ShardWarrior

Well no, I said absolutely nothing even remotely of the sort. Again, you are making assumptions about what a potential new player may or may not do.

You are making a rather large assumption any new players if they do find the game will not want to play through the story. It is much, much better to let people decide for themselves what is and is not fun for them personally. If a new player wants to team up, solo, play through the story or hop in an AE farm, more power to them. That is the beauty of what we have here. There is something for everyone. Stop worrying so much about what new players may or may not do and let them make up their own mind. Focus on what you find fun and stick to that.

This is unequivocally false. All veterans posting here in these forums and playing the game have been here going on 18+ years. We are still playing. A great many of us will be here until the server collapses or the world ends, whichever comes first. We have not gotten bored and left. There is absolutely positively no reason whatsoever to falsely believe there are not others who will feel exactly the same. The game could be altered to make your every wish come true and there will still be people who will come and go. As for what makes CoH great, there are many different reasons for many different people. Please stop judging others on what brings them joy and what they should or should not enjoy in playing the game. There is no right or wrong way to play.

Had some free time this morning and rolled up a Temporal Warrior Stalker to test. I spawned in RV as expected and spoke to Castle to level up. Character creation and leveling is working as expected. I did not get a chance to test going over to Pocket D or any SG bases yet. Question - would it be possible to add quick access to the other PvP zones in RV? Would make things a bit easier I think to travel back and forth without having to rely on Pocket D.

That is not really balanced with merit gains from normal content though.

Depends on what rewards are important to the individual. Fire farming may have better XP/inf/salvage etc returns than running a +4 ITF. However, if the reward you are looking for is playing with a group of people and running content together, then the ITF is more rewarding. The inverse of that is also true. I think it a mistake to be so laser focused on one kind of reward in these discussions. Just my 2 inf.

So it is possible and we can expect this next update then? 😁 Yes, of course I am joking.

As I understood it this would only be possible by a complete engine rewrite. Champions was the next generation engine after CoH.

I would think the folks here could set up some sort of monitoring to look for accounts doing this (if they do not have it already) or any of the other activities you mentioned. Seems to me this is similar to monitoring for gold farmers on a commercial game. We know there used to be code to monitor how fast people were leveling to 50. Find the people doing this edge case activities and deal with them accordingly.

I know I am old, but I am fairly positive I am remembering what I saw correctly. Thanks though. 😉

Yes, if that is a way to keep the conversion around. I personally think it is better than completely losing the ability to convert them. I am sure others will feel differently. Outside of Incarnate crafting, I personally liked converting them to fill in IO sets where I was missing a recipe or two or to purchase ATOs or Purple IO recipes if I was low on inf. I do not know if having the conversion limited by cooldown achieves what you are all after though. Was just a thought and would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

I ran Sister Valeria at +1 x 1 on my main. I did not encounter any bugs that I could find. Just wanted to say BEAUTIFUL work on the cave environments! Top notch work there. Story was good and easy to follow. I did not feel the length was too long or too short. Felt just right in terms of length. Personal subjective feedback - Doubling up of Surgeons in every mob is a bit much. They are very quick with the fortitude buff recharge. The teleporting is annoying too, but easily dealt with if you take them out first. The amount of EBs and Bosses in the second and third missions especially made this a bit of chore if the goal is to clear every map. I know you do not need to, just if one is inclined to do so, be prepared for a bit of a slog. The 2 AVs and First Cyst in the final mission are a real chore. None were challenging at +1 x 1, just tedious. I will try to do another run as time permits. Overall nice job! 😁 Thank you for making this.

Is it not possible to have the EMP to Reward Merit conversion have a similar cooldown instead of outright removing it?

I ran Sister Valeria at +1 x 1 on my main. I did not encounter any bugs that I could find. Just wanted to say BEAUTIFUL work on the cave environments! Top notch work there. Story was good and easy to follow. I did not feel the length was too long or too short. Felt just right in terms of length. Personal subjective feedback - I second what @arthurh35353 mentioned above about the doubling up of Surgeons in every mob. They are very quick with the fortitude buff recharge. The teleporting is annoying too. The amount of EBs and Bosses in the second and third missions especially made this a bit of chore if the goal is to clear every map. The 2 AVs and First Cyst in the final mission are a real chore. None were challenging at +1 x 1, just tedious. I will try to do another run as time permits. Overall nice job! 😁

Not sure what server you played on during the live days, however I remember sets like Mako's Bite going for 2 billion inf a piece on Triumph. No thank you. We definitely do not need to go back to those days. As for the rest, speak for yourself. I like feeling super and kitting my characters out to the gills. You are more than welcome to build your characters the way you want, just afford me the same courtesy.

Start telling people about it. It helps the Homecoming team here with more people testing in addition to proving not everyone wants everything instantly.

I am convinced people have lost objectivity. That makes perfect sense for a commercial product where there is a financial incentive to fix these. This is not a commercial product and most commercial products do not have a Brainstorm server where they can make anything they want at any time. Brainstorm disproves your theory here. Again, word is already out there that anyone can have unlimited amounts of anything they want (levels, inf, IOs, incarnates, badges) on Brainstorm with zero effort and hardly anyone is there. If the majority of people wanted to just use exploits to get everything without any effort, you would see Brainstorm being the main server and than other servers being the ghost towns. Your argument does not hold any water. To your first bullet point - yes, that is it exactly. There is virtually no one there despite everyone being able to roll up anything they want any time they want without limitation for free with no effort. Any player can have a thousand alts on Brainstorm and instantly have any IO set, any Incarnate ability and cap each one with billions of influence within minutes. Hardly anyone is doing this. Your second bullet point is made meaningless by what you are able to do on Brainstorm. Think about it objectively - it does not matter if a character is wiped if anyone can just recreate them with everything they had before within a few minutes. Also, when was the last time Brainstorm was wiped? So why are more people NOT taking advantage of creating everything they want risk and effort free Brainstorm? Here is a good answer.

I will bet real money they are seeing an extreme edge case being perpetrated by less than a handful of people with no easy fix that unfortunately does not impact the masses. It is very safe to say the vast majority will not bother with this since they have not done so already. Just look at the number of people posting in this very thread who after all these years did not know you could even convert EMP merits to Reward Merits. All one need do is look at Brainstorm. The capability to roll up any max level character, fully kit them out with whatever IO sets and Incarnate abilities and billions of inf is available on Brainstorm and few take advantage of it. Everyone can have everything they want on Brainstorm for no effort, yet there is hardly anyone there. No need to take my word for it either. Take a look here -

I think it a gross over exaggeration. Were this even remotely true, the vast majority of people would be doing the AFK farming thing already. Quite clearly they are not.

@Troo Option B would be my thought. Not sure why EMP to Reward merit conversion cannot be capped at a set amount per day. I suppose AFK farmers with tons of accounts can still make quite a lot of EMP merits per day, but that should still put a dent in converting them and slow them down a bit.

@DrunkFlux - there was also people taking advantage of the huge dilithium payouts by rolling alts and leveling the reputation systems that added to the dilthium exchange crisis which exists there now. This is why they got rid of those payouts in the last update. With that said, there is one very critical difference between STO and Homecoming. STO is a commercial product where real money is being exchanged so there is much greater reason for concern. There is no real money being exchanged to purchase anything within Homecoming. Also important to remember, the market on Live was not seeded like it is here. This is not to say that people truly abusing the system here are of no concern at all, just there is a difference between the impact for a commercial product and non-commercial product.

As far as I remember, you should be able to get this from the context menu that pops up by right clicking on someone. There is no need to manually type in a command.

Is the 61,500 merits per day just by converting EMP merits to Reward Merits? If so, would it not have been easier to just cap the EMP to Reward merit conversion to a set amount each day? I am skeptical of that figure as well. Again, if there are a few doing this, would it not be better to deal with these extreme edge cases?

Define "playing them enough". I think you need to read the whole thread. Some people do actively log in to their RP characters, but keep them at specific sub-50 levels for a variety of reasons. There is nothing wrong with that and it is not squatting a name. This would be a concern if there were a limited amount of names available. There are over 170,000 words in the English language alone that can be made into literally countless numbers of word combinations to generate a name. There are many, many other languages that provide even more words that can used in even more combinations to make a name. All kinds of words have more than one synonym. There is simply no danger of the game running out of names ever. Google can direct you to all sorts of name generating tools to help anyone pick a name. If a specific name a player wanted is already taken, there are threads here and here and here and here on these forums for anyone to post a request for that reserved name they are interested in or they can browse for one that is listed there as released. Players are also able to use the /get_global_name to contact the owner of a taken name they are interested in and negotiate with the other player to release it.

Ugh!!! I will pass on that one. 🤣 Thank you. I sincerely hope that the folks who like to think everyone wants "easy mode" and an instant "I win!" button read this.