ForeverLaxx

To be clear, I'm not anti-farm. My early memories of farming in CoH dates back to the old Freakshow dumpster farms. The devs have gone on record to say that they don't mind farming either, in a general sense. Everyone knows that if any kind of farm is possible, it's going to happen. What changes is how "profitable" that farm becomes and what things you can spend farmed materials on. More sinks would certainly help. Base Upkeep was Prestige-based, I'm pretty sure, which was its own currency. We're getting yet another new currency for vanity items, so that's out of the question. What could you offer for Influence that a player might find valuable but a farmer wouldn't find trivial to get? I'd imagine it would have to be something with a duration that could be purchased multiple times, but we already have things like that and it's not working. The only way any changes to farming income would be effective (that still allows characters to meaningfully farm) is to find the reward balance and spending balance points. That's probably a pretty monumental undertaking for a small team of volunteers.

To be strictly fair about it, they're only playing with wealth that's already in circulation. Buying and selling things on the market is just transferring wealth from one party to another. Technically, it's reducing total wealth because of the AH fees. Sure, Player A might have as much wealth as Player B, C, D, and E combined, but it was player B, C, D, and E that bought items from Player A after they found Player F's listings and saw a "profit" could be made with just a nominal amount of time spent crafting/converting. I don't generally care about farming, but looking at the marketeers as those who are the "real problem" is misleading. Raw Influence on an account isn't a good indicator of where it came from or who gave it to who. Farming, by contrast, generates new currency that eventually devalues currency already in circulation. We don't have the level of inflation we had on the live servers, and probably never will, but it can still be a cause for concern if left unchecked for too long. My only contention regarding the haves vs havenots scenario is the removal of systems that were leveraged for years that newer players won't be able to use in order adequately play catch-up. Vet levels, and by extension, Emps have been returned to the AE so I think that particular problem has been avoided. I still think there could be a loot table vendor that accepts Emps to simulate a more controlled, weaker version of the old Emp > Merit conversion but that's probably not happening.

@Number Six I'm not sure that's specifically what I'm referencing. I know Cryptic/Paragon ran an "inactive character" program at least twice. The first time was a much more loose run than the second time, as in, the parameters were more open and it allowed more names to be freed. However, in both cases, nearly all of the names released were either "garbage" names (think keyboard mashing) or so specific that no one picked them up on another account. Very few names actually got claimed by other players in that wipe and honestly, I feel like that's going to be the same here. That said, I appreciate knowing that there's no way our system today could flag characters without being a persistent system that requires player upkeep. Guess it's just something I'll have to deal with even if I'm sure 95+% of my names won't be stolen from me if I lapse for a year. I still don't like it, though, and I fully expect this to be active player maintenance with no real positive effect for anyone outside of a small handful of lucky name-grabbers who really wanted some ultra-generic name.

@Marbing Welcome to dealing with UltraAlt. You either agree with him or he calls you a troll and blocks you. In any case, I feel this name release system should probably just be turned on once, then shut down again. If the goal is to free up names on inactive accounts primarily, then a "quick flag" of character names should be all that's required. Once those names are flagged, does the system have to remain active for them to be available? I'm still not convinced that anything more than a handful of "good" names will be freed by this regardless considering Live's history with the system, but someone somewhere must want a name on an account that's been sitting for 3 years. If the name can remained flagged after the system is turned off, I think that's the best option. I don't like enforced upkeep, even if it's an entire year of grace period. I don't think any of my names are at risk of being swiped out from under me since I put a bit more effort into them than it seems others do, but that doesn't mean I actually want to spend the first 30 minutes of my play session loading whatever zone each of them logged out in. Just as the "it's not hard to log them in" argument is considered simple, so is spending 5 extra minutes picking out a suitable alternate name. If you can't manage that, your character must not be that important -- certainly not more important than the character who already has the name, anyway.

The amount of people I see in Pocket D with bios full of kinks, "preferences," measurements, "model backgrounds," "wards against 'psychic intrusion'," "susceptible to 'psychic intrusion'," etc etc made me stop reading bios while I'm in there. I used to read bios all the time, but I guess Pocket D has become an extended bedroom for some people and I'm not interested.

That was suggested pretty early on and, from what I understood of the dev response to it, that it's not really a thing they can do. Your character is just flagged with a suppression timer once mez ends, so even if you de-toggle manually in order to wait for recharge instead, if that suppression timer is still active your toggle still won't do anything until that timer is up.

You're mistaken, if only because you want to craft a scenario that puts this change in the best light possible. Whatever slotting and bonuses you're using to get Hot Feet to 6 seconds will get Darkest Night down to 4 seconds. Using a Break Free after the first 2.5 seconds means DN is up 1.5 seconds later. In that time, I've moved away, queued it up, and will be casting it as I go around a corner to break LoS. That's roughly 2 seconds of time after spending 2.5 seconds under CC for a total of 4.5 seconds without a debuff active. What you're suggesting is that 7.5 seconds (2.5 CC + 5 Suppression) is somehow faster than 4.5 seconds. No matter how you spin this, 7.5 will never be faster than 4.5. Sorry, but the math doesn't check out.

Play-testing tells me it's still a nerf. You can already take care of the "problem" with animations by utilizing a joust/kite technique but in the reverse direction. Jump backwards around a corner, hit your toggle debuff while at the peak, and be protected from return fire while you wait for a 2 second cast animation to finish. That's two seconds to get the absolutely necessary for survival toggle back on, which is the only one I care about, vs 5 seconds to get that toggle plus less useful ones on all at once. I think I know which I prefer. This does not pass the play test and I'm tired of the devs pretending that getting to fire one attack while running away justifies it.

Only thing I can come up with is that he has ties to the Family, Arachnos, and sold his soul to a demon that the Circle had locked up somewhere. Eve's boyfriend (ex, really, since her demon killed him) was a Family contact and he could have heard about her through him somehow. Ghost Widow took interest in Eve after she killed her boyfriend so he could have heard about her through his Arachnos channels. It's also possible he just heard about her organically as she started getting big in the Isles, which is what led to her boyfriend becoming jealous and attacking her, leading to his death. The demon he made a deal with could have been the same demon that killed Eve's mother, the original Desdemona, since they had it shackled and hidden away. All of his missions have something to do with demons and mysticism in general since he's trying to get out of his contract so it's possible he just came across her or heard about her since she's a powerful Demon Summoner. I couldn't find any direct link, though. Just circumstantial links and speculation.

Fair enough

Warshades have two (Inky Aspect and Orbiting Debt). "Dark Epics" is nebulous since not all of them have Darkest Night, Death Shroud, or Oppressive Gloom (and of those that do, it's the only toggle in there which makes who that affects reliant on Primary/Secondary to be "offensive toggle heavy"). I already explained to you in a previous post that your Dark Miasma + Dark Epic Pool only had 2 Offensive Toggles but you keep repeating this "dark sets are going to suffer the most" mantra and I don't know why. Just because Dark-themed sets tend to have many toggles overall doesn't mean they're all Offensive Toggles. Even Dark Armor, notorious for its heavy use of toggle powers, only has three that affect enemies, one of which costing almost nothing to run and the only set with Cloak of Fear. Dark Armor is moot to think about, though, since it has standard melee character mez protections. This leaves only Darkness Affinity (one offensive toggle), Dark Miasma (one offensive toggle), and various Dark Epics (zero or one offensive toggle, based on AT). You'd have better luck focusing on Nature Affinity or Force Field with their two offensive toggles like Warshades (still dubious, but at least closer to being relevant), or my example from a previous post with Radiation Emission's three offensive toggles. I have no idea why you're so fixated on sets with only a single offensive toggle and pretending it will affect them the most due to having "a lot" of offensive toggles (they don't). Ironically, sets with low offensive toggle count will be affected the most, but not for the reason you seem to think.

This reminded me that they lowered the threshold for a new instance of KR in order to bandaid fix the Paladin event. If KR becomes the new AE hotspot, there's gonna be a lot of KR instances on the trams.

Which wouldn't do that anyway. It would just bring back the old "bridging" system players used to maximize XP for whoever was getting PL'd. Powerleveling has always been in the game. I don't do it, at least not yet, but I don't care if other people are. Some people can't enjoy a character until it's capped, others can't enjoy a character until it's fully kitted, and people like me consider a character "complete" when it leaves the character creator because my concept is all that matters to me and I basically only solo. Trying to remove powerleveling is a fool's errand because no matter what you do, a dedicated player is going to find the most time efficient way to gather XP in any system that allows players to decide what they're doing and for how long they're doing it. Any measure to curb this beyond the point of reason directly harms the rest of the playerbase and is not a wise move. A certain someone with a vendetta against PLing will never learn this simple lesson because he demands everyone enjoy the game in a manner he deems acceptable. He'll pretend you can do anything you want as long as it's not PLing, until he decides it's negatively impacting his play experience and the game. Gets killed in a PvP zone too many times? Suddenly he'll think PvP is a blight. He hates PLing because he believes it's impossible to be entertaining or that the end goal can't possibly be worth "skipping" content. Being in another's shoes is beyond him. That's just how his brain works.

You're overselling the "use other powers" aspect. For the sake of argument, consider a scenario for a player where, having their debuff toggles dropped due to mez, is actually still alive after that mez wears off. Assuming they somehow manage to not faceplant 1.2 seconds after their toggles drop, they come out of mez. What's the first thing they do? They run. They aren't standing next to mobs wailing on them while trying to get their toggles back online; they're running. They're running because they still have to wait for recharge. They're running because they'll take less damage (usually) at range than up close. They're running because they're at 5% HP and need to break LoS to pop inspirations/heal powers. They're not sticking it out and blasting for 8 seconds, hoping to survive on 5% HP for 8 seconds, just so they can get their toggles active again in 8 seconds. This scenario even plays into your hypothetical situation the best because while you've broken LoS, you probably haven't left leash range so your toggles will come back on before they get to you... but you can already do that with this strategy, in less time than 8 seconds. This best-case scenario for these changes is still worse than current Live. This is all just academic anyway because you're going to die when you get mez'd and your debuffs drop. Any content where you're going to survive without your debuffs is content you didn't need them on to begin with, so having them down for 8 seconds or down for 4 seconds + animation time is moot. You're eating dirt before that mez drops or immediately after because you're a squishy that needs those debuffs to survive.

And the worst (best?) part is he'll just put you on ignore if you disagree with his position or don't think PLing is evil, accusing you of attacking him or being a dirty powerleveler in the process. I don't know how people like that function. It's bizarre to me.

I'm not sure what the point of this topic is supposed to be. I know you've been going on about "this is just the first step towards free 50s for everyone in all content" with regards to the PvP 50s that are trapped in PvP zones (and Pocket D) forever, but you do know there are other servers that already offer that "free 50" feature? Or that you can just play on Brainstorm directly and get the same experience? I feel like this thread exists to stir up drama around doom-posting because it would get pruned out of the beta thread if you kept it there.

Imagine that. The people who will be affected by a change are voicing their concerns while those who aren't either don't care or are dismissive regarding those concerns. I fail to see how the former is a problem but the latter should be applauded. In any case, all this worry about "name campers" is silly. You're not getting a list of released names so it's not like you'll even know that the name you wanted is available in the first place. And, just like on Live, the kinds of names going up for release, or at least the vast majority of the released names, are going to be unwanted names from the start as they exist for reasons that aren't "name hoarding." Even the number given by a GM is but a small fraction of the names that would have released on Live when this initiative was ran twice, and it was so unsuccessful in curbing the "name camper" claim they never bothered to run it after that. To me, all this name gnashing just seems like wasted effort. They'll run the program, you won't get your name, and you'll still be annoyed. All we're doing is adding enforced upkeep to the playerbase. I knew it was coming, but it's still annoying. At least when I was playing on Live, a paid subscription guaranteed my names were free from being ripped out of my hands, but if the kinds of names I see people demanding be freed are anything to go by, I don't think any of my names are in danger to begin with.

Dark Miasma only has Darkest Night. Its other toggle is a self-buff with no component that affects an enemy. Even Storm, known for its end-heavy toggles, only has two that affect enemies (Snow Storm and Hurricane). The reason I called out Rad specifically though is because it has three enemy-affecting toggles with Enervating Field, Radiation Infection, and Choking Cloud. Even in this extreme case, you still have to have another powerset with an offensive toggle alongside it, be that an Epic Pool power in the Defender's case or a Primary Control power in the Controller's case. Spelling it out like this makes the 8 second penalty even more egregious to me.

Rad Melee/Dark Armor can, among others. You almost have to go out of your way to get that many offensive toggles though, and usually those that can already have mez protection to keep them up anyway. Beyond that, you basically have to be a Something/Rad Controller or a Rad/Something Defender to get there.

The amount of reward you get out of RP is directly proportional to the amount of catgirls you have with you at the time. Or inversely proportional. Depends on who you are.

"Balance" via scarcity is not balance.

I don't see this as a problem. Sending all your excess Emps to an alt for trade-ins on a loot table is the same as getting that badge on every character. People already farm these Emp Merits for their alts' use in building up their Incarnate powers so it's really no different. I'm not trying to find a non-solution, but rather, one that provides an outlet for a currency that becomes dead after a certain point. I personally think the Incarnate system itself is a mistake, and many of the powers available through it never went through proper testing and tuning, but that ship sailed forever ago. My contention is that, eventually, under this current build, you end up with Emp Merits that do nothing and I don't like currencies that continue to accumulate that do nothing. Rolls on a loot table can be whatever the devs want it to be. Sure, it will probably result in less influence towards the character than going Emp > Merits > Converters > Influence does now, but it's something. This is also a solution, if not an ideal one, for people who would use the Emp > Merits > Direct IO Purchase route but then, that route was never ideal to begin with. In both cases, you still get something for Emp Merits where the proposed beta changes do nothing but let them build up.

I hope the irony of this statement isn't lost on you. With that out of the way, I'm glad Vet Levels are returning for those who partake in "extensive use" of the AE. My concern is now, of course, that Emp Merits will become a useless currency after a certain point. I'm never a fan of games with 15 different currencies that all produce nothing (but continue to drop) after you've worked through whatever system they were built for. That's just UI bloat, currency bloat, and it can be a huge problem down the line. Destiny 2, a game notorious for many things, is also notorious for its currency bloat. Every event, every Season, every little thing seems to have its own unique currency specifically to prevent players who have been around a long time from "getting rewards" without doing the associated content. There has to be a better way at handling this without creating new currencies and deprecating old currencies that only serves to punish long-time players. I'm more of a fan of "required quest/mission completion" as a gate than new currencies. Like how Patron Pools are locked behind a badge, would it be possible to create a unique vendor that won't talk to you unless you have a badge (or even a series of badges/Accolade) that could take excess Emp Merits and trade them for random rolls on a loot table?

Why do you view everything with a lens that's permanently set to "PLing is Evil"? I'm genuinely curious.

Well good news, then. Full reversions for reasons other than unforeseen bugs/consequences are rare. In nearly all cases, when something hits "public" Beta, it's happening. All that tends to change is the severity, if anything at all. It's been one of my biggest complaints in feedback threads of the past. So take heart. Most of the changes that get through their closed testing where only certain people are allowed input will continue to make it through the public testing phase. No need to worry about people who "cry loud enough" or whatever.