Lockely

You'd be surprised. Among a lot of Gen Z is a longing for more long-form content as Tiktok is burning them out. What they don't have any patience for is things that intentionally waste their time or stunt their progress just to do shit like stretch out your subscription to another month. Not like we did. Having a goal to work towards and accomplishing it is still very much in vogue, but basic gearing in an MMO shouldn't resemble the housing crisis for a new player, ya know?

As pointed out by @Pleonast earlier, this ignores the entirety of today's MMO landscape. There's a reason why games with much faster dopamine loops are growing and traditional MMOs like this are no longer even being developed. Not only are attention spans shorter across the board for all of us, but the people this game would attract are a tiny niche compared to the overall market. It's a dated game, with dated gameplay mechanics, and a dozen confusing systems that don't explain anything. Put yourself in the shoes of a new player. You're riding that new game high, you get to the 15-25 range and thats when most of your unslotted attacks start whiffing. It keeps happening, over and over, and you keep racking up this thing called XP debt, which means you're making literal negative progress (they won't know about debt badges and the unlocks) and you haven't gotten enough of your origin slots w/ accuracy to drop. Most new players, even back in the day, ended their game there. They went, "this game sucks dude." and logged out for the last time. A small minority of them will go, "Hey, /help, I keep missing my attacks, what am I doing wrong?" to which point Help is going to reply "Oh you need to slot accuracy enhancements, you can buy them at vendors when if they haven't dropped." So, they trudge over to a store, slot up on DOs because they're at the top of the list, and everything is hunky dorey for-- a handful of levels. Then suddenly they start missing over and over again, their attacks hit for less damage, and they look at their slots. Red numbers. Now, they have to replace all of them and, oops, they don't have enough Inf to do so because the rent is too damn high. On my level 27, which I have just been throwing into MSRs to level, I have 13 total enhancements slotted outside of the 5 free ones you get from S.T.A.R.T. It costs me 404,927 to upgrade a mix of 13 DOs and SOs to level 30. I have 22 slots sitting open without anything because it's a money sink to upgrade those and I'm just going to start dumping IOs in soon, but that's because I *know better* from having maxed out a character. New players will not. New players will hit this brick wall head first and nine times out of ten, they'll just quit to go play something more rewarding. Nostalgia alone will not drive further interest in this game and these servers. As grim as it sounds, those of us who played this game as kids are getting old. Life, responsibilities, and even death will eventually pull us away from it, and if we want HC to continue paying its bills we need a steady stream of new players who want to continue beyond level 25. There is no reason to withhold QoL changes just because it's always been difficult. Things that worked 20 years ago don't work now (and arguably didn't work then, else NCSoft wouldn't have transitioned the game to a freemium model and then shut it down), and we need to stop living in a vat of 'back in my day' and realize the game's industry has changed and so has its audience. We either adapt or fade away into irrelevance.

To be fair though, that's only because they keep the market stocked with goods by system and not by player so you don't have to rely on players farming drops to keep the economy stable. It's stable because stabilizing measures have been taken. But it does mean that prices stabilize at a level 50 price point and no lower. Even the low-level sets that cap out at 30 meant for players to use before transitioning into big boy sets go for 1-3mm Inf per slot. Is that cheaper than Live, certainly, but we really can't compare Live's market to today's market because the changes made by HC have fundamentally altered the entire landscape of it. Still, if you can't afford SOs, good luck touching IOs and Sets.

Making DOs and SOs cheaper isn't going to "substantially change the paradigm." You know what does? Making an entire market that converts IOs to whatever level the buyer needs them at versus what they're being sold at, ensuring there is no reasonably priced lower set IOs for people to buy as they're all priced at Attuned levels. This locks out anyone who doesn't learn how to game the market out of buying them. As the game doesn't explain the converter based economy to anyone, this means this knowledge is located outside of the game, and thus new players are being left out. Making it so first timers can afford the bare minimum of filling and updating their slots as they level up with non-set Enhancements is a QoL change for new players. Nothing more.

I've played nearly every MMO on the market at some point in the last 25 years, and a ton of MMO-adjacent / 'lobby-based multiplayer with custom character' games. Most of the newer ones these days go by the unique Global name model (often with a discriminator number to avoid overlap, i.e. Lockely#1234) and character names are no longer unique. We're halfway there with Globals already, but I don't know how robust the system would be to fallback on Globals for chat channels instead of unique character names. Ideally, every character has a unique numerical identifier server side anyway so the database shouldn't 'care' what's in the name field, but with these old games, who knows? Would it be weird to see another Lockely? Sure! But I think I'd make that compromise over having hundreds of names sitting on accounts un-used for literal years.

Absolute truth. My first 50 took me, and I am not joking, 4+ years because I kept burning out trying to level the OG way of contacts and missions, and kept getting frustrated not being able to hit a damned thing, or running out of END after three shots but not having the Inf to keep my DOs up to date. My second 50 took less than 2 weeks, and is almost fully slotted out with IO sets. My third and fourth 50s will be done within a week of creation, and I'm already working on their IO sets. The initial character, i.e. the one New Players are going to deal with, is the struggle bus. No one denies it. Once you get to 50 you have an infinite money fountain to supp from with daily MSRs and Hamis. From there it's smooth sailing, but up to that point it's unleavened frustration and I would have lost *several* friends I've brought in if I didn't throw a few million Inf their way to carry them through to max on their first characters.

It does accept them.

TOs, while being 'useless' were still useful in terms of being affordable on a "I'm new and just doing contacts" Inf income. DOs are not. SOs are right out. Since TOs have been removed, DOs really do need a reduction in cost. SOs can stay as a means to throw a bit of an oompf into some powers if you got a little extra cash lying around. Folks who have been playing this game for a long time and have optimized strats need to realize that the grand majority of new players aren't going to dive into Fire Farms and MSRs and TFs to level quickly. They're going to level the same way you normally do in other MMOs, i.e. the quest grind. It is going to take them significantly longer to level their first character, and they will have significantly lower amounts of Inf to spend until they break into the end-game content and realize "Oh heck, this applies to the whole game, I could have been doing this the whole time." That first character is where we will lose new blood on the journey. No one is asking to give them free LotGs. Well, almost no one. They just want basic competency from playing the game normally. The converter-based economy didn't even exist on Live and the game itself doesn't make reference to it or support knowledge of it in any way, so it's not justifiable to assume every new player is going to figure it out before they hit critical burnout or frustration.

I had a full-on false Mandela Effect moment when I cleared Sgt. Harris and took back Fort Darwin, walking down that ramp after the mission and having memories resurface of the first time I played CoV. I agree that I liked the zone flow better, but I don't see how it could be returned to how it was at this point without overly significant dev time that should honestly be spent bringing Khalisti Wharf into a playable state. I doubt OG Mercy exists anywhere within the 'files,' so it would need to be re-made from scratch. As a bonus, this means the devs could bring it up to the same standard as Goldside, and maybe make it so that we're not killing snakes over and over and over for the first 12 levels. But I wouldn't want it at the expense of new content.

My only concerns with this is I've experienced a ton of lag and slow down on map missions with a lot of pets and psuedopets in the mission. Adding more might cause even more chugging. I'm not sure if there's an internal limit per character or anything.

I was in this group, and have been running MF TFs all week. First any of us ran into it as a group. The only thing different this time is we had a villain alongside us, so it was a co-op mission.

Ever join an MSR and watch your XP debuff disappear just as you're about to pull pylons? On at least Everlasting and Excelsior, you can't risk leaving to re-up else you might lose ~30mins of XP and rewards. To solve this, can we get a S.T.A.R.T. vendor tossed into the new Vanguard base? We have all the other vendors there, including Merit and Holograms, so let's round out the set. Being that it's got an AE base and practice targets, it's meant to be the end-game Player Hub anyway, so let's not shove more people over to Pocket D or Atlas Park. Certainly makes more sense to have one than the Shadow Shard does, anyway.

I really like the Commander living up to the original "intention" of redside tanking at CoV launch. MM has since evolved into something entirely different and I know people who enjoyed that strange original role for them back then.

It's still funky but it updates quicker than it did and I don't feel like I have to prompt it as much to actually give me a price list.

After watching @LordRassilon play it on stream, I've made a few final fixes, but I am comfortable calling this one done-done unless a future patch breaks something. Thank you to everyone who helped playtest and provided feedback! Keep on the lookout for my 1-24 Goldside Mission coming to a WIP near you soon!

Ideally, at least for offices, there is a distinct entryway with doors that aren't generated elsewhere, and that's where you'd want the dot, but it may not be a practical application of effort trying to identify which 2x2 blocks are entryways versus the dozen other 2x2 blocks if they're not labeled in any distinct fashion.

Old CoH maps really do be the Backrooms before the Backrooms ever existed. AboveTheChemist has a workable solution for you using current methods of adding a thumbtack via macro. Being that we get a green dot for elevators, maybe a Red dot for the entrance/exit might be useful? @AboveTheChemist is that doable with something like how we can track badge locations on VidiotMaps?

I know that was the initial intention for MMs way back in the day, that our pets would serve as the tanks redside because Brutes were supposed to be our flavor of melee damage dealers, but I don't know if you can even argue cottage rule for that nearly 20 issues later into the game. But I do agree that our pets either need to survive a bit better, OR it needs to be easier to get them back into the fight. The current meta of both disposable AND cumbersome to replace isn't cohesive to the gameplay experience, nor the expectation that is set when it takes nearly a full minute to set them up only to watch them evaporate moments later. Meanwhile my unbuffed Tri-Gun on my Arsenal Controller sits there and eats EB hits for breakfast.

If she's a bots MM, it's her rifle. All my beam rifles got flagged as invalid this update.

Against a group? My bots, for example, are all complete single target until I get them their upgrades. You're not bringing your T3 Henchman for its ability to punch a single guy and occasionally shoot him with a KD chance, you're doing it for the burning patch combined with all the cone lasers and missiles to mop up a group. ESPECIALLY if playing in Hard Mode content where every little bit counts. At that point the MM exists purely as a support drone, and there are other ATs way better at that with more team contribution.

Henchmen take individual Insps, they don't share, so thats 6 Ultimates to temporarily buff the whole team, or ~6 million Inf for every 3mins of buffs. On top of that, they have to be dragged out of combat because henchman interrupt their ability to accept insps with their auto-queued attacks. You see this especially bad with Bots. Good luck even feeding them a heal Insp let alone an Ultimate most of the time. On top of that, they're still wafer thin in Incarnate content where they get appropriate level shifts, so you'd be dumping ~6m inf into a bin and lighting it on fire as they get either evaporated by the alpha, or a lucky KB turns them into fancy, gold plated dust. Surely the solution to this isn't "Spend several ATOs worth of Inf every mission on Inspirations." If summoning and buffing replacements was less time consuming, I don't think any of us would mind their current state, but as of now I have to not only cast all three of my summons, then wait for them to actually animate in and appear, then cast both my upgrades, then cast any specific buffs (i.e. shields), and THEN get back into the fight. The only thing I can think of is perhaps adding additional global set bonuses on the Superior Mark of Supremacy ATO. At 3/6 it summons your pets with the L6 upgrade equipped, and at 6/6 it summons all your pets with the L26 upgrade equipped. Does it pigeonhole MMs into taking it? Yes, it's creating one problem to solve another, but I think similar to Stalker's Guile: + Chance for Hide, that's a tradeoff we'd take as a compromise.

Glacier, I usually find your additions to most threads to be useful, but you are entirely out of your depth on this one. This here shows you don't have a clue how MM actually plays. In order to get the effectiveness out of our pets, we have to be right alongside them to give them our Inherent buff, plus all the Leadership buffs we're forced to take. We have to be next to them for Bodyguard mode to work. Sending them in to absorb the Alpha and then spending nearly a full minute re-summoning and buffing over and over and over again in high level content for nearly every pack of mobs is not consistent with any other AT's play style. MM pets are tissue paper even when they're on a full tanky build like Bots/FF. As soon as something breaks through all the +DEF you give them, they implode and then so does the MM unless you've run away preemptively, depriving them of your Supremacy buff and making them even worse.

Can confirm No Fade on cloak does nothing currently.

Without slow enhancements and the way it actually deals damage, they are an extremely limited number of viable options. I'm actually not sure if it's intended that this skill does so little damage overall, as a ton of our initial burst (at least on Dom) comes from our ground patches. The only one I think that makes a ton of sensebesides Annihilation is Frozen Blast with the chance for an Immob, but gosh that set is expensive.

Managed to catch @LordRassilon's stream tonight and it was a heck of a good time. Tune in folks!