Erratic1

You have no way of determining how much PLing there would be. People might very well strip their 50s, save the resources, then make and PL new characters. Stripping the resources from old one you are forced to delete in fact makes it easier to get the new 50 up and going. And you've incentivized stripping because in order to have the new character and old one had to be deleted and you might as well get something out of it.

See second bullet point. It cannot be taken but there could be two Face Puncher Emeritus running around. Look at DC and the Flash character. Just how many are there?

It is almost a shame there is no, "Retired" setting we can give characters which would: Flag them as Emeritus and give make an, "Emeritus" title available. Track ownership to the player by some unique value. Release the original name back to the pool for use (since the character now tracks to the player invisibly). Make it so they can only be logged in and played while they have rest xp (no point in being retired if you are not retired). So, @FrequentAltMaker levels her character Face Puncher to 50, retires the character, and thereafter can display Emeritus in her title and play the character infrequently. @NedNewbie decides to make a character named Face Puncher and delights to find the name available. At some point he might even retire the character.

Guess I will have to build it and test it...

But Brutes start with a lower base and scalar.

I thought Brute damage cap was lowered to keep them beneath a certain other AT?

I keep thinking I am making my final brute. I had thought that with the Energy Melee/Radiation Armor brute I got to 50 a week or so ago. But I was compelled (goaded) into making another one following a discussion elsewhere. So, I have violated two expectations: a new brute and retreading ground from Live (as I had an SS/Energy brute there). But I know more about building characters than I did on Live and IO sets are much easier to come by. Probably did not help I was perusing the Tanker forums where it was once again claimed Tankers are the superior farmers. Can we Brutes have nothing? Fine. I will play something no other melee AT can be, Super Strength/Energy Aura. She has been a lot of fun up through level 39. Give a girl Energy Drain and Energize and she'll go all night. And that before even considering slotting IO sets. Now about the Rage Crash.... Like a lot of others, I really hate it. HATE IT! Received wisdom is the more recharge you have the more often you are in a crash situation and I have seen advice about only wanting enough recharge to have Rage available when it runs out. I can really understand the motivation driving that conclusion. But it only goes so far. Say you have Rage recharging every 130 seconds. You pop it, enjoy +80% damage and +20% To-Hit for 120 second, drop to no damage for 10 seconds, then are able to repeat. This is what some would call optimal. Now, say you instead have Rage recharging every 110 seconds. You pop it, enjoy +80% damage and +20% To-Hit for 110 second, * pop Rage again, enjoy +160% damage and +40% To-Hit for 10 seconds, drop to no damage for 10 seconds, then rebound to +80% damage and +20% To-Hit for 90 seconds, pop Rage again to boost to +160% damage and +40% To-Hit for 10 seconds and the cycle repeats from the * above. In the first scenario you are dealing no damage for 10 seconds out of every 130 seconds. In the second, once you are in the repeat phase, you are looking at 10 seconds out of every 120 second dealing no damage. But you have 10 seconds of dealing +160% damage too. Average the two together and...well, you're dealing +80% damage across those two periods. Yes, you experience a period of dealing no damage, but your overall damage is like you did not have a down period. At Rage recharging every 60 seconds you will be experiencing no damage every 60 seconds for 10 seconds, but you will have +160% damage and +40% To-Hit for the rest of the time. I decided to lean into Recharge figuring double Rage might be entertaining enough to make the no damage periods tolerable. What follows is my tentative plan. Yeah, it would be nice to have 20% more S/L resistance. But Rage cycling is the goal, perma-Hasten necessary, and so packing on global recharge a requirement. Let me know of any improvements you can think of.

I had read that when I first read the thread and then when I came back because of the most recent post I had fogotten that stipulation. Thanks!

If Bio is getting mentioned for its +30% to damage, why is double stacked Rage not on the table with its 160%?

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?