Ironblade

I have not. While it does look great and seems like a fun concept, I just don't play solo games much. I'm hoping that Peace Island comes out some day. You play a cat in that one also, but you're one of a group of cats on an island where all the people have disappeared and you work together (online co-op) to solve the mystery.

True, but then the numbers will STILL be wrong - just in the opposite direction. If they are tracking IP addresses, then they are UNDERCOUNTING players since many households (including mine) have more than one player.

Yes. All of them measure the number of accounts logged in and not actual players. So, while they are certainly useful and even valuable for analyzing trends, they don't actually measure what they claim to measure.

I don't think it's as cut and dried as your second sentence suggests, nor do I think we should be framing it that way. Both of those options have drawbacks and have engendered a very negative response. I think a better course would be to look for some middle ground - which will, most likely, make NO ONE happy but hopefully it won't seem like a slap in the face to a portion of the community. Or, perhaps, it will seem like a minor slap to just about everyone. One option is to allow AE experience up to a specific level. Many people said they farm up to 48. Maybe limit the rewards to level 15 or 20. Another option is time gating the conversion, limiting it to X conversions per day or having a cooldown time on the conversions. I'm sure the devs, with a greater understanding of the systems involved, can come up with other options. So far, they came up with a draconian measure which generated outrage. So they came up with a different, but equally draconian measure, which seems just as unpopular (and perhaps more likely to affect the casual player). I think a more moderate measure can be found that will have little or no impact on the 'casual player' while reining in the issue the devs are targeting (farming incarnate merits and converting to reward merits).

You may be right. The current 8 seconds is absolutely ludicrous and seems punitive to the overwhelming majority of builds. If it were reduced to 2-3 seconds, it would be basically a wash for characters with one toggle (which is very common) and an improvement to characters with more (the minority). But if the devs are dead set on having it in the vicinity of 8 seconds, the superior option would be to make no change and leave the system as it is.

I disagree too. I think the entirety of my reply makes that clear. While some measures might seem reasonable, they are inconsistent with having a fun game that people enjoy.

Necro for anyone coming across this thread later on. Issue 27 page 4 FIXES this issue. However, you will need to go to the tailor and re-edit the weapons in question to get it to work under the new system. Issue 27.4 is not currently released, but I have thoroughly tested this on the beta server and it works.

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'.