Luminara

He just ate a thesaurus, he's fine.

Superior Invisibility. In the Concealment pool, Stealth provides the highest stealth, 55', enough to render you completely invisible to anything that doesn't have increased Perception or ignore Stealth. As different stealth powers don't stack stealth any longer, but +Stealth enhancements do stack with different stealth powers, you can still operate with Super Speed or Infiltration and a +Stealth enhancement, and that will give you a higher stealth radius, but Concealment's Stealth is, by itself, sufficient for just about everything.

None of the servers here are undergoing maintenance at the moment. And the Homecoming servers, which is where you are now, aren't operated by the same people who run the Rebirth servers. Perhaps you should ask the Rebirth team this question, if you're looking to play on the Rebirth servers?

Extra light g-strings do shred easily.

Sophistry doesn't work when posts are a matter of public record. Save the spin doctoring nonsense for someone else.

Merits didn't redress the economic imbalance on the original servers because they were implemented in a way which restricted availability, introduced far too late to change the direction of the economy, and merit prices were factored around expected inf* gain and set to an equivalent rate, resulting in the same time spent collecting merits to pay for something as one would grind inf* to pay for the same thing. In other words, Paragon royally fucked it up in every conceivable way. HC unfucked it. And it's fine the way it is now.

We did that on the original servers. It resulted in a hyper-inflated economy, a massive division between haves and have-nots, and RMT traders spamming every channel. Not looking to repeat that experience, thanks.

@Cobalt Arachne just explained, very succinctly, that everyone involved with HC is a volunteer. That includes mods. This isn't their job, it's what they do when they're finished doing their jobs. What they do when they could be spending time with their spouses/paramours, their moms and dads, their children, engaging in other hobbies. What they do when they're not logged into the game, helping players with problems there. And giving them grief for not babysitting the forums 24/7 isn't going to make them more excited to be mods, magically cause extra hours appear in their days, or bestow presentience on them so they can head off train wrecks before they happen. There are half a dozen or so people trying to maintain order on the forums, at the expense of their own enjoyment of the game, their personal lives, their sanity. Cut 'em some slack.

I said there were 1000-1500 players logged in at any given time. You're mistaking that as the entirety of the population. It isn't. You do realize that I said, "as an example", because I was using purples as an example, to illustrate one segment of the market which would be impacted? And the number of players currently logged isn't the same as the total population. And when the people with the big bucks are throwing it around, prices go up. They go up because the people with billions of inf* can afford to pay whatever they have to for what they want. whatever it takes to out-bid others, whatever the sale price is on that last item. And, again, we're talking about recipes or enhancements with a low or no drop rate, so they're not being replenished as quickly as they're being removed. Going deeper, you're dismissing a key facet of this. It doesn't matter if everyone doesn't immediately type /ah and start buying enhancements, there are restricted supplies of the rarest enhancements. There aren't enough of these enhancements for 10% of the currently logged in players to purchase everything they want, much less the entire population. After the first 50-75 people empty the market of those enhancements, everyone who goes shopping has to go home empty-handed. How many enhancements you have stored, or what types they are, doesn't alter the basic fact that there wouldn't be enough on the market to go around. Supply and demand. Increase demand several times over without increasing supply and you have inflation. Yeah, some players have some enhancements stockpiled and could take care of their freefties. Others don't. New players wouldn't. Regardless of what a limited sub-sect of the population might have, "Fuck 'em if they're too poor or too slow or didn't start sooner" isn't a solution that flies. The HC team won't go for a system which benefits the wealthiest players, or those who hoard the most shit, and screws over everyone else, no matter how hard you advocate for it or sweetly you phrase it. Every 50 created under the current system generated drops which could be vendored, listed on the market or saved for use. Even if they ran with the 2XP buff, they still generated drops. Regardless of whether they were leveled the slow way, soloed with 2XP, teamed the entire way or stood inside a farm and waited, they all generated drops. They all at least partially supplied for their own needs. Freefties wouldn't. Freefties would exit character creation with nothing but their dicks in their hands. There's no equivalency between leveled 50s and freefties in this context, and that makes your question irrelevant.

I broke this down in a previous post, in yet another "DEER DABS GIB ME FRE FIDDEES PLZKTHXBAI" thread. Guess it's time to do it again. At any given time, there are ~1000-1500 people playing. There aren't 25000-37500 purples, to give one example (presuming a desire for 5 sets of 5 enhancements apiece, per player, 25 purple enhancements times 1000-1500), recipes and crafted enhancements combined, on the AH. There aren't even enough purple recipes and enhancements for 100 players to grab 5 sets of 5, or, in fact, for every one of those 1000-1500 players to purchase one set of 5. Everyone can verify that just by checking the listings on the AH. I sat here and counted the number of recipes and enhancements listed last time I did this, and to my knowledge, nothing about drop rates has changed, and the population has remained relatively stable, so I'm confident there hasn't been a gigantic uptick in purple listings since then. Within an hour of freefties going live, the entire purple segment of the market would be empty, including any that have been sitting there for three and a half years (which were probably listed at or near the inf* cap). The whole fucking thing. Not a single purple left in any category. Now the market is devoid of purples, and the trickle coming in doesn't even begin to approach the demand. Prices instantly shoot up, and because supply is only meeting a few percent of the demand, they will never go down. Once the purple supply depletes, the prices go straight to 110,000,000-120,000,000 inf*, and they stay there for the rest of the time the HC servers are here. This scenario will play out across every segment of the market that isn't seeded. Purples, ATOs, HOs and variants thereof, PvPs, Winter enhancements, they'll all go dry in record time, surge in price and remain out of stock or at single-digit supply with massively inflated prices, because they don't drop frequently (some don't drop at all, like ATOs and Winter enhancements), they can't be rouletted the way uncommons and rares can (can't turn a rare into a purple, or a Winter enhancement, or a HO, et cetera), and their reward merit price is comparatively high. And, unlike what happened on the original servers, we won't see some purples selling for half the price of others. We have converters, so even "crappy" purples are worth as much as top tier purples. Same applies to all of the low drop/no drop items. They all peg at the same exorbitant prices, none of them will be comparatively cheap. The uncommon and rare segments would also be heavily impacted. Uncommons would all but disappear, snatched up by players hoping to cash in on the gold rush by converting them to valuable rares. As the uncommons dwindled and the prices increased, they'd turn to less expensive rares and convert them. Prices across the board would go straight up. And no-one, and I do mean no-one, is going to spend merits on recipes to supply the market, not when merits become the only viable option for the most valued enhancements. Even at 5 merits for randomized rolls for rare recipes, that's essentially money down the drain. Sure, we have some players who could prop the market up for a little while, if they spent every waking hour converting their wealth to merits and constantly dumping random recipes on the market, and everyone "behaved" (meaning, didn't immediately purchase the cheap recipes to flip and drive prices up), but they wouldn't do it indefinitely, nor could they, as they'd be functioning at a loss. I'd speculate that a really aggressive player could sustain this for about a month, maybe two, before he/she burned out or ran out of funds. A concerted effort by a collaborative group of extremely wealthy players would be more sustainable, but still not an indefinite solution, and it would hand pricing control to an unknown third party... which would, essentially, give them a form of control over their fellow players. Lower level recipes would experience a drought as devastating as purples, as they just don't drop from higher level foes, and the recipes and enhancements currently available would, as I noted in the previous paragraph, dwindle and vanish. The Karma, Kismet, Miracle and Basilisk's Gaze segments, for instance, would collapse entirely because those couldn't be obtained by running Hard Mode content/Incarnate content/level 50 content. Zero listed, thousands bidding. Prices on "trash" uncommon low level recipes and enhancements would skyrocket as they were snatched up for conversion, furthering the shortage and reducing availability across the entire segment. Players spending merits wouldn't "waste" their merits on randomized rare rolls, crafting and converting to uncommons to dump on the market, they'd be spending them on the stuff they wanted, like those over-priced purples, or stuff to sell at higher prices than lowbie uncommons. The only way the market would have any lower level recipes or enhancements would be from players not using the freefty option, or the ones exemplaring down to run low level content... just to acquire recipes... to sell for ridiculous prices... Players could still purchase recipes with reward merits, obviously, but acquiring merits takes time, even if the player is doing it by converting inf* to merits. That 100,000,000 inf* per hour from farming is only 100 merits, equating to one Winter/PvP/ATO/purple from a merit vendor. A random rare recipe is 5 merits, which would help stabilize the prices of uncommon and rare recipes and enhancements somewhat, but consider that this now means even a "trash" uncommon recipe has a minimum price of 5,000,000 inf*, as opposed to ~5000 inf* as they are now, and that's just for some garbage that can be converted and resold or, if the player has a lucky conversion (or is just swimming in inf*/merits), used. And that touches on another aspect of the market impact. We tell ourselves that market prices are capped by merit values, but that discounts transaction fees, crafting fees, converter costs, the player wanting a return on the time invested, and expecting to make a profit. Market prices won't be capped by merit value, they'll respond to inflationary demands, supply and player interactions and expectations. An uncommon enhancement won't cost 5,000,000 inf*, it will cost 5,000,000 inf* plus the cost of crafting, and conversion, and transaction fees, and a profit margin. Merit value is, in truth, just a starting point. It's unlikely that inf* prices for items on the market would soar too much above their merit value, but rest assured, they absolutely would not be the same. The inf* cost would always be higher. In short, anything that isn't seeded would disappear rapidly, supply would fall so short of demand that it wouldn't be funny, and prices would go above merit values and not come back down to manageable levels without a total reset. We'd be right back where we were on the original servers. And the freefties some people clamored for wouldn't be instantly playable, they'd be in a worse situation than the power-leveled characters, because they wouldn't have a single merit or 1 inf* in their pockets, market prices would be 1000%+ above what they are now and they'd be running around with no enhancements, or only drops/SOs/common IOs, until they ground up enough lucre to pay for their "I made an instant 50 and now I'm going to go run Hard Mode shit!" builds. Sure, some players have stockpiles of inf* and could shrug off the inflation, but new players would be fucked, non-farmers would be fucked, casual players would be fucked. And all of the work the HC team put into creating a thriving and stable economy would be flushed down the toilet. It's a bad idea every time it's raised.

To expand on my previous post, I noticed the spasmodic window behavior last night, when I was in Peregrine Island, running a route to polish off the Unveiler badge. I passed by Motel PL repeatedly, never closer than a couple hundred feet, but close enough for my framerate to drop. The framerate loss would remain even when I was down by the docks, where the Nemesis troops spawn in the little café plaza and the Rikti and DE hang out on the beach, well outside of draw distance of the motel. I don't recall exactly where I was when I dismissed the robots, but I do remember that it was near the center of the zone, because I was flying to the base portal when I did it. That was when the pet window went banana balls. After I dismissed the robots, the window kept switching between the default No Active Pets minimal and the full window with all of the defeated-state pets displayed... but when I reached the base portal, the last couple of flickers showed one of the robots, or the Maintenance Drone, "alive", just before I entered the base portal. When I zoned into my base, the window behaved normally. Summoned and dismissed pets several times this afternoon and haven't seen it happen, so it appears to be caused by high player density. Guessing that it's packet loss or delayed response causing a forum argument between the server and client.

If you don't know how the game works, much less what's in the game, please educate yourself.

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Invention_Origin_Enhancements#Procs

Happens on Robotics, too.

This was missed when the animation times for Robotics mastermind attacks were decreased. The Animation Time Before Effect was reduced to 0.233, but the actual animation time is still 2.112 seconds. Consequently, there's now a 1.879 second pause, during which the character is rooted and unable to activate any other powers.

@Snarky's girlfriends are in Canada. You'll have to settle for succubi.

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Category:Zone_Events

An optimistic hope that people will learn from one another, develop wider perspectives and grow. Or the mods are collecting data on what civilization will look like after the zombie apocalypse.

This is why I fight Knives.

So... they should park Mercedes somewhere easier to locate? 😁

I took advantage of the holiday event to finish leveling my Bots/Rad. Started at 45, and with 26.5% Endurance Reduction, my Protectors were bottoming out in the course of fighting a single EB. Hit 50, switched to the planned build with 59.62% Endurance Reduction and they're definitely benefiting from it. The difference in endurance usage is notable. Also, @Paradox Fate ran some very specific tests to determine the effects of Endurance Reduction during the beta, which also show Protectors benefiting from slotted Endurance Reduction. There's no bug here. Or, if there is, it's not that Protectors ignore Endurance Reduction enhancements.