Coyotedancer

I can't honestly say I miss any of that.,, especially not the cysts. I had friends back on Liberty who refused to run with my Peacebringer over those stupid things.

Flea is the one making the claim... It's on him to back that claim up with something more substantial than an assumption if he really wants to have a serious discussion.

So we're making an assumption that AE farming is consuming the entire City...

Do we actually have any dev-provided data mined proof that "An overwhelming majority of game hours is spent in AE farms",,,, or are we just making that assumption based on the constant begging in Atlas park on Excelsior?

Oh, it's definitely profitable... But I guess my thoughts on that aspect are tempered by knowing a few marketeers. Compared to what they can make in the same amount of time it takes me to clear a map, my rewards are pocket change. I know that if I really wanted to make a fortune, farming isn't really the most efficient or most rapid way to do it.

Just a gentle reminder here, Flea... But some of us really do farm for fun. I know the "OMG REAL CONTENT!" types will never believe that, but I promise you it's true.

I play my 50s through the game at all kinds of levels when I'm running with our family SG team... It doesn't really matter to me what level that content is. I would like to see all of the factions get 1-50 versions though. It would be fun to run into higher level Skulls and such.

Excelsior isn't the end-all be-all driver of how the game should be developed any more than Freedom was back in the live days. (And for what it's worth, Everlasting has quite a few players, too. It's not exactly an abandoned wasteland even if it isn't the "most populated" on average. RIght now? Ex has 688 players. Ev has 379. The others are around 100 each.)

I was bouncing around various servers yesterday, deciding which characters to keep where and doing some general tinkering with them and I noticed something. That constant begging for farms? It's more common on some servers than others. On Everlasting? Hang around in Atlas for awhile and you'll see some of that. It's not constant, but also not unheard of. I was in Atlas on Torch for about an hour and saw one request to be farmed. Reunion? I don't think I saw anyone do it. I can't speak for Indom. I haven't been over there yet. Excelsior, though? Holy hell. It was *constant*. "Lowbie LF Farm"... "Farm me, please?"... "Sitter LF farm" over and over again the whole time I was there. Given that, I can see why people on Ex might feel like nothing else is ever getting run. o_0 But,,, still. Realize that Excelsior's situation doesn't seem to be universal based on what I was seeing yesterday. If that was a typical day across the shards, we might want to look at "server culture" solutions more than mechanical ones, because the 'problem' (If it really is one-) hits some places harder than others.

Not to mention those of us who would rather NOT have to grind DA arcs until we go cross-eyed on characters that might not actually be well suited to it. (Like the sonic defender whose iToys I'm working on right now, using the vet level grants he's gotten from being dual-boxed in AE with my farmer-) ALso keep in mind that not eveyrone can rely on iTrials. Time zones are a pain in the rump.

That seems like a reasonable compromise.

I'm just going back to my farming... I still have a sonic defender who needs a few vet level iBits to finish his Incarnate toys. You know, a character who would just be a royal pain to run through the DA arcs a few (dozen) times on his own. The pearl-clutchers can just keep on railing about how awful that is and how I'm ruining their game by being able to do that. Somehow. 😐

FlyingCodeMonkey and I had them do miniatures of our 13th Age tabletop characters. Their miniature designer is just good fun to tinker around with.

For whatever it's worth, this afternoon I went in and got both Nem and the Bride to mighty level 6. It took about ten minutes of street-sweeping with a 2xXP booster running. 'Not exactly a difficult thing, in other words, even if you have a page of RP NPCs to do. Just tackle them one or two at a time.

Now I want to make a Flute Ninja...

I love it. XD Mr, Coyote has a whole series of dog characters on Everlasting... Cinnamon Bark, Peppermint Bark, Jurassic Bark. He got a chuckle out of Karl. 😆

This is just warning mode.

I must have been doing things wrong all along, then... I don't know about anyone else, but mine have all gotten equipped reasonably well all along. Maybe not QUICKLY, mind... Especially back in the old days of red and blue sides having separate markets... But eventually. I couldn't see them as complete otherwise. The favorites just got the first pick of the better stuff.

For people who don't do the iThing and are grumping now about their emps being useless.... Adding other things to spend them on might not be a bad idea. They don't even necessarily need to be things that can be monetized. What if Luna were to offer Emp exchanges for her old annual badges? Or if there were Emp-based prices added for the new costume powers as an alternative to the new currency? (Or put in an Emp-to-new-currency conversion, for that matter... Though I do realize that would quickly turn into a monetized resource) Emps for high end random recipe rolls, AE ticket style? Emps for random ATOs? (Also potentially monetized, but still more fun for people than a pile of super inspirations...) There are a lot of possibilities beyond just stashing them to incarnate the next alt. ETA: Cross-posted with Cobalt there. It's too bad about the Aether conversion being off the table. That carrot for getting people to run the new challenge settings is sort of dead in the water for us solos and small-team folk.

Run Doc Q when it's the weekly... Or join the daily Hamidon raids... Or ship raid regularly... Or get the zone exploration accolades... Or maybe do some iTrials. Or story arcs. Or tip morality missions. Or go beat up some giant monsters. Or do one of the Signature Story Arcs every week. Merits come from many sources in this game. You're losing ONE of them. And gaining a new one in the process. The sky isn't falling and merits aren't going extinct. People built up scads of the things before vet levels and Emp conversions ever existed. If they could do that in the past, you can still do it now. There's no reason you can't.

Tickets also can't be sent to other characters on your account. Again, making them a lot less useful than the Emps.

I've never understood why we can't mail iBit salvage to other characters on our own account. The characters I run through DA end up with a ton of common and uncommon bits they'll never use looking for their rare and VR drops. I'd love to be able to ship those off to the next alt in line.

Regular merits from other sources aren't going anywhere... and unlike the vet level Emp grants, you don't just stop getting them at some point from Hami, or TFs or mission arcs. I'm sure the conversion merits were a nice bonus to get, but people earned merits by the ton long before Emps came along. Losing one source isn't drying up the whole well. It's sort of like a lot of us were saying in the AE thread about losing vet levels there... We could still have gotten them other places, even though it might not have been as easy.

I'm fine with this... But then, I'm one of those people who only uses Emps for Incarnate goodies, not as a regular merit source.

I hit post too soon. See my edit. Salvage is character bound not account bound. That makes it less useful right off the bat.