MHertz

The thing about a speedster is that it is both attack and defense. The only way to really be fair about it is to make an Epic Archetype (like a Kheldian) with speed-based primary and secondary pools. If Quickpunch is an attack powerset, what happens when you pair it with Stone Armor? The same would go for, say, Shapeshifter or Size Change. The means of attack is built into the means of defense (eg, turn into an elephant or shrink to gnat size and deliver a super-punch).

Character Name: Wiid Wiilow Global: @Hertz Base Name: New Perez Park Shard: Everlasting Passcode: NEWPEREZ-23883 Item Count: 3,459 Category for Contest: multi-purpose base under 7K items Other Associated Contributors: @Mho and @Farad (These are also my accounts, but all 3 accounts worked on base because they are identical triplet plant girls. Should I win, I would hope that all 3 triplets get the badge, to maintain their identical presentation.) Additional Info/Must-See Areas: This is a reclaimed corner of Perez Park with all of the enemies kicked out. At present, the park is set up for a cherry blossom festival due to take place at the end of April, complete with drinks stations and a place for a DJ. Near the entry portal is a large pipe with a teleporter leading down into an old Vahzilok sewer tunnel, which the SG has converted into item storage and teleportation. Beneath the central fountain, accessed through a door at the base of the SW side is the cistern, contaminated with old magic by a century of the Circle of Thorns' presence. In the NW corner, another sewer pipe leads down to an old Circle of Thorns aqueduct, where the Wild Willow sisters have built their living space (look up after you go through the portal). It is warded against COT Spectral Demons coming back in through the collapsed aqueduct, but there is a security station to monitor for any other intrusions into the park.

I just discovered I can’t make a cherry blossom tree. The tinting on the plants often contains a base of yellow or yellow-green that can’t be removed. The best I can get is orange. Would it be possible to make versions of plants and bushes (and maybe even grass) that are fully tintable?

Aha, hints! It’s a riddle powerset! Tier 1: Old Standby (light damage, stun) Tier 2: Rubik’s Force Cube (immobilize) Tier 3: False Alarm (-DEF debuff) Tier 4: Rot-13 (Slow) Tier 5: Aim Tier 6: Smug Superiority (Perception buff) Tier 7: Say the Secret Word (win $100) Tier 8: Scavenger Hunt (AOE knockback) Tier 9: Vexing Conundrum (AOE Confuse)

More Ancillary Power Pools. Force Fields. Give FF Armor to self-bubble, a containment field to keep mobs grouped together, etc. Electric for Controllers and Dominators. Maybe an Illusion APP. You know, to keep with the themes.

I liken PFF to self-rez powers. If everything goes fubar, you have a power to help you, even if pure Defense isn’t always the best method. Some might say it’s better not to have things go fubar in the first place. I would trade for a click (not toggle) PFF that is 100% impregnable, but it has 100% Placate on it. Can’t take aggro, but can’t get harmed either, including by AOEs. Same thing as Detention Field, but for yourself.

The smallest thing I really want: The ability to swap where the costumes are in the menu. Move the “main” costume to the bottom row and put something else in the upper left.

I lean toward maximizing drop rate, not pumping up XP. Going for +3 or +4 enemies never made sense to me, because while you level faster, you defeat fewer enemies. That means fewer chances for a good drop, fewer enemies accumulated for badges, and so on. So usually go +0 or +1, with team size set one larger than the team itself. Also, I multibox, so I don’t need the added challenge of tough enemies in a huge swarm when I’m managing 3 toons.

The smallest change? Alphabetize the costume options. I don’t even need new ones. Just make the existing ones easier to locate.

If you want to keep your level 50 on Excelsior and you only get 8 slots, you can’t make a new toon in that occupied slot, unless you make a new account. But in the current 1,000-slots-per-shard model, that 50 is not likely to be crowding out any of your potential future toons on Excelsior. In the current no-fee model there is also no penalty for making a second or third account. You could take 3,000 slots on Excelsior if you were bored enough and it wouldn’t cost you anything. I am in favor of releasing names for level 50s under the same terms as non-players (because at least for the moment the distinction cannot be made). I’ll say again that the PL part doesn’t bother me, and I think could divert the debate into an argument about PLing instead of staying on topic. I know you’ve replied to this already, but I’ll further note that if we had fewer slots, there would be less PLing, because there wouldn’t be unlimited slots to place those characters.

I agree with you. I think you missed the point of my previous post. What I said was “who cares if someone has 300 50s that they don’t play?” But the context is “we have so many slots available, there is no opportunity cost to hoarding idle names.”

Citation needed. I have never, ever said I had a problem creating new character names. Even on Live, it was a simple matter. There has never been a case when I said, “I really need this name, and I’m willing to push the other user in order to get it.” I have also never claimed that a name purge would be good for me personally. My argument is against using sentimentality and anecdote and perceived benefit to decide on name policy. A balance has to be struck between giving a good experience to new players with no banked character names; casual players who only play infrequently; and current players who have names they feel ownership of. Trying to shift the burden off of one group and onto the others is not a solution for the long-term game population. Give new players a bad experience and frustration at the character creation step, and you have no fresh blood. Squeeze out casual players and they won’t come back. Dump on the current players and they’ll bail. Whatever rules that emerge should be reasonable and clear and easy to implement, and I think they are.

It also used to be a badge of honor to have a 50 on your account at all, in light of the limited number of slots you got. With 1,000 slots per server, it only exacerbates the name camping problem and without much benefit to the person doing the hoarding. Who cares if someone has 300 50s that they don’t play?

The shards need to know that a given name (found on Account 789) should be made available to Account 223 upon character creation. Somehow that flag must be set. As I understand it, either a) A script has to be built that grabs a list of inactive accounts from the login server, then access each shard and set the flags on all applicable characters on those accounts. This would have to be run periodically (probably no more than 1/day, but could stretch to 1/month); or b) The shard server has to add a real-time check every time a name is requested, such that it tracks a name back to the account that owns it, calls the login server, and verifies whether the account is active; or c) Some code must be written such that when people log in, the “last active” date is appended to the account; this would have to a workaround in case that account hasn’t been logged in since the code was added.

You said a lot about what “should” be able to be done, without (as far as I can tell) any experience or knowledge that would make yours an informed opinion. If the devs say it’s not a thing they can easily do, I’ll side with them, rather than accuse them of being “incompetent or incapable” (your words).

Again, I reiterate, they are looking for people with knowledge and applicable skills. Armchair vaporizing does no one any good. Or just maybe when the devs say something is difficult, we … believe them? Crazy, I know.

Good thing I didn’t assume that, then. Some desirable names are being played now. Some are not. The odds are good that the desirable names are likely to be older, because they are often easier to think of. It is also probably the case that characters inspire players to play when the powers, costume, bio, and name come together well — so “good” names may have a longer shelf life than one-off test build names and hack jobs and pun-of-the-moment ideas. (The corollary here is that a new player is likely to stay longer if they can get a name they like.) It is equally unreasonable to assume that the only idle names are undesirable. People don’t take breaks from the game, or stop playing, or move on to other things, because they didn’t have any good names. Sometimes even good names will go idle because the player moved on. A player leaves behind, let’s say, 20 characters. Maybe 1 or 2 of those names are cool. Someone should get them.

It is a volunteer staff. If you are that wise about how the data is structured, offer to write the solution yourself. People would thank you.

I doubt they are actual gibberish. Maybe uncommon, unpopular, silly, or improbable — but most likely actual words. Like I said, the awesome names are maybe 5% of the total, because most names just aren’t that good.

A quick sample of active players using the names they could get. I hope you can see that’s not the same as a sample of names that are presently idle. Names that are idle for 1 year: were created with more freedom because there were fewer existing names already in use at the time may have contributed to the unavailability of better names for the active players now I’m not saying there’s going to be a ton of awesome names freed up by this. Likely not — most names just aren’t that awesome to start with.

If you’re assuming those 600k names are mostly gibberish, then you’ve got your hopes up too. Some of them will be idle names like “Phoenix Dark Dirk Steel” that are useful to very few. Some might be names like “ashagsjah” that people used as a mule or as a base builder or as a spammer. But I’d wager a good portion, maybe 60%, will be at least second-tier names that would smooth the process of getting a character online: the whole Darkblade, Shadowblade, Nightsword, Starstab, Shadeknife iteration people go through when they can’t think of anything really superior. Maybe 5% would be names that make people go “yeah, awesome!” I have long said in this thread that the odds are good that few individuals will be able to declare success from this — defined such that they would find a name they always wanted. We shouldn’t be trying to measure this by how people feel about the names that become available to them.

By no means. I said I would never miss it if someone were to haul it all away. I’m just too lazy to get out in the garage and do it myself.

Sweet! I’m all about solutions based on things we can measure. If database stability is not an issue, then it can be disregarded. We still have the issue of, what did we estimate, 600K potential names being freed up, out of 2M names? That’s a number worth discussing. That’s 30% of the existing characters — it’s not nothing.

I believe it was already mentioned that this is a distinction the game cannot make, because there is no “account activity” that can be tied to a character. I would be in favor of this hypothetical example, for all the good it does.

At least it is a measurable metric, as opposed to hypothetical scenarios about people who feel a certain possessiveness about a thing they don’t care enough about to use, but can’t allow anyone else to enjoy. I keep boxes of old crap in my garage too. MIDI cables, external Zip drives, old computers, portable CD player, chargers to batteries that turned to lumps of acidified plastic long ago. If I’m honest, I’m never going to haul out that old PowerMac 7100 and play “Fool’s Errand” ever again. If someone was volunteering to clean that crap out, I would never miss it. I might go, “Dang.”