Excraft

Negligible to you running fully kitted toons, to the casual player not so much.

AKA "the undesirables".

Thanks to both of you. I realize it's subjective and opinion, but to me those merit rewards are much too low for the extra time and effort involved. I might run this once just to try it and then never again. It's still faster/more fun to just do speed TFs and can earn more merits faster.

Question - are reward merits for ASF and ITF being increased to compensate for the nerf to EMP merit conversion? If I'm remembering right, these were added as additional incentives to try hard mode stuff and were told that those could be considered the additional merit rewards because they could be converted. That's no longer the case, so are reward merits getting increased for harder difficulty levels?

Was thinking about this some more... sounds a lot like a problem over in STO where people were taking advantage of the big dilithium payouts from finishing Rep systems. They would complete the rep system, then delete the character and start over. All that dilithium can be converted to Zen which is purchased with real money. There's no real money here though so not sure why this is such a crisis. Could you maybe backload the merits from Vet levels instead of front load them? I know it wouldn't stop the behavior, just make it take longer and help discourage it. Just a thought, not a great one but wanted to share.

I don't see that happening. You can't earn badges toward accolades in AE and my experience is most people are using AE to skip the lower levels, then going back and playing them once they've got all their slots and builds finished. If what you're saying here is true, it would be getting harder and harder to fill requests for TFs and story content. It's not hard to find or fill teams on Excelsior for anything non-AE related. I don't know about other servers.

That sounds fair enough. Maybe a rule change is in order? I mean, if you're all calling it abusive behavior, sounds to me it's something that you don't want people doing so probably best to make a rule and enforce it.

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.