Erratic1

You can exit a fight, take a knee, recover to full health/endurance, and still have a nice chunk of Fury, which will as you noted very quickly be back to superior damage levels after a swing or two. Due to another conversation last week, I got around to making the SS/EA Brute I had been avoiding doing (played one in Live, was trying to avoid repeating myself but also know more about building characters...so gave in). She was decent at lower levels, but once she got Energy Drain at level 24...oh my...the wrongness which has ensued. Mostly mentioned because I had been paying attention to Fury while leveling her.

I am going to avoid having this apply to myself: I am good with letting you be wrong.

Ebonblade is available on two shards Onyxblade is available on all shards

Tempest in teapot. 50's names are not up for release in any event, so I am not going to argue the point. The furthest I can see it being reasonable to release names of level characters is if/when the work is done to determine the account they are on has been inactive for a significant period. FWIW, I just gave up the name Preeminent. Imperil was open and I felt it better captured the hazardous nature of being around the character (Bio/Rad villainous tanker). Some may not think either name is all that awesome and that I did really get a good name either way. Beats 'Toxic Todd'.

Then as you like to say, good thing I didn't assume that. I don't disagree. The key words above are, "leaves behind". Active players have not left.

It is unreasonable to think that desirable names are universally not being played. I was here a year ago (and two and three). Naming has not gotten meaningfully harder in that time. "Black Ice" went early I am sure and was not available after the first week or two. Some character names I have gotten in the last year: Restless Dead Ultrapower Glamours Street Druid Trapstress Ghostfist Stellaris (renamed later) Eye of the beholder how desirable those are but they are not names nobody would think of (I think).

Here is a quick sampling of player names from my most frequented server showing right now as I type: Agatha Stone Aubrey Kate Axle Rock Black Ronin. Deflagrator DiscoTech Juliet Doctor Mortuus Dro Skulls Dro Tsoo Forrest Gumps Frozen Circles Fyre Urchyn Garbopolis Gemma Trappe Ghost Gunman Graffiti Artist Grats Higgs Bonsai Hon Any of those names you would likely think of to use were they forced to be available to you? A GM has noted the great number of names which nobody is going to be rushing to get. Freeing up a bunch of names may occur but those names were not preventing people from getting what they want.

Your characters are tied to your acount otherwise when you logged in you would not have a list of characters presented to you. Whille there may not be a specific field in a database tracking when accounts log in, given you have a database with accounts and with characters with datetimes associated with being logged in, it is a straightforward query to find the most recent datetime associated with each account. I last logged in about an hour ago. Only one character will show that time--the character I was logged in to. Save that time against my account name and write it to a table. Do that for everyone and...oh my, you have a table of accounts and last activity.

Back at shutdown when Sentinel was created to extract out character information for possible reimport should the game be saved some way, the xml files produced were 31KB in size. So figure a milllion characters would fit in 31GB. My five year-old phone has twice that for its base storage.

In my previous job the company kept every fiscal transaction, along with all the associated medical information ( procedures, resources, guarantors, insurance [including how it changed over time], contact information, providers, locations, payments, charges, etc.) going back for 30 years. It is hard to see how our character, especially coming from what was constrained by the technology of 18 years ago, is really producing that much clutter in terms of modern storage.

The discussion was about purging 50s from active accounts vs from inactive.

Well, I have to say that some might be spiteful enough to start creating characters, getting them past level 5 so their names are protected for a year, and then logging them just to take a larger chunk of the namespace because some people want to advocate annoying busy work. Not me of course, but some.

To underscore what athereal is saying: Attuned Performance Shifter: Chance for Endurance, as I type this, is running a little over 3 million influence on the auction house. Enhancements converters, which may be purchased three at a time for a single merit are running 75 thousand. 3 million/75 thousand = 40 converters. Divide that by 3 and you need 14 merits to afford a Performance Shifter. The Positron 2 (Dam Hero) task force pays 15 merits and is available at level 11.

I did not read my own post is what you're saying? Anyone who is not willfully obtuse can see the import of the character to me but even for those so socially challenged they cannot, my telling you it is important to me is all that matters in determining that it is. Get back to me when you are not just objecting to be objectionable.

No. You may not care. Greycat, I, and you don't know how many others do care and we are telling you we care. Now, why do you think your opinion on -=OUR=- characters carry greater weight than -=OUR=- opinions?

I have a good friend, great guy, who, with no insult intended, tends more towards, "bright shiney" in his approach to games--he gets into them, plays for a while, then is off to the next thing. When he heard City of Heroes was back, he came back, brought his wife, played for about four months, and was off to the next thing. That was at release. He's not coming back. And if he does, his character names being lost would be an incredibly rare disappointment (there is one which is based off his last name, which is also a good name to work into any character with a particular theme of power) which would not disuade him. But in all honesty, he is not coming back. Dropping the names of characters on inactive accounts if a very different beast from dropping names from those stilll playing the game. Doubt me? Who is here telling you that? Me or my friend?

I told you why I care. Did you not read my post?

Moreover, you do not get logged out of the game if you are standing in a supergroup base short of the server resetting. Go to your base, get a phone call from a friend about doing dinner. Dash off to meet them then return 3 hours later and your character will remain logged in and have 3 more hours of play without you doing anything. Time active is a dubious metric.

My most recent 50 is a character I made the day after Christmas who hit 50 Sunday before last. He is my 18th character to hit 50. Not a great number but then I take breaks from the game, do not play are often as some, and tend to play multiple characters in a span of time instead of just focusing on one. Since he was created I have probably made a half-dozen other characters and given them some amount of play time including a couple which are in their 40s. Point here being that it really would not be implausible for me to have 1-2 50s per month if I focused and did not take breaks from the game. Let's say I had done that since launch. At four years that would be 72-144 50s. What is your need that I have logged into those characters annually to retain their names? Why is not my ongoing participation in the play of the game sufficient?

My first character on Homecoming, my first 50 on Homecoming, the holder of my global name, and the leader of my supergroup is a level 50 I no longer play. She's okay, not great. Love the bio I gave her, and she and the bio are shown off in the multimedia section. But like I said, I no longer play her. Are you really that much better off that I log her in once per year just to avoid losing her name?

A proxy for a direct record of account activity would be the last time the most recently played character was active.

I disagree, at least partially. A 50 on an actively played account should be inviolable as goes their name. A 50 on an account which has been dormant for long enough (at least a year, maybe two) should be open to loss.

How would you come to that conclusion? It is certainly doable, and I do know people who exclusively play that way. On the other hand, I can say that each of my eighteen 50s was levelled through playing the game*. I can say that as I play my characters up, I see some number of other characters who I keep bumping into along the way who are obviously not taking the insta-route to 50. Though since that is how I play, that is what I am going to encounter. Is there a good way to determine how long it took someone to reach 50 on a character short of having caught them within a short period of them having been created and noticing they went creation to you observing them as being level 50 and it only having been a day or two?

Historically I have taken Tough in the teens, but largely because it was a convenient place to slip it in. Having it and slotting and running it are two different things. Oh...there are also the times I was angling for Cross Punch so needed a second power in the Fighting pool to get there. Super Strength has no area attacks until Foot Stomp, so getting Cross Punch early is a way to get around that. Likewise with Radiation Melee (because Proton Sweep is miserable).

No...just no. Q: When the scrapper does not crit, what happens? A: The Brute is ahead. Q: Is the scrapper going to always crit? A: Possible but increasingly unlikely over multiple hits in a fashion trending towards zero. Q: How does one figure out the average result: A: Simplifying things to make present an explanation, consider only single target attacks. Each attack can either crit (C) or be a normal hit (N). A sequence of attacks then has finite possibilities. For a single attack you have two possibilities: C or N. For two attacks you have four possibilities: NN, NC, CN, or CC. For three attacks there are eight possibilities: NNN, NNC, NCN, CNN, NCC, CNC, CCN, CCC. For k attacks there are 2k possibilities. Q: But the scrapper, when he crits the Brute cannot keep up. A: First, there are plenty of targets which survive a crit. Second, if the scrapper crits he then goes onto the next target. The consideration here is what happens on average over time. Yes, a scrapper can make three attacks and get three crits. If the scrapper has a ten percent chance of getting a crit then one time in a thousand he make a sequence of three attacks and gets those three critical hits. Nice and wonderful, but there are nine-hundred, ninety-nine other times to consider.