nzer

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Can you not? It would also be worse if one of the devs posted a flyer about it on some random street somewhere, but that isn't going to happen, so why bother talking about it? That's precisely the popup I'm talking about. If a player doesn't have any inactive characters when the system goes active, it will be a full twelve months before the policy can actually do anything. Most people will have forgotten about it by then, because no one has some random name release policy in the back of their heads at all times, nor should they have to. And this doesn't even address players who start playing after the policy is implemented. They quite literally will not even have the opportunity to see this pop-up you're talking about, because they won't be here when it happens. Most people do not randomly read through all the launcher news and FAQs of every new game they play, and even if they do it would still be completely reasonable for them to forget a handful of sentences about a name release policy in the following twelve months. I don't know why you think people will ever be talking about the name release policy in global chat channels. We have warning messages in-game currently and this giant forum argument, and I have never seen anyone talk about the name release policy in-game. This is a perfect example of your skewed perspective from posting on these boards every single day for years, and from your own personal investment in this issue. For most people, a name release policy is not something worth talking about or even thinking about. It's like reading the terms of service for some random app. You're here debating over a particular section of the terms of service, and because you do so frequently, you have the misguided perception that other people are also interested in the terms of service and reread them whenever there's a change. But they don't. Other people don't care about the terms of service. They don't want to read the terms of service before they start using their shiny new app. They don't want to think about the terms of service while using their shiny new app. Even if they read the terms of service, they will not remember every single line item, because there are a lot of them and they are not directly relevant the vast majority of the time. Similarly, people playing the game do not really care about a name release policy, and frankly I would be shocked if the devs didn't see people actively caring about the name release policy as a bad thing, because why on earth would you want the average player playing your game to be thinking about a name release policy every time they login? That would be horrible. It's supposed to be a transparent thing that happens in the background to free up names held by players who are no longer active. No one should want players to need to do active management of their characters to avoid name release. Sure they do. To run afoul of what I'm talking about they only need to not do so during the 30 day warning period. Someone could take a break from the game for a month, not a particularly long stretch of time, and come back to find one of their character names gone without having seen any warnings of any kind. If you think not seeing a footnote in a patch notes pop-up or seeing it and not remembering it twelve months later is willful ignorance, you should reevaluate. I don't understand why you two are even arguing over this. Both of you are so quick to act like the situation I'm describing couldn't possibly happen, even though it will definitely happen constantly, but neither of you, nor anyone else, has attempted to voice a reason why the system shouldn't work the way I described, or why it's actually better for it to work as currently written. Can you maybe try that, so this conversation can at least have some semblance of being productive?

I have a macro for the following command: powexeclocation cursor shield charge I expected this macro to activate shield charge at the position of the cursor, but instead it causes my character to rotate 180 degrees and shield charge in place.

It is literally what you're saying right now. You're saying that because the name release policy will be explained as part of a patch notes pop-up, that means every player is therefore perfectly aware of it at all times and are solely culpable for failing to maintain regular activity on every individual character. Your argument necessarily refuses to place any blame on the policy itself if someone loses a character because they didn't see the policy in the patch notes or forgot about it in the intervening twelve full months before the policy can even begin to come into effect, both of which are not just guaranteed to happen, but will in fact be the case for a vast majority of the playerbase, because contrary to what you, someone with 1.3k posts on these forums over what I imagine is a period of several years, clearly seem to think, not everyone is plugged into every little thing that's going on with the game at all times. In fact almost no one is. I can't even with this. I'm not even talking about scrapping the name release policy at this point, just changing it so it isn't so easy for it to sneak up on players who are logging in regularly. I have no earthly idea why that stance would be controversial at all, yet here you are staunchly fighting it for I don't even know what reason. You have to be trolling at this point, or just so aggressively contrarian that you can't fathom the idea of agreeing with anything anyone says unless it is exactly what you're already saying. It was rhetorical. I'm trying to divine from my tea leaves the magical sequence of words that will get you to understand that basing this system on individual character inactivity reduces the whole system down to a "do you know exactly how the system works?" check, which is stupid. People who know they have to log in every single character individually will do so, and people who don't know that will not, and the latter will be at a substantial risk of losing their character names even if they are literally logging in to play every single day. That is utterly nonsensical. We should not be discriminating against players who are categorically not inactive on the basis of whether they know the exact details of the name release policy. Anyone who is logging in regularly should be exempt from inactivity-based name release, because they are not inactive. Sure, you first.

Why not? No one in this game is trading low level DOs, not even to alts. I can't imagine what the benefit of preserving this system would be.

If you think most players read the entirety of the patch notes for every update, you are quite simply incorrect. I would bet most players don't read them at all, especially not from a pop-up right after they enter the game. That is possibly the worst place to expose patch notes, because at that very moment the player is actively trying to play the game, which the patch notes are an unscheduled interruption from. If there's any point when the player would be most willing to immediately dismiss a notification, it's right then. Regardless, "well it was in the patch notes last year" is such a horrible rebuttal. I don't see how this is relevant. I already know you want people to be able to lose their names, that's why we're having this argument in the first place. Yes, and with the way the rules are currently written those who know about them and have the time to game them would be disproportionately favored, which I think is unfair. If you want to disagree with that, or disagree that it's a problem, be my guest. I'll continue to argue with you over it.

Inf from defeats and mission rewards wouldn't be affected, so you would still be getting more inf overall.

Yeah, all of this seems super reasonable to me.

I haven't proposed a fix, and arguing that what I'm saying must be false because I haven't proposed a fix is fallacious on its face. My point is and has always been that the original criticism is perfectly valid, and that "well actually it's easy to make inf if you know how" and "if new players don't want help, they deserve to fend for themselves" are poor rebuttals. It's not like it's hard to think of fixes though. Lowering the cost of DOs. Lowering the cost of upgrading (I don't know exactly how this cost is calculated, but e.g. providing a discount over the actual purchase cost of all the new enhancements when upgrading). Awarding significantly more inf from early story arcs is something I can't fathom anyone having a problem with, given that the money will only be used by new players to buy DOs or SOs. At a certain point, the problem here stems, presumably, from very early game progression not having been updated to take into account the changes Homecoming has made to the base game, chief among them innate double xp.

I'm sorry, but how on earth is it not a defense against that argument? You're saying allowing new players to fill their enhancement slots is the same as completely removing the entire enhancement system and having the powers naturally improve with level. I'm telling you that I already have my enhancement slots filled, and that that does not in any way nullify my engagement with the enhancement system. I still have to choose which abilities to slot. I still have to choose how many slots to give them. I still have to choose what to put in those slots. Not only do those questions not go away because I'm able to fill all my slots, they're the most important questions the system forces players to ask in the first place. I'm at a loss as to how to explain this to you, because it's practically tautological. In fact, I want you to try explaining, specifically, why you think a new player being able to have enhancements in all of their slots invalidates the entire enhancement system. Be extremely specific.

What I replied to was in response to me talking about exactly the same thing I'm talking about now. So if my comment was a reply to nothing you said, yours was a reply to nothing I said. Ultimately, what I'm saying is that a new player should not have to actively research anything to be able to keep their slots filled with unexpired enhancements. That's baseline functionality, and the game should provide them with everything necessary for it. That doesn't mean they should have the very best enhancements at all times, not even close. Just that they shouldn't, at all times, have half their slots empty or expired. It sounds like we agree on that, to some degree.

The fact that it's an extreme take of my comment makes it literally not what I'm saying. This is a textbook slippery slope fallacy. I mean think about it for a second. I already have all my slots filled at all times on all my characters, because I know how to make inf. Does that somehow invalidate the entire enhancement system? Of course not, how could it?

Because one new player went to the forums, and they came specifically because they found the gameplay system intractable without a player pattern you yourself admit is not evergreen. So I don't really find this reasoning compelling. They're literally here because they were frustrated by an obvious missing piece in the basic gameplay systems. Most modern MMORPGs intentionally do not require players to do research to meaningfully engage with basic gameplay systems, and the ones that do are typically panned for it. Endgame min-maxing and optimal progression? Sure, absolutely. But that's not what we're talking about here. You're phrasing this as if it's an unreasonable thing, but it's not. The game already has a sliding scale of player power to cost in the form of the DO > SO > IO > IO set progression. I don't see any reason why an unsupported player should be unable to even use all of their enhancement slots on top of that. What does that add to the game? And again, this is specifically exacerbated by changes unique to Homecoming, such as innate double xp. It was not as much of an issue on live because you were getting more enhancement drops from enemies per level.

As has been pointed out directly to you several times now, this policy does practically nothing to stop actual name hoarders.

I got what seemed like a fairly obvious "these players see people running around and posting in help channels and still don't ask for help? They don't deserve to be catered to, let them fend for themselves" vibe from your edit. If that's not what you meant then I guess I apologize, but I'll take this opportunity to point out that no, not everyone who doesn't ask for help is doing it specifically because they want to solve some kind of puzzle on their own. Many of them genuinely just don't enjoy or don't feel comfortable reaching out to a general chat channel or directly messaging another player. In fact, in my experience such people vastly outnumber the people you're talking about. I would guess that even on Homecoming a good 50% or more of the players logged in at any particular time are these kinds of people. Regardless, I still have no idea what the value is in forcing new players to reach out for help just to use enhancements in any meaningful capacity is. I mean have any of you tried leveling a fresh character with just story arcs, no outside investment, and without the AH? Maybe it gets better at higher levels or something, but early on you don't get enough enhancement drops or enough inf to keep all your slots filled with active enhancements. Maybe you would if you were still restricted to TOs until level 12 and DOs until level 22 and didn't have Homecoming's innate double xp? Like, there's a difference between "let's not spoon-feed new players" and "players need to figure out how to exchange reward merits into converters and sell them on the AH just to meaningfully engage with basic gameplay systems." No, you're misinterpreting how I used that term. I was using it to refer to the players I described in the preceding sentence, that being players who, for whatever reason, aren't inclined to reach out broadly for help.

I need you, for just three seconds, to try to imagine things from the perspective of someone other than yourself. That is, someone who isn't on the forums every single day and doesn't know the name release policy exists. That player's first exposure to this system is going to be when they see an inactivity icon on one of their alts, likely one buried several pages back in the character list. They may not see it in that 30 day warning period, depending on how often they play and which characters they happen to choose to play. They may not even see it until the name has already been claimed by another player. Do you think the fact that they haven't played that particular character in a year is grounds enough for them to lose the name, even if they themselves have still been logging in regularly during that time? I, personally, think thinking you should be able to take a name from an active player solely because they didn't know they had to log into every single character on their account regularly to stave off a policy they didn't know existed is ridiculously, insanely entitled. And I think arguing against fixing such an obvious pitfall of this policy as it's currently written is a little odd.

I typically defend this kind of thing as not actually being that complicated or hard to understand, but just to be clear, a new player is not going to know they can do this, and nothing in the game is going to tell them. They will also almost certainly not be trawling through the forums, and so will not come upon this information on their own unless they decide to google around for how to make influence, which is something many people are actually averse to doing. So this criticism is 100% fair. Even as someone who has tons of inf from doing enhancement conversations, I was shocked the first time I pressed the upgrade button on one of my low level characters. Even just in the mid teens, it can take hundreds of thousands of inf to upgrade a couple dozen SOs. It's ridiculous. And I'm not sure what the benefit of that from a game design perspective is. Players who know the "correct" ways to make inf will never have a problem keeping a lowbie character outfitted with up to date SOs, and players who don't will barely be able to use SOs at all, let alone keep them reasonably current. Even using DOs, I have to imagine a new player would be hard pressed with just the raw inf from defeats and missions. This is so needlessly mean-spirited. Believe it or not, many people enjoy running around a game world filled with other people and maybe occasionally playing on a PuG team but either don't enjoy directly conversing with random internet strangers or have been conditioned to avoid it at all costs because of past experiences with toxicity. This is especially the case with global chat channels, which in most games are utter cesspools. I don't see any reason at all to assume players who want to mostly keep to themselves are assholes, and to punish them accordingly. The world isn't going to end if the game is changed to be a little more hospitable to more solo-oriented players.