Excraft

I have a genuine question here. If you're having bad PUG experiences, then maybe try something different like teaming with people you already know? Or quitting the TF and forming one of your own? Joining random teams is a mixed bag and everyone has a different way of enjoying the game. If you're finding yourself on teams that aren't to your liking, then move on and create teams yourself. You can control what you do, you can't control what others do.

The bar is so low now with "official" Star Trek content that there's nowhere to go but up. I might give this game a try. I still play STO regularly, although admittedly not as much as I used to. Not sure I'd enjoy playing someone else other than a character of my own creation though.

I like the idea of adding a reminder/tooltip about this into the costume editor. If it helps get rid of a good amount of support tickets, that's a good thing.

Oh man, can you imagine? LOL! 🤣 4 Star Dr. Q will be epic.

Interesting response. Do you really need to try something in order to know you don't like it? If someone offered you a stew after you reading the menu and seeing the ingredients included like festering rotted roadkill and raw sewage, you'd need to try it first to know you don't like it? For the record here, I'm not equating any of the changes or additions to this game to rotting sewage.

I don't disagree that you see a lot of what you're describing in the Suggestions sub-forum and would agree a lot of it is just noise. What I was referring to earlier was specific to the BETA testing threads. Currently being the operative word in that sentence. I've no doubt there's more coming, unless you feel that MLTF, LRSF and such aren't going to get the same treatment.

Sure, by a very, very select few extreme edge cases. Based on what I see and the PUG teams I run on daily, the absolute overwhelming majority of players aren't anywhere near that level. Not even close. Content should never be balanced for what a tiny minority of players are capable of doing in my opinion. That's a bad design philosophy. You're just making things more tedious and annoying for the majority of your playerbase. What you're essentially arguing here is the old "I have a sandwich, so you can't be hungry" defense. As for incarnates, I personally have always agreed with the sentiment that there needs to be more specific incarnate level content - more story arcs and trials specifically designed for and balanced toward incarnate level characters. Council, CoT, Crey, Arachnos etc. in PI radio missions don't fall into that category. If they're too easy, that's because incarnate level characters have outgrown them, just like they've outgrown the content in Atlas Park or Mercy Island. I disagree and don't think any AT should be "pushed" in favor of another. One of the unique selling points of this game was that any AT is optional, not required, for a team. Things will absolutely always go better with a balanced team, which is more than enough incentive to take the time and form a well balanced team. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be what we're getting. "Pushing" specific ATs is being done at the expense of all other ATs and by neutering defense and resists with auto-hit, unresistable damage attacks, near insta-kill attacks, heavily scripted encounters that are very punishing of failure and the like. This is true some of the time, but based on my own experience here, it's not what happens the majority of the time. Feedback that has been well thought out and well presented against changes being made or against the direction of a change gets immediately shouted down by the white knight brigade to the point of getting lost in all the noise, getting outright hidden from view, or basically refuted with "it's not changing, so deal with it" type responses. I personally know quite a few players who won't BETA test or provide feedback any longer because of that. It's not that they expect their feedback to be acted on or changes reverted either. It just isn't worth it. Yes like ED, which nearly killed the game. One last thing that I'd like to clarify here as these forums are polluted with overly sensitive people who inject intent into posts that isn't there, I respect your point of view and appreciate that your experience is different than mine. I'm just offering what I see based on my experience. My disagreement with you and questioning your responses isn't a personal insult or attack.

I think you're grossly underestimating the amount of time, effort and money that would be required to "go ahead and make a better version" of the game. Again, this is a group of volunteers doing this in their spare time.

Why would they want to? I think you're forgetting this isn't anyone's full time job. These servers are run by volunteers in their spare time.

This isn't true. You can use emotes with Shield Defense. I don't know that all of them will work, flypose emotes come to mind as an example, but I know you can use others for sure.

No, we don't. You'd be penalizing players for not sticking with a poorly run team. Just the other day, I joined a Posi 1 TF that was advertised as a speed run. The team organizer - who was only level 8 - refused to pass the star over to someone higher level, then decided to set the difficulty to +4 and refused to lower it. Several people quit the TF as it wasn't what was advertised. Your proposal would penalize them for that.

I would hope Jackson would not want to turn this into a trilogy either. You could be right about the appendices. I haven't read the appendices themselves in quite some time, so there very well could be more story in there to plumb. Even if there is a lot of room to work within, I'm certainly happy that its Peter Jackson and his team doing the story rather than the absolutely abysmal hacks over at Amazon.

Cautiously optimistic. I'm loving that WB is giving Amazon a huge middle finger for their abysmal steaming pile "The Rings of Power". I like that Jackson and co. are involved, but I do agree and share your concern about studio meddling in this one. As I recall, and granted I could be wrong as I read it a while ago, the whole story about the hunt for Gollum was condensed to a paragraph or two in the Council of Elrond. That seems like very little to stretch into a whole movie and you know the studio will want to make this a trilogy. Will be kind of hard to tie into the LoTR trilogy too given the wildly different timeframes you mentioned. Overall, looking forward to this.

Thank you for saying this. I'd like to add that it should be up to the HC folks to determine what is or isn't a waste of their time. They're smart people, they can make those decisions on their own.

Again, so what? The only reason they're taking donations is to cover the costs of running multiple servers which are needed to accommodate the number of players and spread the load out. Less players = less servers = less money needed. HC operated for years without taking any player donations. With no players, it's less of an expense which they could go back to paying out of their own pocket. Also, how many times has HC said they're never going to be a for-profit business? They're "not currently operating for-profit" because they don't want to and have said countless times they never will, especially now with the license agreement with NC Soft.

HC is not a commercial enterprise and it never will be. What difference would it make to the HC crew if HC lost a lot of players? This is a passion project run by a group of volunteers in their spare time. If they wanted to, they could block access to anyone and everyone except family and friends if they wanted to and go back to being an underground invite-only server. HC can continue to do what they're doing now with or without the rest of us here. They're under no obligation to any of us players nor are they beholden to any of us. Other servers are chugging away just fine with a limited player base as well. Losing players would be much more of a concern if this were a for-profit venture.

That's fine that you believe there are. I don't find any of the reasons given so far to be all that compelling. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion. I don't think this idea will ever be implemented nor am I demanding it be done, I just don't find it to be a bad idea. This excuse gets tossed around a lot and it never works. What is or isn't an "improvement" is highly subjective. There will never be universal agreement on changes made to the game. Some saw the addition of hard mode TFs as a much needed improvement whereas others saw it as pointless and a complete waste of development effort. Some see the revamps of hig level enemy groups as a good thing. Others are complaining about it. It's all subjective to the individual. As for being able to get global names already, yes you can do that, but it isn't necessarily easy or efficient. We can also send our alts recipes or salvage or inf by using in-game email too, but it would be much easier/efficient if we had global account storage accessible to all characters on an account, which would be an improvement.

If this were an option in chat settings, then people would have to enable globals in chat to see them which is "doing something" too. I can understand that and empathize, however if anyone is truly that concerned with their online privacy and anonymity, perhaps they can choose more random global handles to better hide their identity and protect their privacy? Nor is there right now a compelling reason to not have it showing in my opinion. You're welcome to disagree.

That's certainly their choice as to what games they don't want to play for whatever reason(s) they have. I find it difficult to believe other being able to see a global name in chat is the sole reason someone decides not to play a game, but I suppose it's possible. Other, more successful games with populations orders of magnitude larger than HC seems to indicate this isn't an issue for the vast majority of people. A small handful of people saying "I don't like the idea of others seeing my global because I like anonymity" isn't exactly what I would consider a compelling argument against the idea to be honest. As has been mentioned, global handles are very easily obtained already by anyone looking for them, so anonymity is already out the window.

I'm sorry to hear this and that you had to experience this kind of behavior from another player. I certainly hope you reported that person and they had their account permanently banned. This is completely understandable. I'm not sure how having your global optionally visible in the chat window removes your anonymity though. Unless you are choosing to tell others about your RL identity or posting that information publicly, I don't see how they can glean that kind of information from you simply by seeing your global chat name. As others have pointed out, global names are already easily accessible to anyone. Also, I wanted to apologize if my earlier comment was taken the wrong way. I was not suggesting people who are against this idea have something nefarious to hide. That isn't at all what I meant, rather I was just asking for clarification as to the reasoning for why they would want to hide their global name. That reasoning has been provided, so thank you.

I'm not sure how feasible it is to implement this here - STO had this same problem until recently. The patch Cryptic did for this was if the character goes above the cap by earning EC (eg. inf) from market sales or vendoring, it will send and in-game email with the excess funds to the character. It can be claimed at a later time once they were below the 2 billion EC cap. This way, players don't accidentally lose out on the funds and don't need to keep rolling alts to hold onto excess funds.

Not sure I understand what the big deal is about this and what people who are against it are trying to hide. This is how things work in CO and STO and it's an option to turn on or off in the chat settings. What's the big deal about needing to hide your global?

First, this game isn't a commercial venture anymore and it's never going to be a commercial venture ever again. It's run by a group of volunteers in their spare time, so capitalism doesn't really apply to design choices here as it would for a commercial product. I understand the design concept just fine. I agree that "revamping" ALL NPC groups to make them harder everywhere and in everything was not a smart decision. This game has never been about the required trinity WoW style of play and it never should be. Something I think HC did right was to add difficulty levels to various TFs. This was a great idea and executed very well. Those who want a greater challenge have the option to run it. Those who want don't want to run higher difficulties don't have to. Having options is a great thing. Making content more difficult everywhere for everyone is not in my opinion. For me personally, there are times when I want to run with a well balanced team for higher level content. More often, I'd just like to kill the hour or two of free time I have curbstomping bad guys solo. If this trend continues to make "regular" content more difficult, I'm going to have to start wasting time trying to recruit healers or buffers. If I have to do that for everything, including radio mission and such set at +0/1 settings, it will be time to move on from here for me. This has always been the case since the game launched and continues to this day. No class/AT is required for content to be completed. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having a well balanced team with a blend of tank/damage/heal/control has always made content less of a hassle and more efficient in several respects. Just one example - I often run SBBs with a group of friends. When we have a solid tank, the squishies aren't wiped out in the first round of the arena by Claudia and Camilla because their aggro is controlled. The AVs in Casino Heist don't run and jump all over the warehouse with a tank taunting them. With strong debuffs, all of the AVs melt that much faster. Same thing with running LGTFs or ITFs or LRSFs. If you've got a well balanced team, things go that much more smoothly. Sure, you can do an all tank ITF, but it's going to take longer and not go as well as having some buff/debuff/high DPS on the team. Personally, I don't want to see this game become yet another WoW clone. I think that's the direction we're headed in sadly and I agree with those who have said this isn't what the core audience is looking for.

Several people complained the game is too easy, support classes were "unnecessary" at higher levels, healers were superfluous etc. and cried for harder content. Now that we're getting harder content, people are complaining. I feel for the HC folks on this one. They just can't win. Honestly, what did people expect would happen? It was obvious from the get go that in order to make content more "challenging/harder", HC was going to adjust enemy NPCs to totally neuter defense through auto-hit AoEs, neuter resists with un-resistable damage, negate damage and make support/buff/debuff roles more a mandatory must-have requirement than nice-to-have to round out the team. I personally don't find the new and "improved" Council or CoT any more difficult. They're more tedious, but not more difficult. You still have options available as you don't need to run 4-star hard mode TFs and avoid the whole WoW-esque style of heavily scripted dungeons where you make a tiny mistake and you're thoroughly punished type of play.

Yes, it was mostly a joke. However, going by the definition proposed by many people here, what you're doing kind of is name camping. No one else can use the names you're using. You have names other people may want, but can't have because you've created them first. Some are even advocating for 50s to be included in the list too. Unless you're playing every single one of your 50 +3 characters every single day, they're just parked and camping a name someone else may want to actively play more frequently than you do. Not saying I agree with that assessment at all and I don't think you're doing anything wrong, but that's what quite a few folk here are using as the bar to define what "camping" is. I just find it interesting that it always seems to be the other guy who is the one camping.