battlewraith
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Posts posted by battlewraith
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1 hour ago, Ignatz the Insane said:
At this point in the game, making money is also a non-issue for anyone willing to dip their toes into the Market.
1 hour ago, Ignatz the Insane said:On the flip side, say a player is power leveling an alt to 50 and using Empyrion Merits to fund that character. They're buying large amounts of desirable IOs while contributing almost nothing but Converters to the Market. I'm no economist but that seems bad.
I'm glad you point this out, because I think it's an underlying issue that informs a lot of this discussion.
I suspect the majority of the people who are in favor of, or at least fine with, the conversion nerf are people that routinely make a lot of money on the market. So of course it's not a big deal to them. They, like the emp reaping afk farmers are sitting on a pile of cash. Likewise, a recurring rationale for nerfing the conversion, or farming in general, is that it will possibly lead to inflation.
So what? I hate using the market more than I dislike sitting in a farm. At what point did it become assumed that playing the market to support all of your inf needs was the expected thing to do? Clearly for a lot of people, the optimal way of funding their endeavors is to use the market. So it comes across as very hypocritical to point to some sort of outlier like emp farming, nerf the conversion in a way that affects everyone, shift the desired resource to team based activities and meanwhile ignore the fact that players that like a certain other solo activity in the game can easily make enough inf that this sort of change doesn't even really affect them.
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2 hours ago, Spectral said:
So, I guess the consensus is: Empyreans are like Astrals now... either you have stuff to T4 or they are worthless stuff that accumulates in a corner...
Pretty much. People keep saying that you can send them to alts. Okay, I send them to an alt and use them to do all the incarnates. Now what reason does that alt have to run those missions, particularly when the conversion to merits is nerfed?
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58 minutes ago, Lines said:
The two should be working neatly in tandem, but in CoH I believe that they don't. Where CoH is a game that encourages multiple playthroughs, but the content is underplayed, that to me indicates a colossal design issue (one which I think has existed in the game more or less from the start, gradually getting worse).
I don't see this as a colossal design issue. I think it's actually indicative of the core strength of the game, as well as the primary activity in which I think most players are engaged--creating their own characters. This game is much more open-ended than other MMOs with respect to both character creation and the extent to which these characters are bound to the overall narrative of the game world.
The content is very secondary to my creative goals. It's more like taking a character to the gym, rather than reading a book. The different trials and whatnot are basically like doing reps on different pieces of equipment. I don't pause at the barbells and ponder the lore of how they got there, particularly after using them a bunch of times.
This is something the "this is an MMORPG" fundamentalists don't get. The things that actually made coh special are things that were actually pretty substantial deviations from the formula.
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1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:
CoH as an MMORPG is part of a game genre thats inherently based on character development, lore and gradual progression. individuals expressing surprise or disgruntlement at the devs for releasing updates which are in-line with, or build on the genre feels misguided - CoH is not a pickup and play shooter. exploits and methods to circumvent the standard path are the exception rather than the rule
the “pay to win” elements which were introduced years ago were disliked by some players as they felt it broke the system of gradual progression which all players were locked into - i expect the disgruntlement against AE is rooted in similar beliefs
I think that's a reductive and ultimately destructive way of looking at things. A lot of people are fixated on how they think things should be. A lot of the talk about genre, balance, progression, etc. come across as this nostalgia for gaming in the early 2000s, as if this game were new and being freshly released into the world.
It's not new. It's almost 20 years old. And there are people playing that following their little niche obsessions. Shitting on them and saying they are not playing according to plan is insane, especially when you don't have vast resources to do a whole lot with this antiquated game engine.
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58 minutes ago, arcane said:
Changing incentives is something every MMO dev team does. It is not nefarious, and it does not force players to do anything.
"Something every MMO dev team does"--sure but that says nothing about whether this is a good move or not.
"It is not nefarious" --Nefarious, no. Misguided, could be. Again you're offering a generic platitude in response to this specific set of circumstances.
"does not force players to do anything" -- Right so you've quickly gone from "herding" and "coerced" to "forcing." A policy doesn't have to force people to do something in order to be regarded as bad.
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1 hour ago, arcane said:
I have good news!
Of course you do.
1 hour ago, arcane said:No one is being “herded” or coerced into anything by this patch.
Semantics. The devs are changing rewards for certain content. They are either doing this on a whim for shits and giggles or they are trying to change player behavior. Take your pick.
1 hour ago, arcane said:The very slight shift in incentive structure will impact your ability to solo in exactly zero ways!
Very little would affect your ability to solo. Get rid of the market system, get rid of IOs, get rid of incarnates, etc. none of this would affect your ability to solo. He's talking about the way he plays being nerfed in an attempt to get him to behave differently.
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1 hour ago, Astralock said:
You and others like you just don’t get that City of Heroes is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where teaming with others is not only encouraged, but expected.
If you want to solo as a super-hero, that’s fine. There are other very good video games for that. Batman: Arkham City, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the just released Marvel’s Spider-Man which I understand is excellent…
LOL right. So the people that don't play the way you think they should are shown the door and directed towards other games. I think this is an example of saying the quiet part out loud.
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1 hour ago, arcane said:
I doubt you know much of anything about me. That much is obvious.
I don't need to know anything about you. I was responding to a generically stupid claim about casual players.
1 hour ago, arcane said:(1) all currencies must be useful to everyone.
Absolutely, inanely irrelevant. This debate is about a change to make something currently valuable much less so. It's about the devs intentions to change how players spend their time, not players dealing with the consequences of their choices.
1 hour ago, arcane said:(2) empyreans will be useless once incarnates are done. Wrong.
I said that they would be useless for characters that are done with incarnates. So if I don't intend to use them on an alt, they are of no value.
But wait--I can convert them to cash.
So instead of: emps to merits to IOs/recipes.
I can do: emps to threads to ultimate inspirations to market to some cash value to purchasing IOs/recipes on the market.
Yay? Let's make the market a more mandatory aspect of gameplay than it was before.
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1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:
true, as a balancing change however, a number of trials are getting a significant boost to merit rewards - for casual players it may even result in an increase of merits received per hour of gameplay
It might. But this assumes that the casual player can and will commit to doing the type of content that awards these additional merits. People that wanted to avoid teaming or have limited time to commit to trials are going to be expected to do this. Or just grind a ton more inf in order to make up for the merits that they can no longer expect to get.
1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:a stream lost, a stream gained
Most of this discussion seems to assume a generic player that is only concerned with grinding content in order to get rewards. So in this mindset, you can remove one incentive and put something different in play and as long as the end result is more or less the same numerically, all is good.
To me this is more along the lines of an employee at a company who has been working remotely for a couple of years due to the pandemic or some other reason. Management decides that the in-office culture of the company is suffering because a lot, if not most, of the employees prefer to work remotely. So they mandate a pay decrease for remote employees and offer a bonus for working in the office. And then they are confused when employee morale drops even though people could make more money working in the office.
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2 hours ago, arcane said:
Casual players wouldn’t have so many empyrean merits lying around that they don’t need them for incarnates. From what I can tell the people complaining about the change have been pretty wealthy on average.
I doubt you know that many casual players. Not everyone bothers with incarnates. After this change, emps are going to be worthless for anything other than incarnates which means losing a resource stream for merits. It also means that for characters who are already done with incarnates, emp merits will be a completely worthless reward.
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4 hours ago, America's Angel said:
It's negligible because it only takes ~20 extra minutes to powerlevel to 50.
20 minutes of time.
Ok, let's imagine that we're talking about someone's commute to work. I would imagine that 20 extra minutes on the road would be a really big deal. Now a commute obviously happens more frequently than PLing new characters, but like the commute that extra 20 minutes is going to get tacked on every time a new character is leveled.
I wouldn't call that negligible. But if it is truly no big deal, then why fix it? Someone's really going to tweak a variable that has been in play for (years?) and add extra time wasted on an activity just so that they have the satisfaction of correcting a mistake?
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1 hour ago, Rudra said:
Waste of time and effort: making a power set look like another power set when that power set already exists.
A "powerset" is a combination of animations and effects. Certain combinations already exist. The proposal is to allow players more options to mix and match and create new combinations that don't currently exist. Not sure why it's so hard for you to grasp the distinction.
1 hour ago, Rudra said:May as well just remove all but the best power sets from each AT and give that single power set all the animations.
Lol what? So people are playing underperforming sets simply because the animations are cool?
If people want to play the best sets in a given AT, they'll do it regardless of the animations. That has no bearing on this suggestion.
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On 8/11/2022 at 12:07 AM, Rudra said:
You are asking for power sets in the same AT to have the same animations. No. If you want a specific style or theme and there is already a power set in that AT with that specific style or theme, use that power set.
This isn't even an argument, just somebody dictating their lack of imagination to the rest of the playerbase.
Pro: Players are given more options to realize their character concepts (eg. a vampiric version of Poison Ivy that uses plant animations but has the darkness effects).
Con: Rudra doesn't like it for some reason.
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2 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:
1/3rd is not negligible. its 1/3rd. if they deleted 1/3rd of your inf would you shrug and blow it off? no
Yeah we want to get people out of AE, so let's nerf the boosters so that it takes longer to pl....so that people spend longer on the farm.....in AE.....
These changes, the merit conversion nerf in particular, will do nothing to players who have serious farming routines or regularly make billions on the market. It will fuck over casual players who basically farm when they need to outfit a new alt and who used emp merits to buy enhancements because they don't have tons of cash lying around.
If anything, it will probably make afk farming more mandatory, since a substantial amount of players can't commit to continuous blocks of playtime to do the content that the devs apparently want people to be doing.
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1 hour ago, Astralock said:
Also, comparing marketers to farmers is like comparing apples to oranges. Marketers use and manipulate INF and inventory stock. Farmers create INF and inventory stock. That's a huge difference between the two.
For the purposes of this discussion, it's like the difference between Superman and Clark Kent. Superman doesn't have a job OR wear glasses!
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I remember a friend in 1979 having the 18" Kenner xenomorph action figure. The dark plastic bubble head popped off revealing the skull underneath lol.
As for the science, Alien is a horror movie. The whole point is that this thing is alien: it doesn't make sense, and is constantly changing. Viewing it scientifically is missing the point--which is why ALL of the subsequent films go off the rails and just turn into action/suspense flicks. Viewing it in terms of Giger's art, I'd say the thing is a kind of metaphor for rape.
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Maybe it's actually a marketing campaign for this new film?
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I've got an invite to the Midjourney beta a while back. It's one of the AI art programs that creates imagery based on a prompt you give it. I thought I'd see if it could do something inline with my OC. I gave it the prompt "beautiful blond devil girl holding a flaming skull." I shouldn't have said "girl" because it actually took that literally. Also for some reason instead of "holding a flaming skull" it added skull features to her face. Despite the distortions, it kicked out some interesting imagery:
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1 hour ago, SwitchFade said:
You did what to people?
Lol what? Said something they didn't like I guess? It's not like I know a lot of these people.
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10 minutes ago, Marbing said:
All you have to do to get a bunch at once is disagree with some people and they will literally go through all of your posts for the past couple of days/weeks and give them all 👎 all at once. I know, it has happened to me more than a couple times from a couple of individuals on these forums. 🤣
Yeah that happened to me after I posted in this thread. Someone gave me seven thumbs down in a couple of threads from two or three months ago. Lol.
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39 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:
I am not sure that applies here. Perhaps I misunderstood the post, which very well could be the case, however I think the intent was to point out how the history here makes anything they say suspect. No matter what the folks here may do, the beginnings of how all this came about are not going to be forgotten and there are still a great may people in the community that did not like being lied to for years, no matter the circumstances. I would also point out that people may feel differently if it were their property being stolen versus that of a company that upset them.
I get the feeling though that a fair amount of the people that are never going let the "lying to the community" thing go are the same people who will turn around and remind me that this small volunteer dev team doesn't owe me anything (the next time I complain about not getting something I want).
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1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:
He can still farm. He can still solo. He can still team. He can still run i-trials. He can now also run advanced difficulty stuff for new or increased rewards.
But he can do all that right now can't he? Lol don't get hung up on the analogy here my dude--you know the whole conversation revolves around reducing rewards to cause a change in behavior.
Also I made the same Troo joke recently 🥸.
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1 hour ago, Troo said:
Ok funny, but for those who havent read as much of the forums: No one steering the ship is telling anyone how to play. (except pvp zones and name squatting)
How is changing the rewards granted for different content not them telling people how to play?
Troo you're fired. But i am in no way telling you that you can't come in here and do the work for free.
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1 hour ago, arcane said:
I don’t believe you read my post. I asked what you are upset about if nothing is changing. I already understand that you think nothing will change; I’m asking why a non-change is your hill to die on? It’s a very strange stance to me and I sincerely don’t understand it.
If the change is aimed at dedicated farmers, afk farmers, etc. those people will adapt. The ones that will be affected by this are more likely casual players. The ones identified as "the problem" will likely suffer no major inconvenience, whereas the people who sometimes farm when the need hits them will lose resources they previously had available to them. Unless they want to run a bunch of additional content that may or may not be attractive to them.
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What to do with Empyrean Merits in the future...
in General Discussion
Posted
Yeah I don't see where you're getting cognitive dissonance from this. There have been pages and pages of people explaining this--there's nothing inconsistent about it. People are objecting to their preferred playstyle getting devalued. The fact that similar rewards are available through other methods is absolutely not the point.
Let's look at an extreme hypothetical example: All merit rewards are removed from pve and shifted to pvp. You get a daily quota from killing a certain number of players in each zone and the arena. Now, given the nature of this community, imagine the rage from players whose incentives are being shifted over to an activity that they vehemently oppose. Then you look at them as if they are confused because they explicitly say that they don't want to pvp even though they are clearly assuming that the merit rewards they want would be most manifest there. So what if they would be most manifest there?