Andreah

It is tedious, for sure. However, I still open a few hundred now and then.

My reward merits go exclusively into boosters and converters. Most times to sell, occasionally to use. I never convert emps to reward merits. My emps go exclusively towards incarnating 50's, and get emailed forward to new ones. If I need ATOs or Winter-O's, I buy a few packs, convert to what I need, and then sell everything else for a net profit.

Up until recently, I would have agreed with you. But I've asked around and a surprising number of players seem to do this. Sometimes I wonder if we're so attuned to the market and our (market) logic we lose connection to non-attuned players approach things. I'm still aghast at how many people buy recipes with reward merits. I never even stopped to think they might be getting those merits by converting their spare emps. And some of them don't dig hard into the incarnate system, and a few not at all. Maybe the Devs have some analytics for insight into that. If so, then I would trust they know how many people who don't farm but do use veteran Emps for reward merits to buy recipes and who'll be impacted by this change, and there really aren't many. Or maybe this has caught them from left field as much as it does me, and they don't even have metrics for it, or even any good way to collect them.

If a player puts this much work into developing their characters, they can spend the time to level up to 6 and then spend thirty seconds once a year ensuring the character's name will never be tagged available.

I find it mildly humorous that people who are so against selling things on the auction are so willing to buy things on the auction. And often (even if not in this case) seem upset that prices are too high.

I think I'd like to see the topic separated into its natural major divisions, whatever they are, and see those discussed at a more thoughtful pace. Without people feeling their playstyle is under assault. That last bit is a tall order. For example, I think a significant part of this topic is what attributes of gameplay merit reward, and to what relative degrees? I see, generally, three camps on this: 1) Time; 2) Effort; and 3) Risk. Each one of these is complicated though; "Time" spent at or away from the keyboard? Effort before the activity (design and planning) or cognitive effort (control action) during the activity? And what does "Risk" mean in a game? What, exactly, are we at risk of losing or even not gaining? But if we start to discuss these at basic levels to arrive at mutual understanding, much less agreement, I have a suspicion where it's going to go.

Personally, Id like to see more focused debate. I don't want to get drawn into more of this "It should/shouldn't exist" level stuff. There are some points to be made, discussions to be had, and fundamentals to be worked out, but so long as everyone sees each other as threats to their playstyle or to the fundamentals of the game to others, we're just talking past each other.

Well, the way it is going to work, unless they decide to change it, is he deserves it more than you right up until the moment he hasn't logged it in in 30 days. At that point, anyone else can deserve it more than him if it is claimed. Until that new holder hasn't logged it in for however long for the level bracket they get it to.

Thanks for organizing the fantastic Tanker Tuesday Tour on Everlasting @Warboss ! This screenshot does not do justice for how many psychic clockworks have been herded by multiple tankers into that one dumpster. Let's just leave it that Ionic Judgment is not going to hit them all.

If you use anything in a base, even, say, a converter with any storage window open, it will try to put one in it each time you use the thing. I get warnings on my enhancement bins for this commonly.

They put them back in the new patch notes.

The problem becomes how to store this huge amount of Inf. We have our sneaky ways, but some are inconvenient and have other risk exposures. And folks have gotten bitten by those too!

This is why I'd go through boosters, and accept a generally lower return per merit in exchange for 15x fewer stacks and related clicking. However, there is no way the booster market can handle the volume without crashing prices down. (Which I'll note it's currently down about a third.) While I'm sure there's a tiny and yet very extreme tail on the distribution, and it's surely something, case by case, I doubt our devs approve of, that's not to say it's the only level of this they're concerned about. I suspect there's less extreme AFK emp farming, or even non-AFK emp farming, that they're concerned about. It might be 10x less efficient, but 100x more common. But they haven't told me, and I don't know.

I think we had a pretty thorough discussion of the time periods, back when this was first discussed publicly years ago and now recently. I've given my feedback and while I didn't get my way, in fact it went the other way, I'm satisfied I was heard. Yes, it is easy to get to level 6, but imagine a notional name-camper from the early days sitting on hundreds of names, all level 1 or 2 and being far beyond the thirty day period. Their first inclination to keep those names will be to log them all in once a month. After a few round of that, they may decide to level some of them up to six to get past the monthly requirement and get a year. If you have a lot of names, just getting to level six on them all is a significant burden. I can be okay with that. It proves they're willing to put some effort into keeping those names.

This is my chief concern. It doesn't affect me, but it does affect quite a few people I play with. Looking back at my ITF example from earlier in this thread, there's as much as a 5-10x reduction in rewards from the ITF for someone who was intending to use the emps from vet levels earned in it to convert to reward merits to get IOs' for their character. I would be interested to know if using Emps from vet levels earned outside of AE to convert to Reward merits to get IOs was seen as badly imbalanced play. I'll add that quite a few players don't advance their incarnate abilities beyond T3, and some only T3 their alpha slots for the level shift from it. I don't know how to solve the problem here, if it is in-fact considered a problem.

I would say it is to attract enough players and keep them happy enough to sustain the servers' concurrency and community we have for the foreseeable future. I don't see how having say, ten times, as many players would improve anything. In fact, it could be substantially worse. I don't know if our dev team with agree with me on this, but I wouldn't automatically assume they're in favor of unceasing increase in new player accounts and ever higher concurrency. Perhaps it's more trying to curate the structure of the game system to retain the players they feel make their ideal vision of the game's community. Again, without them coming forward and giving us their individual detailed conceptualization of what make the community work for them, we can only speculate.

Ooh! Ooh! Do common salvage next! :D

I mainly want to temper expectations. People see numbers like 700,000 and imagine their own favorite names they couldn't get will suddenly be available on their shard, and while that may occur for a few people, it may not for many others. And the 700,000 number might shrink very quickly as more players become alerted to their character's status and log them in to keep them safe. Will it shrink to 50,000? Or merely down to 650,000? I have no idea.

I'm pretty sure based on what Cobalt Arachne said earlier, they can't edit or adjust any of the run animations, so it's probably not going to happen. They're basically proliferating existing full animations to our configured use. It would be nice to get a confirmation of that.

As a separate movement animation mode? Because I use Athletic Run a lot and like it the way it is.

Fold space affects up to 16 targets and brings them into or at least close to, melee range. You might already have some mobs there. The ones over your cap will have to be dealt with somehow or they'll continue to use their ranged attacks on you, even from close in. As you fight that group, you'll probably end up with the 17 in closest attacking you in melee, and all the rest a little further away attacking you with ranged attacks. If you're with a team working together, it might help quite a bit to get the distant "snipers" pulled in close to the fighting. They're probably already shooting at you.

Those 700,000 names won't just show up in a giant list. And a great many of them may not be very desirable names for other players. If you think a name you want is in there, after the full system is enabled you're just going to have to try it and see. Further, a lot of players might take the time to log in and get them untagged shortly after the name warning policy goes into effect -- I would be interested in seeing the same statistics 30 days after it goes in. I'd also like to see how many accounts they're owned by, and how many accounts own a cumulative fifty percent share; though those might be harder to collect based on what they've shared of the data architecture.

I'd be cool with that; but that still puts a big hit on people who were using Emp merits for non-farming to get their IOs. Let me give an example. As a new level 50, you can run the ITF in a "Kill Most" team, and in an hour get about three veteran levels and 26 Merits. Those three veteran levels could give 20 Emps which would have converted to 200 Reward Merits. That's the biggest share of the merits the player would have used to get IO recipes. Now, I'll grant that's not a good way to spend Merits, but people do it to avoid the auction. Some people don't know, others just don't like it. However, 200 Merits will buy 2 Purple recipes, or 4 rare recipes, or 10 common recipes. Now, those player's won't be able to do this. I'm not one of them, I don't personally care, but these aren't the players the AE experience changes were supposed to affect, and now it sure does affect them and in a heavy manner.

That's kind of the whole thing for Empyreans original use. If you have enough Emps, you can go straight to Tier-4's as soon as the slots unlock. And ifyou have extras, you can email them to yourself to use on the next character. But you might continually uses fewer than you earn, and build up an excess.

Every now and then I agree with you; this is one of those times. Demand for super inspirations is fairly inelastic. You could drop their prices down quite far and people would not buy many to use. It's just too inconvenient to keep a supply of them at hand to use when needed. There will be price drops on them, and the Emp->Inf conversion will get fairly low. Still possible, but less convenient and poorer rate of conversion.