battlewraith

Yes, I think in terms of locales this one is a no-brainer. Would fit well with coh lore and offer a lot of creative possibilities. I would also like to some more eldritch/Lovecraftian themed content in the game and this would be a good bridge to that--maybe some of those old ruins in the deep desert aren't human in origin.

This is kind of how I picture the ToT witches when they come out the door and see a bunch of supers.

Somebody was wondering if they were getting bored with the game quicker as the result of getting older. He responded with this: It seems apparent to me that he's identifying himself as part of the group "older players" (whatever that means). And since he's apparently representative of these older players he feels comfortable just waving away somebody else's thoughts about aging and decreased tolerance for grind (which he mischaracterizes as wanting the "easy way"). That's bullshit. Different people have different shifting priorities as they age. It was a weird thing to say. And it's a weird thing for me to have to clarify and bicker about a question that he didn't bother to answer.

Yeah and???

No, not really. First of all you said it was false that a pipeline like that existed, which is incorrect. Secondly, yeah it's less complicated to just go to the vendor--and immediately start wasting that inf on low level content that they will pretty quickly burn through. And then once those SOs are red, wonder why the character isn't performing that well anymore. So how about instead of the 50k, there is a contact you get immediately on entry that leads you though this process. It introduces you to the free p2w movement options, marks the exploration badges on the map (so that you learn the significance of badges and that they may reward you with things like merits), and then guides you through the auction house process. You get more money and learn more about the game then getting a small inf gift to support the easiest and most fleeting levels. Also, if there was a message at the start that said, if you need some startup money ask the friendly community! They would probably get more than 50k lol.

This is from the newcomer's guide in the guide section: If we assume that the new player doesn't know anything, and isn't going to do any research or ask any questions, then I doubt throwing 50k inf at them is going help them much either. They don't know where to buy enhancements, what enhancements to buy, etc. etc.

Ok, so first off nice clickbait. As for the actual suggestion: 1. I thought there was already some scheme in place to get cash for lowbies. You get an exploration badge or something that grants you some merits, then exchange those for converters which you then sell. I thought the return on this was at least 150k. 2. I logged on a character to check. At lvl 2, you can start buying SOs for around 4k a pop. Doing so would strike me as really foolish since you burn through those early levels pretty quickly even if you're not using xp boosters and/or running dfb. Personally, I don't think I bother even slotting any SOs until around lvl 20, at which the price is much higher. I think at least 10k. So that 50k really doesn't do a whole lot. If you used it to slot earlier, then you would level faster--and the SOs would expire more quickly. Ok it's some free money. It will help a little. But it's a weird place on which to focus dev attention. If you don't like this content, you level through it quickly to the point where 50k isn't a big deal. If you do like it--then you go slow and savor it? Why are you in a rush to get enhanced, which would presumably get you through it quicker?

I haven't ignored anybody in the game, so I was unaware of these options. Everything you mentioned should just be part of ignore, especially topics. If somebody can't stand your opinions to the extent that they're going to block them, that person shouldn't be able to chime in on discussions that you started.

Why do the butthurt people that have me ignored feel the need to reference me when they have a meltdown lol?

It was ridiculous 13 years ago. Therefore...they shouldn't be lowered now? Is that the point of this?

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?