Doc_Scorpion

Please, remember, exemping is a thing. And you also have to consider 'trollers and Masterminds - which, especially the latter, don't need slots do be significantly useful. (And honestly, in my experience, most T9's provide some level of usefulness even with the default single slot.)

I copied over my lvl 29 bots/FF from live, and she pretty much cruised through street sweeping in Bricks and a number of Alignment missions. (Especially when I leveled to 30 and picked up Upgrade.) I'm currently running a low level bots/EA through King's Row on Brainstorm and not noticing any significant problems. Both on default difficulty. The lvl 29 especially felt more lethal. No changes were required to my usual playstyle other than becoming a bit bolder with my bots/FF.

Potentially. Much depends on how, if, NCSoft decides to handle the matter... and we just don't know for certain.

Trust me, I've been on staff for day and weekend events all the way from head honcho on down... It's a *much* bigger [censored] headache job than you realize. I'm not saying it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done - just that you should disabuse yourself of the notion that it "wouldn't take much".

That would be true if CoX was a solo game. CoX is not a solo game.

True. But this issue is about much more than even level characters facing even level content. It's also about characters exempted down from higher levels. For example: Without this change, there's simply no way to get a T9 into Yin - it caps at 25 and T9's are level 32, seven levels above the cap and outside of exemplar range. With this change - T9's are level 26, well inside exemplar range. At some cost, someone as low as lvl 32 could pop into a Yin with their T9 fully slotted. And of course lvl 50's have even less of challenge to facing Clamor and her horde with a fully kitted T9. As I view it, that's the real potential for problems - high level toons exemped down into lower level content with a heavy hitting power previously unavailable in those ranges. And then there's Masterminds. Their T9 doesn't need slots to produce an instant and practically always on increase in power.

Saw you on Brainstorm yesterday, looked pretty sharp!

The Maintenance Drone *poofs* on zoning. Bug or WAI? (If the latter, it's mildly annoying but so far doesn't feel like a deal breaker.)

It's easily testable by those of us who play in the mid levels and don't rush to 50. (Me? I've only got two 50's out of twenty five odd characters - my two signature characters.) It's also easily testable by exemping down into a mid level Task or Strike Force. (Given the number of people who exemp down for the Weekly Strike Targets, this is particularly important to test. There's a reason why previous posts have been excited about Yin.) That being said, I have a lvl 29 bots/ff MM that I've been running heavy on Brainstorm to test those changes. Went ahead and unlocked XP and popped up to 30 to pick up Upgrade Robot (rather than messing about with a respec), and it's a pretty significant power boost. Between that and the upgrades to 'bots she's markedly more lethal. She's got quite a bit of solo work left to do at 29, and I'll definitely be respecing her when this goes Live.

You're still slot bound though... So that offsets getting that nuke early just a little bit. OTOH, it's going to considerably change late 20's play for MM's - because their T9 is useful even without slots.

If you haven't tested it, you're "seeing" anything - you're just guessing. Take your bots out for a spin on Brainstorm and work with facts and knowledge. (I have, at least briefly. So far I haven't found anything that feels like a significant nerf.)

The Maintenance Drone's description is just an alphanumeric string:

Not as complete a test as I would have liked because I'm juggling too many balls at the moment.... - Created a Lvl 1 character the day the '30-day' patch went live. - Mis-entered the dates on my calendar, and didn't check him at the 20 day mark, but on day 29 he was displaying the orange yellow warning flag. - On day 30, was still displaying the orange yellow flag. - Got busy over the weekend and couldn't check, but on day 33 was displaying the red orange flag. Seeing them side-by-side, it's kinda hard to distinguish one color from another. The yellow needs to be more clearly yellow/brighter, and the orange more orange to make it easier to distinguish between them.

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.