nzer

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.

This is so absurdly hyperbolic. I've personally never spent more than five minutes coming up with a name, and I've made several characters in the last week alone. Regardless, the correct solution to this problem isn't to take away people's names, it's to allow people to have duplicate names. An easy way to do this is to append a random numeric sequence to the name that gets hidden when the name is displayed in the UI, which is a system tons of other games have used for years.

There are not enough GMs to police copyright infringement across a playerbase that has no idea those copyright violations are against TOS. Of course we should be telling new players to not do that.

Do they? It's been four years, and they still haven't turned the name release policy on. I don't even think the position is wrong. I personally can't think of a single MMO I've played over the years that released character names due to inactivity. It's well understood that you might not get the exact name you want.

Something I find notably absent from this thread is acknowledgment that the vast majority of the game's content is extremely easy in pretty much any full team, regardless of composition or coordination. That's partly because the content just isn't that difficult to start with and partly because Homecoming specifically has a good amount of power creep compared to live. So I would ask people to consider the possibility that the person rushing ahead to engage a new group isn't doing so because they're a moron, but rather because they'd like to be able to use more than two abilities before the pack is completely obliterated.

Those are just the basic camera controls, all they let you do is rotate the camera and zoom in/out. I want to be able to move the camera up and down and side to side. Not just rotate the view up and down and side to side, but actually move the camera's anchor point such that it's no longer pointing directly at your character at all times. That God of War screenshot is a good example. You can't orient the camera that way with CoX's camera controls, if you zoomed it in that far the character would completely block your view. The camera in that screenshot has been moved horizontally so that it points past the character rather than at the character.

I look forward to your post, because I can't find anything that does this in the options menu 😐

As far as I can tell all the game supports is changing the camera's orientation and distance. What I want to be able to do is apply a vertical or horizontal offset so the camera can be made to look over the character rather than directly at the character, as is the case in almost all third person games.

For sure. I don't want to ask anyone to relearn how to use anything.

Movement in hover and fly is always totally relative to the camera. W sends you in the direction the camera is pointing, space sends you toward the top of the screen, X sends you toward the bottom of the screen. These controls are not ideal if you're moving the camera around to get a better view of things around you, since in order to move in a particular direction you may need to rotate the camera to an appropriate orientation first. In most games with 3D movement, the movement directions are only relative to the camera yaw, not pitch. All WASD movement would occur only in the X/Z plane and would never move you vertically regardless of camera orientation, and space/X would only ever move you along the Y axis. I think this would be way more intuitive than the current flight controls, and should be offered as an option.

The character being directly in the center of the field of view is visually obstructive. It would be cool if there was an option to adjust the position of the camera. This is mostly an issue in enclosed spaces, and especially with hover/fly.

If you're selling purples you already have everything you need to make as much inf as you want. Sell a purple, spend the inf crafting uncommon set IOs and converting them to rares with converters, and sell the rares. The margins on this are so absurd if you know how to pick the recipes that I often make back the initial investment before I've even listed everything, and even if you have no idea what recipes to pick it's still practically impossible to not make a profit.

I have a 12 button mouse, and I bind hotbar 1 to 1-12, hotbar 2 to shift+1-12, hotbar 3 to alt+1-12, and hotbar 4 to ctrl+1-12. It would be nice to be able to have all of those hotbars in a 3x4 layout to match the layout of the thumbpad on the mouse. Unfortunately, the 3x4 hotbar layout puts the hotbar number in the top left slot, which throws the whole thing off. The Naga tray doesn't suffer from this problem and works perfectly, but I can only have one Naga tray as far as I can tell.

Upvoted as well. Pet names are incredibly annoying and there doesn't appear to be an option to disable them. I'll also mention, pet health bars appear to be controlled by the Villain Health Bars setting, which is similarly annoying.

Necroing because I was searching the forum with the same question, but reading your guide and looking through the options file, there does not appear to be an option for pet names. Pet health bars seem to be linked to ShowVillainBars, but I can't find anything anywhere that touches pet names at all.

I would say the best way to "preview" a powerset is to just start playing with it. Leveling is quick, respecs are a thing, and you have 1000 character slots. It's not a huge deal if you don't end up liking something.

I'm sure OP doesn't need any more recommendations at this point, but I just wanted to jump in and say masterminds really are not that hard to play and don't need any micromanagement, even at high levels. In fact manual control is usually going to be worse than the default defensive follow orders, because of bodyguard mode. As was said before, bots/force field is impossible to screw up and pretty much plays itself even with cheapo enhancements. Thugs/ and demons/ are also good, and you can go /time on any of the three if you want something more active. A lot of the other combos do require more investment to shine though. I also probably wouldn't recommend mastermind for a first time player, just because it's so different than everything else in the game. But it's not a bad choice by any means.