ShardWarrior

Are you saying your bug reports are buggy? Is that even possible? 🤣

You can use the /get_global_name slash command to locate the player who has a name you are interested in to contact them. Or you can also use the various threads on the individual server forums to post requests.

From my understanding no, you should not. This first phase is just the warning part. Actual release of names will happen at a later date.

In that instance, the player is still active and can be contacted to negotiate to release of a name to you.

Serious question - have you all ever given any thought as to why not everyone plays on Brainstorm if they can instantly have everything they want? Clearly the ability exists on Brainstorm, yet very few take advantage of it. I think that is telling. As for the new currency, seems ok to me. Advanced difficulty is something I personally run once or twice for badges, then do not bother with after. Kudos to those who enjoy it and I hope this option gets added to more content, although I admit I would not want to see a Relentless level Positron or Synapse...

Sure with single IO sets costing several billion influence on the exchange back in the day, and that was not even purple sets. No thank you. We do not need to go back to that.

I would add less repetitive and thereby less boring. There is not enough variety in mission objectives that the game becomes very stale, very repetitive very quickly. Low level content is like running Synapse or Citadel all the time. The NPCs change, the activity remains the same. Much more variety in what the mission objectives are would go a long way in addition to better rewards in my opinion.

This is much better. It provides people who have a stable of lower level alts a lot more time to keep them active if they want to.

No worries. Sometimes a second set of eyes is helpful. As far as whether these suggestions are all coming from the same small circle of people. I have my suspicions about that as well. And from what I am reading in this and other threads, I am not the only one. No, I personally have no direct proof so take that with a grain of salt, but I have seen enough smoke to know there may be a fire somewhere.

This is an edge case. Quite clear not everyone would go through the time and effort to do this. And even if they do, let them for all I care. It is their time to waste and if that is what brings them joy in playing, more power to them.

I certainly hope not. Based on what the Homecoming folk have posted, they will not make changes unless they have a broad appeal. If only 10 to 20 players will benefit from this, then it was a complete waste of time and should never have been done in the first place. Having said that, I am in no way against this change, so please do not get all bent out of shape over that. Perhaps I misunderstood the post, but I do not believe this was intended as an attack on the PvP community. You may be reading this wrong.

Unless I am mistaken, my recollection of the few requests there were for advanced difficulty options was that the game is too easy and people wanted more of a challenge. Having the challenge itself is incentive enough for them based on what those requested it had said. I guess that is no longer the case?

If too many reward merits from EMP conversion was a problem, why not add in more things to spend those reward merits on? I mean, you all are creating yet another in-game currency to buy costumes? Just use merits. Or add converting them into the same sort of reward table where the amount that can be converted is limited per day.

Brainstorm is there too and very few people use it, so your argument about the "I win!" button does not hold any water. If it did, the majority of the players would be on Brainstorm.

Not sure what servers you are on, but I am seeing people advertising to put together mission teams and/or TF/SF/iTrial/WST teams all the time on Excelsior and Torchbearer. Literally every minute or so. There is absolutely no issue with non-AE content needing to be kept alive on either of those servers. TFs/SFs/iTrials requests fill up quickly. From what I can see with my own eyes, interest in these is very vibrant and there is a lot of interest in running them, so no, there is no problem. If there is a struggle to find teams for this, I do not see it. Wanted to add - people are speed running TFs all the time, not just AE, and that was not the intended purpose of that content either.

Just guessing here, but it seems like someone took issue with a few people farming EMP merits from Vet levels on multiple characters in AE. Removing Vet levels from AE would only force people doing that back into PI portal map farming, so the net result is same. STO had a similar issue with people leveling up alts to run them through the Reputation system and cashing in on the big dilithium bonus for completing a rep. That is a different story though because of the in-game dilithium exchange where people can convert it to Zen to buy things in the store, and that impacts Zen sales on a live game. I just do not understand why this is such a horrible issue here. If someone wants to invest that kind of time doing enough farming to earn 5,000 EMP merits like in the post @Troomade above, more power to them. They are not people I would be teaming with to do other "correct/dev approved" content anyway, so it makes no difference to me personally. Being able to convert EMP merits to Reward Merits was a nice bonus and means to buy recipes that I needed to complete a build without needing to farm tons of inf to buy it on the exchange. Like others have said, I do not chase Incarnates on every character either, so piling up worthless EMP merits does not solve anything for me. This is just making me want to play less, not more.

I hate this for the same reason as well. I really do not care for being forced into team content and relying on others to run TFs as the main source of merits. Running a WST once or twice a week was ok, now basically having to farm iTrials for merits does not make me want to play more. It is definitely going to have the opposite effect. I liked having the option to convert EMP merits from Vet levels when I did not feel like running TFs/SFs. I cannot help but agree here. That is exactly what this change is.

All depends on what the names are and if they are desirable to someone else or not. They could release 700,000,000,000 names and if they are all meaningless strings of letters and numbers that make no sense and that no one else would want to use, it becomes pointless.

This is a very good point. Would having some kind of intro and/or introductions type mission like Levantera's "Welcome to Vanguard" arc that introduces you to everyone in the RWZ? Something like that might help here get the player familiar with all the contacts and what they can do.

Nor is there any guarantee that these "no sympathy" entitled people who are checking names daily are going to actually use any of the names they may wind up getting either, so the net result is nothing.

Well, for starters, you have no way of knowing how long they had the names in question. For all anyone knows, these were costume or character experiments they had for a few minutes and decided not to keep. Nor is it any indication on how many total characters the person has in total. If this is the same person I think it is, they post A LOT in the costume showoff thread, so these may indeed be just costume experiments that are only around for a very brief time. Second, if they are publicly releasing names then they are not really squatting them, are they? Third, so what? So long as that player is active in the game and you are able to contact them to negotiate releasing a name, why is this an issue? Why are they obligated to turn it over to you if they do not want to?

If this is the case, which I am extremely skeptical of, would it not be better to deal with that one individual instead of inconveniencing everyone else?

Were this auto-release thing only applied to dead accounts, there would be no reason to contact a GM because the names would be released automatically due to account inactivity. If the person is still playing, you can get their global handle and contact them to negotiate.

Every more modern game I have seen does not have this because it is not necessary. Cryptic fixed this in the engine upgrade they used for CO and STO which made the need for a name release irrelevant. Names are a combination of character@account as far as the system is concerned. I personally have seen several duplicate player Captains named Jean Luc Pikard or James T. K1rk running around in STO. It just is not that big of a deal.

I understand not wanting to put any additional burden on a volunteer group. With that said, were this my team I would rather the burden be on us to solve this problem instead of our end users having to be inconvenienced. Anniversary badges are not as frequent as this is going to be. I appreciate your time in providing answers. I understand that there is no changing any of this at this point.