macskull

"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.

Sure, from levels 32 through 35. Before level 32 you can't even slot it so it does nothing for you. As soon as you hit 36 that level 35 SO is now -1 and a level 25 IO is now slightly better, and then once you hit 39 that level 25 IO is now infinitely better since an outleveled SO gives 0% benefit. You can also slot that level 25 IO at level 22 and you're guaranteed that enhancement value forever unlike an SO which needs to be upgraded to maintain that value. I'm also not sure why you're bringing SO level into the discussion because absolute level doesn't matter for SOs, only relative level. EDIT: Updated some numbers, since a level 25 IO is better than a -1 SO.

I'm sorry, are you suggesting that SOs are more effective at higher levels?

This discussion is solely based on cost in a direct comparison to SOs.

Slotting level 25 or 30 generic IOs has a higher upfront cost than a similar SO but the benefit is that it's a one-time expense and then you never need to worry about it again.

You can manually create those directories and it'll work just fine.

This is pretty important - I did a speed Aeon recently and it was the first time I'd run Aeon at all since the very early versions in testing at the beginning of last year. I was thoroughly lost most of the time, but I also expected that to happen, and made it clear when I joined that I hadn't run the TF before.

I mean, if you want to get super technical, Elixir of Life puts an unresistible 4-second mag 1000 hold on whatever teammate you rezzed with it. Until Issue 13 that power would drop all your toggles, even if you were a melee AT, and until last August (page 4) it would drop your offensive toggles as well. Granted, I feel like you would absolutely know you were under the effects of that power because you'd have to die to have it cast on you but...

I've joined task forces that were advertised as "speedy" and then the leader decides to set difficulty to +4 "for more XP and inf" and that's when I bow out and hop on the next team trying to do it. There are plenty of "steamroll" or "kill most" task forces that are advertised as such, and if I'm trying to get inf/XP/drops I'll join one of those (or more likely, I'll just farm, it's faster anyways). What I can't do, though, is farm reward merits or other things (prismatic aether, D-syncs, etc.). TL;DR: if I wanted XP and inf from defeats I would farm instead.

Here's a weird one that I think is pretty uncommon: EM/Fire. It's not nearly as good as it was before Burn got nerfed but even after the change Burn reliably procs the hide ATO which lets you do an attack chain like Burn -> TF -> fast ET -> snipe -> fast ET -> rinse and repeat. Burn + an epic AoE make up for the relative lack of AoE in EM. It is squishier than almost any other melee character I've played outside of Barrier or team buffs, but insta-deleting things with a bunch of fast-activating powers is nice.

I don't quite understand how the AH history bug came into being, since it wasn't there on live. I suppose maybe bucketing things together did something, but I can't see any obvious connections.

Salvage is still seeded but the prices the seeded inventory is listed at is significantly higher than the going rate, so the seeded supply just exists as an "oh shit" backup. All the super packs are seeded since the old Paragon Rewards system doesn't exist anymore, and ATOs and super packs no longer drop as rewards from mob defeats.

Yes, the old character database is still out there. No, you'll never be able to import those characters onto Homecoming.

It isn’t possible to count unique players without IP address data, and I’m not certain even the devs have that level of fidelity. However, we can make some assumptions and observations and infer an answer. Player counts are stable over the last year, and the individual server populations have remained proportional to the total population. This could mean a lot of players multibox a lot of the time, or it’s relatively uncommon, or - most likely - it’s somewhere in the middle. There is no reason to think the proportion of players multiboxing changes enough to matter, or we would see that reflected in the graph. Regardless of multiboxing, the point of this isn’t to focus on the number of unique players but rather to show that the total population has remained relatively constant.

Weekends are the peaks. If you look at the graphs on Discord you can see the same thing happen.

"Homecoming is dying." "The servers are empty, no one plays anymore." "It's so hard to find teams even on Excelsior." "The lower-population servers are a ghost town." "Fire Blast is in desparate need of buffs." "Regen is a good set when you use an entire tray of oranges and purples every fight." Have you or a friend heard someone utter those phrases, or ones like them, ingame or on the forums? Or even on Discord? Well, here's some cold hard data. Background: Last March I was curious about player count because it felt like less people were playing, but I had no actual data to back up my feelings. Sure, the HC Discord has player count statistics, but they only go back seven days so they're kind of useless for long-term analysis. I initially started my tracking by manually checking player counts from the server status page at a certain time once a week. This was fine, unless I didn't have an internet connection at 6PM on a Saturday, or I forgot to check, or I forgot to write down the number, or Mercury was in tardigrade, or Corey was in the house, or whatever else the cosmos could dream up to disrupt my plans. Oh, and I was about to drop off the face of the earth for half a year with no way to even get onto the internet, let alone update anything at all, and a tracking system like this that relies on manual labor is definitely not going to work when the person doing that labor isn't around to do it. "Surely there must be a better way," I thought. Turns out, there is. Enter Python and my "the only coding experience I have is a few months of Java 15 years ago and even then I could barely make a functional program" self. Turns out, you don't really have to write your own code from scratch when what you need is 90% complete somewhere else - you just have to find the pieces you want and put them together, then make them work for your specific task. In my case, I wanted a script that would do the following things: Pull the player numbers from the server status page. Put those numbers into a Google Sheets document. Repeat steps 1 and 2 at a certain interval. Use Google Sheets to determine the maximum player count for each server (and total) for a given day. Graph these maximums. Simple, yeah? Not so much. So many headaches. Took me a solid 3 days of tweaking code and tweaking my Sheets document to get things working. Google Sheets is weird about filters and zeroes, so I had to get creative with Google's query language to get the data in a format that would give a user-friendly graph. The result: A 50ish-line Python script which does everything in steps 1 and 2 above, an AWS virtual host which handles running the script every 15 minutes (and hosts everything since my computer is not always online), and a Google Sheets document with... just a few lines of data. Today's the one-year anniversary of when I got the whole thing up and running, so here's a year in review! So, player numbers did what, exactly? This. They did this. (Ignore those weird dips in January and February, the script pulled no data for a week or so for some unknown reason). There are some significant dates for the peaks and valleys: 28 August 2022: Issue 27 Page 4 released. 2378 peak players, almost 200 more than any other day over the past year. 25 December 2022: Christmas. 1450 peak players. Makes sense, right? The release date for Issue 27 Page 5 isn't statistically significant and is buried somewhere in those peaks in mid-October 2022. More macro analysis: player numbers are roughly similar to where they were this time a year ago. They peak in the summer then fall off in November and December. TL;DR: Reports of Homecoming's death are greatly exaggerated. That being said, there is extreme stratification in the server populations. Excelsior tends to have a population greater than the other four servers combined and Indomitable and Reunion really are mostly empty. I suspect there is nothing that can be done about this, but player population and proportional share of server population has remained relatively stable so I suspect we're simply sitting at a baseline. In other words, the people who are still playing the game four years after it came back into the public eye are here to stay, and any large population changes (down or up) aren't going to happen. One more thing: If you want to play around with an interactive version of the graph above, check the links in my signature.

Oddly enough, April 2nd had the highest concurrent peak player count (about 2115) since Halloween. I've got about a year's worth of data now and from what I can see November through January were the slowest months (makes sense, it's the holidays) but other than the weird peak at the beginning of April player numbers have been relatively stable over the past year. I'm assuming that peak was due to the Mapserver event but the weekday player numbers this week aren't anything significantly different than they've been.

No, they're both "Moderate Increased Range." The PvP-specific range bonuses are separate from the non-PvP-specific ones but Experienced Marksman's bonus is active in PvE as well.

The question then becomes: what is "authentic?" The game was constantly changing during its original run. Maybe there's a point in the game's past you could look back at and say "I want to play the game as it was then" but you end up missing out on tons of QoL improvements which came later. For what it's worth, I agree with the other poster in this thread who said that even if the game came back as it was at shutdown with similar player numbers to what Homecoming has, I'd stay here. I don't have the time or energy to deal with the exhausting grind that so many systems in the game had. I think it's also worth pointing out the reason Homecoming started off very differently from the live game is because the code base HC uses had over 6 years of improvements and changes after the live game shut down. Many of those changes were to simply make the game playable with the tiny population which existed while the game was "secret," and the other servers out there working off the I24 codebase are having to find different ways to address those problems - for example, the barely-functional market from the live game is exponentially worse when there are only a few dozen concurrent players most nights. Hopping over to, say, Rebirth and seeing the last 5 sale history for a purple IO go back nine months is disheartening - sure, they've changed merit vendor costs and added new ways to IO your characters, but they still require grind. This is largely because it was the first publicly-accessible server that was stable enough to handle large populations and didn't get nuked from orbit after three days by a scared admin. Homecoming's head start all but ensured it was (and would always be) the server where the vast majority of players ended up. I would have to go digging through my post history to find, but a year or so ago I did some digging because someone insisted this wasn't true, but HC had something like 2 weeks of lead time over any of the other currently-active servers.

WoW is an anomaly in the MMO world and using it as a comparison is going to make anything look bad. But, we'll use your numbers. We'll assume "tens of thousands of players" to mean 50,000 which is probably generous. At its peak WoW had 12 million players. That 50,000 people playing vanilla WoW on private servers is... 0.4% of the maximum player count. That's essentially insignificant.