nzer

February 11

I tried to respec while I had a level up available. It let me go through with it, and I discarded some enhancements at the end, then I got a "Respec failed" error. Despite not having actually respec'd, the enhancements I discarded were gone.

I guess I don't know if this is actually a bug, but it seems like if the respec fails the whole thing should fail, and I should still have all the enhancements.

Edit: Actually, several of the enhancements that I re-slotted are also gone. So I think there's definitely a bug here.

February 9

On 2/3/2024 at 11:58 PM, Psyonico said:

the selling fee

This is presumably a perfectly acceptable, and in fact very generous, cost for un-attuning an enhancement, since even if this was made directly possible it would likely not be free.

I don't oppose adding a recipe for an un-attuner though, just for convenience.

February 9

39 minutes ago, roleki said:

Which is what I described.

"Stacks duration-wise" implies, at least to me, that the duration of the new buff gets added to the remaining duration of the old buff. You didn't go into detail, so I think it's important to point out that's not what happens. It doesn't stack, it overwrites.

February 8

1 hour ago, roleki said:

FF+Rech doesn't stack magnitude-wise, but it stacks duration-wise;

I'm pretty sure it doesn't. New procs just refresh the duration.

February 8

It's super infuriating for my character to always be in a combat stance while shield defense's toggles are enabled. I don't want to have to toggle them off to get a normal idle, and I want my character to be able to idle with the shield out, because the shield is part of the costume.

The normal idle already plays with the shield out after area transitions, so in theory this should be doable.

February 8

The benefit is that it triggers more frequently and has higher uptime.

This is not a small benefit, IMO. There are several powersets that can slot FF into two, three, or even four powers, and can have near perma-hasten levels of recharge without any set bonuses.

February 8

1 hour ago, InvaderStych said:

Gotta be something to do with the cursor tracking itself, maybe?

Possibly? I started using powexec_location cursor macros on an ill/time controller a little while back, and have never experienced this issue with any of those powers. I've also not experienced it with Combat Teleport, although I admittedly haven't used it that much.

February 8

43 minutes ago, Excraft said:

Unlikely as it might be, someone may have created characters named "test001" through "test1000" or any combination of gibberish letter/number combinations just to try various costume concepts. I've done that and I know of others who do the same. We don't have hundreds of characters like that, but it does happen.

Even if it's not specifically for name camping, those characters are taking up database space when you could instead have just used the "Save Costume" button. And I don't think anyone has a problem with a handful of characters. Three or four hundred is a problem.

February 8

48 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:

Edit: About the only thing different I can think of is that I turned off default FoV, highly doubt that has anything to do with your result but it is one possible difference in our setups.

So did I actually, my FoV is around 70 or 80.

February 8

Regardless of the name policy, blatantly camping 400 names with unplayed level 1s is something that should be actionable. A GM should be able to generic all of those and leave an email saying "please do not do that again, or you will be banned."

That's the only thing that will actually prevent dyed-in-the-wool name camping.

February 8

So on further testing, this is extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't. Things I've tested:

Whether I activate the binding with a mouse button (I have a thumbpad mouse) or the keyboard doesn't matter
Whether I unbind the button first or use my typical macro setup (I have each number key bound to slots in two different trays so I can use macros like this and still see the ability cooldown) doesn't matter
The angle of the camera doesn't seem to matter
How far the cursor is from the character doesn't seem to matter
How far in the camera is zoomed doesn't seem to matter

I've also gotten it to activate without turning me around, but also without going to where the cursor is pointed https://streamable.com/5ol294

February 8

Here's a video. The slot is bound to 7, and I ran /unbind 7 first.

February 8

2 minutes ago, Luminara said:

You said that even if people know they have to log in before X period, they're going to forget or just not do it, and they'll lose names. You've said that multiple times, so I don't need to quote it.

Now you say that people are not going to forget and constantly log in on time to camp names so they won't lose them.

Those statements are not in any way contradictory. It is entirely possible for someone to start camping names when they read about the name release policy, then eventually stop, forget about the policy or just stop thinking about it, and then get hit by it after taking a short break from the game. We're talking about people here, not robots.

And if your problem here is that the "everyone" in your previous comment was meant literally, again, please stop with the pedantry. I said people will start camping names, not literally everyone. It is entirely possible for some people to start camping names while other people read the policy, ignore it, and forget about it, and while other other people don't learn about the policy at all.

9 minutes ago, Luminara said:

I know the GM would ascertain the full situation, make a judgement call, reach out to the player who had the name if he/she felt it was warranted and try to find a resolution satisfactory to both parties.

This is a meaningless platitude. Unless the character was named after their recently deceased grandmother, or something, there is zero chance a GM takes a name away from its new owner after who knows how many weeks or months and gives it back to a player who lost it due to this policy.

In fact, that exact scenario is in direct opposition to what basically all the proponents of this policy are saying in this thread, which is that the policy is A-OK because if someone doesn't log into a character for a full year they clearly weren't using it and deserve to lose the name.

15 minutes ago, Luminara said:

So the people who never come back don't have names locked away...

But if they do come back, sorry to anyone who claimed those names, because they actually still belong to their original owners and will be given back? Do you hear what you're saying right now?

February 8

26 minutes ago, lemming said:

YEARS! You know how many people here have probably got just as much if not more experience? Probably quite a few, myself included.

I think you're being rather harsh on the users. Apparently they can't read or retain any memory.

Then I question how user facing your position is/was and how much attention you paid to the users of your products, because believing most players read and remember patch notes represents a colossal misunderstanding of what the average player looks like. Maybe in enterprise software, but games? Not a chance. Obviously most of them can read and retain information, I'm not saying the average player is an idiot. They're just not anywhere near invested enough to go out of their way to read patch notes and remember their contents for literally an entire year.

I don't even read and remember most of HC's patch notes, because beyond "oh look, a new thing, maybe I'll try that sometime" they just aren't relevant to me at all. I don't care whether some powerset I haven't used for an archetype I don't really play got reworked. I don't care that some ability got numerically retuned. I don't care that some random bug was fixed. I'm not trying to minimize the devs' efforts, it's great that they're doing all of those things and great that they post the patch notes. But none of that is important to me in my regular play. And if any of you think I or any other player should be punished for choosing not to read patch notes almost entirely filled with things that are not immediately important to me in my regular play, you can please go sit in the corner and rethink your unreasonable expectations.

Patch notes are a poor vehicle for this information. A pop up in the character select screen that is specifically and solely dedicated to this name release policy might be an acceptable vehicle, if it was delivered at every single login. That's about where I would place the line for a reasonable expectation that every player is sufficiently notified.

February 8

20 minutes ago, ZemX said:

So you are both certain of it and unable to explain it? Why am I not surprised"? "It will be so because I say it will be so!"

I mean I don't know how you would expect me to explain it. I can't put years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games, and constant interaction with gamers of various stripes throughout my life into a forum post. All I can tell you is that I'm certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of players have zero interest in reading long blurbs of text, let alone about something as boring as this, and that even when they do read them they will retain almost nothing for any meaningful length of time. At any major studio, the suggestion that policy be written under the assumption that all players read patch notes and remember their contents would be laughed out of the room.

6 minutes ago, ZemX said:

Regardless of poor word choice, the point is the same. They either aren't working on it or they are working on it in secret.

Again, stop carrying water for the devs. They don't need you coming onto the forums and stifling feedback based on unfounded assumptions about what they are or aren't working on.

February 7

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

I think your examples of how someone is going to miss this and be surprised by name release are either contrived.... or well deserved consequences of being willfully uninformed about a game, especially an MMO, that one is playing. As I said before, the name release policy is just one of many things your hypothetical person who is ignoring all game news is not going to know about. If losing a name convinces Mr. or Mrs. Oblivious to pay attention to patch news every now and then, it's probably a good thing.

I really don't have the words to explain to you how completely certain it is that the vast majority of Homecoming's players will either not read about the name release policy in the patch notes or will forget about it in the following months. You have to be a special kind of unaware to believe that isn't just not a certainty, but is actually a contrived scenario that won't occur in practice. It will, period.

I also don't have the words to explain to you how misguided it is to think players deserve to be punished for not reading patch notes. That really is just a ridiculous notion. I don't want to pretend to speak on behalf of the devs, but I would shocked, and I mean absolutely floored if any of them agreed with the idea that players deserve to be intentionally disadvantaged if they don't read the patch notes. In no universe should the average player of any game be expected to read patch notes. They're provided as a courtesy for players who are interested.

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

And as @lemming just pointed out in the post above yours, even changes *I* think should be minor, aren't necessarily easy or possible in this creaky old client or server code.

I'm sorry, but you don't get to hop on this bandwagon now. Concerns around the technical feasibility of a better solution are entirely reasonable, and you argued with me for several pages without so much as alluding to them.

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

Those of us you're arguing with here didn't create this policy. People who have much more knowledge of the inner workings of the game did. Claiming there's "no reason" for it to be this way, as you have before, is presumptuous. This goes double for all the suggestions further up thread (including yours) that it might be possible to tweak the way names work to allow duplicate names on a server. Something similar to the Champions solution. But if THAT were possible, why did this name release policy even get created OR moved up to the warning phase again, by the people who know how hard it is to do stuff?

The devs are human beings, they aren't infallible. In deciding on implementing this policy as is they would have made a number of assumptions - not technical assumptions, but assumptions about what players prioritize and are willing to accept, or assumptions about the likelihood and impact of various edge cases, etc. - and those assumptions may not actually be correct.

I also don't think they need you to carry water for them. They are not beholden to forum posters. If they want to respond here with their reasoning, they can do so. If they don't want to, they can not. They are not materially harmed by any of our opinions, or the stating of those opinions. Let them worry about what is or isn't feasible, and communicate that information to us when and if they wish.

51 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Not what you asserted to be the case.

I really don't have the patience for this kind of pedantry. My point is that expecting people to have perfect recall of the exact details of the name release policy at all times is unreasonable. I don't care whether that happens because they didn't read about it in the first place or because they forgot about it. That is irrelevant. The point is that the policy should not favor people who know how to exploit it and disadvantage people who don't.

51 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The problem with your point is that it's based on the presumption that everyone is going to start camping names as soon as they're released, that the GMs will shrug and ignore players who come back and ask for help recovering a name, that "community" is a word mouthed by self-interested assholes who use it facetiously.

I don't think my point is based on that presumption, but yes, other than the last all of these things are true. People are absolutely going to start camping names as soon as this policy goes into effect, that is made clear by this very thread. And there's zero chance a GM reclaims a name that was lost to this policy, outside of maybe some extreme circumstance. I mean think that through for a minute. You think that if a player comes back from an absence and says to a GM "I haven't played this character in a year and lost the name, can I please have it back?," the GM is going to take the name back from a person who is by definition actively using it and return it to them? They would not. Why even have the policy if that's on the table?

February 7

6 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

Because, quite simply, that is NOT the goal. The goal is to make more names available to people who play the game more frequently or consistently.

You're describing a side effect, not the purpose. And every change to any game is going to upset some people. This question here is: Does the policy have more pros than cons?

Of course it's not the goal. But it is a side effect of the policy as written, an undesirable one, and one that is easily addressed in the design of the policy.

The question here should be "can the policy be implemented in a way that does not cause this side effect?" The answer to that question may well be no, because of technical constraints. You'll notice that when that point was brought up I acknowledged it as valid and didn't attempt to argue it.

But with the exception of @Excraft and now you, no one who's been arguing with me has brought that up. They have not been arguing that changing the policy would be good, but can't be done because of technical constraints. Instead they've been arguing that the policy should not be changed in the first place. I find that completely unjustifiable.

February 7

Just now, Ironblade said:

The fact that someone might forget something is thoroughly irrelevant because we can guarantee that someone is going to forget it.

The fact that people forget things is entirely relevant because it creates a pain point with the system and can be easily addressed.

Notably absent in literally every single response disagreeing with me over this is any kind of argument whatsoever for why it's desirable for the system to punish people who forget how it works. This absence is unsurprising, because that very clearly is not desirable. Yet for some reason people are jumping out of the woodwork to fight eliminating that pain point from the system. I don't know what you call that if not contrarianism. It's practically a textbook example.

February 7

1 minute ago, Excraft said:

Not sure that's a fair comparison. The HC patch notes are nowhere near the biblical length of the service agreement with places like phone service providers, social media, etc.

Sure, and they're also not written as obtusely. But I think there's an obvious commonality between them, in that both scenarios are essentially punishing the user for not remembering two paragraphs of a multi-page document they read months or years ago. I don't think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a name release policy would or should be top of mind at any point for any player. It's the kind of thing you'd expect a player to forget about, and intentionally so; it's meant to be a background system that frees up names from players who no longer play the game, not something that is actively managed.

February 7

(I apologize for the triple post, shame on me)

9 minutes ago, Excraft said:

I wonder if there is a way for HC to move any characters to the "front of the line" to show up on the first page of the character listing to make it more obvious to the player?

This is another good way to address part of the issue, but it still doesn't do anything for a player who takes a several week break (intentionally or because of real life responsibilities) when one or more of their characters happens to be nearing 11 months of inactivity.

February 7

8 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

And if they can't be bothered to read something that is prominently presented in the game, tough.

And if they've forgotten it in the intervening 11 months before it actually becomes active?

This line of reasoning is completely ridiculous. I remain astounded anyone is arguing it at all. Although not really, because all game communities are rife with rank contrarians who will argue with any point of criticism they can think of an argument for.

February 7

4 minutes ago, Excraft said:

A couple of the HC folk contributed to that discussion where they explained how the account tables were separate from the individual shard tables, and there was no easy way to link them together to flag all characters on every shard for that account as "active" when someone logs into their account. I'm sure there are HC folk who could explain this in much finer detail, however suffice it to say they said to do this would be difficult and time consuming, so they opted for the low-hanging fruit solution of reviving the name release code that existed on live.

I would argue that it's worth spending the time to do a better implementation given that the system has already not been active for years, but I'm not going to fight this reasoning very hard. If the obstacle is dev time and the devs would prefer to spend that time on other things, that's their prerogative.

6 minutes ago, Excraft said:

As for people not reading patch notes or in-game popups, I can't say I agree with you there. The information is readily available to everyone and HC can't be responsible if they provide that info, but the player doesn't take the time to read it.

Of course they can. Most players will not read it, and of those that do, most will forget it fairly quickly. Period. It is for precisely this reason that courts regularly rule terms of service to be unenforceable: it is well understood that people do not read or remember them in detail. The idea that players are solely culpable for failing to apprise themselves of the intimate details of something as utterly banal as a name release policy that is only communicated in patch notes and an FAQ is absurd.

February 7

20 hours ago, C U R S E said:

but the to hit debuff screams a defensive set

I see people saying this a lot, but isn't the extra -tohit redundant with a defensive set since it's so easy to softcap? I would think it would be better on a resist set since it allows you to squeeze out more effective defense.

February 7

8 hours ago, Wiseguy said:

Are you activating the macro by pressing a key combo sequence, or are you clicking the macro?

I have it bound to a mouse button. Clicking wouldn't work obviously, since it's powexec_location cursor.

I tried /bind lshift+lbutton "powexec_location cursor shield charge", and that does the same thing. I can post a video in a little bit.

February 7

Just now, lemming said:

Heck, based on the scenario that nzer describes, since this theoretical person won't see any of the warnings, they probably will never no that the character now has a different name.

Of course they will. The warning is only shown for 30 days prior to the name being released. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to not be able to play the game for a month because of real life, or to still be able to play, but only have very limited time.

That is, in fact, my entire point. The system is supposed to give players a year to prevent their characters' names from being released, but if you don't know about the policy or have forgotten about it, you actually only have 30 days. I don't think anyone in this thread would argue being away from the game for 30 days is sufficient grounds to lose a character name.

Again, there is no reason the policy has to be written this way, nor is what you're saying an argument for why it should be written this way.

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