Nurvus

I knew I'd regret posting that, but I figure either I'm wrong and look like an ass or correct and it leads to some reflection. I will say that I at least tried to do some due diligence to back it up but it's not 100%. Very fucking sus, but not 100%. At this point I don't really care about the odds though.

If this is the case, everywhere else I've played at is much more covert about the arrangement and probably has an NDA or something. I have never seen such a free exchange of development information to the general playerbase by players. Even now it looks like twozerofoxtrot shared something they shouldn't have and you're having to do damage control. **I'm not gonna keep dragging this out so don't worry about that. I've said what I felt needed to be said to maybe improve the situation and I honestly hate being confrontational. This is waaay outside my comfort zone and I'm only being a dick because I think it might be helpful. I don't think I have anything else to say that'll be constructive.

I'm just going to dump a few random things that I imagine are possible causes of the drama around here. Gotta burn more bridges I guess. Since this is a very small community, the devs are uncharacteristically close (compared to a retail MMO) to a small group of people. It's to the point where random people will speak for developers. I don't think a staff member even said anything about Faultline's break, it was players. This leads to the appearance that there's an inner circle. How do these players know what's going on with the development team? Leaking info on the inner-workings of the development team just doesn't happen elsewhere. Yes you can join the "gold standard" discord or whatever, but I don't think this is a proper solution. It's a really weird situation from an outside point of view. Communication could help *a lot*. I was honestly disappointed that the dev blog about the AE vet level changes was canned due to the pivot to emp merit conversion removal instead. It felt like a cop-out. There was still a valid reason to explain the thought process behind these changes so people don't assume things and freak the duck out. Guess what happened. Writing a blurb about the reasoning behind a change is extremely useful. Here's the gold standard for patch notes: (click the "overview" buttons) https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/#battleaction The moderators are doing a poor job. I'm sorry, but if people are harassing developers the moderators should be on top of that. If a player has done nothing but spout vitriol to the point where a staff member is feeling hurt, ban them. That should be a ban-worthy offense. Also, topics need to be shut down before they get derailed. We really don't need half a dozen topics about farming that all devolve into bickering. Maybe the community is just too small with too much overlap for the impartiality required to avoid drama. This is my first player-ran MMO since my days in UO decades ago. I will say that many of those shards were filled with staff favourtism and unprofessionalism. I swore off private servers for the impartiality of retail servers until HC came along. This felt *very* close to a retail game until this last time I checked in on things. Now it's starting to feel like a private server.

If there's a topic that's cluttering up a forum, a decent idea is creating a megathread for it. It's done a lot on larger reddit communities. That way mods can lock down new threads and point people to the megathread. I'm not sure why all these threads are even left open as it is.

I actually did have a chat with them last night and I think it was more productive than shitting on them. Also, I brought up the Code of Conduct to avoid the whole "well ackshually..." discourse about the first amendment lol. But oh well. I TRIED. People here just can't help themselves with escalating everything.

You need to abide by the Code of Conduct. 😛 If you want to vent or whatever you can DM me if you want. It'll probably be better if another big argument doesn't start.

Just let it go my guy. I don't think you're unreasonable, but I don't think the changes are rooted in a dislike for farming. I think there's a push to make farming *less efficient* and hard mode content more lucrative, so Inf gain shifts to PAPs. They won't outright kill farming, but don't expect it to stay the best source of Inf. For whatever reason you can't say something is "nerfed" here unless you want to be gaslit into thinking you're a big dumb idiot. Inf farming saw about a 10% decrease. It's a nerf, but you can still do it so it's not a nerf I guess.

I'm so mad, my frogs keep jumping out of my pot.

They've communicated that it's just a coincidence and a side effect of fixing bugs/improving powersets, but if you're not terminally online you may have missed the posts and got the wrong impression.

I haven't tried it on a Sentinel yet, but I actually really like my Seismic/Earth Blaster. Seismic Blast can use a fair number of procs and knockdowns can be nice soft CC. The main downside is the delay on Meteor kinda sucks. If you're not taking advantage of a lot of procs I'd give that a try.

Necromancy MMs and they're going to lord it over us lesser ATs.

Gotta get those clicks!

Change is natural, but you can also have different aims or visions for said changes. Rebirth aims to try and stay close to classic CoH, while Homecoming doesn't really have a clear aim. Maybe modernization? Both are fine paths, but I don't think they're equal at all; it just depends on what's important about CoH *to you*. A purist will probably be happier on Rebirth, while those that want modernization would be happier on Homecoming. After spending some time on Rebirth myself, the two servers feel vastly different. I think it's safe to attribute this to the goals of both dev teams. Meaning, you can change whatever you want, but your overall intent can take the game down two different paths. You can't just assert that change is inevitable and all servers have seen changes, so they're all in the same boat. Direction matters a lot.

It probably wouldn't kill the game. Level boosts are extremely common in modern MMOs and they work out alright (as in they haven't killed those games 🙃). You do get people that have no idea what they're doing, but CoH is extremely simple mechanically. Like it's not really a thing here to care about someone's DPS rotation, healing ability, tank cooldown usage, etc. I can't say I've seen someone care about mechanical performance specifically. It's mostly all build/powers/pre-planning/mission knowledge. Instant 50s would probably be very inconspicuous in CoH. They'd be indistinguishable from an AE bébé at worst. I don't know if it's a good thing to add, but it doesn't feel too game-breaking at first glance, especially if there's a cooldown. Does Homecoming need to worry about player retention/people exhausting content and getting bored as a non-profit game?