nzer

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.

I mentioned this earlier, but the fact that the policy is applied per character and the warning only shows up when the character becomes inactive means this could easily hit people who are logging in every day if they have characters they happen to not be using regularly.

That post is overly wordy, in fairness. It boils down to "do exploration badges for merits, turn merits into converters, sell converters on AH." And you could even remove the first part, because almost anything you do in-game will give you merits.

Performance during leveling is a perfectly legitimate concern for anyone who isn't going to farm-sit the character to level 50, which is basically everyone. I would actually argue that for a lot of players performance during leveling is more important than performance at endgame, and I think the game is already fairly rife with sets that are strong at 50 with high investment but an absolute slog prior. Not to say that there's anything wrong with DP, but let's not take a stance of dismissing the opinions of anyone who isn't at 50 with an expensive build.

Not in the context of the argument I was responding to originally, but if you want to intentionally not attempt to understand what I'm saying I guess I can't stop you. There's also an interesting wrinkle to this that didn't occur to me before because it's not practically relevant, but under GDPR at least character names would be considered personal data, meaning they actually are owned by the player rather than the devs. This wouldn't prevent the devs from deleting the name from their own records in accordance with a name release policy as far as I'm aware, but it's another conceptual hole in the argument that names should be communal because the devs are the ones who own them.

Part of this is on me, I said inspirations when I meant enhancements. Regardless, it absolutely is not a false equivalence. The enhancements on your characters are unique, and the fact that they're equipped by your characters means mine can't use them. If I were able to take a full build off an abandoned character, that would potentially save me from having to craft and sell hundreds of enhancements, or a dozen hours of AE farming, or thousands of merits, etc. Similarly, the work involved in earning the badges on your characters is unique, in the sense that if I wanted to earn those badges on my characters I would have to put in similar work. If I were instead able to take an abandoned character I would get all of those badges for free. Etc. My point here isn't to say that if you're allowed to take my name I should be allowed to take your character. I called that out as an absurd position. My point is that the logic of "technically the devs own it, not you" does not somehow make the thing a communal possession for the entire playerbase. That does not follow, and if we pretend it does it leads to absurdity like the scenario I described. I don't think anyone needs to present evidence that the inactive names aren't a problem. You're talking about instituting a policy that will potentially cause irrevocable harm, so evidence needs to be presented that they are a problem. And I personally don't think a couple of people saying "I have trouble finding names sometimes" is evidence of anything on its own.

Because not being able to have something because someone else already has it and not being able to have something because it's being actively taken away from you aren't the same thing. One is worse than the other. Especially in an old school MMO, where unique names are the norm. That's really the crux of the issue. I don't think anyone is saying players should be free to hoard and deprive each other of names. No one worth listening to doesn't think that's a bad thing. But in my opinion the policy as written is not something that should be enacted, for the following reasons: It will not actually prevent players from hoarding names It will cause the release of names that were intended by their owners to still be in use It encourages degenerate behavior, such as logging into every single character on your account in sequence just to refresh their name expiration, or compulsively scrolling through your entire alt list to check whether there are any characters with a name expiration warning. This could realistically cause stress for players with OCD or anxiety. Its existence is not communicated to the player until very near the point of name expiration, meaning a player who isn't aware of its existence will not actually have a year to refresh their characters names, they may only have as long as the pre-expiration warning period It does not protect characters who have XP turned off Character level is the wrong way to gauge investment in a game where some people level solo via questlines with no XP buff and others level by sitting in AE farms If there does need to be a name release policy, as a player I would expect it to err on the side of leniency and be more along the lines of "on X date each year, any account that hasn't logged in in the last twelve months will release the names of all characters that are below level 10 or have less than ten hours of playtime." This would at least guarantee that any player regularly logging in would not need to care about checking every single alt for inactivity, that every player actually gets a full year after they stop playing the game before their names are released, that the system is not trivially defeated by an hour of farm sitting, and that players who prefer to play at a slower pace are as protected as powerlevelers. That said, I echo @macskull's skepticism as to such a policy being necessary in the first place. Does this really need to happen now, rather than taking a bit more time to implement a better solution, like de-uniquifying names altogether? I'm not saying it doesn't or that the devs don't have evidence that it does, but from my perspective, occasional isolated complaints about name availability are not evidence of anything.

Permitted by who? The devs? By that logic nothing you have in the game belongs to you. If you're gone for a year I should be able to take your inspirations enhancements, your influence, your supergroup, and all of your characters, because they don't actually belong to you and you're not using them. Right? Obviously that's absurd. Of course the name belongs to you, you thought of it and attached a character to it first. That's how this works. It's not musical chairs. Regardless, whether a person owns the names doesn't matter in the context of what you're arguing. Someone else is using the name, and you think you should be entitled to use it instead because they haven't played in however long. You can't make this argument and decry people as acting entitled at the same time. I'll point out that I said I'd be curious to see how many name availability checks hit those unused names rather than active names. For all we know a majority of them are junk that no one would want anyway. Why not? Taking a name away from a player who may later want to use it is inherently negative. If finding workable names is easy we should prefer the solution that doesn't allow names to be taken away from players who may still be using them.

I think the point here is that it's not up to other players to decide what constitutes them being invested in their characters. If someone has very limited time to play, it's entirely possible they could put a character down to try alts and not come back to it for a year. And if it's buried on the third or fourth page of alts, or they just aren't paying a ton of attention and don't realize what the icon means, they could easily lose the name without realizing it at that point. Is that the kind of player this change is meant to target? I have to imagine it's not. I would be curious to see the stats on how many failed name availability checks actually hit names that would be considered expired according to this policy. To your later point, I would bet it's fewer than many people think.

This is pretty rude, and also wrong. None of my characters have lazy names, and several have names I'm quite proud of. Do not act like your own struggles to come up with names that aren't taken means people who don't struggle just have lower standards. You are literally arguing you should be entitled to other people's names.