Stoked

I think you may be making an incorrect assumption here that I feel my suggestions must be incorporated. That's not the case at all. My preference is to leave the names alone altogether or allow players to contact each other and work it out without the COH governing body getting in the way. This is another tactic like hiding or deleting posts that destroys community. Purposefully spinning someone's feedback that you don't agree with so that it seems absurd or invalid is totally inappropriate but thanks for your response. Since we've already seen examples of devs creating alt accounts and using them to post here no one can make an informed decision about what the community is looking for or if it's just the devs themselves. Again, this whole thread and others like it labeled "feedback threads" are a misnomer then and the process falls flat on its face because there is no trust.

I realize that with all the traffic in this and the threads concerning AE feature changes, there is a lot of negative feedback. I want to be careful to point out that I for one really appreciate everything that the developers do to keep the game available. That's as sincere as it gets. But please, save everyone the effort of trying to help come up with ideas or better ways of doing things if you're just not interested. You can't add an ID column and use that because the whole code base would have to be rewritten. You can't do updates on login because of multi-threading. You don't want to run a SQL process off-peak hours for one or more reasons. I mean, apparently there is no solution available except to annoy people endlessly into giving up their names so you or a friend of yours can get it. The whole idea of a player being able to catch a name that's been freed up is a fraud. We have no way of knowing the name was freed. What are you going to do ... post a daily list of all the newly available names here so 2 million people can login and try grab it? I mean, why even bother telling us that you're going to do any of this stuff? Why call this a feedback thread when the only real interest is hearing "everything you're doing is great"? Just do it and let everyone know after the fact since we have no control over what the decision is anyway. This is the kind of drama that turned vets away from this game in the past. Is there actually ANY interest at all in growing the population of unique gamers or ultimately just to dwindle it back down to the "inner circle" that was playing before you were forced to open it up to everyone? The Devs inevitably do something like hiding/deleting posts or creating alt accounts to post from so it looks like more people are looking for something, etc. That destroys the integrity of the community. Once that happens, it really doesn't matter what you say or do, no one will ever trust you again. And that's the real tragedy. Games like this are healthy long term not just because they're fun but because the Devs have made a concerted effort to gain and maintain the trust of the community. Without it, you may as well just own it and tell everyone you really don't care what they have to say ... just play the game we've provided or go away.

Regarding the process to update accounts on login ... You don't have to execute updates on login. Just leverage the stored last login time and simply run a job 1x per day or week or whatever to execute the updates at off-peak hours. In all my years as a DBA and programmer, I've never seen such a ridiculous word salad used to describe why multi-threading is getting in the way of executing a SQL query. As if there's only one way and one time to perform those updates. Give me a break.

Why are ANY changes being made to anything that has to do with play style? Who cares if you can earn merits in AE? Who cares if someone wants to run the same TF over and over racing through as fast as possible just to get the purple or salvage? Who cares if there are people that spam the chat channels with promises of reward for defeating them in PVP? I find it ironic that the only people ever being impacted by these system-wide nerfs are those that have taken the AE feature and made it into something that they can enjoy any time. You don't have to wait for other people, you don't have to be on some ridiculous event schedule and you can change the level and number of mobs at will. I can't think of any Dev created content that even comes close to how much fun it is to play some of the AE maps out there. Maybe instead of focusing on how you can make the AE folks as miserable as those others farming TF's all the time, you focus instead on creating a couple costume pieces. Maybe you focus on creating new power sets. Maybe focus on NEW content. You know, something productive that will keep people playing, not wishing they had kept their WoW account active. I find it amazing that the same things are done year after year that proved ineffectual or downright destructive in the past and the Devs somehow feel a different result will come about. There are too many other server options that offer much better costume randomness, content or powersets to alienate the players using HC. Why nerf and ruin things here instead of taking a few notes from the others and just leaving the game mechanics alone? It is your constant fussing and meddling with the mechanics that turns people away. You aren't bringing in new players because you decided to make a fringe minority happy by nerfing AE.

Imagine if Google or Twitter started instituting a similar policy if you didn't send enough emails or tweets? Who cares if there is more than one toon with the same name in game anyway? Are there people triggered if they see another "Captain Spout" or "Fire Hawk" or "Raven" in game? I mean seriously ... this is such an inane thing to be concerned about. If the devs are using it as a primary key or other unique identifier in the database, that's an architectural/design problem that can be fixed quite easily with an additional ID column. If it's not used as an identifier, drop all this insanity about names and do something productive.

I'm confused because everyone of your points is a "should have". Based on what? Your own opinion or some grandiose delusion of being a Live Dev controlling gameplay for hundreds of people ( or more) ? Look, I respect your need to grind. But that's on you. That's how YOU want to play and forcing new recruits to slog for hours to get a couple levels and come back and do it again is not a recruiting tool. That's an inevitable retention issue. In other comments as well people attribute shards dying to AE or farming in general. If you PL your toon to 50 and get incarnate, what's left to do ... right? How about going through Ouroboros and doing all the low level content it enables? How about PVP? How about I don't care if there's nothing left to do because I just like making alts and assessing each build's performance. Point is, as so many have already said, if you don't like the play style, go to another shard or go to Cake, Rebirth, et. al. where the ghost towns are a result of not being able to use AE for leveling.

A few thoughts I hope aren't too redundant. I've read quite a bit of this thread and feel like there is a faction of people that will complain about almost anything if it doesn't suit their play style or expectation. That in and of its self is inappropriate because there are no rules about how you must play or level a toon. I certainly respect those that want to grind away day after day, not taking advantage of PL or AE or XP boosts. Good for you! Not so good for anyone else. I tried moving to Rebirth if not to simply escape the whining; to at least see what the new costume pieces were like. They are in fact fantastic but that costume uniqueness comes with a hefty price. There are no IO sets available in AH. None. You are forced to use merits or a lot of money to pay for the salvage and recipes and craft them. Still not necessarily a huge problem except that you never have enough money because you're forced to buy new SO enhancements every few levels or you can't hit or defeat anything. This inevitably leads to grinding for influence so what do people do? They run the same TF/ high level story arcs over and over trying to earn enough or get drops. Guess what peeps ... that's FARMING. Any time you repeat a mission, arc , TF or simply go grinding through the streets you're farming at some level. There are quite a few other "issues" on Rebirth that I won't detail here but I think it's important to keep perspective. It took me almost 3 hours with a team going through DA arcs over and over to get from 25 to 29. I blew the couple million influence I had made on lvl 30 SO's because I couldn't hit anything any more. Two levels later, I'm doing that all over again. Without player donations you can never get ahead and actually save for IO's and properly build an end game toon. Instead of trying to bully or swindle the Devs into changing game play for everyone on a shard, try just moving to another shard or server altogether and play there. No different from a tv channel or social media channel, if you don't like what's going on change the channel. Oh .. you have a bunch of 50's on HC that you don't want to have to build all over again? I wonder why ... Recruiting new player ideas: 1. MORE COSTUME PIECES PLEASE - everyone is starting to look the same 2. Consider weapons as costume bits (non functional) but you can carry around a staff or shield for instance 3. Fix the base entry process. You should be able to do this from anywhere EXCEPT PVP zones by using an Ouro portal type design. These shards are never getting licensed by NC so make it free or a permission that an SG leader can give to people in the SG. 4. NEW LOW LEVEL CONTENT - this one is huge. You may generate a lot more interest in the game by new players if they don't have to slog through the same old story lines over and over for all the alts. peace out