macskull

That's Thunderspy, and they're reeeeeeeeeeally weird about balance but then call Homecoming unbalanced because of things like Kinetics on MMs (which is unironically one of the worst MM secondaries because of how hard it is to effectively leverage its powers on an MM). They've got some cool ideas but a lot of their changes are so off-the-walls bananas that I can't really see it as anything more than an occasional playground.

Fiery Embrace used to work like Embrace of Fire (the Dominator version) and gave a straight damage boost. The exact boost varied by AT but for Scrappers it was 100% boost to fire damage for 20 seconds and 80% boost to all other types of damage for 10 seconds. In Issue 18 it was changed to add additional fire damage to all your attacks (but the old +dam version was kept in PvP). The way this is accomplished is by setting a "global chance mod" from 0% to 100% for any power with the "Fiery Embrace" tag in order to tell the game to add the extra fire damage. Unfortunately this means adding that information to every single damage power Scrappers can use so it's probably an oversight that Scrapper epic and pool powers don't have the tags, especially since Fiery Embrace's description says it "causes all your damaging powers to do bonus fire damage." TL;DR: FE used to affect pool powers back when it was a damage buff and those powers never had the correct flags added to them when FE got changed 13 years ago.

The initial testing was something like "pick up glowie and get it from point A to point B, if you die you drop it" but that was hard to test without full teams.

Issue 27 Page 5, not Issue 5. So... about 10 months ago. Capture the Flag and Control Points don't do anything, IIRC. We did some testing with objective based SG PvP early last year and it was fun but it needed quite a bit of polish to be ready and I don't think it's a priority since most of the PvP changes on Homecoming have been the result of a single dev's spare time.

I'm sure you didn't intend it, but your entire post is a great argument for doing away with the name release policy altogether. You say I am "part of the problem" (but conveniently ignored the part of my post where I said I'd let someone have a name if they asked for it) but no one's been able to demonstrate that there is even a problem in the first place. The name release policy was announced in May 2019 with the intention of being implemented within a few weeks of that announcement, but here we are over four years later and we've only recently implemented the "warning" phase. Why? The team wanted to make absolutely sure they did it right so no one lost names accidentally. That should tell you how attached players are to their character names or, at least, how attached the HC team presumes them to be. I don't think a character-based login timer is the right way to go. I could have a low level character that I only play rarely because the group I play with only gets together one or two nights every few months. I could primarily focus my attention on two or three characters while having a much larger number that I play less often, but that doesn't mean I want the names of those other characters to suddenly get snatched up by someone else. Account activity is probably the way to go, if the policy is actually implemented in the first place. Now that being said (and this is anecdotal evidence, so take it how you will) I occasionally see posts on the forum or on Discord about how someone is returning to Homecoming after not having played in years. I know if I was someone who'd played for a while, left for whatever reason, and came back a couple years down the line to find all my characters had had their names taken, I probably wouldn't bother continuing to play. I haven't really seen a good argument for a name release policy other than "I want a name someone else already has." You can't really make an argument from a cost or database size perspective, since that character occupies what is basically a single entry in a database which ends up being essentially meaningless in the grand scale of the entire game. As far as how other games have handled name release for inactivity, I'll present two examples: City of Heroes during its original run and WoW. City of Heroes: The original version of the policy came out about a year and a half after launch in late 2005. Players with inactive accounts, where "inactive" was considered "unpaid for at least 90 days," had names released (among other things like removing SG membership) if the character was under level 35. Maintaining a paid subscription, even if you didn't log in, prevented this from happening. The original policy lasted about six months before it was stopped. The policy was brought back in late 2007, but only affected characters level 5 and under. Both versions of the policy were enforced via a script manually run during server maintenance, but this was an infrequent occurrence. The aforementioned script was only ever run twice, because the development team decided the policy didn't free up an appreciable number of names. While the name release policy technically continued to exist even after the game went F2P, it was never enforced for the reasons I mentioned above. WoW: I don't know what the original policy was, or if there even was one, but as of 2018 if your account hadn't been active for two expansions or four years, whichever came sooner, names were released for all your characters. At some point between 2018 and 2022 that policy changed and now only requires your account to be inactive for two years before releasing all character names.

It takes longer to get to 50 now, even using those methods, than it's taken any time in the last four years, and the pace is downright glacial compared to some points when the game was live (15-minute 50s, anyone?). You're also assuming that just because "it is no big challenge to get to level 50" (it never was) that a person can't have developed an attachment to a character name or concept, and I know I would be more than a little upset if I came back to the game after a year away and the characters I'd played for years had lost their names. I don't like the name release policy, period. I am 100% camping on some good names on characters I don't play, and would absolutely give one up if someone asked for it, but that has never once happened to me. Besides, at the end of the day, it shouldn't really matter what level the character is, or whether I'm attached to them or not - I came up with a concept and/or a name and the name happened to be available, so I took it. If you come up with a great idea and you find out the name's already taken by someone who hasn't played the game since 2019, you can do what everyone else does in that situation and... come up with a new name.

Maybe I'm smoking crack and the last year has been a fever dream, but wasn't PvP in SG bases re-enabled in Page 5?

The problem with this is you would be taking an already-small PvP population and spreading them out over even more places.

You've probably already seen how vehemently opposed players are to something like that based on responses in this thread. I think, for the most part, this game is very easy and casual and a game like that tends to attract the sort of person who isn't interested in the level of challenge PvP brings.

I'll usually roll a new character or change up the build on an existing one if I find out about an interesting power combination - my Energy/Fire Stalker is a result of that. Unfortunately, it just so happens that a lot of what I consider interesting ends up as the target of a bugfix or nerf...

I don't think it would. It would be a nice bonus for people who already PvP, but rewards you can already get more reliably from other sources aren't going to attract new players.

This is a pretty common misconception. I already mentioned it a few pages back in this thread, but the only PvE-affecting change made solely because of PvP was reducing the tick rate of Hurricane. People like to point at travel suppression as an example of something PvP caused, but 1) some travel powers already had negative side effects while they were running to discourage their use in combat and 2) travel suppression doesn't really exist in PvP anymore but it's still in PvE. On the other hand, people conveniently skip over the improvements that made their way to PvE but were originally implemented for PvP reasons, like toggles not dropping while mezzed or melee attacks gaining an across-the-board 40% range buff. As to your last point, making everyone exactly the same is, I supposed, balanced in a way, but it's pretty boring, especially for a game that prides itself on variety and customization. You're always going to run into a rock-paper-scissors situation in PvP and that's not necessarily a bad thing (and that's why teammates exist). It's also worth pointing out that between instant level 50s, accolades purchasable at vendors for 10k inf, and an extremely affordable supply of enhancements on the market, the barrier to PvP in this game has probably never been lower. More on-topic, though: Prismatic Aethers are like... 4 million inf on the AH? I'm not opposed to having them drop from PvP defeats but it would probably be tied to a timer or rep like PvP IOs are and even if you wanted to farm them you wouldn't be able to make them at a meaningful speed compared to just doing PvE or buying them from the AH.

I'll elaborate: the PvP community at large cannot stop toxic players from being toxic any more than you can stop people from engaging in catgurl ERP in Pocket D on Everlasting. The organized PvP community, as it existed, did a fairly good job of policing itself ingame and the more toxic members of that community often found themselves unwelcome, but there's no similar amount of organization or community for zone PvP - anyone can go into Recluse's Victory and talk shit in broadcast, hit you with -jump, and Wormhole you into a dumpster. As I said earlier though, enemy chat is disabled by default in PvP zones so if the shit-talking is what you take issue with, that's as simple as restoring the default chat settings or placing the offending player on ignore. If you take issue with how they are playing the game your best bet is to report them and hope the GMs agree that what they're doing is griefing. Or, I dunno, leave the zone and come back in a little bit when they're bored because they can't find anyone to attack. Here's a video of some early alpha gameplay of CoH. If you watch a few seconds past the timestamp in the link, you'll specifically hear the arena and PvP mentioned. Just because it wasn't originally in the game doesn't mean the game wasn't built for it. If your argument for "the game wasn't built for PvP" is "there was no PvP when the game launched," then I suppose you could apply that same logic to levels 41 through 50, respecs, being able to run more than one defensive toggle at the same time, badges, capes, auras, multiple costume slots, or the entirety of CoV. PvP was added to the game about a year after launch, which in the grand scheme of things isn't long at all (less than eight months after respecs were added, about six months before CoV, two years before Inventions, and five years before the Incarnate system). You say lots of changes were made to PvP to try to balance it like that is a bad thing - games with a healthy PvP scene continually made balance passes and adjustments to ensure "what's good" is continuously changing so the meta doesn't get stale. Luckily, changes to the game which were made solely for the sake of PvP balance didn't affect PvE (except for Hurricane's tick rate getting nerfed, that one I will concede). PvP in this game is not perfectly balanced, nor is it perfectly balanced in any MMO. Sure, you could add a game mode where every player just gets to pick an NPC's predetermined powers and everyone has exactly the same build, but that's... boring and runs counter to everything that makes this game unique. "Some builds aren't viable in PvP," I hear you say, and to that I agree you may have a point - but that's also true for lots of things in this game. If I'm wanting to fire farm I'm probably not going to do it with an Empathy/Archery Defender because there are better options. If I'm trying to solo an AV I want a build with lots of single-target damage and some -regen, and not every character is going to have those things. PvP's no different. I did not say any of those things. PvP does have its issues, but they're fewer and less significant than they've been at any time since Issue 13. I don't really buy the player toxicity argument either - every PvPer had to start somewhere and they probably also encountered their share of toxic players but they wanted to understand what was happening in the game and why it was happening so they could get better, instead of going "that person was mean to me, so I'm not coming back." I'm also not complaining about how PvPers are treated so much as the type of responses the very mention of PvP tends to elicit on these forums, on Discord, or ingame - just from this thread alone we've got responses running the gamut from "PvP can die in a fire" to "I would rather get AIDS" to "I'd sooner gouge out my eyeballs with anthrax laced sponges." That kind of attitude may well stop an interested player from even trying to PvP.

Others have already pointed out these exclusions are for your own powers and other players' powers will still add to your own stats, but the one bit that really bothers me from this whole change is the interaction own-player stealth powers now have with Super Speed. Super Speed's stealth has stacked with everything else since time immemorial but for some reason it had to get dragged kicking and screaming into the changes from page 5. I didn't have access to a computer or an internet connection pretty much from the time page 4 was in beta until well after page 5 went live so I was very confused when I came back to the game and was getting routinely spotted by everything while running Arctic Fog + Super Speed like I'd always done.

Yeah, but it's hard to find one that's as fast-paced as CoH's is. The almost FPS-like speed and twitchiness is what made it popular with a large group back in the day, but that's also probably why it isn't more popular now - the game is extremely simple and pretty easy and PvP is a huge departure from what most players understand about the game.

Brute by the Foot, Brute Roll-Up, Broot Loops, Brute Salad, Quadratic Stormula...

You could liken it to Rebirth's auction house: the "bucketing" that HC has doesn't exist there and population is pretty low, so while the auction house technically exists there's no guarantee the item you're looking for is available at any price because there is simply no supply so you have to go through alternate means to get it. It really is unfortunate that HC's player base isn't high enough to sustain a PvP population because PvP in this game has always been fun and some of the PvP QoL improvements we've had over the last few years have been the best things since Issue 13 happened.

Sure, but there's a definite pattern - PvP-related threads outside of the PvP section of the forums tend to attract the type of poster who says things like "PvP can die in a fire" (a direct quote from the tenth post in this thread, for example). That's not a Homecoming-specific problem either: it happened all the time on the old boards as well. It seems like an inevitability that whenever a "what would it take to get you to PvP" thread pops up, people come out of the woodwork to shit on PvP. Like... that's great, you don't like PvP, but that response is the ingame equivalent of telling someone to take their car to the dump when they ask how to change a headlight bulb. It's not constructive, it's not helpful, and it's not relevant. Even responses along the lines of "fix the players" are worthless because 1) that's not how it works and 2) the "toxic" PvPers are and have always been a tiny minority. Then there are the "this game wasn't designed for PvP" and "PvP isn't balanced" responses because at least in the case of the former it is demonstrably, objectively incorrect, and in the case of the second, it's a gross oversimplification of a bunch of pretty complex issues. PvE in this game isn't balanced either.

These are already options in the arena interface. You can disable set bonuses, accolades can be bought for peanuts at a PvP vendor, and you can disable some or all Incarnate abilities. As far as PvP zone gameplay goes, all non-Alpha Incarnate abilities are disabled and accolades don't work unless they're the PvP-specific version you get at the vendor for 10k inf. It's unfortunate that historically zone PvP, which was probably a player's first introduction to PvP in the game, tended to attract the type of player who would be seen as toxic. However, enemy chat is disabled by default in PvP zones. It seems much of the complaining about "toxic PvPers" came from players who went into a PvP zone - despite the multiple warnings that they could be and would be attacked by other players - and got attacked by other players. Some of the most fun spontaneous PvP I've had is when a few players go into RV for the pillbox and AV badges, others show up to hunt them down, people on both sides get backup, and all of a sudden there are 4 teams of players all chasing after each other while still trying to do badges.

"Reasonable" is subjective in this case. Besides, if there's no shortage of ways to make influence, the price of something shouldn't really matter to you all that much. Outside of some Hami-O and D-Sync enhancements the most expensive items on the market are what, 15-20 million? That's pretty damn cheap relative to how quickly a level 50 can get inf just from playing the game. You'll also notice that with rare exceptions IOs, ATOs, and Winter enhancements almost never sell for more than 25 million inf because there's a practical cap thanks to the existence of merit vendors. There's a transition point somewhere in the 20-25 million inf range where you roughly break even getting your enhancement from a merit vendor instead of off the market, and if market prices go any higher than that smart people just dump merits at the vendor and end up flooding the market with supply of that item until prices go back down.

If nothing else that's been done over the last 4 years has managed to get more people involved in PvP, adding one more reward as a drop for player defeats won't do it either. The PvP scene was fairly active the first 2 or so years after HC popped up, probably out of some amount of nostalgia, but Homecoming's population is just too small to have any kind of consistent, meaningful PvP presence outside the occasional zone interaction.

Boosters are weird, they're a 5% boost for each booster so you get 1.25x effectiveness if you have 5 of them. They've already been called out as something that may get "adjusted" in the future. Looking at that chart from the wiki there's huge jumps from 10-15, 15-20, and 20-25, but then much smaller increases over the rest of the range. I can't say for certain why it's like that, but I would guess it's because the original devs wanted the lower-level generic IOs to approximate TO and DO effectiveness, and for level 25-30 generic IOs to approximate SO effectiveness. Of course now that TOs and DOs have largely disappeared from the game SOs are a total no-brainer and it might be worth looking into smoothing out that progression curve.

Those numbers are for single-aspect IOs.

That's true, it does depend on leveling speed. From an efficiency/cost standpoint I think the move is to get by on drops and the occasional SO purchase from the AH or a vendor until 22, get a full set of level 25 SOs at level 22 (since leveling starts to slow down in the mid 20s), and then replace them all with generic level 30 IOs once you hit 27. At that point you can just slot any newly gained slots with the highest level generic IO you can slot at the time.

That is absolutely not typical or representative of how most people play the game. I am specifically directing my advice and information toward the OP, who was looking for a way to save money using the IO system. You are correct in that generic IOs are less powerful than a +3 SO until level 40, but if all you care about is the highest enhancement benefit you're paying to upgrade your SOs every single level until level 37 and that is absolutely not cheaper than just slotting generic IOs. The advice already given in this thread says a level 25 generic IO is a little less effective than an even-level SO and a level 30 generic IO is a little more effective. If you're interested in cost the no-brainer move is to start slotting generic IOs at either level 22 or 27. You also mentioned SOs at very low levels, which do exist, but the first 15 or so levels go by so fast that you're throwing money out the window if you're trying to constantly upgrade your SOs. I don't bother slotting anything except drops until around level 20 or so.