Andreah

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.

You can still convert spare Emps into cash; it's just not as lucrative as via reward merits. And this does kind of hit players who were running non-AE content and getting emps from Vet levels there to convert to reward merits to get IOs pretty hard, too.

This will be self-limiting to a degree. Imagine this goes live, and huge number of Emps from farming and ordinary content flood into the market as super-inspirations. Only so many of those will be bought, listers will undercut listing prices to try to get their to sell, and eventually many will stop and the price will settle where demand is enough to keep the supply from sellers who remained sold. I don't know where that price is relative to Inf/Emp, but I'm sure it's lower than before.

I was already herding a lot; people generally like it, if they're not getting murdered by it. I think it will take a little more care and judgment so that a herding tank/brute doesn't herd when herding is bad for the rest of the team.

I sometimes wish, back when HC had launched, that there'd been a rate limit on making fresh characters. Like, one per day, for the first month the servers were up.

It may sound good in theory, but there would just be more accounts made to get around it.

I often finding myself wishing the aggro cap were higher, but then I think about it a bit and decide that's not really a good idea. A full team of active, powerful, characters can still aggro huge numbers of mobs. But it takes coordination and skill. Now, the challenge for that team will be getting the right number of mobs aggro'd, and also into melee/AoE range, and attacking on the characters that can take it. I look forward to it.

One thing I would like to see is a "Yellow Alert" level that would show up a few days before a character was going to get the red triangle of vulnerability.

If anyone thinks that more than half the names aren't being held by fewer than half the accounts, that's patently absurd. Moreso, I expect and consider it almost without question that the vast majority of the names in the database are held by a small fraction of the total accounts, and worse, many of these accounts with many names are held by the same actual player. I'll cite the Pareto rule. And I would love to see the devs produce statistics of how many accounts hold how many names. I recall at HC launch a number of people mentioning they were systematically going through names they could think of to deliberately squat on them. Again, no sympathy. Log those characters in once a month or risk losing their names.

That doesn't solve name squatting, it just solves account abandonment. I could be in favor of more aggressive name release schedules, criteria, and features; such as: Level 50 names not being entirely safe, e.g., a faster schedule and only a one year grace for level 50's. Only level 50 character on the first page never becoming tagged for release Requiring the character to be played for a full cumulative hour to untag the release warning Only allow to untag by login a single name per day An automatically generated forums post each day by server of names which have been newly tagged for release Let's keep in mind how reasonable this is. The folks who're most upset by the new system have been sitting on vastly larger shares of the namespace than typical players, don't actually care enough about their character names enough to spend a single minute, or less than a minute per month on them, or frankly, don't hardly play the game anyway. Again, I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy for the level of entitlement I perceive.

Market prices of valuable IO's aren't really driven by the supply of recipes that farmers produce. For example, the price floor on LotG's is not greatly affected by the supply/price of base recipes. The dominant element is the price of the average of 39.43 or so converters it takes to make them from uncommon IOs. That's 2.76 million at the current price for 39.43 of them. Even if it were only 30, that would be 2.1 million. You could drive the cost of the original recipe down to zero and it barely moves the needle. And converters primarily come from merits. Most of the recipes farming produces are, like in most content, common ones. These can't be used in the conversion process, the need for them is pretty low in end-game builds. Most all of them vendor for more than they sell in the auction, and that's likely because farming drives their auction prices down. Which means they are not a supply in the economy at all -- they're getting immediately vendored, or listed, bought and then vendored as an inf source. Salvage that farmers get is likely more of an impact, but the most efficient, least expensive means to produce useful IO's occur at lower levels where there's not a lot of call for the expensive rare salvage; instead for yellow and white salvage, which even at their seeded prices barely budge the needle on the floor for expensive IOs. My conclusion would be that farming on the whole, even by the high intensity master farmers, doesn't really drive prices down much, if at all. What it does do is create a lot of inf, which if not siphoned off in some manner, would drive prices up. The losers if farming were actually removed (not just the hair cut we're likely to see from these changes) will probably be the near-Trillionaires who siphon that excess off, because there will be a little less of it. All of this is speculative, but I'm not too worried about the game economy.

I really doubt this would do it alone. Pocket D would just become more unbearably crowded, and likely will anyway. Fortunately, there will be new alternative locations for RP'ers to go hang out.

I think you're reading a lot more out of my post than I put into it. Farming contributes significantly to the economy, I think that's clear. I believe farmers also spend a greater fraction of their time on-line actively gaining XP/Inf/drops that non-farming characters. Possibly much greater. Farming impacts the economy in several ways, it's not just a one sided supply boost. We really could use new statistics, and imo, ideally new statistics by time spent in AE vs not in AE. That might not be possible to get.

I think there is some truth to this. Farmers making new farming characters, or new farmer creating their first farming characters are a big part of the demand for IO, and especially the high end ones. Remember this post? And also this specific bit of data, from two years ago? I doubt it has become less unbalanced. Farmer characters do produce a lot of the goods in the economy, but they also consume a lot of them, and cause a lot of Inf to be generated which pushes prices up if it's not sunk out or absorbed into the trophy hordes of those Trillionaires. Also, I doubt we have a Trillionaire in-game just yet. But we certainly have quite a few people in the hundreds of billions.

I kind of like this idea, but it would be an underwhelming substitute for farming vet levels and I expect it might be seen as insult on top of injury by some here. Maybe if you could bank up more than one level's worth of patrol experience, or if patrol experience could be as effective at vet levels as 2XP is before 50.

A player would have to think about the other things they would have slotted in those powers, and other switching to multiple OF would still make a well balanced and capable build. It also grants some ranged defense, and I can see that being sought after.

Sudden Acceleration is a bit of a self-defeating set as it stands. But I could see it being five slotted a lot. Or, we could create a new Hami-O or D-Sync that did KB->KD conversion. And maybe had a little recharge or accuracy or something else no one would object to. Then delete the KB->KD from Sudden Accel and make it a five piece set.

What of we tuned down the set bonuses on OF a bit and made it, the whole set, non-unique? Mainly the six set knockback protection reduced to 2 pts, or even 1 pt. Hrrm, I could even be convince it would be fine just entirely as-is with non-unique.

In principle, I agree. I think PvP needs a lot more than just a rewards boost, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.

The ones over the cap might attack you if they are in range, have a line of sight to you, and have a ranged attack power. They won't close in and attack you in melee range. Edit: here's the relevant snippet from the patch notes on this: If an AI-controlled enemy has no valid target due to them all being at the cap, it will choose the capped target with highest threat that is in range and use opportunistic ranged attacks. They will no longer mill about, oblivious to the action going on around them. Enemies that are beyond the cap *will not* pursue players that move out of range.

This doesn't work so well as you might think. going up a couple of levels is not the same as picking a mob out thirty or forty levels above where it exists. Someone has to create new version of those mobs with level appropriate sets of powers and abilities and ensure they've been balanced against players at those same levels. Some enemy groups span the entire range of levels, but not all of them. It's a lot of work.

The OP means that you could go to say, King's Row and run the radios there at level 50? Or that you could go to King's Row, pick up a radio mission there, and exemp yourself down to it automatically? I think the former, but I am not sure. However, if so, the problem is that many of the enemy groups in those radios don't scale to 50 smoothly, or at all. They would need a lot of developer work to fill them out and balance them. I'm in favor of this, I suppose, but I don't know if it would make a good use of the time and effort. Finally, both Hero and Villain sides have a unlockable contact that will allow you to run any of the Bank Safeguard or Mayhems from all the zones. Maybe these contacts could also offer you the radio/paper missions from those zones similarly exemplared. Just a thought.