Ironblade

I will see your cat with a foil hat and raise an additional foil hat.

A few more days and it will be 'The Borderline Pathetic AE Debate'.

Probably, but it never even takes a full day. And these aren't little donations. Based on the total dollars and number of donations, the average is almost $29.

I don't think so - just the name. The three Gorgons were Stheno, Euryale and Medusa (who was killed by Perseus).

Is it possible you're on the wrong server? Maybe instead of Homecoming, you had the missing characters on Thunderspy or Rebirth? Have you played on multiple servers? We're asking these questions because I don't recall ever seeing a situation where characters actually disappeared. Every time, it has turned out that the player was on the wrong server, wrong shard, wrong account, the characters had moved to the 3rd or 10th page, etc.

Well, it had two things I couldn't get in Dual Pistols - a long-range sniper attack to lead off with and a hold.

He's serious about the half trillion influence. As for 2800 characters, I haven't seen him play a lot of different characters so I don't think he actually plans to make that many. He'll correct me if I'm mistaken. 😛

You're not missing anything. I did this back on live (hoarding more inf than I could ever spend). It was a game within a game. I employed every possible method of accumulating wealth back then. It was just something to do. Now, I don't. I work the market a little to ensure I have all the inf I will ever need but I have around 1/20th of what I had back then. It's still more than I think I can spend, but now it's just a margin of safety and not hoarding for the sake of hoarding. What changed? I dunno. I just don't feel like it now. Edit: Upon further thought, maybe what changed is that, back then, CoH was the ONLY online game I played. When it shut down, I diversified and now I just don't spend as much time in CoH as I used to. Edited again: So, yeah, that's a good question you posed. I would guess that it's kind of like badging - just one more way to compete. FYI, my main has every badge. 🙂

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.