Dr. Gemini

No deep knowledge required. There may well be more efficient ways to make inf, there may be enhancements that get a better profit if you spend your merits on them and craft. I don't know because my way is simple and takes 1 minute of looking at the prices of 3, easy to find on the market, things. I can't stand spending my time playing super broker instead of super hero. However, lots of helpful people who do watch the market post here and give advice in game so its neither difficult nor time consuming.

I'm reading this as I type this post and I just don't see what possible issue anyone could have with....wait a minute....what's this last line? "By playing this game you agree to the possibility of being chosen to have your mouth sewn on to another person's...."...ewwwww.....what the hell, man! What the hell!

The big thing is, 34 merits (using a number you noted in your earlier post) buys you 102 Enhancement Converters. These are selling at about 125,000 inf, and slowly dropping, so let's call it 100,000. That means 102 x 100,000 = 10,200,000 Inf. As someone who does like to start using set IOs from level 20 onward, I can tell you that will set you up with recipes and the salvage to make them at low level (and you'll find many enhancements are cheaper to buy than to craft). Those few very expensive IOs (relative to the current market, at least), such as the Performance Shifter proc, you just buy a cheap end mod set recipe or enhancement and save a few converters to turn it into one. That can get iffy, though my worst luck to date with that has been burning through 12 converters. While converters are dropping, boosters were selling for 1.75 mil last night and still had a low supply. Unslotters are also doing well at 150,000 each, but are also heavy on supply. The point is, to date, one of these 3 options will net you the money to slot your character, and if you keep spending your merits on whichever has the best inf to merit ratio at the time, you'll continue raking in the dough as you level up to the next group of sets you want to slot.

You don't have to have the best DPS or the best at tanking in a group to contribute. I don't know how many teams I've been on with multiple tanks where one tank was the primary tank. Where did that leave the other tanks? Can't DPS, don't need their tanking, so why have them? Because everyone who participates in a team contributes to the team.

I would think that there would be no means of keeping people from editing their characters unless there were a central server they were held on. Anything that exists solely on one person's computer can be hacked. The Homecoming team should not be expected to either set up and finance a central server nor to alternatively develop software that can facilitate character transfers. The people who want this should be the ones prepared to finance/develop the tools and this kind of request should be more of the "if the tools exist would you allow it" kind.

If you freeze it in time then you don't have CoH. Change was the game. The game in issue 1 bears almost no resemblance to I23. The only difference between a professional dev team and the Homecoming team changing the game is the original dev team got paid, and had to make game decisions based on profit. One of the main reasons MMOs or other forms of online games last so long is change. Someone may buy a single-player game and play it for a few years, but it gets old and stale because nothing about it changes. For example, I loved Diablo 2. I played that game more than anything for years. While sometimes I miss it, I also know if I ever tried to play again I'd take one look at the thing and realize that I've already done it all and I really don't want to play again. No one is ever going to like every change made, but, if the game doesn't change the nostalgia will wear off and people will start drifting away.

There are at least 2 servers with what I would call "toxic" communities. A few minutes of reading what they allowed posted on their forums convinced me I wouldn't want to play in the same game with these peoples, nor trust software from people allowing that kind of behavior to go on. I don't see that in Homecoming. Even the forums, for all that things can get a little heated at times, is tame compared to any other game forum I've seen aside from my other "go-to" game. Luckily, not being a for-profit game it doesn't matter what a gaming site has to say about us (although I have never seen any evidence that gaming sites influence the opinions of more than a tiny minority of a game's players anyway).

NCSoft also has to worry about who is going to stand and fight if they take action. IP holders often lose cases where the opponent is not making any profit from their IP and they can't show any losses due to unauthorized use of their IP. Not that those always work out well for those who fight, either, the Star Trek case being one good example of that. Fortunately for us, there is just as much reason to think NCSoft will do nothing as there is to think they will do something, so we can viably choose to think positively and enjoy it. At least that's what I'm going to do.

This needs to win the award for most hilarious thread on the forums. But I've brought the cheese because clearly many of you have had too much wine.

Of course, the number of people you knew were less than 1/10th of 1% of the playerbase of a game with a growing playerbase at its end, so the disposition of people you knew is irrelevent. For all the WoW was a juggernaut, very few people who played at launch (which was shortly after CoH started) were still playing it at the time CoH ended. That's the nature of games, because no game is perfect to everyone, and we all get tired of games if we constantly play them.

IMO, the game now is not so much about making you dance for treats, but is rather about letting you decide how you want to spend your time here. It doesn't need to give you an impetus, you decide why you want to play and create in your mind your own sense of accomplishment. Perhaps I good analogy is I could spend a weekend night playing poker with the guys, and the impetus is of course competition and trying to win some money. Or I could spend the day in the garage making something out of wood or doing some other craft. Unless I need to make, sell, or fix something, what is my impetus for spending the day in the garage? Well, just because I enjoy the making things. Not having to be commercially viable, the game can just be the hobby that you create your own personal satisfaction out of. You have a great deal of choice in how you play and how difficult you want the game to be. There are many things to accomplish besides leveling and incarnate abilities. Don't get me wrong, it's completely understandable that some people want a game to force those challenges, that its not the same if you are creating your own to be overcome. However, I don't think that is what the game is now. For me, that's part of the appeal, as there are plenty of games that do lead you from challenge to challenge (my other "most-played" game does exactly that) so its nice to have one in which you can make your own path, you own challenges, and write your own story.

They do stack in a single power, but, as Charistoph said, that doesn't make the best use of their procs. However, you can always load them into whatever powers you have and when you gain new ones stick a training enhancement over the second one you put in a single power, which will destroy the prestige enhancement, then go back to the P2W vendor and grab another one of whatever you overrode to put in your new power.

Converters were still the best bet as of last weekend simply because even though they are dropping the prices are fairly stable, while unslotters, catalysts, and boosters tend to range all over the place, but average slightly below the ratio of converters. Now, if converters drop below 100k (which might happen soon the way they are going), or the others ever stabilize, that may change.

I had a green lantern homage character in the original game that was a titan weapons/electric armor brute. Also had a golden age green lantern fire control/fiery assault dominator (as much of Alan Scotts early appearances were him shooting emerald fire from his ring).

No, but I am being forced to level one character at a time to 50 because maintaining the number of alts I usually play is untenable. For me I normally play one character one weekend, next weekend I'm jonesing to play a different powerset (for example, before this announcement I was wanting to start a mastermind this weekend), next weekend I'll play something else. That's how I ended up having 128 characters and I cycled through them for the months out of the year I'd actively play. I'm completely in favor of taking measures for dealing with people just grabbing names while the grabbing is good, but, these rules go further than that and I can't see my playstyle being viable. Given the amount of AE powerleveling going on earlier in the server, I'd put cash money down that I have more time on my level 20 than many 50's have on them. But, its their sandbox, so I'm in the process of deleting all but a handful of alts I've created so far because, thanks to the kindness of those who got the game working again, I have options. I can alt solo on my own personal server and play the handful I can maintain here when I feel like teaming until I get a 50 I can replace with a new alt. That's what makes both this place and the game itself far better than when it was a business is having options.

Actually I'm not, but I guess you have to push the "you just want to reserve all the good character names" narrative to justify your position. I'd be fine with unlocking level 1's that haven't been played in 30 days. I'd be fine with unlocking names of all characters on an account that hasn't been played in a year. I already said in an earlier post that I'd be fine with a 6 month or a year limit. But, don't let me get in the way of your justifications. Your justifications are just as much "excuses" for backing an opinion as mine are, but don't put words in my mouth while you're trying to makes those excuses.

...or I don't want to farm a specific trial on every character over and over to 21. Not everyone wants to rush to 21. Some people like to play through the missions. Apparently, though, we don't count anymore because "you can get there in an hour, it's no big deal", or "how can you be attached to a character name you only play once a year?" is the only way you're allowed to play the game now. I rarely actually lose my temper but this policy has me so pissed I've had to rewrite this post half a dozen times because I can't express my opinion of this within the forums rules. It seems like they are catering to the "I couldn't get Hero Man as a name so there's no good names left! Wahhhhhh!" crowd. But, whatever, I get the message, don't make alts, just play one character to 50 and if you get bored only being allowed to play that way go do something else.

I think the naming policy is horrible. It is incredibly short. I wouldn't mind 6 months or a year. For me, I don't play one game exclusively all year. I play a game for a few months, then put it aside for a few months and play something else. On the old game, I had 128 characters, because I like trying different things. I don't play one character constantly, I don't power level, it took me 4 years to get my first 50. Now, I'm being forced to play one character exclusively to 50 or lose my name because I'm not going to be logging on and mucking about with dozens of characters that I would otherwise have, especially when I'm not playing. To me, this basically says "we don't support alititis", which is, frankly, what makes this game so great.

I don't think they can make the super packs feel rewarding because of the fact you're buying it with inf and most of the pack is marketable. I feel they're more for fun, if you have inf to burn, than anything else.

Frankly, it would give me no more hope for longevity if NCSoft gave this place a license than their being a rogue server does. NCSoft has proven themselves, over and over again to be untrustworthy and completely uninterested in their customers. So, better things are as they are now and NCSoft is not making money from this than paying them off for a couple years until they go "Corporate restructuring has forced us to pull the license and demand the servers be shut down. We are so sorry". Maybe I'm too cynical when it comes to them, but I have no doubt whatsoever that would be the eventual result.

Don't worry. This game is very forgiving and end game is not the big deal it is in most MMOs. In fact, between respecs and the fact that you can have multiple builds on one character, anything you do miss out on you can fix.

There are uncountable numbers of comic fansites across the web that use copyrighted material on every single page. I can find every costume of every hero ever created with a google search, which will show me page after page of scans from comic books, none of which have the copyright owner's permission to be posted. No comic book company has gone after any of these in recent history, despite the fact that it is inarguable that these violate their IP. CoH is no different when it comes to making copies of their characters. The Marvel suit was actually about removing competition for its planned Marvel MMO, not about copyrights, which is why DC didn't come along and do the same thing. For comic book companies, fans playing Marvel/DC characters, just like fans putting up a random page or scene from a comic book, is advertisement. What they care about is using their IP to profit or advertise your own business.

...the first time. In a game that massively encourages altitis, it goes from being meaningful to tedium around the 10th time.

I don't believe that's the case. Only by exlemparing do you earn x2 Inf for 0x XP.

I go for IO sets as soon as they can be slotted, targeting anything that gives a Recovery bonus, and replace them about every 10 levels. While those percentages may be small, they make a noticeable difference in maintaining end, especially on characters using toggles. Of course, I hate end management so I'll take every benefit I can get. Money falls like rain in this game, even for people like me who are not market gurus, so financing doing this is not an issue. Its just taking them time to do it every so often.