Ironblade

What the hell is that? Can we look that up somewhere????? Edit: Never mind. I found it. I had looked for it before posting, then went back and looked again and tried clicking on things I had never realized were clickable.

I counter your question with a question of my own. Maybe someone knows the answer to this, but I don't. When it says 'Heroes' and 'Villains', is it basing that on the character alignment or whether they are in a blue or red zone? If it's based on the ZONE, then anyone in Ouroboros, Pocket D, etc would not be counted. So I'm guessing it's based on character alignment, in which case it is not useful as a measure of how often red-side content is being played despite how often it is held up as an example of that. Yes, entirely a valid point. It would seem to make sense to calculate rewards based on time spent. HOWEVER - I speculate that would lead to a mass exodus of players. People in general like to feel they are getting a bargain, gaming the system, getting ahead of 'the Joneses', etc. If that were removed, I think a lot of people would leave.

Not everyone has the luxury of arranging their life to accommodate uninterrupted gaming time. And, of course, by their very nature 'emergencies' are unpredictable and can not be scheduled. I'm not saying this applies to most players, but it irrefutably applies to some. In fact, it does not. Even though it uses the word 'Players' in the heading, it is actually showing how many ACCOUNTS are active. Within the TOS, one PLAYER can be running three ACCOUNTS. I personally have three accounts. When I have all of them logged in simultaneously, the forums will show me as being three players because the game can not distinguish.

Nah. It's WAY too easy to defeat that measure. Plus, that's the kind of measure the devs want to avoid because it will inevitably harm non-farmers. Someone is running one of the horrific missions (like find the 18 stage magicians on the Orenbega map), they're 90% done and have a child/pet/whatever emergency. Game logs them out and they have to start from scratch. That has the potential to infuriate people who are doing nothing but dealing with a real-life emergency.

In theory, yes. In practice, I would think anyone engaging in heavy AFK farming is savvy enough to find a way to negate that solution. I don't AFK farm and I can think of two methods offhand.

This is the big issue. The Construction Event will not occur until one of two things happens: 1) Someone kills one or more of those Paladins. 2) The server gets reset on Tuesday morning (or whenever). The reset clears them out.

I don't think he would have said something like that, since it makes zero sense. THERE IS NO RISK. He probably would have said something about EFFORT or TIME SPENT vs reward. After all, that's the metric that was used to determine the reward merits for each task force - average time to completion. And AFK farming yields rewards for little or no effort, which upsets that paradigm.

I think it would be more accurate to say that anyone with astronomical wealth can (or can attempt to) *MANIPULATE* the market. ANYONE can play the market. And, if you have patience and half a brain, it's a path to achieving astronomical wealth. I still sometimes use Reward Merits to buy enhancements because it's faster and easier. Up until recently, I didn't even know we could convert Astrals and Empyreans into Reward Merits but I have over 36,000 of them. What else am I going to do with them? Every so often, I'll spend a thousand to buy 3,000 converters and turn those into about 2 billion inf but I'm certainly never going to use them all up. Once you have enough inf, you don't need to be efficient with it. I have nowhere near the half trillion that some people have, but I do have enough to not care.

There are 54 zones with the full 8 exploration badges, plus a handful with just one.

I've seen this on live, also. I think there might be some sort of internal clean-up routine that frees up the name but it's on some kind of cycle, once a minute or something.

I think the cooldowns are all or nothing so they might be able to code '10 per day'. So it would probably have to be something like a 90-minute cooldown or 2-hours cooldown. That does seem like a reasonable middle ground, though. I think there needs to be more effort in identifying a middle ground or compromises. We went from 'No vet levels in AE' to 'Vet levels are back but no conversion to Reward Merits'. Neither of these options has been well-received. We need to look for an option that blocks the problematic outliers without harming the average player. They can't. One of the devs said that if they had a reliable way to stop AFK farming without penalizing active farmers, they would have already done it.

Well, this arc is from The Pilgrim and it's level 25-50 so you can't outlevel it. Also, I don't know that there is any way to drop a CONTACT. I think you probably just dropped a mission. If you dropped the first mission (or any other), you should be able to just go talk to him again.

Obviously not a GM here, but that seems fine because you're not using the names and likenesses of actual people (which is prohibited). If he looked like MC Hammer and had that name, that would break the rules. But I've seen lots of characters that look like MC Hammer and have a name that makes some oblique reference. Also, I'm old school, so I would have gone with Ivan 'The Polish Hammer' Putski for a pro wrestler. 🙂 As for the second one, that's pretty dark. I had to look up '27 Club'. Seems even less infringing since it has no one's name. Edit: The Hammer guy should have a dwarf outfit. Lots of literary dwarves known for using hammers.

Absolutely NOT. Having said that, I would like to expand on two particular points. 1) A little bit of planning goes a long way. I'm not saying you should download Mids and min-max your characters. I plan my builds in an Excel spreadsheet once I get to around level 30 and have a feel for how it plays and what shortcomings it has. If I'm having END issues, I can build to fix that. If I'm too squishy, I can build for that. Etc. So I feel that SOME planning ahead will have you much more satisfied with the performance of your characters. 2) If you plan to run something like Relentless Aeon SF or be the lead tank in certain incarnate trials, that's a different story. This is not just 'end game content'; it's end game hard/challenge mode. You'll want to build more carefully if you're going to do the absolute hardest content in the game and/or LEAD end game content. If that's not in your plans, you're fine. Planning your build can have a dramatic impact on how the character plays. - Lots of people build for their 'squishy' characters to have defense over 45%. Not easy, but big impact. - My character Toggle Man runs 18 toggles in combat and has no END problems. That was pretty cheap and easy (more than +50% recovery, not including procs). - I built a beam rifle/kinetics corrupter JUST for Really Hard Way badge runs. He is built to maximize damage - his own and the team's. - I have an invuln tank with +370% regeneration. That was pretty easy; regen is generally the first set bonus. And this doesn't have to be expensive. An optimized, high-end build can cost a half billion inf. My invuln tank with 370% regen cost between 30-40 million. Think about whether you have a character that you like, but if only they had ??????? (better recharge, more endurance, some defense, etc).

I believe that would be an example of a straw man argument.

Here is a direct quote from the Terms of Service: "We allow a basic level of multiboxing on the Homecoming servers outside of peak times. These rules apply on a shard-by-shard basis (by ‘shard’ we mean Torchbearer, Excelsior, etc)." So you can stay 100% within the ToS and multibox three accounts ON EACH SHARD SIMULTANEOUSLY. Not sure why they phrased it that way, but they did and went to the effort to clarify exactly what they mean by 'shard'. The computer I had 18 years ago could run three accounts. I think it's quite possible my current system could run fifteen. For the record, I only have three accounts.

Personally, I never did this because I generate crazy amounts of Reward Merits by running the weekly task forces. Also, I didn't know (or had forgotten) that we could. 🙂 Having said that: 1) Consider whether you might want different/additional incarnate powers on some existing characters. As a specific example, if you're leading or assisting on some content, you might want the Clarion or Incandescence powers in the Destiny slot. 2) If a character has 50 or more Empyreans, you might want to convert to a Transcendent which allows you to email it to another character on YOUR account and convert back to Empyreans to give them a headstart on the incarnate powers. If you're reasonably certain neither of those situations is applicable, by all means, go ahead and convert to Reward Merits. I actually went through a bunch of my characters yesterday and found that I had quite a few who had 3 or 4 different Destiny powers *AND* a lot of extra Astral/Empyrean merits. I ended up emailing NINE Transcendent Merits to my newest 50 and converting some stuff to Reward Merits.

Indeed. Unfortunately, more than once, I have seen people express their outrage and say that some change isn't 'better for all' because THEY don't like it. They don't seem to grasp that 'better for all' means 'better for the community' and not 'better for every single individual'.

That's probably part of the point. It's a role-playing destination and having a place with a dark atmosphere is just as valid as the Luau. A group of smugglers and pirates who haven't bathed in a week fit better in a dingy bar drinking swill than in a tiki bar with fancy drinks with little umbrellas in them.

In theory, I suppose this could be an issue. Realistically, though, I don't see this one change as being significant enough to noticeably increase the population in the PvP zones. I was in Bloody Bay yesterday, getting a Shivan Shard, and there was no one else in the zone.

Did not see that coming. I'm guessing that datamining showed tons of inactive characters at or near level 1. This seems like a pretty generous policy now. Thumbs up!

Good call (about this thread). I was going to suggest that this deserved it's own Focused Feedback. Having said that, the original AE change (no vet level rewards) was quite a dramatic change. Now that is reverted and we have this change, which is also quite dramatic. Based on these changes (about to try to guess dev intentions), it seems that earning Emps/Astrals in AE *AND CONVERTING THEM* is what's being targeted. I therefore restate my suggestion that I made in response to the original AE change - continue to allow the vet levels BUT FOR A LIMITED TIME (maybe 15 levels). This addresses the issue in a 'middle of the road' manner. Maybe 15 vet levels is too little or too much, but that's where there's room for debate. These all or nothing approaches don't seem great.

The Empyrean/Astral Merit to Reward Merit conversion has been removed from Reward Merit vendors. Huh. I'm sure I must have heard about this at some point, but I did not know we could do this. And now we're going to get Reward Merits for iTrials. Works for me. 🙂

Huh. Did not see this coming. Seems like a good way to let people check out PvP without a big up-front time investment to see if it's something they want to get into. Not seeing any downside at the moment (although someone may come up with one).

Whether you 'buy' it or not is irrelevant. As a database programmer, it is ABSOLUTELY possible that there is no way to do it other than querying the entire character database for that shard to see which link back to a particular account ID. Do I know that it's set up like that? No. Is that a REASONABLE way for it to be configured? Absolutely it is. And, since we were TOLD that it isn't practical, I'm guessing that's exactly how it's set up. Unless you've set up relational databases, you don't have enough knowledge to comment.