Elemental “Design a Trait” Contest Voting Begins!

I'm disappointed. All the chosen traits are not good enough. I hope that Kael was simply stressed and threwed darts or tossed a coin to select five of'em cause I for one do not approve of these five....

In the spellscompetition it stood between two that are both great. Here it was about finding the one that sucks the least.

I went with Outlaw connections from xmorg.

I haven't read the list of suggestions but if people only can come up with superpowerful traits then they need to learn about a thing called 'gamebalance'!

I tell ya, if I made such a competition I would limit each entry to 1000 words and demand headlines like in a CV.

Not shortly explained in the first 50 words?   Disqualified!

Admitting that I didn't read any of the full list, I have to disagree. I would like to see all five of these in the game. I went with Hidden Assassin. The fact that that it even made the final five seems to indicate that it's possible to code in, in theory... and this makes me pretty excited.

Of course, I forsee some major balancing problems with this one when used against sovereigns. But, since Stardock doesn't pay me anything, I'll let the developers deal with that one, if necessary.

Not really. Sovereigns will not only usually be a player's toughest hero but will have tons of nasty magic to fall back on. If you can get a champion with the trait to such a high level that he can actually kill a sovereign then you deserve to win. Would probably only work well against players who shelve their sovereign.

What excites me is that if they implement this ability they may end up implementing a whole spy versus counter spy system. You can do so much with traits like this. Traits for crossing borders without declaring war, stealthy units, disguising units, and detecting stealth-ed units. I already feel the urge to mod in a ambassador trait, that allows you to place them in neutral or ally cities for mutual prestige bonuses. Combine with Assassin trait for win! Also think about the ramifications on Dynasties when they are implemented!

True. But say you have a full stack of well equipped troops led by your sovereign. You're fighting me, whose sovereign and one other random champion has this trait. I go in with the champion first to take a little "off the top" of your sovereign, but my champion is killed, as you suggested and rightly so. Then I go in with my sovereign who also has this trait, and make short work of yours, who has just taken part in a battle.

Meanwhile, your gigantic army is just standing there not able to do anything. Would this be a horribly frustrating loss? I think so. Would it be a satisfying win? Maybe, but probably not. Now, neither of us can really tell without actually playing the game, but it's something to think about, huh?

Edit: I do think that having the code in the game that would allow for target selection when entering tactical combat would be very cool. I would LOVE to make a mini-mod that gave sovereigns the ability to have Highlander-style, risk-it-all duels with an enemy sovereign. Even if it turned out not to be a very fun game mechanic in the end.

My trait isn't in the top 5.

I am dissapoint    

These 5 seem very basic, i'll just go with that assassin thing.

That assassin trait looked cool so i picked it. Outlaw Connections wasn't too bad either... and Black Market Merchant was interesting concept though, IMO, it's pretty boring in the actual gameplay, just more money.

exactly

Now that would be a better trait than any of the selected 5

Perhaps they've already implemented the others into E:FE & these where the only 5 they hadn't already thought of

Perhaps people were making their traits too powerful, but I have to sort of agree, not too impressed with any of them. Although the assassination thingy would open some windows for more variety in tactical combat, so I chose that.

Oh...it's supposed to be a tactical ability?  I didn't catch that from the description.

Well they were suppose to be simple. Im sure many entries were disqualified by default because of they weren't.

I made mine way too complicated and in depth. I was planning to go back and shorten it, but didn't have enough time  ....   oh well.

I don't see how my trait was complicated. It boiled down to: +strength, +dex, -charisma, reduced effects from healing, chance to poison enemies in melee combat.

If that is considered to be too complicated then

I thought all these were good solid ideas. None of them are on the huge scale of the chosen quest options, but they shouldn't be. Champions will be getting one of these every level.

I ended up choosing Hidden Assassin, since that one could substantially change gameplay on the small scale, but I would like to see all of these go in in some form.

I'm very disapointed too :'(

Is that the most imaginative the players could come with ? What about skills like Lycanthropy ? or Wolf Tamer ? What about Flaws ? Like Lost Love, the hero could get married only once or not at all... I mean come on ! Open a role playing book and look at the trait, there's plenty far better than this !

Oh well, I guess Ill go with Hidden Assassin...

Probably because they couldn't handle the sheer awesomeness of it.

In all honesty though, I think these contests give ideas to the devs as to what we want & if alot of the submissions were faulty for some reason or another then I have no doubt the ideas behind them will be at the least considered.

Ah well - mine didn't make the cut. Of course, odds were low with so many submissions, but you don't enter if you don't hope to win - and when you don't, it's still disappointing.

Kinda hard to know what "too powerful" is for a game that doesn't even exist.

Not saying you're wrong because I'm sure that's part of it for some of the traits that didn't make the cut, but it's hard for us trying to just be creative and come up with ideas to know if +2 would be too powerful or +1 or if 15% would be better than 30%, etc.

Lol. The problem with some of the traits wasn't one of a few percentage points. Some of the traits would have dramatically changed the way you play the game, and required huge amounts of coding. Traits are random.... and can apply to both champions and normal units. They are supposed to be a nice bonus or interesting tactical choice, not a game ending spell or a complete rehaul of the entire magic system.  

I wonder why the beast dominator trait was chosen over my trait that was basically the same, and submitted first. Either way I am not too thrilled with either of the choices. But I voted for the beast dominator trait that was submitted simply because their is currently no real way to get the wild animals into your armies.

I don't think that it actually controls monsters, Dominate is just a stat nerf.

But I agree that there needs to be a better way of getting monsters in your army. The preselected buildable system is kinda lame.

I think most of these were picked because they are easy to implement. Take mine for example, the Dominate spell already exist and is working fine. It only takes a slight modification of the current spell to make it only usable on Beast and your done. Polistes, as Dsraider pointed out my suggestion does not control best it's just prevents them from counter attacking.

I think they should all be put into the game.

Same for mine, but a tad more complex. Whats the point of asking for traits if they only want ones that are easy to implement? LOL Anyways now that I see yours is a combat trait I can now safely say that mine was different that yours, I just misunderstood what the description was saying as dominate according to my mind mean "bring under ones control".