Doc_Scorpion

I got half of it even as I read it... But then I'm something of a Japanophile. Had to look up the other half.

Nobody is punishing farmers. You can still farm and power level to your heart's content. Neither pre-change nor post change is anyone being forced to do anything they don't want to do. AE farming and power leveling aren't going away and the Devs aren't dumb enough to even attempt that impossible task. You can still farm and power level to your heart's content.

No. When there's an outlier that can cause a problem, you don't make the problem worse. You fix the outlier, that's just common sense. If I find a nail sticking up out of the floor, I don't raise the floor to match - that's stupid.

Precisely. On Live, the supply of LotG was limited to drops of the LotG recipes. High demand lead to high prices because supply was limited. On HC, the supply of LotG is... I won't say unlimited, but due to converters certainly much higher. High demand for LotG means higher demands for converters (happily supplied by players cashing in Reward Merits) and higher demand for "trash" IO recipes - of which there are many. Thus the inflation in price is diffused across those many "trash" IO recipes rather than appearing in the price of the LotG IO.

I still see calls for Hollows teams in general and Frostie in specific on Excelsior now and again. If I can, I drop what I'm doing and join in because they often don't get many takers. I miss low level play, everyone is in such a rush nowadays. I miss tactical play, battles nowadays (at all levels) are ungraceful zerg rushes.

*facepalm* Distinct accounts are a virtually irrelevant metric. What matters is accumulated player hours, and over the course of three years (from launch to I9 release) - there's no doubt in the mind of anyone that HC over the equivalent period (public opening to now) has a vanishingly small fraction of the active population compared to Live. *facepalm* They didn't need to farm to push prices to the moon when I9 dropped. They jumped the very first day because they had oceans of Inf accumulated across three years of normal gameplay. They (Live) also had something else HC didn't/doesn't - an enormous number of existing characters, all of whose players wanted to get their characters into the IO "game" all at once. Then Inf farming began in earnest. (They already farmed for XP and badges.) HC also has things ameliorating prices that Live didn't. On Live, converters lagged the introduction of IO's by almost five years. On HC, they've been here since Day One. On Live, salvage was never seeded to hold down prices. On HC, that's been a feature since Day One. On Live they didn't "bucket" items on the market. On HC, that's been a feature since Day One. Live and Homecoming - economically speaking, apples and the thing least like apples you can imagine.

That's exactly the one I was thinking of, and I suspect the one @Aiax is remembering.

Yeah, I should have stopped reading right there because the two situations are in no way comparable - HC doesn't have what Live did: Untold oceans of inf sloshing about from three years of accumulation with no place to spend it. (Not to mention a zero-to-sixty surge in demand.) Your conclusions are thus, generously put, questionable.

Is that the one where you're rescuing an Arachnos defector from execution?

According to the Dev team, no. On Live, keeping your names was as simple as keeping your account paid up.

The same thing your claim about underused features is backed with, decades of experience in MMO's. Nothing I said can possibly be interpreted as meaning the aren't people who will try PvP due to new features.

Most folks aren't too bothered by farming per se, we just accept it as something that happens and move on. What's raising hackles in Cox isn't farming as a generic activity - it's one specific subset of farming.

No, PvP isn't "underused". It's actively avoided by the vast majority of people because it's an activity they simply aren't interested in. Temporal Warriors won't significantly change that any more than any other in a long line of attempts to induce people to PvP.

True. But we're not discussing changing ATs or powersets. They're an invariant background to the changes this discussion is spun off from. And arguably, that's as it should be - changing ATs or powersets has enormous ramifications to all forms of gameplay. I don't think anyone (least of all the Dev team) wants to open that can of game balance worms. That's why I say risk, as it's being defined in this discussion, is something of a red herring.

With all due respect to Flea, I wish people would stop dragging risk into the discussion because it isn't really relevant. Risk in this game is, by any rational measurement, all but completely non existent. You don't lose skills and you don't lose items - at the very worst you lose a little bit of time. All that bringing up risk accomplishes is diverting attention from the core issue - the disparity of returns on investment (whether time or in-game currency) between farming and pretty much everything else that isn't farming.

You'll be able to buy the tokens off the AH, so no need to grind for them.

Honestly, that's up to the PvP community to make happen, not the Devs or the GMs.

Fort Trident - Submarine, tested the teleport, all links work. But they're all one way... (Fort Trident -> Zone) WAI or bug?

Confirmed. Created an SG from scratch, entered the base and opened the Base Editor. Placed both an Icon and Facemaker NPC in the entrance room, neither acted as a cosmetic surgeon. (The option was present, but greyed out.) This persisted even after logging out and logging back in.

That assumes you want to rush the characters past all the low level content. Not everyone skips low level content, not everyone rushes to 50. Not everyone wants to concentrate on a new alt to ensure they reach a "safe" level. There does have to be a certain minimal level of investment for the system to work at all, but the level of that investment must be balanced against a wide variety of playstyles. This is a good change as it dramatically reduces the burden on active players while penalizing inactive accounts. (Sure, sure, more campers will be able to slip through the net - but "better a thousand guilty go free than a single innocent be unjustly punished.") You can't put such a system in place with inconveniencing someone, but somewhere in the single digit levels is probably going to be the best place to set the bar to minimize that. Level 6, which can be rushed with the investment of half an hour, or easily obtained with a few evenings of regular play, seems to be about right.

Though it's not mentioned in the patch notes, this is already in place.

What word are you looking for? What's missing in the patch notes or what's wrong when you visit?

I'm neither here nor there WRT herding (unless it's being done by an incompetent or personally unpleasant tank), but the return of a more tactical playstyle (as opposed the current uncoordinated zerg) is certainly welcome.

Wandered about Echo Plaza a bit, everything looks good!

And if you don't want to mess with a DFB, hit the P2W vendor for a Double XP boost and do a bit of street sweeping (especially west and northwest of City Hall)... I didn't formally time it when I tried it this morning, but it didn't take very long to hit lvl 6 with a melee character. And given that it's more than two years since Homecoming opened to the public, the names on truly inactive 'early adopter' accounts will go available as soon as the dev team flips the switch and activates the system.