Yesterday I quietly released the Taketori Katana. It is available in my main shop at Anhalt Hill (first place in my profile Picks) as well as SL Exchange :
So far I’ve gotten mostly good feedback, though there’s at least one person out there who apparently hates it (I think his exact words were "The handling on this thing sucks"). I admit that it’s a little different, and may required getting used to (there’s no auto-combo ability in this sword, for instance), but most people seem to be reporting that it’s pretty smooth for them.
The most important thing to remember about the Taketori Katana handling is that it is specifically designed to not require rapid-fire button mashing or perfect timing. It is designed such that it should be easy to move smoothly from one attack to the next, or attack to block, etc. As an example, if you pressed W for a forward slash, you can press and hold D at any point while the W slash is executing to move right into the D slash when the W slash is finished, you do not need to wait for the W to finish. Same with block and kick. The number one priority for the Taketori was the ability to smoothly transition from one thing to the next, almost like a rolling motion from one key to the next.
Some people have reported that the Taketori is faster, some have reported that it is slower, and there are people I trust completely on both sides of that argument. Who is right? Well, technically speaking, I did in fact slow down the Taketori a little due to feedback from some of the best fighters I could find, but a great deal of testing has not shown the weapon to actually be slow. Most testers have reported that it is fairly well balanced.
Only time and widespread usage will really reveal what the overall consensus is, and while I feel that the speed is pretty good "as-is", I think exactly the right decision was made : It’s possible to release an update that is faster, if required, but if I release a "too-fast" weapon and try to put out an update that is slower to try to balance it, then many people will simply choose not to use the update.
Beta testers may wonder "what happened to the rolls?", to which I can only say that although I still intend to incorporate the rolls in a future update, I never considered them an essential feature, and making them work properly and consistently despite SL’s quirks and the greediness (in terms of aggressive polling time and insistence on overriding literally everything) of most animation overrides was just more work than I was willing to do if it meant putting off the release by a couple more weeks.
I also plan on creating a unique special attack for this weapon. :) It’s another one of those features that, although it would be quite nice to have a unique special, was just not a showstopper.
I hope to do a postmortem article soon, but as it is I just picked up a new contract at my RL job and need to return to gritty reality 
Please feel free to leave any feedback you have on the new weapon, I would very much like to hear what people have to say!!!
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