Doc_Scorpion

Y'know, I never even noticed that... Learned something today, so that's good.

I chose my words with care, and did not say anything that could possibly be interpreted as claiming you stated that.

Curious as to what that insures.

There's a lot of people (especially in the suggestions forum) who don't think people should be allowed to comment on their posts unless they agree with the poster. This poster has recently encountered some rather sharp criticism, so I suspect they're coming from that angle as well.

Forgot to add: IMO, we really need more sub 50's (especially teens and twenty somethings) to simulate the usual composition of a PI radio team if another test run is organized.

Mostly good. The influx of new players (mostly) haven't been infected (yet) with the nasty "rush to 50" virus that's pandemic on Homecoming, so there's been a lot more low and mid level PUG action.

Some money, maybe. But the stark reality is that CoX (Live edition) was a dying game - it's population slowly and inexorably shrinking. (From the limited data we had at the time, it seems to have peaked about I2, and except for a spike when COV was released, steadily declined thereafter.) This idea, popular among the playerbase, that NCSoft killed some kind of golden goose is bunk. Scene: Summer 2008 Event: Iron Man (the first of a long run of MCU movies) is released The effect on CoX... essentially nada. The game's population continued to decline. The lesson: The Avengers set a record because it was the capstone to four years of well received and high grossing superhero movies. And those four years and five movies had no visible or long lasting effect on CoX's population. Seriously, this another mythperception among CoX players - that there's a significant market just dying for a superhero themed MMORPG. There wasn't and there isn't.

I was on Kaizen's team yesterday, one of the sub-50's (a lvl 35 EA/EB defender), so from that POV.... The fights seemed "tough but fair", and I actually felt like I was contributing with my buffs/heals (and the fights lasted long enough that I had time to) and I got to blast a little too. But there weren't any incarnates, so I don't know how that's gonna go. They make a mention of fewer deaths, and that goes back to previous testing with my lvl 50 earth/rad controller tagging along. My 'fender fared well because she was built around working entirely at range. My 'troller has to get in close to use Radiant Aura to try and keep Stoney and the team healed, and both of us (controller and pet) were routinely getting mashed by all the AoE. Ultimately, I simply stopped bringing him out. In summary, overall the increased difficulty is good. But the overabundance of AoE is bad for controllers and masterminds. Unacceptable.

It lists us as having 1.13 million players... Which I find suspect. According to Number Six, we currently have 64,000 active accounts. But anyway, beating out UO isn't that impressive nowadays. It's a dead game walking, a literal ghost town.

Indeed!

That's why we've been doing some team testing. If you can help, please drop by!

I'll be there with a sub-50 support type, but I have to leave absolutely NLT 8:15 EST. The meeting I thought wasn't gonna happen is gonna happen.

I think some folks need to scroll back up and actually read and understand how this bonus works. It's not a Mission Complete award, it's a Task/Strike Force award... And given the effort it takes to complete a Task/Strike Force, it's highly likely that nobody who desires a reward is going to want to invest the time and energy on a Task/Strike Force where they know they won't get the reward. (That is, there won't be "ah well, we'll get it next time.") This goes squared and cubed if they have more than one character they want to get the reward on that day. Dailies are socially corrosive, distort gameplay, and we don't need either here in the City. I oppose them on principle. Where there is a reward, there is pressure to get that reward as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We see that with AE farming. We see that with the WST. We see that with badge collecting. We see it with people who'll drop what they're doing to collect a few Merits from knocking out a GM. (Heck, even powerleveling partially stems from that same impulse.) We see that every day of every week. We don't need to gather data by letting it go live. Humans will behave in the future in the way they have in the past and behave currently. You simply cannot in good faith argue otherwise. And if you've played long enough, you saw the chaos around the farming nerfs and the removal of the base teleport macro, and I have no desire to go through that crap again. The only way to limit the damage is to change the reward period to weekly, and it's better not to implement it at all.

As a dev said some time back... "There's a difference between teaming and soloing on the same map a bunch of other people happen to also be on".

In fact, the more I think about it, I'd be a lot more comfortable with the proposal if the window were expanded from from 18 hours to (say) 48 hours or a week. That will markedly reduce the FOMO pressure that dailies (18hourlies) can produce on players. The pressure the current proposal can generate to log in daily and get in on a TF speed run will not (IMO) be healthy for the game as a whole.

I kind of agree with you, but *shudder* that brings in a lot of bad juju from gatcha games. I'd rather see it extended a to a week so there's less pressure to do it NOW.

You might also ask in the Costume Request thread in the Art & Multimedia subforum.

Just out of curiosity, do you recall the cap in the 2019 time frame? When I finally came back in Aug/Sept of that year, three red dots on Excelsior were pretty common. IIRC, a combination of natural erosion of the playerbase and upgrading the hardware brought an end to that. I don't recall seeing heavy loads after mid/late 2020 or so.

If possible, it would also be interesting/useful to run a group that isn't all 50's. Something more typical of groups running PI radios. I'm bringing over some low level toons that could participate in that as well as GM hunting. I'll try to be there, but being PST I'll likely be limited on time as well.

Yeah, me too. I've seen nothing on Excelsior that even remotely resembles what I regularly saw on Freedumb back in the day in terms of players and activity. Not in invasions, not in GM hunts, not in the LFG channel, not anywhere. The OP is correct that compared to the rest of the market CoX was a small population, niche game. But I'm not buying the claim that Homecoming even approaches anything resembling the numbers back in the OG days.

Yeah. I'm used to being able to stay in range for Radiant Aura to keep Stoney healed up and to use my Epics, but that was pretty risky tonight. And poor Stoney took quite a beating, I had to re-summon much more than I'm used to.

Happened to be topside in the RWZ on other business, and noted the leftmost dummy was not present. Waited over a minute (I timed it), and it did not respawn. Also confirmed that jumpers can reach the surface from the base via both vertical shafts, thank you for that! Edited to add: Confirmed range targets are targetable. Confirmed the portals work, to and from both Firebase Zulu and Peregrine Island.

It is A official game - but it is not The official game. That will always and forever be the OG, live, version. Homecoming is it's own distinct thing.

@Cobalt Arachne stated these changes do apply... Which brings up the question, is there any way to trigger these events during the Beta so these monsters can be tested as well?

You don't need to test the proposition that "human beings will behave in the future as they have behaved in the past". Nor is asserting that truism "speculation". And if you don't think adding a reward alter distort gameplay... I invite you to run a few DFBs and observe what happens in the fight against the Vahzilok, where only a badge (as opposed to a prize worth millions of Inf) is at stake. I invite you to keep an eye on the LFG channel and observe the ebb and flow of what task forces predominate over a given week - and how that tracks closely with that week's WST. (And for many Task Forces, the reward for Role Diversity is in the same cash equivalent range as the WST rewards.) And if you were here when the base teleport macro or farming were nerfed... Then you cannot in good conscience claim that removing this reward (if it goes live and has undesirable consequences) will not cause deep divisions among the community. We've been there and seen that.