Lazarillo

This feels quite backwards. Reward Merits can be earned super fast and in greater numbers across lots of different content. Empyreans themselves are much more grindy to obtain, and can be sent to alts and used for Incarnate stuff that Reward Merits cannot. I kinda shudder to think how much more I'd have had to grind many of my character if I'd blown Empyreans effectively on stuff that I can buy from the AH...

I'm not 100% certain this would work, but I feel like I recall that you can bind multiple "powexec" functions to the same bind, it's just that the game won't execute any but the first/last on the list. However, it might be worth checking to see what happen if you used a bind like this with two powers in the the bind that were mutually exclusive. So if you did, like a "powexec_name Ageless Destiny$$powexec_name Rebirth Destiny", might only fire off the active power, since you couldn't have both powers to activate at the same time?

As is Penny herself. One reason I will always and forever insist that her Superhero codename is Pitstop.

...most of which is not viable to experience in a TF, though, since mission text is can often only be experienced by the first person to click on certain things (who in many cases, must be the team leader). There's not much rich to the Aeon SF when I have to lag behind a team wondering what the heck is going on, and just being assured that yeah, it's somehow important. This is a big point of why for TFs, shorter tends to be better, because team content, and story rich content, are very highly mutually exclusive, just due to the nature of the way the game handles things. And why Aeon still needs a SSA mode.

I don't think it's as fine a line as "yes" or "no". We're in Praetoria. There are shades of gray (even if it looks awfully blue to that one silly Circle of Thorns guy). There's a degree to which I think this idea "claims" the game, which is where I think the problem comes about. The game belongs (or, at least, "should" belong) to the larger playerbase, not to the development staff of any one community. And in that regard, player characters shouldn't really feel held in any different a regard to server-team characters, as I see it. Plus, as noted, they did try this already, and it fell really flat, to me at least (doubly so since the team member who did the arc left anyway, maybe?). Doesn't mean there can't be story potential, but it needs to be approached in a way that doesn't commandeer the characters or the game world in too great a degree. The Vigilante and Rogue arcs were both good examples of how to do new content right, IMO.

I'd really rather not. Piecemeal tried it and it honestly felt kind of unfulfilling when I realized I was just playing their character's origin story. On top of that, I dunno, it just feels...incompatible with the game's true form. Like, for better or worse, this game doesn't really "belong" to the current dev team. Trying to make it "theirs" might give a sort of misappropriated in the same way that, say, having them take on preexisting canon character names (like the original dev team did) wouldn't really feel right, either (and to my understanding, is deliberately avoided by the HC team in part for that reason).

Out of curiosity, had you just pulled them out of storage, and was the storage window still open? I ran into this bug at some point a while back, where every time I used a Catalyst, I also ended up putting one back into storage. So they were depleting from my personal inventory twice as fast, but weren't actually getting used up.

I mean, they can go back and remove all Incarnate rewards from non-Trials, then, eh? Vet levels are an "anomaly" in and of themselves. We're ironically not supposed to have that without farming anyway...just farming trials instead of whatever else. I'm talking about AE as a whole. When the current patch goes through (because let's be honest, we've been told this has already been in testing for a while; minds are not getting changed at this point), it's not going to affect me, true, because I've already been shown the door when it comes to AE. However, removing Veteran Levels is symptomatic of a much greater issue (one that, again, would be solved far better by re-implementing the MARTy system, and for that matter, would solve the problem of people just inevitably going back to farming Battle Maiden or Infernal instead). It's another step in the wrong direction, and my take is that they should re-evaluate what their actual goal is, how best to use AE, and how best to discourage farming, rather than simply doubling down on a process that hasn't curbed it in the least, but has and will continue to push people away from player-created story content.

They cut rewards in half and will be turning off character progress after hitting 50. How is that anything but discouraging its use?

Because he made the claim that no rewards was irrelevant if he was able to RP with SG. And if two stories are equally good, what's the line between them?

I am saying they should be valued equally. A good story in AE should be equally rewarding to a good story in the game's basic content. And vice-versa. It comes back to the point of disincentivization. The dev team actively discourages playing AE for story content, relative to playing the rest of the game for story content. And they don't do this out of anything against AE story content (as far as we know), they do it because they simply don't care, as much as they care about slowing down farming. It's simply acceptable collateral.

Content should be equally rewarding across the board. If I were to go through AE and find an arc that's as well-written as Operation: World Wide Red, I shouldn't have to settle for it being less rewarding simply because it was player-created content. If all people care about is RP for RP's sake, then they don't need the gameplay rewards (and if they do need the gameplay rewards, they shouldn't be disincentivized to RPing their gameplay by getting half/no progress depending on content level).

It's not the farmers than ran people out of AE. It was the Homecoming team nerfing AE rewards across the board as a punitive (and ultimately useless) measure against farmers. Trust me, you won't find many people much more anti-farm than me, but this is one spot I don't hold against that crowd. They need to revert reward values and just turn MARTy back on. Simply decide was is (un)acceptable and set that as a hard limit.

That's a real shame because it basically pigeonholes this set into a very specific theme, and doing an entirely separate set with such little thematic difference feels like time that could be better spent on something more new and unique.

It's far worse for people who want to use AE for non-farming purposes, really. But most of those people were already driven away, I guess. Survivorship bias, kinda? AE is only used for farms, so nerfing it now only means nerfing it for farms, right? That's the way it's being looked at, anyway.

There are no reasons given (though we all know what they are). (And the doubly amusing thing is, I agree with those reasons, but this change does nothing to address them, while being punitive towards the people who aren't the "problem".)

Is there anything to react to then, besides just assuming that reasoning? Incarnate XP is off in AE. Testing done, no?

This is sort of related to one real hangup I see coming. ITFs, in general, are fun to run but a pain to set up because they can be done so many different ways. "Let a 50 have the star" is pretty much the only thing that's always agreed upon. "Oh, this is a 3* ITF? I wanted a 2*." "I'm only here for the hardest diff, our team of 7 level 35s and a non-Incarnate 50 better do 4* or bust!". It gets even worse because at least with the base difficulty system, you can adjust after a mission goes particularly well or poorly.

Only for farmers. There's never been much real incentive to step into it for non-farm players. This change will give it even less.

¿Por qué no los dos? is favorite maxim of mine.

He's in perma-jail, until/unless new writing staff decide to do something new with him. The original dev team had plans to use him to take up Statesman's mantle at least in the short-term (maybe longer if people liked the idea), but that was part of the Battalion story and never made official (unless you count NCSoft trying to use it for their failed DotA clone).

If it's not that big of a change, then isn't it still a waste to do it?

It's a bit annoying because as usual, it feels intended to curb farmers, but does even more to reduce incentives to people who'd otherwise use AE in its "intended" fashion.

Looks like a neat idea, especially with the pet not really being a "pet", it opens it up to a broad number of potential concepts. Not a huge fan of the music notes in all the animations, though. A note-free version would feel much more versatile.

AE had rewards nerfed to slow farmers, which has somewhat ironically led to only farmers wanting to use it due to the general feeling of a low "return on investment" for non-farmers. Thus few people use AE for what it's "for" anymore.