Lockely

I reported it on both Beta and Live bug report forums, but the dev doing the costume change updates has now retired from the team. So, we likely won't see a fix until someone new steps into that role. They're all volunteers.

And there definitely wasn't a patch that just came out that reset every single costume with a beam rifle powerset to be 'invalid' and forces you to pay major costume change fees to fix it.

Really depends on how its implemented. Passive inf gains pre-50 wouldn't really cause a problem since once you hit 50 on your first character, you basically turn on a money fountain that never stops. I doubt people would be hardcore leveling characters in the pre-50 range for higher Inf gain. Especially when most of that money is getting removed into vendors anyway, not into the AH. And none of that is equivalent to a single merit converted into 3 Converters and sold on the AH. All it does is help first timers with passive income to keep their slots up to date and play with their costume.

There are several pages of this thread where we discussed if it was a thing or not with multiple people reporting inconsistencies in their experience leveling on Live and HC, and no one had an answer. I even asked "Was this maybe a SCORE change?" to no response. So, the XP rates are different, which means the scale of everything is off and I don't recall the HC devs making any price adjustments for vendor Enhancements to match. So, we're back to square one of this entire thread: Can we get those adjusted so new players have a way to keep their basic slots full with vendor enhancements/drops as they level their first character? Other solutions, such as ensuring enemies always drop something usable by the character, i.e. DOs/SOs of their origin, would also do well to mitigate it. The expectation of filling a gear slot with usable gear is a core tenant of not only this game, but every other game to ever exist, so we should be working towards ensuring that's doable.

Hold on this is good data. A minion kill at 25, per the Live XP table is supposed to be 69xp. Patrol XP is 1.5x so you should have gotten 104 XP (103.5 rounded up). You got 144. That means the real XP/minion is 96. You will gain enough XP to level up with 888 minion kills, which would net you exactly two SOs. On live it would have taken 1235 minion kills for the same thing. Players are losing out on ~24k Inf at this level juncture. A Lieutenant should be 320 per kill, or 480 with Patrol and you got 576. That makes the real XP/lieut 384. The XP rates are higher than they were on Live, and thus this problem compounds because you are outleveling your standard expected Inf gain.

May also be a "The Finals slowed movement speed on release"1 situation where an unrelated cause, like the aforementioned CoT and Council buffs, have made it feel slower by slowing down defeat progress. 1. They didn't, they reset everyone's FOV and movement speed is perceptual based on FOV

The very nature of the system and the extreme emphasis on enhancement slots, as well as forcing the players to go visit the origin vendors and have *lengthly discussions with them* to ensure they knew of their existence during the new 'tutorial' story arcs (Twinshot, Dr. Graves) is proof alone. If they didn't want the slots filled, they wouldn't provide them so often. The game is balanced around having *at least* TOs in them as you level. TOs are gone, so we must now discuss DOs/SOs. This is such a weird argument to be having over the intent of devs who don't even work on the game anymore and whose opinion no longer even matters. What matters is the new player experience in 2024, not climbing up the hill both ways barefoot in the snow back in 2006.

On top of that, you can go into the Historical Discussions on the Paragon/Homecoming Wikis and see the XP rates were subtly changed over the years without corroborating patch notes or dev discussions. Entire tables were built and then invalidated without so much as a patch note. Things have definitely changed, maybe it was with the original SCORE code? But Inf income both passively from defeating enemies and active from selling unusable enhancements does not keep up with slotting as you level, let alone basic maintenance of existing slots.

It's a small popup when you get your first ever Reward Merit. I linked the text of the popup in an earlier reply.

I wouldn't call this teaching much more than making aware the little popup they got means something. If you go over to the merit vendor, there is zero explanation as to what any of it does, and the only thing that is directly understandable are the supremely expensive ATOs. "Oh, this is where I save these up for my class sets." It also shows them a 'cheap' form of SOs, which is actually far more expensive than they have any right to be and probably shouldn't be on the merit vendor as they seem like a trap. Same with Standard Invention Recipes. ~1m worth of Reward Merits for a level 50 default IO. The Merit Vendor, without an explanation of the converter economy and the worth of the items, is one giant noob trap.

Mainly because the test is to see how a new player is going to experience the game. The AH if you don't understand the converter economy is basically a giant brick wall anyway. You open it, look at the enhancements you want, and if you aren't stumped by the interface, you take one look at the prices and click the close button. The game teaches you it exists, it doesn't teach you about converting reward merits into anything, especially converters, for a quick buck. The players won't know or understand the 1inf listing trick to get starter money to list things higher. They won't know you can farm exploration badge accolades in Atlas to immediately make ~1mil give or take 100k. They won't know or figure out any of this unless they come to the forums and ask, or a kind soul sits them down to explain it. The whole point is to show how bad it is for new players to try and level up off drops and active mission income alone.

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.