Doc_Scorpion

Even back in the OG days, there seemed to me to be a significant number of people who thought that if you added an ICON, a trainer, and a Wentie's rep to Ouroboros... that would be just about perfection.

I'm not dismissing it, I'm sounding a warning. I'm pointing out that UO is a corpsicle, living death frozen in time. And as you point out, HC is already riding dangerously close to that line... I want HC to be closer to what it was on Live - a living game within a vibrant City. I don't want HC to evolve further along the same lines UO did - catering to the hardest of the hard core. Catering to those who "won" the game by rushing to highest levels and now complain of "nothing to do". That social meta isn't a healthy game, it's a death spiral.

More accurately, go ask Ultima Online and then do the complete opposite. That is, just because it's been around a long time doesn't mean it's good at retaining players... I'm not entirely certain how they're keeping the lights on, but the shards are ghost towns and population a bare fraction of what it was at its peak.

This is... not a good idea. Despite the fact that fad and fashion are leading people to misuse chatrooms, they are not a substitute for forums. You can't quote. You can't link. You can't thread. You can't search. Stuff is all too easily pushed off the top of screen and lost forever to the mists of time. It's very inconvenient to scroll back, locate, and substantively reconstruct a conversation. (Not the least because you can have multiple parallel conversations in a single chatroom - and no ability to "take it to another thread". They are emphatically not a place to discuss or post things of any long term importance (such as policy) because of these drawbacks. They're great for in-the-moment stuff, but otherwise folks need to be redirected to the forums. (That is, to be useful they must be monitored and moderated.)

Yep. I mod a closed group on Facebook... I reject about 2-3 very obvious spammers for every real person applying for membership. I reject about 2-3 people who don't meet the criteria outlined (a photography group that requires residence in the local area) for everyone who does that gets admission to the group. My anime blog... thank the $DIETY for the automagic spam filters that Wordpress provides for the comment section. 20-30 bot comments a *day*, all spam/scam. (And that's for a blog that gets maybe 10-12 legit visitors a day....) A friend of mine who runs IT for a local water utility once told me that, on average, they get a potentially hostile visitor (port scanners, looking for unpatched vulnerabilities and the like) to their public facing website 100 times a second. 24/7/365. It costs virtually nothing to run a bot, and a sweatshop isn't much more expensive, so there are a LOT of them.

That was my question too. It's very odd that the OP quoted you, didn't answer the question, and instead went off on a tangent about farming. (I don't think they realize how farming interacts with their proposals. ) That being said, I lean towards the "no way" camp... It gets people to play lower level content, but doesn't really encourage conventional leveling... (The two are not the same thing.) It does encourage farming because those low level TF's/Trials can be started by characters of any level. The permanent double XP weekend and the easy availability of DFB stand squarely in the way of normalizing low level play. (And the current meta stands guard at that wall armed with a thermonuclear shotgun.) That's means there's few teams, and that makes things very difficult for any but the experienced player.

That was an experiment, not a test of an upcoming change. (And *sigh* the number of times I've had to explain this shows why the devs are reluctant to announce experiments.)

<nods> All of my Defenders are built to be Offenders at need. They're much more fun to play that way. Back on Live that confused/annoyed people (of which there were more than a few) who equated "Defender" with "healbot". Of course, that wasn't helped by the not insignificant number of Defenders who were healbots. But there were also many who welcomed it. A good Offender is much more than a low-rent blaster. Which leads to my story... Double XP weekend, and I'd been pushing hard to get the Doc (a rad/rad Offender then and now) through the 40's. I'd gotten up on Saturday morning, and ended up on a team that was more or less stable for about six-seven hours. Got several nice compliments for knowing when to heal/debuff and when to blast. I really needed to take a break and get a shower, some calories, and bit of quiet time, and said so in team chat. They told me to write down the names of X, Y, and Z (all members of a particular supergroup that were running the team) and message them when I got back and they'd re-invite me. Thought they were just being nice, and thought nothing more of it. Told 'em it would be an hour or so and logged. Got back on after about an hour and a half and sent a /tell to X. No response. Then to /Y. No response. Then to Z - and got an immediate team invite. When I expressed surprise that a slot was immediately available (remember, Double XP weekend)... "Oh, we've been playing a seven person team hoping you'd be back soon".

That's today's patch to Live. The thread is about yesterday's patch to the staging servers. I am using the beta manifest.

Still, patch notes of some kind would be nice - as I said above, patch notes are how we the players know that it's WAI and not a bug or hack job.

I saw that too... But no patch notes, which I find very bothersome. Even if the patch didn't/doesn't do anything significant, patch notes are how we the players know that it's WAI and not a bug or hack job.

That's why you follow a wakie with a break-free, insta cure for rez sickness. One everyone but my /regen scrapper, I usually follow those with a blue and a green.

*Looks at thread title.* *Looks at statement of purpose.* I'm seeing a mismatch here.

It's not that you don't know. It's that you refuse to know. You asked for an honest answer, you got an honest answer. Problem is you don't like the answer.

Absolutely 100% incorrect. That question has been answered multiple times: Farming creates cash from thin air, increasing the money supply, and creating inflation. Marketeering transfers existing money between players and (via consignment house fees) removes money from the economy and decreases inflation. If you've watched these discussions, then you've seen the answer I gave above on multiple occasions. If you missed it, you weren't paying as much attention as you thought you were. If you saw it and dismissed it or didn't believe it, then that's on you.

Same reason I want an Amusphere... With a Full Dive (virtual reality) rig (unlike a Holodeck AFAIK), you're no longer limited by your physical body.

You're likely to find more help in the Help & Suggestions forum: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/12-help-amp-support/

Can't put my finger on why, but I like the idea of making it a unique.

Hands down, Sword Art Online - VRMMO's and Full Dive technology are just so cool.

The filthy polluted bay in Crey's Folly would be exactly where I'd expected a mutated giant monster to take up residence... Just sayin'. 😁

You'll probably want to ask this in the Mastermind sub-forum... https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/19-mastermind/

The GM's also summoned large scale duplicates of the players... Had a hard time getting a screenshot of myself (in black and green in the center) due to crowding, and because 'fenders don't seem to fare well as Giant Monsters. I wish I could have gotten a screenie of the sixteen-tentacle Lusca, but I couldn't zoom out far enough. Also... whatever that melee temp power was we had at the end, I need to know how to get it. 🙂

If you view "the health of game" as being merely an abstract collection of "hard numbers". Sure. But that's a very narrow and reductionistic view. And it handwaves away the the "culture and mindset" question you yourself brought up.

Certainly. The question is whether a particular change or changes are healthy for the overall game or not. I do not believe that HC's ever growing fetish for speed (in leveling, in completing missions, in travel, in kitting out uber-builds, in practically every facet of the game) to be healthy.