battlewraith

"In my gym we regularly bench 500lbs.! It's easy." "What? No way!" "Yes way homeskillet!" (flexes) Five different people start benching 100lbs.

Psssst.....ask for a moratorium on the use of "homeskillet" too please. Thanks!

I think I make maybe 100 or 200 million inf by the time I'm done leveling a character. Part of the attraction of the farm is that failure is an option. I space out and forget to heal and die. The dog needs to go out. I get a phone call. etc. I can start and stop at will without inconveniencing any other people, which adds a lot of flexibility to when I can log in and work on a character. In the imaginings of SwitchFade and arcane, people like me are evil figures that are mercilessly inflating the market and churning out perhaps hundreds (!) of roided out billion inf characters. *shudders*

Straw man: 1. an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument. The misrepresented position is that people against this change are claiming that they won't be able to make money without emp conversions. That is not what people are saying and it is obviously not true--which makes it easier to malign the people against this nerf. Grasping economic function is irrelevant. You made the claim that farming always leads to inflation. There is no apparent inflation and there hasn't been for some time, despite farming being a constant. Your statement is simply false. I don't claim to know why my posts got wiped. A couple of them didn't even make reference to other people. "Or was the point to be vengeful?" Instead of passing off false dogmatic beliefs and ridiculously inflated farming numbers as reality, do more of this...um...dramatic character analysis. It will be fictional AND entertaining to read.

Who are the people that are claiming that? I haven't seen anyone who farms in any capacity saying that they won't be able to make inf without this conversion. This is a distortion of the actual complaint, which is that the nerfing of emps as a resource will result in people farming more or having to do more of the content that they don't find enjoyable.

Which is a strawman. I already responded to that comment but it didn't go over well and the mods cut several comments from this thread. I don't think dedicated farmers/afk farmers/etc. are complaining about this change. They can afford whatever they want, as can the people who routinely make a killing on the market. So this supposed contradiction is an unlikely speculation to begin with. Speaking for myself, I like to make a new character, get it to 50, get it enhanced, and then run TFs or trials or whatever. Farming is a means to an end. I don't do it for fun and I don't look to grind a huge stockpile of resources (and I don't have any afk farmers). I do it as much as necessary to get the new character ready. The nice thing about the emp conversions is that they lessened the amount of time that I would need to spend farming to set a new character up and I would get them incidentally while doing non-farm content. All this nerf does is make people like me have to spend more time farming to make up for the deficit. And this just seems like straight up bullshit. The trend of farming emps through power leveling disposable characters may be recent (which I doubt), but the merit conversion and farming in general has been around for as long as the server has. If farming always causes inflation--where the hell is it? I'm not seeing major inflation anywhere. Other people have pointed this out as well. Yeah nothing's more selfish than playing the game the way you enjoy and hypothetically putting some aspect of the market at risk of something. You can feel the tension, as if this inflationary boogyman was about to jump out at any moment. But it is real nice of your lordship to suggest that people impacted by this nerf get tossed a bone every couple of days so that they can "play their way." What a pillar of the community.

First of all, razor blades are sharp and are indeed designed to cut things. That titan greatsword would sure as hell cut things. Fighting sticks in Filipino martial arts are a proxy for swords. Styles vary somewhat, but double stick motions are exactly the same as sword movements. If you are training properly, you employ the weapon with proper edge alignment, even though the stick doesn't have an edge per se. Furthermore, if you're striking properly the tip of the stick will cut. A typical training method involves cutting through the layers of a banana tree. I agree that the ingame logic is purely based on vibes.

Wrong. It's clear you don't like people's ideas. Fortunately, no one is under any obligation to please you.

How about another quick comparison: OP complaining about MMs not getting updates: 7 posts. Rudra arguing with OP and other posters: 34 posts. If you didn't feel the need to argue the crap out of other people's suggestions (mostly because they don't suit your preferences) this conversation probably would've gone somewhere else. Most likely it would've sunk off the page, with no need for locking.

Because those rewards didn't get added in conjunction with them being removed from some other aspect of the game. Also you must've been oblivious to the history of pvp in this game: the inclusion of badges in pvp zones in order to lure players in there was very unpopular with a lot of people.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

"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.

Of course you do. 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. 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.

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.

I don't need to know anything about you. I was responding to a generically stupid claim about casual players. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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?

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. 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.

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.

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.