Excraft

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.

Not sure I like it. Full article here: https://www.superherohype.com/movies/574640-supermans-james-gunn-shares-official-image-david-corenswets-suit-revealed

Right so I guess it's only other people who are name camping then. 🤣

I understand that the # is just a place holder. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm not sure all symbols are usable in names, but the idea does have merit. I think it's a lot more difficult than some might think to implement this idea though. As far as whether HC can do it, I've no doubt they can. They've got a great group of very smart, very talented people working on the code. From posts I've seen them make over the years in threads around this topic, it's pretty clear at least to me that they know what they're doing. I've no doubt they could re-code the entire engine to get it to work the way Cryptic did with their next generation engine they used for CO and STO. It looked to me like it's less about what they can do versus what made sense to do with the limited time they have. Re-enabling the old name release policy was the low-hanging fruit version of a fix. I don't have any doubt that if they really wanted to fix the name issue once and for all through code, they could do it. Again, they're very smart people and they know what they're doing. It's just a matter of time and effort. I'm not sure most people would be too happy if the HC people spent the next year or two re-coding the entire game just to fix names and didn't release any new content at all.

@Captain Fabulous, your idea is a good one and I'd support it. I'm not sure the code here will allow the # sign to be used in names that way. I'm thinking it's probably a whole lot more coding than most would think. Still a good idea though!

If it's so minor a thing and so minor it's not an issue, why even bring it up in the first place?

There's nothing stopping anyone from creating or using an "actual" name here either. You can also use words and/or phrases from other languages and nationalities to pick from here. I assure you, the game is in no danger whatsoever of running out of word combinations to create names with. Every single day I log on here, I'm seeing new names that are unique, clever, funny and creative. This is so far beyond trivial an issue that it's not even worth noting to be honest. If you liked the costume that much, take a screenshot.

And how many individual players is that in relation to the overall number of individual players.

That's a really large stretch given the extremely tiny number of players in CO, which is still probably more players than are here. Regardless, it proves that the code change to make names non-unique works and anyone can have a name they want. I've seen it in STO myself, but again, that's people making clones of Kirk and Picard. It's rare to the point of being non-existent. I can't remember the last time I've even seen that, and that game has way more players than HC does.

I'd wager you'd very, very rarely ever see this, if ever at all.

Correct. I don't think we need people with titles to organize or run events. The titles don't mean anything, the actions do. Nor do I think people need blue titles to help the community. @ZacKing included a small fraction of examples earlier in the thread. There are a whole lot more player run events going on every single day. I see them every day on Torchbearer, Excel and Everlasting. I too enjoy participating in the weekly SNS over on Torchbearer. I've managed a few Kronos Titans for it myself. There's daily Hami raids on Excel in the evenings. MSRs are regular events too on Excel. I've seen players specifically running patron arcs daily just to help others unlock the patron pools. There's one player who specifically offers zone tours to help new players unlock the LRT and get access to every zone. To my knowledge, none of these things being run by other players are to promote specific SGs. None of the players out there who have been organizing and running these events day after day, week after week, year after year have ever had a blue title. Having a blue title has never been nor will it ever be a requirement to be a helpful, friendly member of the community to organize events that others can join in on. It just takes a desire to do it, which granted most people don't have. Those that do however, the absolute majority of them aren't CRs and never will be CRs and never have a special title which ultimately is meaningless in relation to the ability to organize events. If you enjoy helping others and organizing events, by all means please continue to do so. I don't see how having a blue title is a requirement for you. From what I gather, your video tutorials and such were all done prior to there ever being any kind of CR position, so if you didn't need a title before to be helpful and organize events, it doesn't matter that you don't have one now. @Kalikamata is a great example of this. It takes a lot of coordination, effort, time and communication to organize and manage several leagues running the SNS concurrently each week. That's all being done without a blue title. As for the base crawl idea, I don't see how having a blue title had anything to do with it. That's something you all could manage without the title and from what I understand, there's more categories to come for it outside of the tech bases. Are those not happening now because you don't have the title? If the base crawls will continue, it just proves the point that titles aren't needed for it. I also want to add, and I can't believe I'm going to say it, but I agree with the HC thought of not having too many events too often that have big prizes like gold titles and merits and such. To clarify, I was not suggesting there was a lack of interest in building in general. I was more thinking of reasons why there may be a lack of interest in participating in a base contest. Sure, I totally agree there are a lot of bases out there now, primarily because of the removal of the prestige system. Absolutely there are players making "homes" for their characters. There are also many more players like myself who are making one room storage hubs across multiple characters and accounts. I probably have a dozen or more storage bases across various accounts myself, so while that seems like a big number of bases, it doesn't mean they're all "contest ready" or built for contests. I'd wager most are just for personal storage and quick transport hubs, but I have no problem deferring to your knowledge of what's out there as you'll have a much better idea than I do. I can only go by what I've seen. I do enjoy the work all the builders put into their bases and thank you to all of you out there who use your free time to do things for others. I appreciate your efforts and hope you'll continue to keep doing what you're doing.

^ This. I understand it's an enormous investment of time on a volunteer group to take on and not suggesting that's what they should do. Just agreeing this is the way to solve the naming problem permanently where everyone can have a name they want. You'll see global handles ONLY IF you enable that in your chat settings. Otherwise, you won't see the global and you can still click on the character names in chat to invite to teams or send tells. In the 14 years I've been playing STO, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen two different people with the same name, and that's people making clones of Picard or Kirk.

I have a question here that I'm reluctant to ask because I'm sure some will take it the wrong way and ascribe some underlying negativity and insult to it that isn't there and isn't at all intended. I don't at all mean this to be insulting or disparaging of anyone or anything, so please don't take it as such. From reading the thread here, it sounds like it was a real chore to find people to participate in base contests. Could that be that it's just such a small minority of players interested in and involved with the base building community and there isn't much interest in bases and base building among the larger population of players? Even with rewards like merits and gold titles, it sounds like it was still a huge chore to find people to participate. Again, I don't mean that as an insult in any way, so please don't take it as such. Maybe the players on servers like Indom and Reunion just aren't all that interested in base building? Just like you'll find more RPers on Everlasting than you do on Torchbearer. Everlasting is where the players interested in RP tend to congregate. Also, building a base is a lot more work than pulling together a league to run some TFs or iTrials together. It's not an insignificant time requirement for the builder. From everything I've seen with bases, videos I've watched, posts I've read and people I've talked to, it can be quite a heavy investment of time and effort in building above the plot. Maybe that's something most people just aren't interested in? Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy paying a visit to check out some of these amazing creations. Beyond that, I don't use bases for anything other than storage, crafting and the occasional quick teleport. Most people I run with are the same. I understand that I'm not the target audience for the base contests. Something people may want to consider is that since prestige isn't a thing anymore, SGs and bases don't have the same meaning they had on live to many people. SG leaders who wanted to build to the nines and wanted to do raiding needed large, active SGs with lots of active members to earn enough prestige to build and afford to pay for upkeep. That level of memberships is no longer required here. I'm not saying whether that's a good or bad thing, just that it could be a reason for a lack of interest. Bases are like PvP in that they look to be a very small, niche community among the overall player base. There's nothing wrong with that, just saying that it's a small enough group of players to explain why there's an apparent lack of interest. As to the topic at hand, I agree with those who've said that we don't need CRs. Thanks for the time and effort you spent while in the position though. Please do continue being helpful and supportive. I've enjoyed paying a visit to the bases in the tech showcase.

I like my characters to both feel and be effective. Some ATs/builds are more than others, but overall I try to shoot for both.

I think the lag would be helped if people didn't go nuts and fire off every AoE they have, Incarnates, Lores etc. all at once. Barring that, use the /noparticles command. It does help.