ForeverLaxx

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.

To be fair, I only used that name you stated as an example of a name that's so generic and common, it's no wonder it was taken and I couldn't really fathom how important such a basic name really is to a character's identity. 90% of the time, when I make a character, I get the name I want without any problems. With the remaining 10%, I do a bit more hunting and background tweaking to explain the name and almost every single time, I end up with a character name and backstory that's better than my original plan. I had one instance where I really struggled to come up with a name, but the one I did end up getting was so multidimensional as a descriptor that I didn't even mind my first 8 attempts at a name didn't work. But then I tend to research terminology and jargon when making my characters so maybe I'm some weird outlier. I don't throw my hands in the air when "Muscle Man" comes back as unavailable. I wasn't accusing you of such things as obsessively checking names to see if "Matter-Eater Lad" (or whatever else) is available. I was merely pointing out that some people in this thread have admitted to doing so, with a mix of pride in the act and frustration in its fruitlessness, calling others "entitled" because they don't think they should have to prove they're using it on a consistent basis. To me, the people who keep using /getglobalname every week and trying to hunt down those players are the entitled ones.

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.

This was what I was about to point out. "A short login/logoff" becomes larger when you have to do it 50, 100, 500 times. Maybe the devs think players with that many characters can't be actively using them all (I'm not one of those; I only have about 30 characters I think), but it's pretty presumptuous of them to think this is just a drop in your playtime bucket. If you only play once a month, you're looking at a good 10 minutes or more of doing nothing but logging in and out just to keep a name, and that's me being conservative. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised that when this policy goes into full swing, all those "free names" will remain mostly free for years to come. It's not like you get a list of suddenly freed-up names so you know to go try them again, and most players who get a "name taken" message just exercise another brain wrinkle to make a better name if they really wanted that character.

Have they ever come out and said exactly why "offensive toggles" have to have the suspension (previously re-toggle) drawback? Standard defensive toggles don't have to worry about this under the justification that defensive toggles are needed to stay alive, but aren't nearly all "offensive toggles" just defensive toggles with extra steps? You already have to recast them against every spawn and are reduced in power thanks to the Purple Patch, so why do they have to suffer even more drawbacks in the first place?

The fact of the matter is, anytime you give tools to the player to craft content designed specifically to be as non-threatening to their character as possible, you're going to run into problems applying "appropriate" rewards to that content. Those Fire Farms will absolutely murder anything that isn't stacked with Fire Def/Fire Resistance, but for those who are, they're little more than walking loot sacks. How exactly do you expect a dev team that's trying to balance risk/reward structures around a system that's being manipulated specifically to circumvent that very same risk/reward structure to respond? With scenarios like that, you're basically forced to provide whatever the minimum reward is that the majority of players find acceptable. Do I think cutting all Vet Exp out is fair? No, not really, but when you design custom enemies that are functionally zero threat to you for the purpose of farming, something has to give somewhere. Now with that said, this thread is supposed to be about focused feedback regarding the beta build. Arguing with each other and restating your positions for 10+ pages isn't doing anyone any good. Not even for yourselves. You expressed that you don't like it (and I don't like it either), but saying it over and over again for 10+ pages isn't helpful.

I know I mentioned it in my original post, but that's the part that humors me the most. The same group of people who promised to leave if previously announced AE Farming changes went live are still here, a year+ later, threatening to leave (again) if additional minor changes are done to the reward structure of a farm. I'm not trying to turn this into a war or anything, but the constant shouting of "I'm gonna leave and the game will die!" posting from the same people every year every time a change is made to farming is starting to get old. This is why I called it an absurd outlook in my original post despite my agreement that the complete removal of Vet Levels seems like a weird idea.

Always great to have a new set. My favorite thing about it is that, since it's built from existing powers in different sets, Whip Assault seems more possible than ever.

As someone previously mentioned, a flat 8 seconds for everyone is essentially punishing the whole class because one kid takes their time to do everything, but I think there's another issue no one has mentioned yet: you lose player priority when re-toggling with this system. If someone has multiple Debuff/Damage toggles active that get suppressed, they all go on the same 8 second timer. The player isn't allowed to prioritize which toggles come back on in which order in that system. If you need Toggle A up because it provides more protection than Toggle B, but you're forced to wait the full 8 seconds, you might already be dead before they come back online. Things like Choking Cloud, Noxious Gas, Darkest Night, etc are given more importance in a detoggle situation than something like Snow Storm. Not being able to turn on your survival-boosting toggles before the full 8 seconds elapse just makes you more vulnerable than you were before, and you were already at a disadvantage. The only positive is that you're not locked into casting animations and can move around/attack while you wait for those 8 seconds, but you're probably faceplanting without those important debuff/control toggles getting up sooner. If players are going to lose the ability to prioritize which toggles come up first, then the duration that they're suppressed should be lowered.

This is the closest I could find on short notice. Notice how her form differs slightly from the animation, has a longer stride, and how she transitions her upper body into a more vertical posture. I'm not expecting something like this 100%, but the animation speed of the run currently on beta should look more like this. I'm not sure it's entirely possible, of course. Generally, running animation speed is sped up/slowed down based on the actual movement speed of the player and likely can't be adjusted without adversely affecting how it looks when stuck in, say, a Tar Patch or something.

Because the real truth is that it needs to be somewhere in the middle. The legs should be "snapping" rather than being a continuously fluid motion. I know it's hard to explain with words, but I'm personally speaking from 17 years experience running defense/midfield on a soccer field. The "slow" animation has the right motions, but the "fast" animation is just cranked too high for each motion. For that particular running style, you should see long strides with the legs/arms in a pumping motion. That's actually the real problem. The stride is way too short for that kind of "power sprint."

@Blackfeather I disagree that Ninja Run "looks fine" at slow speeds. Those leg movements do not work unless you're sprinting. When at a light jog it just looks like you're moving through molasses. It's certainly smoother, but it's still not a correct run posture for that slow speed. Regarding Blitz/Parkour, it's certainly jerky at high speed. The feet not bending at the ankles, the upper body not leaning correctly, and the fact that the slower animation is what you actually want at the faster speed in order to look right are what's wrong with it.

Wasn't this done on Live, with Cryptic/Paragon at the helm, with no appreciable effect? I get the idea that people want names freed because of "campers," but when the game had 1000x the population, running the name recovery script freed up so few "desirable" names that it wasn't ran a second time. Sure, we have 1000 slots per server compared to the original... I want to say 20. I honestly forget. But how many people are actually sitting on 4k character names each and how does that compare to 300,000 OG Game Players all sitting on 20 names?

Based on @Blackfeather's animation recordings, the Blitz/Parkour animation doesn't actually look wrong. It's because of the slow speed that it looks awkward. Based on that animation, it's supposed to be a sort of "push off" running animation that looks weird when you move too slowly or the upper body doesn't "sway" with the push-offs like you expect it would. It's just another one of those running animations that only looks correct if you're going fast enough, kinda like Ninja Run.

I don't farm and I don't care if people farm, but I don't really see the point of removing Vet XP from AE. I know that "it's been this way for a long time" isn't a strong defense against a change if the thing being changed is ultimately detrimental to the growth/longevity of a game, but what harm is this actually doing? Farming has already been hit from multiple angles, and I suppose it being a one-stop-shop for everything you could need (even if it's not the most efficient at specific things, such as influence gain) may be a reason... but you've already got a ton of people who have ran their characters through farms/PL sessions for Vet Levels and this would just needlessly create a chasm between those who have been here for years taking advantage of the AE and those who only came in a few months ago/are yet to arrive. I'm not generally in favor of changes that create a Haves vs Have Nots scenario. That said, I do get a kick out of every change that even tangentially touches farming getting slammed with 6-12 people I never see on the forums at any other point. I do agree with them (this time) that this change just seems misguided and serves no purpose other than to slow players down and restrict options. I don't agree that it will "kill the game" though and I think taking that stance is an absurdist extreme.

Inform them not to enter the mission before you, then. If they keep doing it, kick them from the TF and go about your business. It's your TF so run it how you want. With that out of the way, you get less exp running higher difficulties than if you just run a lower difficulty multiple times. In the time it takes you to run a +4, I could run three or four +0s and walk out at the end with more total exp and influence than you. Frankly, I find this to be a design flaw but one that isn't terribly important in the grand scheme since influence is easy to get anyway and you can turn off exp if you think you're leveling too quickly. In any event, those "+4" runs aren't even really that difficult when you're designed for it. It mostly just makes things more tedious than anything else and players generally aren't interested in enforced tedium for the sake of a badge and merits.

I don't really agree. Many players don't even take the control powers in non-control sets unless they also do something else they want or plan to load it up with procs. Nearly all of the control powers that aren't in a control set already have short duration and are often just single-target on top of that. Increasing the magnitude while reducing the duration is pretty much only going to be useful for upping a control into "affects the boss in one application" territory but it won't last very long. The only issues I could see with something like this right away are toggle control powers like World of Confusion, Oppressive Gloom, or Cloak of Fear. Those powers could just not allow the enhancement. It's not like they would be outliers in that regard considering other powers have unenhanceable aspects that are normally enhanceable like Defense or Recharge.

I'd make an "Increase Effect Magnitude" enhancement even if it came with reduced duration of the effect. You could use it for standard CC like holds/immobs/sleeps and what have you, and maybe even Phase/Detention powers.

Not as rare as you might think, though most of those people seem to be permanent residents of Pocket D. With the AE in there, they never have to leave if they don't want to. I usually see at least one or two every time I go there to afk for the "time spent in PD" badge and I often just afk in there in general since there's no hostile mobs to bother me. I don't have these things in my bio since I use it for my character background/origin of powers/explaining my lame concept.

I imagine the mods/GMs could also edit a post, so it will say if they did it instead of the original poster. Other than that, I've always used it to know if someone changed their post after it was quoted by someone else, or to "sneak in" something else into it after getting called out in order to try and make everyone else look like jerks.

Then pick whichever route saves you the most influence. Some people pick the route that saves them the most time. That's the beauty of a buyer-driven economy rather than a seller-driven one. If you don't like the forces at play or don't like the price of something, just don't buy anything and make it all yourself. If something "costs more" to buy direct than it does to craft, and it stays at that value long term, that only means more people prefer to save themselves the time of buying things piecemeal or that money is very easy to get and has a lower perceived value (this is most likely the case for most players -- getting influence in CoH is trivial). Wanting some dev to come in and make direct changes to the market in order to favor direct purchases vs crafting (or vice versa) runs against the point of an auction house to begin with. At that point, just set up another NPC vendor with all the things you could ever want on it, or another tab on the P2W vendors with hard prices. I'm sure you'd hate whatever prices the devs come up with though in such a system, particularly because this already sorta exists with the Merit system and how much more expensive enhancements are to buy with Merits directly. All I know is, I never want to see a crafting system that's more typical in Korean MMOs where you spend months gathering raw materials that have a chance to fail when crafting them into components, just for that chance to fail to keep climbing higher and higher as you try to create an actual usable item. It's even worse when you're trying to put enchantments on an item you've spent half a year farming for just for it to become unusable because that failure chance isn't just a failure chance -- it's a "break your item if it doesn't work" chance. That functionally makes certain power tiers not worth their time unless you have three separate lives to spend grinding and that system is terrible. I have no idea why people think this is a good thing; it was bad enough in original CoH regarding the combining of enhancements to make them last a little longer, but at least that wasn't too punishing since enhancements could be purchased and the failure chance was related to the level difference of the enhancements you were trying to combine. It wasn't like you spent 3 months farming up that Damage SO just for it to delete Power Burst from your bar if the 30% combine chance failed. EDIT: Oh, and OP? Going back through the thread to "thumb down" everyone who disagreed with you and your most recent posts, even when their post isn't even about you and is in response to someone else, is kinda sad. It makes you look like you're unable to take criticism and are petty. This does you no favors and only makes people resent you, causing them to be less likely to bother listening to anything you say in the future. I personally don't care if you don't like my post, even if it's not even talking to/about you, but the timing of your reaction is suspect considering the circumstances.

I know you mentioned not wanting Crey so I suppose that means Paragon Protectors are out, though they work nicely since they can have literally any power you want considering the lore behind them. I've got a (former) Skulls member, a "Girlfriend from Hell" summoned by the Hellions, an ex-Council member... but I don't have any screenshots for you. What you'll probably want to do is look at each villain group on the wiki and see what looks like something you can replicate in the costume creator. I've been able to make "half" Devouring Earth this way, too.

"Exist" is a pretty strong word for what SA became. I never went there, but I do know its history and I suggest just leaving it at this revelation that it's still around.

That kinda goes beyond the realm of a simple disagreement.

Your tendency to put people on ignore simply for disagreeing with you because you choose to interpret that disagreement as an attack (generally when in response to your own dismissive and condescending replies to them) never fails to both humor and sadden me. You want to get confrontational and accusatory of others, and when they respond to you in kind you want to take the "high road" and /ignore them for bothering you. Hypocrisy isn't a good look. Unfortunately, your signature seems to imply that you're proud of this method of discourse. I personally don't put anyone on ignore unless it's constant harassment and threats, and that's pretty rare. Disagreements are good to have because that leaves room for people to learn or appreciate a different perspective. You don't learn anything when you only surround yourself with people that agree with you.