Excraft

If you're able to detect this abusive behavior, you can't just deal with those doing the actual abusing?

If you're an active player, someone can contact you and negotiate for you to release a name to them. It's up to you if you want to give it up or not. There's no need for this policy if players can communicate with each other. Sure they're comparable. Everyone seems to believe every account used up all 1,000 slots on every shard across multiple accounts. I just don't see that as being true and haven't seen any evidence it is even remotely what the majority of people are doing. There's just not that many active accounts here and there's no shortage of word combinations left to use. If you'd like to believe every word a GM says, more power to you. Based on what I've seen with my own eyes, I'm skeptical of anything they say. How many of the "under-leveled, unplayed characters" that are a "huge deal" even have actual words that someone else may want? It's more likely a fraction of a fraction. People see big numbers posted in this thread and are getting their hopes up. By all means, release this on accounts that haven't been logged into in 2 years or more and start with that. Chances are highly likely those people aren't coming back. Active players can be contacted by other players about releasing a name. There's name release threads on these forums. Right. It's not a big deal. Just pick something else.

Right because lying to the community for years about a private server wasn't malicious at all. It's the most honest and trustworthy thing ever. 🙄

I'm not sitting on any names, thanks. I've got a handful of characters at most. Nice try though. If not getting a name you want is causing you this much grief, you should probably go outside and discover the real world out there. There's just far more important things in life.

Yeah and that was such a raving success on live they never ran it again. So you can't get the name you want on an 18 year old game running on a private server. Life goes on.

Someone else got it first. Deal with it and move on. Unless this is because there's a name on an abandoned account someone in the inner circle wants, than that's perfectly ok.

Good question

Let's try it and find out. Seems like this is what the inner circle wants, so go ahead and do it. You all are going to live with the consequences, right?

Where's the proof/evidence/explanation that AFK farming is a huge issue and converting EMP merits to reward merits is causing a market problem? Where's the proof that there's a character naming problem and the name release policy needs to be put into place? These are things we're told to accept as fact but we're not given any substantial evidence or data to even know there's a problem. All that's been posted here is hypothetical stories and anecdote and the white knight brigade jumping all over anyone who disagrees or offers up a different suggestion.

You're all welcome to bury your heads in the sand. These posts are all going to get hidden anyway.

If you say so. 🤣 And insulting others is a good look for you? Give me a break.

It's not a conspiracy theory. Hang around the forums long enough and you'll see.

They aren't that many. It's a handful of people in the inner circle using alt accounts.

The only people losing their shit over this are the people who hate farming to begin with and would like nothing more than to piss in the cheerios of anyone who sets foot in AE. From what I can see, casual farmers don't care what the few exploiters are doing. So yeah, the correct players are being blamed.

Unfortunately a lot of changes made here are due to anecdotal evidence made by the inner circle.

Should be dealt with regardless if they're a farmer or not. I've seen plenty of people who aren't farming acting like jerks. Just report them and let the GMs do their thing.

So when can we expect the nerfs to all TF content to prevent speed runs? Those are extreme offenders too. People are getting full rewards while skipping through the content for little to no risk and not spending enough time on it.

Right, so you don't have any data. You're just spouting falsehoods and hoping people will be stupid enough to buy it. Anecdotal data doesn't work. If you have any real data from actual, real, new player accounts that are legitimately new players, share it. Otherwise you're just spouting BS and trying to pass it off as fact. Provide real quantifiable, measurable and verifiable data. Yeah I'll call bullshit on any idea that's based on false information.

Emphasis added. Prove it. What data do you have that can be reviewed to show this is an actual problem? Anecdotal stories do not count.

What a nice story. It's a complete fabrication and a textbook example of a correlation fallacy, but it's a nice story. Your anecdotal "evidence" doesn't prove anything without real, provable data to back it up. So much wrong with this story - "I know a lot of people have it in their head that Homecoming hardly gets any new players. They are, of course, wrong." How do you know? Show us your data. Where is your data on numbers of unique accounts being created to back this up? How are you defining "new player"? How are you verifying they are in fact a "new player" and not a vet rolling another account? "A new player signs up on Homecoming. He or she sees that Excelsior is the most populated shard, so he or she creates a new character. " What about players who make characters on the other shards? "The new player’s character loads into Atlas Park." What if they started as a villain? There are verifiable numbers of people playing as villains. That much is provable by looking at the server status page. "Loads of people begging for farms in the LFG channel constantly, and occasionally in zone Broadcast. He or she will see AE farmers tell people in the LFG channel not to join a Citadel TF that was just advertised, because TFs are “crap XP” compared to AE farming. He or she will see AE farmers tell others in the Help or General channel that only AE farming is worth doing, because it is the fastest way to both get to level 50 and get your Incarnate abilities. Then that newbie may get a blind invite from an AE farmer, thinking that PLing the newbie is a favor." This entire paragraph is fabricated nonsense. Never once have I ever seen a farmer tell anyone in broadcast or other channel that people shouldn't join other teams or run other content. If you have legitimate, unaltered screen captures or video recordings of the chat that can show this is happening, by all means post it. Otherwise, this is just bullshit. "The newbie, not knowing any better, joins, gets PLed to level 30+, and then leaves. He or she has no knowledge of the game, does not know how to get to another zone, doesn’t know how to get a new mission, and has no INF to buy enhancements because the AE farmer told the newbie to get double XP boosters." How does a brand new player know how to ask to join a team if they aren't familiar with how to use the various chat channels and/or tells yet? Again, where is your actual data to back this up? How do you know for certain what this evil farmer supposedly said or didn't say to this "new player"? "The new player has just been taught that Mission Architect is the entire game. More than likely, he or she will log off and never return." How do you know for certain they will never come back? "Everything I just described has happened quite a few times that I personally know of, with some variation." This is textbook example of an anecdotal evidence fallacy. "AE farming has overall a negative impact on the health and longevity of the Homecoming community as at least some new players are driven off." This is a fine thesis to have. You're going to have to do a much, much, much better job of proving it than making up stories and trying to pass them off as facts. Bullshit is bullshit, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Fair enough but if you're getting interrupted with that much real life stuff while playing that this is a problem for you, maybe you should log off and deal with stuff that's more important?

They didn't say it couldn't be done. They said it was a lot more work to do it by account.

Can't the AFK timer be turned on inside instanced maps? That would solve your AFK farming problem.

For YOU it is. For others who've run the same content hundreds of times or more, it gets stale. Why don't you tell everyone here, how many times should they run the same story content over and over before they get bored and just leave? Give us a number.

Which makes the entire exercise pointless. Just use a thesaurus.