Mjolnerd

Enforcement isn't the point -- it never is with this sort of thing. My city has those rentable electric scooters all over the place and every time I get one, the app tells me I need to wear a helmet -- every single time. Yet I've never, not once, ever seen someone on one of those scooters wearing a helmet. Who just... carries one around with them all the time? But because that message is there and I've acknowledged it, that means that if I fall off of my scooter and sustain a serious head injury, I can't blame the scooter company for it. They will have warned me to protect myself, and I will have chosen to ignore that warning. It's actually there to protect them more than it is me. It's the same thing with items like age limitations in an EULA -- while Homecoming can and should certainly take reasonable steps to prevent their servers from being used for anything harmful or illegal, they can't possibly be expected to control every interaction a child might have with another user. But they can tell you "hey, don't bring kids under 13, this isn't the place for them" and if you choose to ignore that and the kids see or hear or experience something you don't want them to... well, they tried to warn you.

It's much safer to walk down the middle of any given street than the sidewalk. I know -- I know. Just trust me. The cars will miss you. The muggers won't.

Unless you're asking about something on an NPC (spiderlings, maybe?), in which case it's probably not available to players, then the only thing with four spider limbs is the Crab Spider backpack. In order to get the version you're (presumably) thinking about, you have to level a "generic" Arachnos soldier ("wolf spider") up to 24, at which point you'll automatically be granted a respec, and can choose to be either a Bane Spider or a Crab Spider. If you go down the Crab path, you'll get the big spider-leggy version of the backpack. Here's a link to the relevant Wiki page.

An "apply to all costume slots" checkbox for power customization options would be nice, instead of having to load up each slot and update them all individually just to, I don't know, change Hasten to "no effects" for example.

Dual auras. Either in-combat/out-of combat, or just... two at once in different places. Being able to have regular and path auras at the same time almost counts, but doesn't.

Regen is better the more HP you have, since most of its powers operate as a percentage of that total. Brute is the way to go.

Back when CoH was a "real," published-and-sold game, it was rated T for Teen. I don't remember for certain, but it's fairly likely something along the lines of "you must be 13 to play" may have even been in the terms of service at the time (maybe even in the HC version of the agreement now?). I think that's about the most we can reasonably expect nowadays. It's near-impossible to control player-to-player interactions in an online game without implementing really draconian and often unreliable text-censoring methods (your stalker's level 6 power is "[censored][censored]in's Strike" because the word ass is naughty and therefore blocked) and/or maintaining constant moderation, neither or which is realistic for an all-volunteer team.

It's not my definition, I lifted it word-for-word from Forbes. More importantly, I agree with you regarding 50s -- there's no practical reason the rules shouldn't apply to a particular character just because that character reached the highest number it can. But as I already said upthread, I don't feel so vehemently about that, that I'm going to get upset over it. If it were up to me, 50s wouldn't be immune. But it's not, so... shrugging emoji.

Opportunity cost is the value of what you lose when you choose from two or more alternatives. It’s a core concept for both investing and life in general. Basically, it's what you're giving up in order to get something. For example, if you're about to log off for the night and go to bed, but then you see someone advertising an ITF, the opportunity cost of joining it is the sleep you won't be getting because you'll be up late playing City of Heroes instead. Back on Live, the opportunity cost of having any given name was that you wouldn't have access to that character slot for other names/alts -- when you only had between 12 and 36 slots (depending whether you'd paid extra for additional slots) per server, per paid account, that opportunity cost was relatively high. Now, with 1000 slots per server and the ability to make as many accounts as you want for free, the opportunity cost of holding any given name is... well, not technically zero, but negligible. You're basically giving up nothing to have the name -- thus, there's no real incentive not to squat on any name you can get, forever. It's a similar theory to the one behind the Shopping Cart Test; everyone agrees that returning your cart when you're done shopping is the right thing to do, but because there's no direct, immediate personal benefit to doing so, and there are no negative personal consequences for not doing so, many people simply won't bother. (Obviously there are sometimes extenuating circumstances that prevent someone from returning their cart, but it's meant as a generalization -- remove those roadblocks and some people still won't do it.) It's therefore seen as a good litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governance and/or how much regard they have for others.

It might be cheating for purposes of this thread, but I have a character whose name I chose specifically because I find it hilarious when the game inserts it into the generic NPC dialogue in radio/paper missions: That Handsome Devil. "What's That Handsome Devil doing here?" "How did That Handsome Devil find us?" "Get That Handsome Devil!"

I'm familiar with the concept of opinions, thanks. I'm asking you to expand on yours and explain why you feel the way you do. If level 50s are immune, WHY should no names be released at all? What does one have to do with the other?

I don't disagree; in my opinion level 50s shouldn't have their names "locked in" forever and should be subject to the same rules as others. I don't feel all that strongly about it, certainly not enough that I'm going to be upset one way or the other, but yeah... if it's inactive, it's inactive. I'm not sure how that translates to "or else don't release names at all," though.

Oh, I see we're doing that instead of having a discussion. Very persuasive. Surely it will win folks over to your side and convince them to take your opinions seriously.

I think everyone gets that, the confusion is coming from your statement "Nothing will happen on day one anyway. The timer will start then and it's quite a long timer." A hypothetical situation: - I have the name "Doctor Ducklips" on the Freem server. The character is level 25, placing him in the "one year" name release bracket. Right now, today, Doctor Ducklips has not been logged on in 18 months. The character select screen currently, this minute, already displays a little yellow warning icon next to his name. - I do not at any point login with Doctor Ducklips. - On Monthtember 1st of this year, the name release policy goes live. I understand that I would not lose the "Doctor Ducklips" name automatically, it would only happen when and if someone else were to attempt to use it. Based on my (and, I believe, others') understanding of the policy, "Doctor Ducklips" would be flagged as available for others to claim on Monthtember 1st of this year -- the day the policy is implemented -- because on that day it will have already been more than a year since my character with that name last logged in. But the statement, "nothing will happen on day one anyway. The timer will start then..." seems to be saying that, when the policy goes live, that's when the "real" timer will start, and at that point I'll have another full human Earth year (in addition to the previous 18 months of inactivity) to log the character in before the name is flagged as available to others on Monthtember 1st of next year. Have I misunderstood?

Very clever use of the wings!

I semi-recently lucked into the name Metalhead(!!!) on Excelsior thanks to the server's Name release thread. Ever since then I've been trying to figure out what to do with it -- designing and redesigning, trying different powersets and ATs, then deleting and starting over. Currently he's a level 7 Sonic/Invuln sentinel, but that's at least the tenth iteration of the character so far. I've got a look that sort of works, but... eh. "Metallic guy in leather jacket," how clever. So I throw myself upon the mercy of the Costume Request Thread. I'm sure someone here (or a combination of someones) can help me come up with something better than this big ol' pile of generic. At this point I'm not married to anything; gender, powers/AT, or any aspects of the design at all. I just want something, you know... \m/ METAL \m/. Go nuts, folks, I'll figure out the rest once I have a look that isn't more boring than a bass solo.

Hyperbole is fun, isn't it?

I agree, it's good on brutes. My StJ/Regen brute has never had any significant survivability issues. She won't ever be one of those brutes that tanks better than a tank, but she absorbs plenty of punishment and stays upright for lots of SMASH. Strange, my MA/SR scrapper does just fine. Admittedly, with the Body Mastery ancillary pool and a half-decent IO build, but I also don't remember any major endurance problems while leveling on just SOs.

If for whatever reason I didn't pay my phone bill for a few months, I'd lose my number. My actual, real-world phone number that people use to contact me for actual, real-world things. I've given it out to people. They need it in case of an emergency. The phone company would give me a reasonable grace period; I wouldn't have to get a new number because I paid the bill a day or two late, but after a while, certainly less than a full calendar year, they'd say "okay, I guess you must not need/want it anymore then" and free it up for someone else to use. And even if that were somehow a colossal inconvenience to me personally, it would also be a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. At this point, anyone who loses "their" names has had, what, three years' worth of warnings that this policy was going to be implemented at some unknown future date? Plus about six months of more specific, direct, in-game notices that it was coming more imminently. These (former, let's not beat around the bush here) players have been notified. Repeatedly. Over the course of literal years. Anyone who's been paying any amount of attention, and they should be if they care that much, knows it's coming. They don't necessarily know when, but they know. The devs have taken reasonable steps on more than one occasion to inform players of the impending name-pocalypse. Presumably they'll take even more steps (forum posts, probably even a news item in the HC Launcher) once a specific date is chosen. Anyone who gets blindsided by this will have ignored several good-faith attempts to communicate it to them. I find it difficult to be especially sympathetic.

I think there's a subset of posters here who significantly overestimate the number of people who are perched atop a mountain of fantastic names, greedily hoarding them and willing to expend large amounts of time and effort to actively prevent others from taking their precious names away from them. (I suppose it's also possible there's a group significantly underestimating that, too.) I'm sure there are some, but I feel like it's a relatively small number. On an individual level, certainly a given name-hoarder is keeping the more names from the general public than an average player, but overall their impact is probably relatively small. They're a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the player base. And even if I'm wrong, even if most of the really good names are all being held up by a tiny cabal of players who have nothing better to do than hold onto thousands of names just so nobody else can have them, once the policy goes live they won't be able to just check a list of dozens of names at time and click through the creator as fast as possible for the available ones so they can park the "blank" in one of the tutorials, thus blocking everyone else from having that name forever. Maintaining a list of fifty, sixty, a hundred or more inactive names won't be something they can do passively anymore; they'll have to work at it. Keeping others from getting "their" names will become a constant hassle that they'll have to stay on top of actively, taking a significant amount of time, and frankly: good. For a lot of them, especially if they've got a really egregious number of names camped out, it's not going to be worth the time and effort, and they're eventually going to stop maintaining their vault, or at least pare it down to a more manageable size. Maybe not on day one, but over time -- a marathon, not a sprint. Probably a much bigger percentage of unused names comes from absent players, people who are gone and (presumably) never coming back. I know exact numbers are hard to come by, but... does anyone remember an article (can't find it anymore) that came out right after the news broke that the game was back, stating that there were so many people playing on Homecoming that if it were on Steam, it would have been something like the 3rd-most-popular game on the platform at the time? That's tens of thousands of players, give or take. Four years later, we've probably got half that number (if we're being generous) still playing on a regular basis. The other half? Gone. Most likely forever. Among them, the number who have any characters at 50 is likely vanishingly small. But they've probably got at least four or five non-50s that will never see the light of day again. Getting back those names, the ones that were played for a few days and then abandoned somewhere in the 20s and have been sitting unplayed ever since because the person whose account they belong to moved on to a different game years ago, is going to have a noticeable impact on the pool of available names. Will they all be A-plus names? Of course not. But some will. And frankly, we'd benefit from fishing a few B-minus names out of the drain too. Any improvement, however small, is still an improvement. Pretty much. I'm sure it's possible; in situations like this, almost anything is with enough effort and expertise. It's a really a question of whether the amount of effort and expertise required justify the end result, and less subjectively, whether making those changes would break or negatively impact other, existing systems within the game. I don't personally know enough about software development in general or CoH's code in particular speak from a position of expertise, but I am willing to Appeal to Authority on this one and say that if, over the course of a decade-and-a-half that I know of (and probably longer than that), entire teams of people who do know about that kind of thing, from Cryptic to Paragon Studios to Homecoming and Rebirth and Thunderspy and others, who were fully aware of the fact that many people were requesting the feature, chose not to implement said feature, there's probably a good reason they haven't. The horse has been thoroughly beaten. Thoroughly.

The Perfect Solution Fallacy: an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists or that a proposed solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it were implemented. The policy will make it more difficult to name-squat, thus acting as a deterrent and reducing the number of players doing it. You're never going to totally eliminate... well, most problems in the world that stem from people being selfish or hostile or irresponsible or otherwise unpleasant, but you can minimize them and steer people away from the harmful behavior. Retail stores are never going to reduce losses from shoplifting all the way to zero, but the amount is certainly going to be closer to zero if those stores implement countermeasures that make it hard to do than if they just shrug and say, "oh well, I guess there's no preventing it." Deaths due to drunk driving are never going to go away completely, but that doesn't mean we throw laws meant to prevent those tragedies out the window and just let it happen unchecked. And releasing the names from accounts that have been abandoned isn't nothing -- it's likely a pretty significant amount. It's also something that will prevent the problem being compounded in the long term since (after the initial dump of thousands of names when it first goes live) names will be continually made available a few at a time as players naturally leave the game for a variety of reasons, thus making it easier for new players to get into it. If I'm just starting to play today, I create an account, I download the client, I pick out an AT and powersets and design the perfect costume, and then the name I want is taken, so I try another... and another... and another... and another... and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and they're all unavailable, then at best I'm being introduced to the game with a negative, frustrating experience that makes me less likely to enjoy my time with it, and at worst I'm going to decide not to waste my time and give up on it altogether right then and there. Losses in terms of player numbers are inevitable, so MMOs need to continually add new players to replace the ones they're losing or the whole player base suffers. Saying "sorry, someone else got to that name first, it's theirs forever even though they only took it halfway through the tutorial and haven't logged into their account at all in literally several thousand days, guess you're out of luck, n00b" is not the way to entice new people. Or to hold onto some of the existing ones, if we're being honest. As for appending global handles to names, it's been suggested for years, at least since Champions Online was released 14 years ago and probably for a while before that. At this point, I think it it were feasible in CoH's code, someone (HC isn't the only CoH out there, remember) would've done it by now. It's probably time for everybody to let that one die.

I mean, yes... but also no. Given how many people showed up when the servers were first opened up just to check things out and/or for nostalgia's sake, but aren't regular players now, plus the fact that accounts are free and everyone has an effectively infinite number of slots on every server with which to squat on names, there are probably quite a few names that were grabbed early on, played for a few hours to level 15 or so, and then never touched again. Are you likely to get that name you're pining for if a daily player has it? No, probably not. But if it's being held up by some rubbernecker who was just curious and uninstalled the client three-and-a-half years ago (so they won't see any in-game messages about it one way or the other anyhow)... maybe you will.

I play on another server, but realized just now that I've been squatting on a bunch of really good names on other servers for... a long time. Since launch? Close to it, anyway. I'm dropping the following on Everlasting: Adamant Eve Arch-Rival Ctrl Alt Defeat Daddy Longlegs Doctor Horizon Highway Star Madam Smasher Mother of Invention Night's Templar Psychosis Jones Yucatan I'm trusting you all with these, Everlasting -- make something awesome.

I normally play on another server and apparently I've been squatting on quite a few great names over here on Torchbearer for four-to-five years that I had totally forgotten about. I'm releasing the following: Ace of Spades Adamant Eve Arch-Rival Armageddo Auntie Freeze Commodore Core Ctrl Alt Defeat Doctor Horizon Epicenter Freak Accident Great Wall of China Mother of Invention Nemean Night's Templar Psychosis Jones Sentinelle Yucatan Don't make them go another four years without being played!

I play on another server and have apparently been squatting on a bunch of names over here on Indom for... almost 1400 days? I had no idea. Anyway, I released the following: Armageddo Ctrl Alt Defeat Daddy Longlegs Emperor Scorpion Hellrazor Mother of Invention Psychosis Jones That Handsome Devil Villainess War Widow Give them good homes!