battlewraith

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.

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!

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.

Maybe it's actually a marketing campaign for this new film?

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:

Lol what? Said something they didn't like I guess? It's not like I know a lot of these people.

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.

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).

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 🥸.

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.

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.

If rewards are the only thing that matters, why take measures to penalize players for settling on the most convenient pathway to get those rewards?

Fun? Every time I read a comment like this, I wonder if it's a tacit admission that the general gameplay isn't engaging.