macskull

You could use the 100 merits to buy the enhancement outright, but you could also use those merits to buy unslotters to sell and then buy the enhancement on the AH while still keeping an extra 14 million or so towards whatever else you want. Both methods get you the enhancement you want, but only one gets you a bunch of extra inf.

These aren't "weird exploits," these are "easy and beginner-friendly ways to make inf so you can buy stuff." If we're talking about ingame economy and how to afford things, here is some perspective: Inf gain from defeats, mission completion, and arc completion is still about the same as it's always been. The cost of pretty much every item on the auction house is orders of magnitude lower than it was back on live. You can complete an entire character's build for what would have been the price of one single purple enhancement. A PvP IO which might have sold off market for 3-4 billion inf is closer to 15 million inf now. It is so incredibly easy now to afford things compared to 15 years ago.

The policy as it is currently proposed does not do what you say it does.

This once again assumes there is a problem which needs to be solved. There has been zero evidence presented here - or anywhere else - other than anecdotal statements like "it took me an hour to find a name which wasn't taken," and the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data." I've said it in this thread, on other threads, on the Homecoming Discord, and ingame - if someone wants a name that I'm holding onto I would be more than happy to give it to them, for free. In the nearly five years I've been playing on Homecoming and the nearly six years I played before shutdown, not a single person has taken me up on that offer. Not one. I'm not opposed to the name release policy because I would be affected. Just like you, I don't actually care if one of the names I'm holding onto gets taken. I'm opposed to the name release policy because there are players that care, because releasing names based on inactivity is arbitrary and indicates to players that we don't care about their characters, and because the time spent designing and tweaking and implementing this system would be better spent on finding a way for it to not matter in the first place.

To the third point - even if a player is gone for a few years, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care, or that they’ll never come back. Perhaps the “fairest” way to handle it would be for a player to have a big “I am never coming back” button that would flag their account as inactive and if they didn’t come back after some amount of time (let’s say two years) only then would their names be released, and if they ever changed their minds and did come back you could point to the account flag and say “well, you did say you were never coming back.” My point was that any amount of inactivity-based name release is based on an arbitrary timeline because life happens outside the game and just because someone is gone for a while does not mean they’re going to be gone forever.

All this talk about entitlement and you’re the one over here going “they’re not using it and I want it.” There is zero functional difference between the name of a character that gets played every day and the name of a character that hasn’t been touched in a year. The points I have been making, and will continue to make, are: The name release policy purports to solve a problem that has not been demonstrated to actually exist. The policy does not stop people from “camping” names, which is one of the stated issues. The policy will result in existing players losing names of characters they’re invested in. How long that player has been gone for is irrelevant, as are their reasons for why they weren’t online. I don’t need to ask why they’ve been gone, because that’s none of my business, and asking why just means that suddenly I’m the one who gets to decide whether their absence from the game was for a “good” reason or not.

It all comes down to one single question: are we okay with upsetting existing players who are invested in the game on the off-chance that a new player gets upset and quits because the name they want is taken? I feel like that should be a no-brainer. The name release policy is an answer to a nonexistent problem, and the current plan for its implementation makes it trivial for players to continue to hold large amounts of names practically indefinitely. If I want to camp hundreds of character names, it’s only going to take a couple minutes of upfront time investment and then maybe an hour total over the course of a year. The players that are already camping names are going to continue to do so, and the actual number of freed-up names is probably going to be close to zero.

Doesn't really matter if they want to be named that, because you can't use asterisks or ampersands in character names. Nah, not a joke. Would a large portion of those possible names be a string of random characters? Sure - but even a tiny fraction of those possibilities mean there are still billions of possible names that aren't.

Total Domination doesn't do damage and therefore won't take the ATO sets, the text description is an error.

For new players, I agree. I've been doing this long enough that I haven't done TFC a single time since I found out about the mayhem mission contact.

Task Force Commander, not Atlas Medallion, but I could argue that isn't necessarily the best thing to steer new players towards since doing TFC awards a whole heap of XP and merits.

So I have no way of testing whether the recipe drop rate is actually 10% as stated without triggering hundreds upon hundreds of GM spawns which would probably take days or weeks, and I can't test the Hamidon Bud drop rate for the reasons @Glacier Peak already gave. What I can do though, is use the beta freebies menus to test out the random recipes from the hologram vendor. I rolled 500 times and here are my results: It is entirely possible that this data set is simply too small to be accurate, but this distribution doesn't seem to be actually random, with seven of the seventeen entries more than one standard deviation from the mean. The four most and three least common ones are outside the range of what you'd expect, with the fourth least common just barely squeaking by.

These things don't need to be gated, they need to be explained.

Kheldians and VEATs should be prompted on whether they want to play the tutorial, just like every other AT - and they should also tell you in the character description that these ATs automatically start as heroes and villains, respectively. If we're going through the trouble of giving Kheldians numbers instead of question marks in the character creator as a way to better explain them to new players, there is zero reason they should automatically skip the tutorial. Or at least give the epic ATs a note saying something along the lines of "not recommended for new players." EDIT: I also confirmed the new unlock method for Long Range Teleporter works as described in the patch notes but I find myself agreeing with the person on Discord who said that having LRT unlock for either getting 10 exploration badges or a zone's exploration accolade is a better alternative. With the way the unlock is implemented in this build getting the Atlas Park exploration accolade gets me credit for 8 of the 10 badges but I still have to go hunt down the remaining two, and none of the connecting zones to AP (or the lower-level zones accessible via train) have two badges that are particularly close to the areas where you'd enter those zones. I went to the Hollows to grab the last two and even the two closest to the AP entrance required me to navigate around enemies that were up to eight levels higher than me. The addition of athletic run and the raptor pack made getting those two badges faster but it was still risky and I wouldn't expect it to be intuitive to a new player.

I don't know if Tanker ATOs have always been this expensive or what, but I was surprised.

Yikes.

According to the linked post, there were about two million characters in mid-2022. Let's say there have been an additional one million characters created in the year and a half since, which is probably a gross overestimate but whatever. Also keep in mind those two million characters probably already contain multiple duplicate names since that's all names across all five servers. Now, let's do some back of the napkin math, using some assumptions to make things easier: We'll assume there are no duplicate names, and we'll assume every one of those characters is on a single server. Based on the limitations of the character name field (20 total characters, no consecutive spaces, no spaces at the beginning or end, alphanumeric characters only plus one of three possible special characters, names are not case-sensitive), you have 2,840,316,982,931,772,359,523,246,788,905,305,801,901,473,792 (which we'll simplify to call 3x1045) possible unique names. Even if we're being generous and saying there are three million names in use, the three million (3x106) character names currently in existence represent 1x10-37% of the possible names and that's only on one server. Using the later data of "something like 700,000 names in the less than 6 and inactive grouping," that represents 2.33x10-38% of possible names. That's infinitesimally tiny. I have plenty of low-level characters I am not actively playing with names saved for a point in the future, whether that's "I've finally found a concept that matches this name" or "there's a powerset coming out soon and I have the perfect name for a character that uses it." I would almost certainly let someone else have one of the names if they asked... but in almost five years (and another five years back on live) I have not been asked for a character name one single time. It could free up hundreds of thousands of names. Or it'll free up a handful. Or someone who has been out of the game for a while will come back, find their name taken, and get pissed and leave. A new player getting frustrated that the name they want isn't available is unfortunate, but so is a returning player finding out their favorite character's name was taken while they were gone and they had no say in the matter. It should be clear to any reasonable person which of those two situations is worse.

I definitely feel like it was the original intention that the updates were smaller, more-frequent updates given the smaller dev team, but that definitely hasn't been the norm past 2020 or so. Page 7 was in closed beta for something like six months before it made it to Brainstorm, and I feel like pages 5-7 are all big enough that they could have been their own issue. I guess at the end of the day it's just arguing semantics though, since an update's an update.

Good catch. I thought that was weird so I double-checked. It looks like I grabbed the screenshot during an extremely small window of time where the combat attributes window hadn't updated my totals yet even though I'd used the power. Here's another screenshot with the same character, showing the bonuses working correctly. If you monitor your combat attributes you'll notice they usually take a fraction of a second to update everything and I just had an unfortunately-timed screenshot. I also enabled the option to show power recharge timers and see my recharge times reduce while the buff is active.

The regeneration bonus is unique (just like every other single-enhancement regeneration or recovery bonus), but the status resistance portion stacks up to five times (just like every other single-enhancement status resistance bonus).

The ring around the power icon suggests it is a targeted AoE power instead of a PBAoE power. I'm guessing this was changed for the experimental build and was never put back to the correct icon afterwards.

I wasn't, but I checked on a Brute as well. Same thing. The "fury taunt" icon that shows up in the buff bar is unrelated to Cross Punch and often shows up whenever you use any of your attack powers. Tankers have the same thing happen with their Gauntlet power.

I checked City of Data and the power data looks like it's supposed to. I checked on the beta server to be sure and I'm getting the expected 10% recharge buff and 10% tohit buff, according to this screenshot: However, there's no icon that appears in the buff bar when these bonuses are active. An argument could probably be made for that to show in the buff bar, but the bonuses are working like they're supposed to, and this is far from the only stat-enhancing bonus that doesn't show up in the buff bar.

Speaking about the US here, but 21 wasn't chosen arbitrarily (sure, it was based on dubious science but that's not the point) and while the individual states technically can set their drinking age however they want, there's federal money tied to keeping it at 21 so that's where it is everywhere.

All this and its duration is only 30 seconds instead of the 60 seconds the in-set versions get. Conserve Power at least had the same 90-second duration the old in-set version had. EDIT: I suppose I'll just plug this now, because I've said it elsewhere before - this change and the new sustains in the new pools are cool, and I understand the epic recharge penalty is a thing (even if I vehemently disagree with it), but the 8-10 minute recharge timer takes what should be tempting power picks and kneecaps them before they've even left the gate.