Ironblade

That link is broken. If you mouse over it, you can see that .jpg appears twice with a lot of seemingly extraneous numbers in there. Maybe it's supposed to look like that, but it still doesn't work.

Hmm. Just checked and the last five prices are 5.25 million.

As I already observed, most characters are not going to use exactly the same IO's so this is, in your own words, "a contrived nonsense scenario". Yep. Not playing 'optimally' ON PURPOSE. Way too many people playing cookie cutter builds where every character has to have capped defense, Hasten, etc. If I wanted that, I can afford it. But I prefer goofing around. I have characters with multiple travel powers. I built one named 'Toggle Man' whose reason for existence is to run toggles - just because. I'm playing a game where people do crazy stuff for entertainment value. (shrug) I built one character, leveled to 50 and got all incarnates to tier 4 JUST TO HELP WITH ONE SPECIFIC BADGE. I play this character on Really Hard Way badge runs every week and it's not even my badger. I'm having FUN. If you can't grasp that then yeah, we're NOT playing the same game. Toodles.

It's certainly possible. Some SG's will absolutely do this as an SG event and spawn a crowd of GM's. I participated in such events back on live and have seen it advertised on Homecoming. Specifically, "I seriously doubt that somehow 10 players could all coordinate getting to the right point in the Crimson arc simultaneously, and then have all their groups exit in Talos." Why would you have ANY doubt that could be done? That's *EASY*. I could EASILY manage three myself with my three accounts. Solo the arc until you get to the end of the correct mission, then just wait there. Solo on another account and wait. Etc. Then, one right after the other, exit the mission direct to Ouroboros - WHERE GIANT MONSTERS CAN NOT SPAWN - and proceed to Talos. Just like any other ambush in the game, the Titan will proceed to Talos.

Yes. This is a factor with all of the giant monsters. You (or your team) must do at least 10% of the total damage. So, if there's two teams fighting a GM and you're solo, you probably won't get the badge. This is also what causes a problem with Eochai and Jack in Irons. When they spawn TOGETHER and start fighting each other, if they have been fighting a while they do so much damage to each other that NO ONE can get the badge for killing them.

Well, I put a lot of thought into mine. I originally came up with the idea back on live but never got around to writing it up in AE (OMG the AE system is annoying to use). I wrote an origin story for Mark IV (the technology contact in Founders Falls). You can just search for 'Origin of Mark IV' or the ID is 48002.

And there is a completely understandable reason for that - badgers. In order to get all the crafting badges, you have to craft some of every type of enhancement in various level ranges. So people are crafting enhancement that they don't need and dumping them on the market to recoup some of their costs. No, that is COMPLETELY misleading and not at all comparable to the previous example. In order to craft that item you must have the recipe. There is NO OPTION to buy the recipe at the crafting table. You have to buy it from the AH in the 10-12 million range. These two examples have NO bearing on each other.

Ouch. Talk about throwing someone into the deep end. That's some of the hardest content in the entire game. 😛 Anyway, @Akalabeth I'm also a member of Cosmic Council even though my personal SG is on Everlasting. My girlfriend was already a member and I was always commenting how funny Ukase and Snarky were on the forums and she said they're in CC and always play on Friday night so I joined. I play on Excelsior every Friday evening and occasionally at other times. It's a well-run SG.

1) It's a waste of time since I can easily afford the new IO's for new characters. 2) It's a virtual certainty that the new character will need very different IO's anyway. 3) I might want to use the character for something months or a year later. Someone might be planning a Master badge run or something and ask if anyone has a specific AT and powerset. Also, it seems we build our characters differently. "5 gamblers, the full suite of defensive uniques, a shifter or two, and 3 or 4 sets of purps can be used on most builds." I have almost zero characters that can use 5 LotG since I don't play many defense sets and I usually don't take defensive pool powers just mule LotG's. Almost none of my characters have "the full suite of defensive uniques" for the reason listed above and also that I just don't bother. Most of my builds don't need "a shifter or two". (Probably because everyone gets the Miracle:+recovery in Health.) I agree on the purples but, as I noted in point 3 above, if I strip the character I might regret it later.

Sounds like human nature to me. I play all of my characters from 1 to 50, then get their incarnate powers. At that point, SOME of them just don't get played any more since I'm always leveling something new. The easier it is to get more 50's, the more 50's will be mothballed. That's how life is.

There was marvelous quote back on live. I don't recall who it was from. Playing two different scrapper powersets is like the difference between playing tennis and playing racquetball. Playing two different defender powersets is like the difference between playing hockey and playing piano.

And yet, as I specifically pointed out, you can massively farm without setting foot in AE. Defeat badges? Okay, let me run the Dreck map six times. So, unless you're defining 'non-farming gameplay' as anything outside of AE, it just isn't that easy for the game to measure it.

The problem here is having the game engine recognize "'normal', non-farming game play". As I recall, the devs said they would love to nerf AFK farming but had not found a way to reliably do so that would not inadvertently catch people who were not AFK farming. How do we define 'non-farming gameplay'? There are plenty of ways to farm without setting foot in AE. The Dreck map used to be a favorite. The warwolf and Axis America maps were also popular. How many times can I run one before it's 'farming'? What if I run all three of them back-to-back, then do that again. Will the game recognize that as farming? How about if I run the weekly strike target 10 times during the week - but on different characters each time? What if I have multiple accounts?

Sure, but we're on the definition of 'reasonable' again. I *DO* plan ahead, stockpile things, use converters, etc. So every one of my characters has at least two sets of purples, ATO's etc and some have a lot more. And I think the effort I expended is completely reasonable. 🙂

I will answer this two ways. 1) Nope, you've got all of it entirely right. My only additional comment would be that, for a bit of extra work, you can make even more by buying trash recipes and converting them yourself. You see, that's where all those converters are going - to people converting trash into gold. 2) Nope, you've got all of it entirely right. But sometimes I'm too lazy to take that extra step. I have over 30,000 reward merits spread across my characters so I can afford to waste them by buying the purples or ATO's directly.

You've just described the crafting system of just about every MMO or co-op survival game I've ever played. I think it works fine. I can, however, think of two systems I've dealt with that were WORSE in some way. In Black Desert Online, when upgrading your gear, if you fail the upgrade chance: 1) The gear is damaged. 2) The gear is downgraded to a lower enchantment or outright destroyed. In Everquest 2, crafting involved all the steps you described but the actual crafting process involved sitting there during an 'interactive' crafting process that was just tedious and mindless clicking. I like it much better in 7 Days To Die where you get your materials, go to the appropriate crafting table, click, and it tells you how long it will be until it's ready and you walk away and come back later. I still have to gather the materials and build the crafting station but they don't then add tedium.

It would have pretty much zero impact on my play since I *NEVER* power-level any character that I intend to play. Why would I PL anyone, then? Here's the most recent example - the last time Dr Q came around in the 'Weekly Strike Target' rotation, it occurred to me that I could earn some extra merits by quickly PL'ing a character to 40+ so they could doorsit while I soloed the task force on my main. So I did. I logged in my main, a level 50 defender on my second account (that I played to 50), and a PL'ed character on my 3rd account to be used for nothing else. I soloed the TF and earned 732 merits. Having said that, I think the impact on my play would be that we would have less people. A massive nerf to AE would absolutely cause some people to leave. I couldn't guess how many. Could be 2%, could be 20%. Your position is certainly sound. However, there is room for disagreement on the margins as you acknowledge in the definition of 'reasonable'. In my opinion, we CAN finish a build in a reasonable time without reliance on other players. However, I define finishing a build as being fully IO'ed with 'decent' sets. I don't think everyone should be able, in a 'reasonable' time, to have a build full of purples, PvP IO's and ATO's. Decent IO sets will get you 80% of the way to the 'ultimate' build. If you want that extra 20%, you should have to work at it to an 'unreasonable' degree.

Well, there's a window scale command that lets you change the scale of a single window but I don't see the rewards window on the list unless it goes by a different and unintuitive name. FYI, the list of window names is here: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Window_names_(Slash_Command) You could try /window_resetall on one character. That would reset every window back to default size and position. I would do that while you actually have the reward window on the screen. If that fixes it, you can then rearrange the windows to your liking and then use the command /wdw_save which would save your current window settings. Then use /wdw_load to load those saved settings onto other characters.

That's certainly possible. I wasn't paying attention and happened to see the Discord message around 5:30 and figured it had been posted around 3:00, which is their usual 'target'. When I donated, I was surprised we were only around 65% to the target - since I thought it had been about 2-1/2 hours. Then I came back to the forums to post and saw that it had only been about 50 minutes.

Donated. I was about to come in here and post about how long it was taking to hit the target, then I noticed Cipher only posted this thread 51 minutes ago - so we're in good shape. 🙂

YES, YES, OH PLEASE YES! Well, maybe not decades, but many years would be awesome. I would love for computers to be more like cars. You don't hear people say, "Oh, GM just came out with a new transmission. My car's only 2 years old but I'm thinking about upgrading it." Same here but the first bullet point doesn't really apply to me. I generally don't upgrade my systems (hardware or OS). I just wait until it's time to build a new one. However, I used to run SETI@home which meant my CPU was operating at 100% utilization 24/7. Power supplies degrade over time so if you're going to run it hard, you need to go with a larger power supply. The consensus in my reading is that you want a PSU that exceeds your expected maximum draw by somewhere between 33 and 50%. Now I guess we have an additional consideration. My hope is that video card reviews will evaluate their transient spikes in power draw and rate cards accordingly. People will then start AVOIDING the cards with big spikes and the manufacturers will be incentivized to do something about it. Also, one piece of general advice - cut corners on any component EXCEPT the power supply. It's the one item where a dramatic failure can destroy everything else.

Unlikely. The problem is that you don't get to assign the numeric part of the code. It's assigned sequentially, per shard, by the game. And you would have to match both the text and numbers to match my bindfile. Better luck next time. 😛

Absolutely - super practical. In fact, since I play regularly on multiple shards, I have a keybind set up that tries a bunch of different base codes - my own base on Everlasting, Cosmic Council on Excelsior, etc. You just set up the line in the bindfile like this: f3 "enterbasefrompasscode VF-5738$$enterbasefrompasscode COSMICTRANSPORT-6608$$enterbasefrompasscode Enclave-687" Some day I'll get around to adding the codes for bases on the other shards since I have Ironblade on every shard and most of them are 50 already.

Well, that's some serious BS. NVidia needs to get their act together. Their cards power draw can spike to around 1,000 watts and they say the power supply manufacturers are the problem?

Awesome. Now if only your post didn't use the word 'cosmic' incorrectly nearly ten times, everything would be great and there would be nothing to confuse new players. "using the cosmic macro, monitor duty, Rapid Response portal and base transporter" "So recently they changed the cosmic so that you can't just use it anywhere," "so I figured a quick way to still use cosmic with other base travel powers" "You can try in other shards using their specific cosmic macro." "Now how to use these to get to cosmic." "3) utilize cosmic platform as much as you need and pick your exit" "2) once the portal opens up use the cosmic transporter" "I tried this method in one of the other shards but do not have the correct cosmic portal," So, to clarify for anyone unfamiliar with the transport system, there is no power called 'cosmic', Homecoming never made any changes to anything called 'cosmic' and there is no 'cosmic portal' on any shard except Excelsior.