Excraft

You're misunderstanding what I meant, but I can see how what I wrote it can be confusing, so sorry for that. No, I don't need a healer all the time. Not at all what I said, but again I can see how you'd misunderstand.

Huh? That's how you define super, not me. And my builds are fine, thanks. I never said I died a lot. All I said is I don't enjoy tedious, boring slogs of encounters. Nice try though.

Not really. I like playing to feel super. Turning every encounter into a boring, tedious slog where I need a healer to keep me alive against a couple of minions isn't my idea of fun. When I was a kid reading comics, the superheroes I liked all mowed through low level bad guys like grass and had the occasional big boss fights against baddies like Thanos or Darkseid that needed a team. If you like having your ass handed to you by a minion, more power to you.

Can't speak for anyone else, but they can increase the rewards a hundred fold and I still wouldn't run it, nor would 99% of the people I run with. Boring, tedious snoozefests of content aren't our thing.

You don't need super pimped out builds for the higher level difficulty. Yes, it's tedious. And I don't think anyone suggested it isn't optional. Making even more tedious content is never going to bring back anyone who got burned out for sure.

Yes a very, very small group of people cried for harder content on the forums. It is run less as in I never see it advertised anywhere, so that's very telling. The rewards for it suck or people can't devote the time for it or they just don't like the harder content. If one or all of those are the case, which looks highly likely, then yeah in my opinion it was a complete waste of time. I don't care if they want to continue making hard mode stuff for the 3 or 4 people here who want to run it. More power to them. It certainly isn't doing anything to attract any new players from what I can see.

Neither were the runs I was on. We formed from within our private channels when it first hit to get badges, then never again. If they're not being advertised on public or private channels that I can see, that tells me there's no interest in it. And if there's no interest in it in public channels, then who was all of that work done for? Surely it wasn't done for the few who cried for it....

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/code-of-conduct/ If there's people using scripts, then the rules should be enforced on those people and not have everyone else punished for it.

That's great you don't want to PUG a TF on hard mode. Doesn't in any way mean everyone else is the same and won't advertise to fill a spot or two if they want to in LFG. But you don't ever see it. Fact of the matter is, I don't see hard mode TFs advertised at all on any of the channels. "Hard" mode ASF was run in the first few days to get badges, then never again from what I can see. The novelty wore off, at least for the people in the channels I belong to. I see speed ITF/MLTF/YIN/LRSF advertised multiple times daily though.

Not everyone is running optimized AFK farmers or multiboxing. Not everyone is using AE farming. Some people just liked having the option of using that conversion to save themselves a couple of TF runs or whatever to finish out a build. There's lots of things that can be exploited. Using /ah is an exploit. Speed TF runs can exploit rewards at the extreme, but I don't see anyone crying over that. There's less than a handful of people if that doing whatever it was this stupid change was supposed to fix. I guarantee most people aren't exploiting it.

I don't think you've read any of the posts you're quoting. Not everyone bothers with running an optimized farming build or runs AFK farms. It isn't just about having enough inf, it's about the amount of time needed to farm, especially for people who aren't AFK farmers or multiboxing 20 accounts at once. Converting to reward merits helped cut down on farming for some folks. It's also something people didn't "abuse" and liked having as an option. There's a lot of pissing and moaning on these forums about AE and people spending all their time in AE, and your "solutions" are to spend more time farming in AE? That seems very counterproductive to me.

You're welcome to your opinion. I see it differently than you. I also think that for the most part the changes made since the secret server was opened to everyone have been decent. I can still dislike certain changes, if that's ok with you of course.

That ship sailed a long time ago. There's no changing anything at this point, and unless you're heaping praise on changes, they don't want to hear your opinion anyway.

I saw hard mode being advertised in LFG the first week or so after it was launched. I never see it advertised now. Complete waste of time and effort in my opinion. Rewards are garbage for the added time and effort involved.

I'd rather not have to be reliant on a full league of other people to get merits. I'd be fine with removing the conversion if there were more ways added to get merits solo. It's just easier to farm and look into setting up an AFK farm now to earn enough inf to just buy stuff outright. That conversion at least gave some use to EMPs after you've finished out Incarnates and don't want to make any new alts.

You all can't have this both ways. When the topic of instant 50 tokens came up, some people suggested making certain badges like TF commander being required to unlock it. The anti-crowd threw their usual hissy fit and chimed in with the excuse "all badges can be AFK'ed". So yeah, so long as you're on a team of mates who don't mind carrying you, you can AFK any badges or other rewards.

This is absolutely 100% wrong. Teaming is not now nor was it ever expected for all the content in the game. That's complete bullshit.

"Let's not use the TF that proves me wrong"... You and others like you just don't get it. Some people don't want to be herded into running team content. All rewards could be increased 10 times more and I still wouldn't want to team up. I'm not being anti-social, I just don't feel super on a team. I feel superfluous, just like all of the people who've made posts about how they don't feel useful running their buff/debuff toons in high level content. My brute or tank can't get an attack off before the rest of the team decimated entire mobs. That's boring for me. I don't want to be buried under layers of silly colored VFX vomit to the point I can't see what's going on. I want to go at my own pace, not the pace that others want to set. I'm playing this game to feel super, not to have to rely on other people to do stuff. I'm not the only one who feels this way either as others have posted similar things in this and other threads. But we're somehow lumped in with the evil farmers and asked to just team up with everyone else. Well I don't want to. Like I said, I don't feel super on a team and trying to herd people like me into teaming isn't going to have the effect you think it is. Nerfing the emp merit conversion isn't an enticement to try teaming more. It's just going to make me farm even more to make up for that loss.

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.