo-vehicle mode is a powered linear frame, the pride of the EDC's heavy infantry. It is a fifteen-foot-tall armored battlesuit light enough to be air-dropped from a VTOL. It magnifies his strength a hundredfold and is bristling with flak pods, breaching lasers, and other devices specifically designed to take down the most common Decepticon threats.

EDC Space Hero Daniel -- Brave, noble, confident and inspiring, Space Hero Daniel has taken every opportunity his unique upbringing offered him to become a man of the Galaxy. He's a paragon of what Earth can aspire to, a soldier and a diplomat both, and other species recognize "the Earthman-Daniel" as a strong advocate for Earth on the galactic stage. Many aliens see Earthlings as just another unfortunate dwarf-humanoid species whose valuable little planet, inherited from a much more successful, if more primitive, native species after a natural catastrophe, was unlucky enough to become a battleground for the Cybertronian Civil Wars. Although the Earthlings sometimes send envoys to beg for help from the Galactic Assembly, the Earthlings seem both unworthy of aid and a hopeless cause. 

This version of Daniel is determined to change that perception. He champions the cause of the Autobots, which is also the cause of Earth and all planets like Earth that might happen to fall under the Decepticons' hungry gaze. Although he fights alongside the Autobots and the rest of the EDC, he doesn't restrict himself to only taking part in their actions; he has the experience and the resources to operate independently, and will take up any causes he feels are right, both large and small, whether or not Decepticons are involved. He doesn't hate the Decepticons, but he will do his best to contain their threat and the threat of people like them. Because of his wider-reaching morality, Space Hero Daniel is sometimes at odds with some of the Autobots and his own superiors, He recognizes no authority which is not just, generous and kind- he learned that from Optimus.

Space Hero Daniel's exo-vehicle mode is a sleek hardsuit, the best light-infantry powered armor that Human and Autobot science can make. It is capable of short flights under its own power in atmosphere, liquid or vacuum, and is only about twice the size of Daniel himself. With its enhanced strength he's able to wield a powerful proton-accelerator rifle with crackshot accuracy, and its ceramic surface is proof against most small arms, Its hands are dextrous enough that even wearing it, he can still pilot his jump-cutter, a small interstellar transport. Brainstorm assured him that his hardsuit's glossy black-and-white armor can even withstand the heat of unpowered orbital reentry, provided he maintains the proper posture and alignment relative to the atmosphere. Theoretically.

Today I got with Spindrift, one of the character staffers, and went over the staff-side retrofit process for players who opt into the normalization update, then posted it to the application box as an instructional file for later reference.

It amounts to getting an email from the player saying they're opting in, we check with them and our own records to see if they already have any updates that we would need to steer clear of, then if they're an OC, we normalize the stats they haven't upgraded (if they're not already normal) and see what they want to spend their half-off velocity refund on. For FCs whose players opt in, our job is a little more complicated; while we don't have to worry about refunding velocity since the FC's player didn't pay for it in the first place, we also have the responsibility to bring the FC up to the 2013 update standard. That can be pretty involved for complicated characters like Masters or Triplechangers, and especially so for characters with difficult-to-represent gimmicks like hacking, riot shields or mind-control.

Other stuff!

Cybertron's rebuilding is coming along really nicely, and the main builder has started coding new dynamic log templates for our wiki (http://transformers2005.wikia.com) I'm not a wiki expert by any means, but I think the idea is that it's supposed to sort and summarize the logs automatically as long as the people posting them use the template correctly? Also we can have maps of Cybertron and Earth that dynamically assign link to logs by location? I'll be interested to see it in action.

One half of our sleeping god Primus and I chatted a bit and we updated the staff mailing lists to add new contributors, like the builder I mentioned above, and remove staff who are now retired.

I set up the staff email boxes so that they now distribute everything that comes to them to everyone who's appropriate; all the character staff and the other two staff heads can see everything that arrives in the app box without having to log out of their own gmail accounts now, for instance, which is really convenient. Similarly, now Primus and the staff heads also receive anything received by the management box (not that we use it much).

I had to fix a typo on Scoop- this still happens sometimes in building characters, especially the way I do it, which uses a lot of special shortcut code to make it faster, but is also easier to mess up. This time I accidentally assigned Scoop's shovel the same effects as the combined form of his two targetmaster partners! That shovel packed quite a wallop for about 24 hours! Whoops. Fortunately Scoop was a good sport about it when I had to turn it into a normal piece of earthmoving equipment and not a laser-guided cyborg concussion gun. That one was definitely my bad.

Had a pretty good conversation about the Stun and Volatile attack effects with a few of the other staff. Didn't come up with a solution for the problems with Stun (I'll save that for another post) but bounced around some ideas. The discussion about Volatile was not so much brainstorming as my explaining the mechanics and role of Volatile to someone less familiar with it, but I often find that when I have to explain something thoroughly enough, I end up with a better understanding of it myself after the explanation; forming an argument, even if it's one-sided, makes me think about what I know, check my assumptions, and reexamine facts in new light. In this case I was able to get down some good ideas about other things I could easily do with Volatile that had been sort of floating around in my head for a while but not made into anything concrete. So look for me to talk about some experimental effects based on Volatile after I get the code wizard's sweet new abilities Recalibrate and Reinforce released properly.

At the code wizard's behest I publically announced the phasing-out of randomly added decimal places on character stats last night. It's something I've been doing for a while actually, I just don't change existing characters with current players unless they ask, so not everyone had noticed. The other two staff heads felt this was an oversight, so I took a few hours to write up some bbposts explaining the process of ceasing to randomize stats and gradually undoing the ones that had already been randomized.

It seemed to go over well, although the "why" seemed to go over a lot of heads and the "what" still seemed a little unclear to a few. I got a few questions like "but what does this mean for me right now as Blaster?" and "is my character going to change," the answers to which are "nothing, it only applies to the next Blaster, whoever that might be" and "not unless you want it to." I guess the players didn't expect me to make a big announcement unless I was changing stuff that was immediately relevant to them.

Admittedly a four-page announcement that boils down to "for lots of statistical and game-design reasons I'm changing something you won't even see on your current characters and which is not mentioned anywhere in the existing policies because it's not actually a rule" might seem sort of unnecessary, which I guess added to the confusion about why I would make these massive announcements about it, but you would not believe how much staff argue about stuff like that behind the scenes!

Anyhow, so that's what I was doing between about 12:30am and 5am last night(that and also regretfully setting a deadline on the character staff to get a couple apps done before Thursday)! Of course you can't formally announce a new thing without putting it on the wiki, so this morning I also wrote up the retrofit policy and published it to our wiki, and then came over here and posted about it here too. Ha ha, transparency!