macskull

Getting the accolade benefits more easily is achieving balance. I'll agree that removing the accolade bonuses would also achieve balance but that's balance via nerf instead of balance via buff and PvPers almost always get the former instead of the latter. Let me explain general PvP build philosophy to you, in the hopes you'll understand why your suggestion is not a good one. In a PvP build you build for capped HP first, 41 or more points of KB protection if you're not melee, 60-90% recharge, and usually 50%-ish range bonus. Those aren't hard and fast rules, but they're pretty consistent across most ranged AT builds. There are already some powerset combinations that would probably be good in a PvP environment but aren't usable because you can't make a build that meets those requirements without gimping yourself. Additionally, PvP has diminishing returns on set bonuses and buffs - but hit points are the one thing that doesn't. In order for my character to be effective either in solo or team PvP, I need to stay alive long enough to do my job (debuff, heal, buff, damage, etc) and with the current iteration of PvP hit points are the single most important factor in whether I'm able to do that. Building for the HP cap alone is tricky on some ATs and if I don't get that extra 20% from accolades I'm either having to make serious build sacrifices in other areas (i.e. I'm less survivable) or I just don't have as much HP as I should (i.e. I'm less survivable). Making a good PvP build is tricky enough the way things are. See above. And I don't fault or begrudge you from enjoying that. I don't personally care about badging but I know there are people that do. My point was that we're not asking for the badges but rather for the bonuses. That being said, I don't think saying "this change will cheapen my experience" is any kind of reasonable justification to not make changes. Let's say that the badges were also granted along with the accolade powers for PvP - does that suddenly remove any pleasure you get from getting the badges, or that you got in the past? If it does, you may need to take a good hard look in the mirror.

I don't think anyone specified accolades versus accolade powers previously because that's a distinction that should have been obvious, in my opinion.

I don't care about the badges. Like, at all. Almost all my characters have the badges you get from leveling and accolading and that's it, apart from a few incidentals. I care about the accolade powers that are granted as a result of getting the badge. You're arguing semantics at this point. Setting aside any in-game bonuses you get from badges, what does earning a badge get you, other than adding one more to your total badge count, or a new character title, or bragging rights? Absolutely nothing. I'm never going to go out of my way to get the Really Hard Way badge, for example, because other than the thing I just listed, I get nothing out of it.

I'd venture that even among people who get the accolades and don't even consider stepping foot in PvP, only a small portion of them actually give two shits about the badges - they're after the bonuses.

Once again going to point out that asking to not have to do some PvE in order to be competitive in PvP isn't "gimme teh shineez nao kthxbai," whatever the hell that means. If the concern is "giving things to people for free," here's a few counter examples: Until I19, Fitness was an optional power pool that was practically required for every build. Where was the outrage when the pool was made inherent? Until I17, Khelds/SoA required a level 50 on the account to be unlocked. Where was the outrage when the unlock level was changed to 20? Until I21 you had to be level 14 and take a prerequisite power to get a travel power. Where was the outrage when this was changed to level 4 with no prerequisite? Until I12 you always had a base 75% chance to hit an even-con NPC regardless of your level. Where was the outrage when the beginner's luck mechanic was added? Until I19 you had to know which zones had Yellow Line and which zones had Green Line trains and zone-hop to get where you wanted. Where was the outrage when the train lines were merged? If there was any outrage about any of those (all QoL improvements, by the way), it was from the "I had to do it so they should too" crowd which honestly smacks more of entitlement than the people asking for those changes. "I had to do it so they should too" is, quite frankly, a pretty shitty way to justify withholding QoL improvements.

Did you read my edit? You'll find the answer there, and probably in at least one other post in this thread where someone asked the same question re: Justin that you did. Playing the "entitlement" card is a cop-out, plain and simple. For some reason unbeknownst to me I keep responding to your posts, and you keep on not getting it - all that's being asked for is a completely reasonable QoL change. Yes, it'll involve some developer time. No, it won't benefit a majority of players (it won't actually have any effect on a majority of players). No, that doesn't mean it's a waste of said developer time.

Remind me again which server was designated by the Homecoming team as the PvP server? Last I checked, it wasn't Justin. EDIT, because reasons: It's not a perfect solution. It's a workable one sometimes. Here is a scenario: I have a match scheduled for a certain time. All players involved have cleared their schedules for a few hours for that time. That same day Justin goes down for an update. This update introduces a bug which breaks quite a bit of stuff, but which would have been caught before it went to a live server. Now everyone who blocked their time off has to figure out a different time, but no one knows when that'll be because there's no ETA on a patch to fix the bug. Or a real-life example - when Homecoming moved their servers to OVH Justin was down for an extended period of time. You're saying no one should be PvPing during that time? What about the times when there are "release candidate" patches on Justin, and all the extra freebies are disabled? Am I screwed if my team needs me on X character but I don't have that one? Justin as a solution isn't being disregarded. It's been discussed in the PvP Discord before, at least for hosting tournaments and events, but ultimately the issues are the ones I described and that's why it's not a good solution. By the way, the idea that you'd be okay with keeping a second instance of the game running as a chat client is completely absurd (plus I'm not going to be tabbing back and forth between instances to check chat channels while I'm PvPing because that's how I get killed). I think it was Issue 16 that significantly revised most of the accolade powers and removed almost all the PvP requirements from them because people didn't want to PvP in order to get PvE bonuses. There's precedent there. I understand that some people would rather not engage in PvP to get PvE stuff, and that's fine, but why is it so wrong to want to remove at least some of the PvE you have to engage in for PvP?

The counter to that is simple - people that didn't want to PvP to get the PvP IOs didn't have to. They could buy them on the auction house. Hell, that's how most PvPers got theirs too (using inf that they got from PvE'ing or playing the market, not from PvP). Most of the supply came from people AFK farming them because the drop rates were so abysmally low. What @Dan Petrois trying to say (I think) is that there is nothing in this game that provides you PvE benefit that requires you to engage in PvP to obtain, but almost everything that you need to engage in PvP requires you to PvE.

I think you're underestimating exactly how much difference the extra 20% HP makes. I understand that you likely don't PvP so it makes it difficult to explain, but believe me when I say that disabling accolades for everyone isn't a solution anyone would be happy with.

I should have been more specific - I was referring specifically to IOs and accolades in this case. Most PvP builds will do just fine with only the alpha slot and that's about 10 minutes of work. I think that was brought up earlier in this thread. On live, a lot of the high-end competitive PvP took place on the test server because you could easily copy characters over and build however you wanted. However, the test server was unreliable at times (it was taken down for updates or maintenance during matches with no heads-up) and there were oftentimes new and interesting bugs because the test server was exactly that - a test server. Justin has the same issues. At some point we may decide to do things on Justin especially because the "free everything" that's there is quite appealing from a PvP perspective (I already make extensive use of it to test things) but it isn't reliable. Besides, not all PvP takes place in the arena, and if everyone who is PvPing is on the test server they're not able to monitor global channels and friends on the regular servers. There are plenty of times where I'm killing time in a PvP zone and see my friends are forming up a TF or something, so I switch and hop on that. Am I supposed to be running two separate instances of the game whenever I want to PvP? EDIT: In response to the edit about "no one wants to acknowledge removing accolades" - I'm acknowledging it, and I'm going to refer to you my next post for that. It's a non-starter.

I seriously doubt there are any PvPers who would leave because they have to accolade their characters. The point was made that it's lowering the barrier to entry, which is a good thing, but that's more a positive side effect than the main purpose of the request. Honestly, if we had the ability to get insta-50 and IO'd and accoladed but could only use those characters in a PvP environment, I'd be completely okay with that - but that's not going to happen. The OP's request is a far more reasonable one You don't have to accolade, get incarnates, get purples, get ATOs, any of that other stuff to PvE. You can do just fine on an un-accoladed and SO'd build because this game really is that easy. That's not the case in PvP.

Running through content quickly has more to do with the players at the keyboard than the powers they're using. You can do Numina in about 30 minutes with a team that knows where the hunt missions are and splits them up. I think the argument re: ATT/TT would've held more water back on live where powers like that were gated behind veteran badges or Paragon Market transactions, but these days they're available for very little inf to everyone from level 1 onwards. Not saying that doesn't mean TFs shouldn't get updated, but you can do even longer ones like Dr. Q in about an hour.

That isn't what's being asked for though. Did you read through the thread and see the posts where I clarified the OP's intention?

...That's not happening in Bloody Bay, I can tell you that much. I've gotten Shivans and Warburg nukes dozens of times since the game came back, on the most populated server, and I think I've seen another player not on my team once.

I don't think their point had anything to do with forum PvP.

Refer to my previous point - I'm guessing that poster doesn't want to engage in PvP and so avoids those zones. That's understandable, but what I'm getting at is if there are no other players in that zone (which is the case almost all the time) then it's functionally identical to any other zone in the game. They're literally not engaging in the content they don't want to engage in and still getting something out of it (i.e. temp powers, buffs, etc.). I'll reiterate an edit to one of my earlier posts - you have already said you support the idea in the OP, but now you're suddenly deciding it's entitlement and you're against it, you're arguing for the sake of arguing, and I don't have the inclination to indulge that any further. EDIT: For what it's worth I'm sure there would be an uproar if Shivans/Warburg nukes were removed from the game entirely, even though the majority of the players don't care to venture into PvP zones. I'd be totally okay with making them obtainable by different means.

Well, since you'd be the only player in the zone, by definition you couldn't possibly engage in player versus player content. For what it's worth, before I started PvPing I also tended to avoid things that required me to go into PvP zones. If I wanted to get temp powers or buffs I'd check and see if anyone else was in the zone, and if they were I just waited until later. It's not hard to avoid PvP in a PvP zone if you don't want to engage in it.

Going into a PvP zone devoid of players isn't "investing that time in PvP content."

For what it's worth, I would say Bloody Bay is completely empty 99.9% of the time so it's functionally a PvE zone, and it takes all of about 5 minutes to get your Shivans.

That's a good question - you can see your target's HP and end in the target window. For example, I know a Blaster's HP cap is 1847, and if everyone is in Pocket D waiting for a match to start I can click on people to see that. If I see one of the other team's Blasters only has 1600 HP you can bet I'm going to be calling them as a target more often. I might not know exactly what someone's IO slotting looks like but I know what the general build philosophy for PvP characters is (basically, with very few exceptions reaching your AT's HP cap is #1) so I know roughly what their build looks like.

Your argument would make sense if PvE had anything to do with PvP, but it doesn't. Let me be clear - I'm perfectly fine with spending the time to get the stuff on my PvE characters because that's doing PvE to improve my PvE experience. I'm trying to minimize the amount of PvE I have to do to improve my PvP experience. How do you not understand how those are different? EDIT: You've already said earlier in this thread that you think this suggestion is a good idea so at this point it seems like you're arguing for the sake of arguing and as such I won't be responding any further.

Nothing is preventing anyone from getting them and no one is saying the time of a PvPer is more important than anyone else. This is a QoL request, one that PvPers have been asking for for a long time, nothing else. Imagine the outrage if PvE'ers were forced to PvP in order to get necessary items for their characters. We accept that we're going to have to PvE at least sometimes to get our PvP characters ready but eliminating some of the grind would be nice. Do I see it bringing in new players in appreciable numbers? No, not really - but that's not why it's being asked for. Sure, it's easy, and we do it because we have to. It's not the ease of doing it, it's the grind. Takes longer to accolade a character than it does to level them, normally. What we're asking for is to not have to. I'd be willing to bet most of us don't bother accolading our PvE characters because there's not much reason to.

To address your first point: I'm not going to argue that having the +hp/+end accolades in PvE doesn't make you more survivable, but I spent the first four months since the servers came back maining an un-accoladed SO'd Fire/Cold Corruptor and I had zero issues with staying alive. PvE in this game is incredibly easy because the AI is dumb and player characters are incredibly overpowered by comparison, even before figuring in inspirations, IOs, accolades, and incarnate powers. NPCs don't deliberately target you because you have 20% less HP than the guy next to you. In a PvP environment, all other things being equal, you're going to get targeted more often and die faster because you have less time to react. It's not "these are really important," it's "these are essentially mandatory." I think @Waypointhit on most of what I'd say in addition. As an example, I know that roleplayers make up a small fraction of the game's population, yet on live the development team took the time to create and animate a power just for them (Walk, if you're curious). Roleplayers just got a status slash command in the last patch. Base builders have always been a tiny group but they just got a whole bunch of assets introduced in the last patch. See where I'm going with this?

You're not at a handicap for not having accolades in PvE. You're being intentionally obtuse.

I'll bite. PvP in this game has always had a small population. PvP in this game probably has a smaller population because 1) the game's subscriber base has always been small, 2) there really isn't any "goal-oriented" PvP, and 3) because of the nature of the mechanics PvP is much faster-paced and "twitchy" than any other MMO, which is probably the single best part about it. PvP in this game, even post-I13, ruined every other MMO's PvP because of how slow they all feel. It's more akin to an FPS than an MMO and that was one of things that drew players to it. The smaller population doesn't make it any less valid than any other aspect of the game. Sure, that means development resources may not be spent on it as much, but even during the years the private server was up there were at least some changes made to PvP. PvPers have a list of bug fixes and QoL requests and they are being worked on by the development team. PvPers are realists - we know that large sweeping changes are not likely to happen but we can at least ask for some things within reason. This is one of those things. I think the "no one uses it so it's not worth any development time" argument is, quite frankly, complete horseshit and an insult to the people who do use it. Throughout this game's history it's been the underutilized aspects that have gotten attention - entire zones got overhauled because they weren't popular, powersets got buffed because no one played them. This isn't a commercial game with shareholders to appease anymore. I understand the development team is working on their own time but that doesn't mean things can't get done.