ShardWarrior
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Posts posted by ShardWarrior
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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.
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1 hour ago, Ston said:
My mistake, I agree it wasn't an attack on the PVP community specifically, but it was a suggestion that recent updates have been made to appeal a very small group of players that are close to the devs, which just doesn't seem true. There are plenty of changes that have originated on the suggestion & feedback board.
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.
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24 minutes ago, Rudra said:
🤣🤣🤣 I actually did that for someone! I teleported out to each and every explore badge, then teleported her to them! 🤣🤣🤣
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.
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13 minutes ago, Ston said:
This will maybe get 10-20 players into PVP long term.
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.
15 minutes ago, Ston said:Sheathed weapons, toggle suppression, new hardmode content, rebalancing softcapped defense, new costume currency, roleplay improvements... Yeah, the devs really don't care about anyone but the small circle of PVP players.
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.
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4 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:
Specific to the new costumes rewards and the new Aether currency: They were added primarily to incentivize running the new Advanced Difficulty content, with the few slower methods included as a generosity to make Tier 1 costumes reasonably accessible to anybody who wants them.
Adding the new rewards to an existing currency that most people have huge stockpiles of doesn't accomplish anything other than removing a tiny amount of those stockpiles from the economy, which doesn't make that new content any more appealing and thus doesn't accomplish the intended goal.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?
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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.
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2 minutes ago, Astralock said:
No. That’s not a game. That’s an instant “I win!” button. For people who want that sandbox experience, Cake/New Dawn is ———> that way.
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.
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45 minutes ago, skoryy said:
Speed farming AE for RMs defeated the purpose of RMs being a reward for time investment and keeping lower level content alive (WSTs), and that was the problem.
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.
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8 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:
If the intention was to keep players from farming emp merits and converting them, your first solution was significantly better, in my opinion. The new solution adversely affects people who want to play their 50s in a non-exploitative way.
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.
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3 hours ago, Vanden said:
I hate it.
- Converting Empyreans and Astrals to Reward Merits makes it much easier to afford IOs for your character and alts once you reach 50, just by playing the game, thanks to the rewards from vet levels.
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.
3 hours ago, Mr. Apocalypse said:This is just another Skirt around coming outright and saying "We hate farmers, Play our way or else".
I cannot help but agree here. That is exactly what this change is.
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1 hour ago, agentx5 said:
Holy Carp! That's a lot of names that could be freed up! Good grief!
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.
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4 hours ago, UltraAlt said:
When you enter, the trainer isn't there to greet you like Ms Liberty in Atlas.
There are so many contacts that is hard to distinguish who is just standing around, who is relevant, and what to expect before clicking on most of them.
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.
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6 minutes ago, ForeverLaxx said:
Seems to me we have a lot of unconfirmed speculation about name hoarders, but we do have confirmed reports of players who obsessively check names and try to hunt down people to confirm whether they're a dead account or not to try and swipe names from them.
I'm not sure which is more sad, but I did find humor in the obsessive name checkers who have "no sympathy" for others they believe are entitled/selfish... you know, as they obsessively name check and hound accounts for such in-demand names like Big Girl.
I said it before, but I don't believe this policy is going to amount to anyone getting that long-lost name they wanted a year ago but had to settle for a lazy synonym. Of course, I knew this policy would be enacted some day, but to hear that people are actively checking a list of names they feel like they deserve, hoping the original owner has deleted the character/quit is... yeah, I think I decided which I find more sad of the two situations above.
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.
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9 minutes ago, EmperorSteele said:
Check out Player2's "name release" thread in the Excelsior forum. Yes, those are all names he grabbed, then eventually decided to delete. And he (and others lile him) probably have more.
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?
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2 hours ago, Andreah said:
Moreso, I expect and consider it almost without question that the vast majority of the names in the database are held by a small fraction of the total accounts, and worse, many of these accounts with many names are held by the same actual player.
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?
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23 minutes ago, ScarySai said:
Would we be able to ask a gm about the status of a name once this is in place? There's a few I have been trying to track down and I have no clue if it's a hoarder, or an inactive.
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.
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11 minutes ago, Peacemoon said:
I think a lot of games have a ‘name release’ function these days and overall I’m perfectly happy with it.
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.
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59 minutes ago, Number Six said:
1. It could be done during maintenance, though we currently don't have any manual SQL tasks to be run doing maintenance - I wouldn't want to schedule it because maintenance time is not always consistent due to availability. It would mean additional burden on server ops to run the scripts on each database. I'm not sure how viable I'd consider this, since that would mean that it only updates once a week and names could be vulnerable in the interim.
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.
1 hour ago, Number Six said:2. Probably. It's naturally rate limited since most of the time it takes to log onto a character is the client loading the zone. People already do this for anniversary badges, etc.
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.
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22 minutes ago, Number Six said:
Sort of, though there are a couple of issues with it.
1. dbserver is heavily multithreaded (it used to be hardcoded for 64 threads; I rewrote it to be configurable and we are currently running 96 threads on Excel in order to increase the maximum concurrent players it can handle) and has strict ordering requirements for updating character records to guarantee referential integrity while taking advantage of concurrency for performance. In order to solve the issue of long waits at the "Retrieving Character List" screen on login which were caused by waits on the SQL queue, the character list queries were moved to a separate queue with its own thread pool (I think 12 or 16 dedicated threads currently) so they get priority. However, use of that alternate queue comes with the requirement that the queries be *read-only* -- changing character records from the wrong pool would break that guarantee and throw referential integrity out the window. So if updates were done during login, the normal queue would have to be used; which means submitting a separate query for each character (since the threads are assigned with a hashed bucket system based on container ID to load balance requests and make sure the same thread handles updates for the same character in-order). tl;dr bulk updating characters at login could make the login process take significantly longer during peak times when the SQL queue is long.
It's also important to remember that dbserver does not issue raw SQL to the database. Everything has to run through the container system, which is kind of Cryptic's home-grown object-relational bridge, think like Hibernate or something but custom crafted for COH. The container system handles in-memory caching and locking -- bypassing it and changing data directly is a bad idea and would result in an inconsistent view. This is the precise reason that we have strict rules about touching the underlying databases while the shards are running. Even character transfers and beta copies get run through dbserver's container layer. That means no bulk UPDATEs that cross characters.2. Updating them all on login would make all characters on your list always show as Last Played: 0 days ago. There is not a separate field for the name release; the last active time is used as-is. That doesn't seem desirable.
3. With enough work and redesign of the character database, those probably could be worked around. However so far we feel the system works well enough as-is to not want to invest that much more time in it. The most likely changes to happen at this point are tweaks to the various policy tiers.
Thank you much for the technical response. Some follow up questions -
- Why not run an update routine as part of regular maintenance or even run on off peak hours?
- Is having people repeatedly logging in and out for each character they want to keep less stressful on the system? If this problem is as enormous as some are making it out to be and from your explanation here, that certainly seems likely.
- Not sure I understand why having all of the characters showing the same last login is undesirable? I am sure others find this useful, just saying I personally do not.
- Seems odd to me that adding a single column for "active account" to the character database is a huge effort. Is this more effort due to having to rework the character select code to access it versus database architecture issue?
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12 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:
POSSIBLE BUG?
I always get a chuckle when @Bionic_Fleaposts a bug report 🤣
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1 hour ago, Andreah said:
That doesn't solve name squatting, it just solves account abandonment.
Yes, it does provide a solution. Your solution is to contact the player who has a name you are interested in and negotiate with them for releasing it. If they do not want to release the name to you, they are absolutely under no obligation to do so. If an account is abandoned, there is no recourse for another player to contact them, so those can and should be freed up.
1 hour ago, Andreah said:Again, I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy for the level of entitlement I perceive.
I am having a hard time feeling any sympathy toward the entitlement people have in thinking they have more right to something than someone else. There are any number of valid reasons someone may have a low level character name reserved. None of them make you more entitled.
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21 hours ago, Troo said:
I may have missed your solution for name squatting.
Unlock names that are on accounts that have not been logged into for 2 years or more. Chances are highly likely these are abandoned accounts.
21 hours ago, Troo said:While you and I may not be offenders, there are some out there who took advantage, and this is how it is being addressed.
Once again, if the account is active, the player can be contacted by another player to negotiate the release of a name. If a player does not want to release a name, they should not be forced into doing so. The decision to release a name or not should be left in the players hands, not arbitrary nuisance code. There are name release threads here on the forums for players to utilize. Help direct others there to poke around and see if they find something they like.
I will say the same thing others love to say when it comes to cosplaying/homage characters - be original. Come up with a different name because someone else already has the one you wanted. You cannot have this both ways.
16 hours ago, Ironblade said:Whether you 'buy' it or not is irrelevant. As a database programmer, it is ABSOLUTELY possible that there is no way to do it other than querying the entire character database for that shard to see which link back to a particular account ID. Do I know that it's set up like that? No. Is that a REASONABLE way for it to be configured? Absolutely it is. And, since we were TOLD that it isn't practical, I'm guessing that's exactly how it's set up. Unless you've set up relational databases, you don't have enough knowledge to comment.
Emphasis added. If you read my post, which it appears you have not, and had any inkling about relational database programming, you would understand you agreed with my point. There has to be some link between account and characters on a shard. If you can query the character database, regardless of size, for an account ID then there is a link between characters on a shard and account. If you can do that, you can update all characters on all shards as active upon login. I am very skeptical that a query is overly difficult to write that would do this. Were I to make a wild guess, this sounds to me like the character database and/or tables are not at all optimized properly. That is something that should be addressed.
They can say it is difficult all they like and if you want to take them at their word, feel free. I choose to be skeptical. That is not meant as an insult to anyone nor am I saying anyone is lying so no need to get bent out of shape. Given what I have personally seen of the code for this game, it certainly is not an easy thing to work with. With that said, doing things the easy way is not necessarily the best way in my opinion.
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34 minutes ago, Troo said:
Suggestion: Maybe a Sort or a Search that could zero in on "# days offline"?
That would be nice, but does not solve the annoying problem of repeatedly having to log in and out. I simply refuse to accept there is no relation between account and characters on a shard where the characters cannot be flagged as active when a player logs in. I just do not buy it.
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1 hour ago, Marbing said:
This has already been answered many different ways,
I may be misunderstanding the questions, however I believe everyone knows these answers have been provided already. If I am understanding the question right, and I think I am, it is that these answers themselves are what should be but are not being analyzed further. The easy fix route is being taken to the perceived problem(s) with sledgehammers used as solutions where more delicate tools should be used. I think it absolutely gets ignored that this is an aged game using an aged engine with the overwhelming majority of the player base being mature players who have already experienced the content dozens of times over from when the game was live.
45 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:How many itrials does it take to get the stuff I need to get to T3 on a build compared to a farm? I'd like to hear the numbers on that.
This is a critical piece for many, however from what I can see pointing this out falls on deaf ears. The preference seems to be to force you into laborious chores that take longer because that is the "correct" way to play and if you do not agree with that, then you should just leave.
54 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:10) Being surrounded by enemies and mowing them down makes the player feel super.
11) Not having to wait/deal with other players.
These are two very important components as well. Along these lines, I would add that teaming can lead to being buried under layer upon layer upon layer of brightly colored flashing VFX and sound coming from other players to the point where team content is just not enjoyable. If I cannot see or hear what is going on, it does not make me feel super and it is not fun. This is why you see quite a lot of melee characters running off to solo on their own while teamed. There simply is no fun in grouping up and having mobs of enemy NPCS wiped out before you can even get a shot off. That is not fun. Sadly, pointing these out also falls on deaf ears too.
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Just throwing this out there: Level Lock AE
in Suggestions & Feedback
Posted
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.