battlewraith

Yeah the merit cost of enhancements is ridiculous. Lower the cost of buying them with merits or further increase the rewards you get for running content. Ideally, a player should be able enhance a new character without buying anything from the market. Using the market should not be a mandatory aspect of this game for someone who wants run at what would be considered a typical level of achievement (ie, having enough to alt, have decent builds, etc.). Then we can maybe dispense with the endless horror stories of inflation on live and the use of the market as the game's schizophrenic moral compass: Farming is bad because it leads to inflation. Can't skip the farming because it leads to inflation. Yada yada.

No. You don't understand correctly. The point is that people have builds in mind that are possible at lvl 50, but not earlier. They want to skip the content that is decades old and they have done probably a million times in order to get to the actual build phase. They may or may not exemp and play that lowbie content. The character will not feel the most absolutely powerful. It doesn't even have the alpha slot unlocked yet. It wouldn't be changed for all players. Nobody is forcing anyone to take an instant lvl 50. It would be completely optional.. That's why these objections are so ridiculous. Implicitly everyone here knows that we're not talking about a few players. And we're not talking about people who are bored with the game. The anxiety is that people would be able play the way they want without having to pay the 4-5 hour grind tax. And this is upsetting to people who have really bought into the retail philosophy of early 2000s MMOs and see everything as a pseudo job and their characters as flexes on what they've earned. This is not The Sims. Right, and it's also not 2004 COH. Which is good. You can't go back and you shouldn't go back. Imagine what the market would look like if all the sandbox people up and left.

The HC team doesn't have to go for anything. The market, any fucking market, will always benefit the wealthiest players. How naive are you? The whole point of playing the market, as people on these boards constantly reminded me during page 4 arguments, is to redistribute wealth, not generate it. The reason this, as a playstyle, is allowed to be more lucrative than other types of grinding is that it destroys inf through fees. But this is a large part of the reason you have so many billionaires running around to begin with. Yes, new players wouldn't be able to purple out their fifties. The also can't really afford SOs either unless they....dun dun dun!...play the market. Or ask other players for money. The amount of resources that are generated while leveling a new 50 is trivial. Maybe a couple purples and a few other useful recipes. And there is certainly better content that you could've been running with the 4 or 5 hours you spent pling that character in order to pay for enhancing. You seem hung up on the idea of a 50 earning for itself, which is meaningless. Pay for it with drops earned by other characters, do hardmode content, play the market, whatever. All of this is dodging the question anyway, which is not irrelevant. You're painting this nightmare scenario based on supply and demand. People are leveling 50s all the time. What is the demand right now? If it's high, and the market remains stable, then your reasoning fails. People might not be willing to shell out that much for enhancements. Or they are content to use merits to buy things, or just incremental enhance things as they get the drops.

I already skip that chunk. I have for years, as have probably a near majority of other players. When Homecoming came back, there seemed to be this general attitude amongst the playerbase that the game was amazing because it allowed players to follow their bliss in different ways. Sadly there's been a sort of move back towards a weird nostalgic orthodoxy lately. The argument is that the end result is the same. I will have a 50 either way. If I have 10 hours in a week to commit to actually playing, it would be better for me to spend that 10 hours playing that 50 on teams rather than grinding on a farm. And better for other people that are looking to fill their teams. And if you will permit me to get real for a moment--sheer laziness is not skipping the farm phase in making a 50. Sheer laziness is playing this game in the first place when there are thousands of more productive things that any of us probably should be doing. Anyone getting on my ass about not earning things or being lazy--is barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong forest, in a galaxy far far away.

Wow. You sound so hip. Really. Your apocalyptic scenario, like the ones other people have brought up, involves some bold assumptions. 1. Everyone is going to do this. The entire playerbase. Immediately. This is amusing because half the time people argue that there would be no demand for this sort of thing. Also if that many people would want it--if it would be so wildly popular--why are people so hell bent on not having a reasonable implementation? 2. Everyone is going to immediately buy up everything from the market. Bullshit. First of all you go on a lot about purples. Those are what I need the least. I have a bunch of them in storage or spread out on different characters. The number of enhancements on the market is not the same as the number of enhancements in the game. Secondly, if you don't have a lot of enhancements on hand--you probably don't have a lot of inf either. If you cannot afford things, you're not going to buy them on the market. Thus you're not going to be driving up demand. That means the ones buying all the stuff up on the market would be the people who are already sitting on a pile of cash and can mint a new 50 whenever they feel like it. 3. You don't address the most basic question: How many new 50s are created right now over say the course of a month? If you knew that number you could make some reasonable estimation about how an influx of 50s, some of which would fully enhanced with purchases from the auction house, would affect the market. But you don't make any kind of analysis like this and just assume the worst. If I play that game, I can assume that thousands of new 50s are made every month and the market can fairly easily bear an additional influx--maybe a new 50 every month for interested players (maybe around 500-100). If you don't use it, they expire and do not accrue.

No. It's weird that the game is this old and people still don't get it but I'll elaborate. A lot of people, myself included, prefer to play at 50 when you have all your powers, all your slots, and can build with a certain purpose or playstyle in mind. A recent character I made was a perma lightform PB using a build I got off of the forums. I like it. I do trials and TFs with it. But that build was not possible for most, if not all of the pre-50 content. If that content is not something you enjoy doing on a lowbie character, then you skip it. The best way to keep this game enjoyable is to focus on the things you like doing and minimize the repetitive grindy shit that you've done a million times before. I've always had trouble getting names I want and that problem is not going to go away until they do something like a convention that incorporates globals.

Not when it's a response to someone dictating to you the proper way to use these forums. But sure, out of context it looks bad. Ok, but this is a lot of response for something you're convinced is not going to happen either way. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, but that's just me being me.

Yes but look at what you're doing to add things up. First of all, you're assuming that the market as it is now, represents all people who are pling actively selling drops that they get in the course of pling a new 50. I don't and I never have in the course of Homecoming's existence. If I assume that I'm not an outlier, that the majority of people pling are like me and that the bulk of the drops are coming from farmers (including afkers) who are farming to earn then this problem immediately goes away. And getting a free 50 does not exempt you from grinding the resources to enhance it. You would still be grinding content to pay for that. Secondly, you arbitrarily threw in the 2 hours of grinding to VL3. No, the character is already 50 at that point. You can't use this in the calculus arguing against an insta-50. Thirdly, you added up all of the earnings for all of your characters for three years, multiplied by all of the farmers who are assumed to be doing the same thing in the course of pling. Yeah, that would make a big difference but it would only be relevant if you're assuming that an insta 50 option was available ALL the time, and that the people who routinely farm and sell items would stop doing that activity altogether. I understand your rationale but it makes some extreme assumptions that are not necessary.

When my older son was an infant, we took him with us to see the movie you were in. First of all, the theater was pretty empty. So not that many people wanted to pay to see you. Secondly, you put him to sleep. Once you started talking--he slept through the entire thing. Sooo...you're obscure but sometimes soothing to infants (?).

This is your opinion. And unless someone has a gun to your head, it's your choice to waste your time. Don't complain to me about it. Again, that's not your call. Go make your own game and run the forums with an iron fist. Even if this group of devs has no intention of ever implementing something like this, I still think this is a conversation worth having. It gives them a picture of what players are like and what their priorities are.

It would probably do very little. First of all, the drops/resources from spending the time farming up one character is pretty negligible. Secondly, people farm to get resources as well as leveling characters. That doesn't stop just because they don't need to level a 50. I have pages of 50s that have no enhancements in them--I would need to do a hell of a lot of grinding in order to outfit them all. These boards are hilarious with regard to how people overreact to issues in contradictory ways. When page 4 hit, people went off on farming and how it was evil and destructive to the game because of the flow of inf theoretically spiking inflation. Now talking about insta-50s, people are saying we can't have that because....it will reduce farming? Lol what? The dangers are always overstated. And while it's possible that new players would become bored more quickly and/or be more clueless--even though these people can already bypass content through people pling them--naysayers always drop out the possible consequences of the status quo. Which is that every time there is some new or interesting thing added to this game, people who want to play this content on a new 50 have to repeat content that they've done for years, sit on a farm for hours, or do some event like ToT. The danger is the omnipresent one--that players will look at other new games coming out and say "nah, I'm good." Maybe you don't mind wasting a few hours as a tax to play content you want. I could do without it. I think a lot of people could do without it. That being said, there have been a number of suggestions for how to do this. I favor a recycling option. Some people want something that is bought or earned ingame. Maybe there is a timer: you get one insta 50 a month. There are various ways that something like this could be implemented but if you suggest it here you have to penetrate this miasma of Chicken Little bullshit that assumes unfettered insta 50s as far as the eye can see that will wreck the economy and camp all the desirable names and give super judgmental veteran players apoplexy when they pug (why are they pugging?).

You're objecting to a proposal on the basis of how the game has worked up to this point. If this mentality was consistently applied, you would be objecting to ANY change in game mechanics because that's not how the game works. No it doesn't. For people who enjoy that content, it's there. You default to this black and white thinking that says that having the ability to skip over early content makes that early content irrelevant for everyone. In reality it wouldn't change anything for people who enjoy the traditional leveling. For people who like to start at 50, it would allow them to immediately go to the content they enjoy. And then there would be a range of people inbetween who sometimes go straight to 50 and other times follow a more traditional progression. Sure looks that way.

That's not even an accurate description. Progression does not end when you hit 50. You don't skip every piece of content in the game to hit 50. And a lot of players exemp down to play the earlier content when they are 50. Not to mention the fact that players have likely done this decades old content many times already on different characters over the years. The "gist" here is that you want to mandate that other people waste their time somehow, apparently because the supposed fun of doing that early content simply wasn't enough. This has been answered over and over again. People don't want to play on beta because there is no population, they don't want to leave their friends and sgs, and it is subject to wipes.

So does this type of inane comment. And it's been responded to ad nauseam.

Oh I see. Where did they say it was related to AE babies?

Yes it's hypothetical--there isn't an option to instantly level to 50. That's what I was referring to. Now if this is already happening to you, lol might as well offer a leveling option because you're getting bothered whether it's a thing or not. Oh you mean they were lying when they said it was about the zone performance?

You're under no obligation to play with to play with someone who doesn't know what they're doing (or is stoned, drunk, has to go afk, whatever). You can kick them from your team or leave a team that has someone on it that bothers you. I get that a lot of people are hung up on this issue. A lot of people can't seem to update their expectations of the game from when it was live and actually had a subscription fee. But the problem here is that you're opposing a proposed benefit to actual players that are actively creating alts because of a hypothetical situation where a new player somehow bothers you because they don't know what they're doing--a situation which is also kind of farfetched in the age of incarnates.

No. It's not. First of all, the vast majority of my characters were pled, even before AE. When the arena was added, I spent most of my time pvping. The characters that are easiest to remember are the ones that were successful in pvp. There are also characters I remember more clearly because they figured into game related art or fiction. Conventional leveling does not endear me more to a character or make it more memorable. There are characters on Homecoming that I have that I know I spent a fair amount of time doing lowbie content and they are not more memorable for that reason.

Corpse punching isn't an imaginary thing either. Neither is routinely completing BAFs, steamrolling radio missions, etc. I've had one failed team experience all year and it was honestly hilarious. Talking to some people on the forums, you'd think incompetence was everywhere. I only hear about it when I engage in these discussions. But the people you're worried about are getting pled already. Or are leveling through the early content very quickly. So with this change, a variety of people with different levels of experience spend less time pling. They all go straight to 50. How is the end result any different than the way things are now? The only significant change I see is that people don't have to spend hours on a farm grinding a new 50 to play the way they want. That's it. Because they want to retain players and they can adapt their system to fit with new conditions.

There's no reason they can't do both. They could also provide some sort of meaningful rewards (maybe costume options) for people that level the traditional way.

In other words, the people that actually want to play that content. You oppose this proposal because you want to make people do the content they don't like in order to support your preferences. Except that doesn't work anyway because people pl through it in various ways already. Why do I have to name all of them? What if I can name more 50s than you have characters? Also, if you only have one 50 and not many alts maybe the fear that people using this option (or getting pled) are clueless is making an unwarranted assumption based on your habits. I've played pretty much everything to 50. There are some things that I haven't spent a lot of time on, like warshades and dominators, but once you have a general understanding of how the mechanics of this game work it does not take long to get up to speed on anything.

I just quoted a couple standout parts of your post, but the majority of it--almost everything you say about how people play the game and are motivated to do things--is contradicted by my actual experience of playing the game. We are not on the same path and don't need to rely on other players to advance. When I pl a character to 50, it is not the end. It is the start of playing the fully fleshed out character that I had in mind. When I get the character to 50, I'm not hanging out alone waiting for other people to show up (wtf lol?). These general points your making would've made more sense in 2005. They don't have relevance to everyone now. If you want to play that way, more power to you. But it's a ridiculous expectation to lay on people who have been playing for over a decade and probably have their own very specific reasons for why they still hang around. Playing the game at level 50. Exactly what happens now when they pl a character past all the content that they know they don't want to play. Proposals like this don't mean more skipping of content. People are doing that already. The actual gist of it is skipping the hours required to pl, that is the only thing that would be different from the way things are now.

You're the spokesperson for older players?

Yes there's a sweet spot in relation to how much you slot for proc dmg. But the reason I was commenting in the first place was in regard to +dmg buffs from sets. I think the point still stands that proc dmg makes those buffs largely irrelevant. Certainly not all bonuses from sets.

Slow your roll my dude! I'm not advocating anything. If I was, I'd put it in the suggestions forum where it would've no doubt devolved into some sort thematic debate about what procs actually represent in the game world. I do feel that the evolution of the game in the age of procs make something like +dmg not only skippable, but actually a kind of trap that people can fall into when making their characters. Damage is king in this game. So it's not stupid to think that +dmg is a good thing to go for. But it's generally not the case and you need a fairly sophisticated understanding of slotting and set bonuses to know when you're wasting your time. Likewise I think you still have a lot of people running assault and thinking that if they all huddle up in a little group the dmg buff will be good. I think it's actually just a waste of end.