MHertz

I counter with another specious argument about some hypothetical player who tries to return to Homecoming but his favorite toons were given Generic names or deleted. They go around and badmouth the game, no positive feelings, and so on. It’s fun! We can make up scenarios all day. Give active players 1 year to hold their names (including 50s) and give inactive players 6 months. I know that’s a distinction the database can’t make at present, but that would at least favor players who are here.

And I’m for it. If the character isn’t being played at all, not even once a year, then it’s just cluttering up the database. If the player loves the character so much he can’t let it go, but is so indifferent about it that he can’t ever be bothered to log on as that character, it becomes like Gollum’s relationship with his precious.

If our benchmark for whether purging old data is “are people better off?” then this whole exercise has to be re-evaluated. Which people? What is better? In general I would say the game would be better off deleting idle characters, especially on idle accounts, because that would have a measurable effect on database stability and memory usage. All we are talking about is the name, and I’ve already said that, in my opinion, it is difficult to attach any benefit to any one user. Most people will still say “I can’t find a good name.” Only a few will be lucky enough to say “I got the one I’ve been waiting for.” So “are you better off” is not, to me, a compelling argument. Suppose you could “retire” a character. Its name changes from Captain Firepants to Emeritus Captain Firepants or Captain Firepants (Retired) or something. You can no longer trade, gain XP, respec, or use the auction house. You keep a version of the name, you keep the character in the database, but you free up the name for someone else who would actually use it. It would have exactly the same effect as your unused character does now — it sits and does nothing. Would that be better or worse than deletion? Would that be better or worse than a name purge?

I agree with most of your post, but not this. In general, sure. Someone hasn’t logged in a character for a year, great — flag the character name, level 50 or otherwise. How the character reached 50 is not the issue and just muddies the water here.

That’s how I came up with the name for Stickbonker. I thought, what’s the inevitable and stupid conclusion of looking for the most obvious not-yet-taken “named after power set” name for a Staff mêlée fighter? And to RP him, I thought, what kind of person would choose that name? I rarely have trouble finding names, because I don’t name for powers very often. Mr Crunch (invulnerable/EM Tanker) Akoya (FF Defender) Moongold (fire/empathy Controller) Zephyr Lily (katana/SR Scrapper) Caxino (archery/devices Blaster) Overkilt (Scottish mace Brute) Carmen Astra (dark/dark Defender) I could stop playing tomorrow and I doubt more than one or two of my names would be claimed.

Yes. That’s the warning I’m trying to deliver. When the name purge goes through, some people will definitely lose their names. Only a small number of people will actually get names that were being hoarded. We are likely to see more examples of “I lost my name, this game sucks!” than “guess what, I just got the name I have been wanting for years!” And more than either of them we’ll see “The name I want still isn’t free!” Again, I’m not saying this is a good reason not to do the name purge. It ought to be done. We just can’t expect the solution to look like sunshine and roses and tons of perfect names and nobody ever complaining. Very likely more people would want that name than could actually have it, so the balance will tip in favor of “the name purge didn’t work! I still can’t get that name.” Lots of people name their characters after their power sets. Let’s see, it’s a broadsword/dark armor Scrapper, I’ll call him Darkblade. Or Nightblade. Darn, that’s taken too. How about Shadowsword? Darksword? Shadowstab? Occlusion Scalpel? Doompoke? Darn. All taken. Well, I guess I’ll go with xXDark B1ad3Xx. That may be an exaggeration, but it probably will continue to happen more than “darn, I lost a name.”

I agree with your whole post. I am not trying to claim the name purge should not be done; I am just cautioning people, as you are, to mitigate their expectations. Someone somewhere will get upset at losing a name; and hardly anybody here will perceive that the solution worked and freed up the name they wanted.

There is solving the problem, and there is solving the perception of the problem. The actual problem: Inactive accounts and active accounts with inactive characters are holding names that are going unused. First perception of the problem: “I can’t play this dumb game! I can’t get any of the good names I want!” Second perception of the problem: “I can’t play this dumb game! I took a break and came back to play, and my favorite character names were all borked!” Solving the actual problem of idle accounts does not solve the first perceived problem with any reliability. But it may create the second perceived problem. If you are keen to solve the actual problem, then give up on the idea that the perceived problems may have a solution. The name you want may belong to a level 50. The name you want might get logged in regularly. The name you want may get logged every six months. The name you want may get freed up in the purge, and snapped up by some other lucky player who plays every day. The name you want may get snapped up by a greedy player who also doesn’t play the character. Or the name you want falls into your lap, and you end up taking a long break from the game yourself. In all cases, the perception of some third player is still “I can’t get the name I want.” I assume the devs have enough data to suggest the name purge would free up some reasonable number of names, or they wouldn’t be doing anything about it. That doesn’t mean you will perceive any change yourself — but the people who lose their names might perceive one.

I want them to go back to when travel powers were used to get you from one mission to another, not for speeding through Pocket D to get from your AE farming station to the trainer and back. Travel powers used to mean something, dang it. Asking for free travel powers so you can further min-max your build? Meh, it’s not a priority. Might as well ask for a Farming power pool, containing one toggle that does Maneuvers + Tough + Weave + Hasten. It’s about as likely to happen.

I also remember when capes and auras were added. I know you went to a lot of work to prove me wrong somehow, but I know which issue it was and when I showed up.

I had to go back and look to see how early I began — apparently I was playing as of Issue 1, because I remember the Council-Fifth Column battles in Atlas Park. The thing I remember most about those years was doing Stan and Lou and working on the forum newspaper.

I don't recall any differences in opinion worth quibbling about, and I'm very glad to know you are enjoying the story surrounding the Willows. As a longtime Dungeon Master, I'm happy when everyone gets together to write a story in common. It's kind of my story, but I have plenty of good and helpful co-authors like yourself.

I don’t understand the need for this either. I see a lot of players who choose to represent themselves as all-powerful gods, demons, fates, dragons, etc, and it puzzles me greatly. Who is the audience for that? Am I supposed to be impressed or awed by someone who has the imagination of a child on a playground (“I have Everything-Proof Shields, so there! Nyah!”)? Weakness is so much more powerful an RP tool than strength. Weakness invites others to contribute. Strength closes off any other contributions besides your own. I play the Willows on Everlasting, and people seem to enjoy engaging in the backstory and offering to help with things the characters “need.” People are here to be heroes, mostly; what’s the point of playing a hero who can’t be helped by other heroes?

Or, the people are complaining they don't have enough Inf because they can't afford auction prices set by people with far too much money to burn. The question of whether there is too much cash is secondary, however. The question really is "can we think of fun things to spend it on?"

I'm aware what Enhancements do. What I'm asking is, "Around which of the many redundant resources is the game meant to be balanced? What is the design intent?" We have DOs and SOs and IOs, plus set IOs. Is there some hypothetical baseline level of projected income, and where does that income derive from? Is the projected income meant to fall short of getting fully slotted with SOs? (In my experience, it always does at the beginning, unless I load up my alts with cash from my mains. It takes a while to become self-sufficient.) Do the devs consider SOs as trash to be sold, or as baseline equipment to balance around? My suspicion is that there is no coherent design intent any longer. TOs were abandoned. A bunch more stuff was added. Everybody is expected to just dump cash onto lowbies and that's how the game is played now.

At the moment, yes. Also, it would require new infrastructure to deal with stuff like spawn points, hospitals being required in those SGs, warnings for players entering combat-enabled bases, change to AFK policy in SG bases, and so on.

First, agree to disagree. When someone has 30 billion sitting around, they might not be spending all of it, but it means it hurts them less when the cost of IOs goes up 2-3 million per. It hurts everyone else — at least it could, in theory. See below. Second, it depends on implementation. Giant monsters and zone invasions are already coded by the devs to be as non-griefy as possible in low-level zones. Spawn points are already chosen. All I'm saying is that, in any zone where this is already possible, a player could activate it. We're not talking about "point and click-summon a giant monster wherever you want." Third, I did specifically say that maps that aren't commonly used could have prices as low as 0. This would specifically be so people could make their RP-based stories and invite all their friends. Suppose the threshold is about 100 uses before the fee rises above 0 inf — that's plenty of opportunities to design your own bespoke RP story and invite your whole SG to play for free. Another potential way to use the AE system to remove money from the super-rich is this: allow the owner of the map to put Influence into it, like a piggy bank, so that everybody who completes that map gets a payout, or gets extra Influence per defeat, or whatever. This doesn't remove money from the system, but it does redistribute it. It would also be possible to set up some kind of scavenger hunt. A rich player says "I want to set up a 10m prize for the person who finds my glowie in Independence Port," or "for the first person to defeat 20 Carnies in PI" or "the first person who brings me X Invention Enhancement." You know, something to make the super-rich feel like they are super rich characters on the level of Batman or Tony Stark, paying others to do services. It's also sort of like the way Sherlock Holmes uses the Baker Street Irregulars. Or maybe an option to pay an extra fee — when you're defeated, you can ask to be airlifted to any hospital, not just the one from the last zone you were in. There's all kinds of ways that extra influence can be leveraged for conveniences. The trouble with the existing methods is that they are all purchases — spend X and have a new power forever. A true money sink should be "spend X, get this benefit that only happens once." If that were the extent of it, I wouldn't care either. But when large amounts of cash get hoarded, and there is an auction house for rare items, it creates a need for everyone to be equally rich in order to compete for those items. It drives players into min-games they don't enjoy, or grind out XP just for the cash, in order to keep up. I don't have any figures to say whether this is actually happening, so I don't know whether this is a solution in search of a problem. It could be that there is no issue, which I would be fine with. But it would still be fun to have new things to spend money on.

There’s no question in my mind that there’s a lot of cash floating around in the game, at least with certain players for whom that is a goal (or an unintended side effect of long-lived characters and nothing to spend the money on). Should there be some system that gives such players something to spend their money on? Or something to slow down the acquisition of cash at the top levels? What would be fun? What would players accept? For fun things, how about: Pay 25m, trigger a giant monster spawn in that zone. Pay 50m, trigger an enemy invasion of your SG base. Pay 100m, trigger a zone invasion. Pay 10m for additional costume slots. For slowing down cash: AE costs money. The price can scale based on how popular (or how well-used) the map is, starting at 0 inf and going up to, say, 1M per activation of that map. Enhancement Conversion costs cash, not tokens. Using university resources (invention tables) costs tuition, maybe after level 20. Of course, I’m sure people say there’s no problem at all with users hoarding tens of billions of influence, but you know, this is just a starting point for the discussion.

This is a complex issue. I’ll try to lay out my thoughts in pieces. Yes, you can earn a lot of influence in this game by making use of drops, playing the market, selling judiciously, and doing your homework on the cash-income front. You can also get free influence in costume contests, should you be lucky enough to win. The question is whether the game should be balanced around the idea that all players could and should participate in these activities in order to get by. As it stands, even on 1 xp rates, you don’t really start to break even on buying SOs until level 35 or so, but until then it can be a struggle … unless you do the above and get lucky now and then with the RNG. I have always been opposed to the idea of loot and auction houses in this game, going all the way back to the invention system on Live, because I don’t want to be forced to slog through the markets to make a fortune just so I can afford to have an average build. Most games with this feature create a wealth imbalance where rare items cost tremendous amounts of cash. This also reflects that games like this have nothing for the super-rich to spend money on. The loot and cash-driven system doesn’t benefit or encourage my playstyle. I acknowledge that some people really do like it, but it’s not for me. I do it to the minimum necessary. However, the above question about balance assumes one will be buying Enhancements as they go. If you skip all the way to 50, there are several side effects. A) since you are not equipping every 5 levels, you save money; B) you may reduce demand on the market for IOs and recipes if you would normally buy them as you go; and C) you may slightly increase supply of IOs if you sell your farmed drops on the market. The number of drops you get contributes to cash flow, but you do not get enough drops — or enough of the right ones — to be self-sufficient. All too often, you end up with drops like Stun or Fear that you can’t use, even when they are compatible with your Origin; or you get the same IO in the set you’re building and you have to use a totally different system to hope to convert it into the one you’re still missing. So one way to alleviate the excess cash — or the need for cash in the first place — is addressing the drop rate and the vast amount of stuff you get that has no purpose to you. You’d also have to look at game difficulty. At what level does the equation 1 player = 3 +0 minions break down due to increased power from Enhancements? That is, at what level is a player required to have cash in order to keep up with enemy power levels? So the real question about influence and XP is “what kind of behavior is the game trying to incentivize?” Given that this is an MMO, it is unlikely that the solution will be “irrespective of playstyle choices or 2XP, you earn enough Influence on your own that you don’t need any other players.” Is the game trying to encourage the trading of SOs, or is that just an afterthought? Are SOs meant to be a source of cash or something we slot if and when we find them? Would it be easier to just ditch the SOs completely and give us the money? Or would that just push more people toward the invention system that not all players want to engage with? Are players expected to auction their recipes, or use them, or vendor them? Whatever we are trying to incentivize, that’s what new players should be pushed toward and that’s which systems should lead to the middle-road outcome. Right now it’s difficult to see what the intended system looks like. I would prefer a system where the baseline is earning enough Influence to afford SOs for your next level, so new players aren’t shocked by the struggle at level 15 and 20. If people wanted to to extra work to have extra benefits, so be it.

None of the above. Snow and ice. Trees without leaves. Ice surfaces to slide on. Snowmen. Ice crystals. Icicles. Buildings and signs with snow on them. Artwork exists for some of these things, but we can’t do ice bases for our cold-using characters or our Hoth Rebel Base cosplay.

Group name: The Seeds of Willow Alignment: Neutral-ish Core Belief: Preserve lives, not uphold laws Restrictions: almost all female; similar body height and build Role playing: Yes, definitely! Recruitment: via consensus Time zones: Pacific to GMT Discord: private You may already have seen the Willows on Everlasting — the group of mostly-identical women with the similar names in Pocket D and in clubs. For those who don’t know, the Willows were created when the cremated ashes of a woman, Willow Longbough, were scattered in Perez Park, and her lingering spirit was imprinted on the seedlings there due to residual Circle of Thorns magic. The Willows are all tall, almost identical, and they share a mental connection to see and hear what their sisters do. It may not surprise you to learn that some of them are played by one person; but you may not know that it is possible to join the SG if you have an interest in the lore and want to participate in it. We have a Discord server where we keep track of story points and important people in those stories, and where you can take notes and read up on what others have done. We do not have an open recruitment policy; we want to find RPers who are a good fit with the existing players (to minimize drama) and are willing to work within the lore (and build it out here and there, too). if you have wondered about the Willows and think it might be fun to be one, PM me here or at @Hertz in game.

Least favorite maps: outdoor city maps with hostages.

I don’t even pay attention to them any more. I’ve tried entering with a number of my favorite character designs, but I don’t win, so I figure my tastes aren’t the same. Instead, I run character bio contests. Because everyone has a costume.

Give archery shots a 15% chance to apply Immobilization and 5% chance to apply a Hold. Apply +30% damage bonus for enemies within 10 feet. If there is an enemy on a line behind your target, give a 25% chance to hit the second target for 50% damage. +15% bonus for killing Boromir.

I would add a fourth: what metrics you plan to use to test whether you have reached your goal. This can depend on what your goal is; some things are harder to measure than others. A goal might be “solo giant monsters,” so you can time how long it takes. Or a goal might be “do this TF at +A/xB in C amount of time” which means your metric is built into the goal itself. Maybe your goal is “not stink up the joint so bad with this AT against Carnies” and that’s going to be a play/feel kind of thing, maybe defeats per mission or something — maybe you’ll build an AE map for consistent testing. You might also make a short list of things you don’t care so much about, or which you’re willing to give up; or you might prioritize which of 2 or 3 things is more important than the others. Your 40-story building needs to not fall down, not topple over in high wind, and should house 5,000 workers, but it doesn’t need all that earthquake proofing and the atrium in the lobby doesn’t have to be made of glass. In character build terms, maybe you don’t need a travel power in this build. Hey, just because I don’t do super-optimized builds for all my toons doesn’t mean I don’t know how.