Coyotedancer

In Aion, ganking "soft targets" (That is to say, making easy kills out of any member of the opposing faction, in particular those who have little to no chance of defending themselves-) at every opportunity was pretty much a way of life. Ask to be left alone and you'd get laughed out of the game in a hail of "KED!"s and accusations of being a Carebear. AFTER they killed you. Probably repeatedly. That's typical PvP. (And why they ended up adding the non-PvP "rookie server" for leveling-) "Oh, would you be so kind as to leave me be whilst I collect these Shivans, good sir?" really.... isn't.

Welcome to my world. XD I've spent pretty much my entire time on Homecoming doing this. Make an alt... level and equip them... get them their iToys... and then leave them standing around while I get distracted by the next member of the crew. 35 characters I've done that with, now... #36 will probably hit 50 in the next few days... He's 45 currently. (Although, humorously, that particular Sentinel is one of the very first characters I made on Homecoming, on Torch. I moved him to Excelsior the day it went live.) I had abandoned Iah, along with the pair that will probably be #37 and #38, to concentrate on my characters on Everlasting. Prior to this week, he'd been untouched for more than a year.

I don't get the angst over that idea... but I doubt it'll ever happen.

Give yourself time. One alt or so a day for about three years...

*shrugs* The old devs put PvE content in PvP zones in order to provide the PvPers with extra targets. Expecting them not to take advantage of a relatively easy kill when they find one is probably hoping for a little too much. Just accept that you're going to be in somebody's sights when you go in and deal with it. It's not that big of a deal.

It's ever been thus... At least it was back in the Live days... and I haven't come across anything on Homecoming that suggests that dynamic has changed here. Your best bet is to just talk to people, I suspect. Eventually you'll run into that "somebody who knows someone who's part of an SG".

I'm sure there is... But anything out of the ordinary is more likely to be done among members of SGs or with specific groups of friends rather than by randoms standing around under Atlas or in Pocket D. That means that FINDING that kind of group and joining it is mostly a matter of knowing someone who knows someone who's already a participant.

For whatever it's worth, the rule I've always stuck with myself is that I won't say something out here in the 'tubes that I wouldn't say to the same person if we were sitting across a table from each other in the Real World. I may be snarky and not always flawlessly polite... But no moreso online than I am off. Being faceless doesn't mean we automatically have to be asshats to each other, in a game or otherwise.

Yeeeah. Starting to agree. It's not going anywhere good.

If you tell me something like, "Oh hell no! I'm not going to team with that Khalil guy of yours. He's made of stone! That's creepy!" I'd just laugh. If you said "I'm not going to let you join this team with Harry because he looks like a black guy" then... yeah. I'd raise an eyebrow.

Okay... How about this... Rather or not you, personally, consider it harassment... If you're doing some emote silliness that annoys another player enough to make them say "Cut it out!"... (( JUST STOP DOING IT )) You don't have to get it. You just have to stop. Otherwise? You're being That Guy. (Or That Gal, as the case may be-) Don't be That Guy.

In the old days, my usual pattern looked like "Whatever drops" until 12, then DOs until 22, SOs until 32 and Common IOs all the way up to 47, where they'd finally get their "real build". Favorite procs and specials were added as they became available along the way and once we had ATOs, I'd start slotting those in the teens. Sometime last year, I started adding a few attuned IO sets pre-47, too, but I never did that with every power pick on every character. These days? I've pretty much abandoned the 'Under 32' part of leveling entirely (I jump-start new characters by tossing them into a round of beating up cosplayers with my fire farmer-), so the DO/SO parts of that old pattern no longer apply. My current alts' first set of O's are typically the Commons/Attuned/Procs-and-specials/ATOs they get at 30-something. I still tend to hold off on doing their final Everything build until 47.

It is a very zen kind of thing... also pretty darn good stress-relief. XD

That's a good one, too. Red-side it's also used as Aeon City's music, IIRC.

I only have 35 characters here on Homecoming... I've had well over a hundred more between the Live servers and Paragon... I mean, you can certainly choose not to believe me when I say I'd rather never make another alt than run the lowbie drudge-trudge ever again... But that doesn't make it untrue. I don't play exclusively at 50+ by any means... The 32+ game is still fun, and I run my support characters exemped with mid-level teams the majority of the time. I've just come to really, really dislike the low levels and dropping a new alt into a fire farm with Harry is my solution to that issue. Anyway, hopefully hearing from someone who does short-cut their characters out of lowbieville has helped you guys see where at least some of us are coming from. You aren't required to like it or agree with it, but maybe it'll be less of a complete mystery to you now.

That's where you get into the types who like playing finished characters more than unfinished ones, I think. Not being able to hit the broad side of a barn just gets OLD. And it's nice not to have constant END issues. For myself, I know that's the case. So, even though I've probably done Unai's arc a hundred times now, and the gaming gods only know how many iTrials... I still find them a whole lot more enjoyable play-wise than re-running any of the low-level arcs. o_0 And not EVERYTHING is economic. I don't care what the content rewards are. I have a farmer. That means I don't HAVE to care that running at 50 gets any other character X-INF while running at 20 would get them X-Y. For other people? Maybe it matters more. They'd have to tell you themselves.

Zeus Titans who *always* seem to collapse right across the doorway, insuring that no one can leave until they fade away.... >_<

Maybe I can help here... That low-level "content" that you still love running? Some of us have done it so many times at this point that the whole idea of doing it again feels exactly as mind-numbingly boring to us as fire-farm door-sitting feels to you. Skipping past it is not seen as any kind of loss because it just IS NOT FUN anymore. Would you be willing to waste your limited amount of play time doing something that was the exact opposite of fun? I suspect not. Some people just enjoy playing "finished" characters a lot more than they enjoy leveling incomplete ones. Not everyone playing this game is a roleplayer or someone who's interested in "building a character's story". They just want to play a game. Others may have a firm idea of who that character is right out of the gate. They don't need 50 levels to figure it out. And, for what it's worth, not all of us who short-cut characters past the drudge-levels do it by door-sitting someone ELSE'S farm. Quite a few of us have more than one account and park our lowbies in missions with our own farmers. You don't see us spamming LFG, so its easy to miss that we exist. So, while our lowbies may be passive, we're still out there playing around and having fun with our farmers in the meantime. (And yes. Believe it or not, some of us really, really DO enjoy running farm maps. You probably don't "get" that either, but that doesn't make it any less true.)

I have them enabled on most of the gang and just email them all to Amtes (my MM) as they drop. XD

I haven't run into a lag issue so far, but I did get a trio of game crashes yesterday afternoon. I haven't had that problem before. 'Sent the automated report in on the first two (They happened close together time-wise while I was in the character creator, on Torch-), but wasn't given that option on the third, which happened a bit later when I was exiting an AE mission with Sarhadi on Everlasting.

That was the Sentinel Exporter, or something similar... And as far as I know, no. There's no way to import those character files to Homecoming. We've all had to start over from scratch.

Serge finally said "Enough is enough!", got together Task Force Tailor and beat them all into sartorial submission.

You're over-stating the prevalence of that point of view, I suspect. Saying that damned-near ANYTHING is believed by "MMO gamers in general" is pushing it, BB. "MMO gamers in general" would have a flame war over rather or not the sky is blue, much less over what constitutes the 'proper' way to play either a specific game or games in general. I'd also say, just as a personal opinion, that the ones who believe any of that bull are dead wrong. And I'm not in any way "unfamiliar with MMO culture". You're taking the opinions of a certain, highly socially-focused (and yes, often vocal-) subset of MMO players as the majority point of view. How much it reflects reality is questionable.

I don't announce or call for buff-gathering when I'm teaming on my support characters. It really is just as easy, as Shred and others have said, to fire the buffs opportunistically at points where most of the team is in one place. I *do* traditionally announce buffs when I'm ship raiding with my Empaths, though. When I'm getting ready to fire off their auras and Barrier or Clarion, I always do them together and will typically broadcast to the league chat with something like "Buffs in the Bowl in 5... 4..." just to give the herders a few seconds warning to hop back in if they want those effects, I'm sure it's annoying to some people... But given how many people actually DO come jumping back into the middle of the murderball when I do that? It also seems to be useful to some of the crew.

Only one... a Dark/Dark/Fire named Sarhadi, who just hit 36.