Andreah

And judgment being pretty scary for squishies to use. Those high target counts on Judgment powers and the high damage they do may get the casters a lot of undesirable incoming fire from mobs over the cap, even in team settings with tanks/brutes around.

I see it putting a premium on being able to position groups of mobs, both to concentrate them so they're subject to team AoE's and not sniping lowbies/squishies with impunity, and to spread them out of ranged distance so they can't snipe.

You are probably right. It would be abused, or encourage otherwise decent players to try to fib/lie to GMs for name retention advantage.

I suggested a token claim system earlier in this thread, where we would get to claim about one released name per week, and no more than two in any week.

Maybe what's needed is a routine means to notify the GM staff that you wish to lock your account for a period of time, maybe up to 90 days,, and an easy way for them to make it happen on the back end. While "locked" your account's characters would not progress on the release timers, or at least names past their fresh dates not be claimable by other players. I wouldn't want this to be trivial for players alone to do -- it should have a human GM in the loop to exercise judgment. But make it easy to do on the back end.

I've known a number of players to make temporary characters on second accounts to use as extras in storylines. These are rarely leveled very high at all, if at all. Edit: I don't think there's a lot magic about level 2, other than walk power. I expect there would be a lot of level 1 disposable extras, and some might lock at level 2, but if you accidentally got a roleplay civilian to 3, 4, or 5, it wouldn't change the RP. Sometimes these characters are similarly named versions of a high level character, being used for some roleplay purpose that doesn't require high levels, like having purpose costumes preloaded for social events.

How about the percentage being determined by amount confusion magnitude exceeds protection. E.g., Clamp( 0%, (control-protection)/(protection+1), 100%). And I'm also feeling like we're getting off feedback to this one page 4 feature and going off onto full on systems rework suggestions. Changing confusion mechanics would hit a ton more stuff than just the Advanced ITF.

There's been a lot of concern recently voiced in the beta forums about how farming/AE rewards should not be lowered, but rather those from regular content should be increased. What I propose here is separate from discussion of those page 4 changes. Please discuss those over in the beta forums. I wanted to put an idea out for consideration on how that might be done. I consider "Regular" content to be story arcs, task forces, and street sweeping. I'm not counting radio/newspaper, repeatables, or Ouroboros arcs as regular content. That's fair to discuss, too, I'm sure. Of course, I am not an HC developer and can't speak to whether these would be easy to implement, difficult, or flat out impossible. First off, I want to define a term, what I call "Bonus Multiplier". We all know you can choose a experience increase from P2W which ranges from no increase (+0%) up to doubling XP (+100%). Our total XP Multiplier is this bonus added to 1. So, when we choose +100%, we're getting our total experience multiplier of "2XP". First off, for Street Sweeping Content, which is defeating any mob in open world content, I would award double the bonus multiplier amount of XP at the moment each mob is defeated. This would count for XP only and only for non-AVs, non-GMs killed in regular open world zones. There is no influence or drop bonus involved here. Then, I would handle Story Arcs Missions and Task Forces a little differently. While a character is in a mission, I would record the bonus multiplier's worth of experience and influence from each mob defeated on the side for the character, and then award it all in a lump bonus sum at the completion of the mission. This is in addition to whatever experience or influence was normally awarded at the time of defeat of each mob, and even if influence awarded at the moment of defeat was reduced by the base setting, this will add some back at completion. If the mission is not completed, but reset or abandoned, then both totals reset to zero. One could leave the mission and come back into it, so long as the mission internal progress was not reset, the bonuses would be there for award when the mission was actually completed. Autocompleted missions, or missions one was not inside long enough to receive a normal mission completion bonus would receive no multiplier bonus. This will encourage people to not only run missions, but to defeat most of the mobs in them as well. Finally, for each story arc or task force mission completed, provided that mission was not a no-combat "talkie" or "goto", I would award one Reward Merit, regardless of the character's xp bonus setting. This would provide better rewards for content that ought to be the premier content in the game -- story arcs and task forces, provide a boost to encourage people to not just skip over the open world mobs, or to actually sweep in the denser hazard zones, and boost both influence and merit based means of kitting out one's now faster leveling characters.

... I've been six-slotting health for ages? Who doesn't want more health? :D

That game systems has some issues too, but other than that I prefer mathematically asymptotic systems, I'm not going after it here. This issue with confusion and knockback in AdvITF isn't the first time this has been an issue, but I suppose it's the most glaring. I would expect some people to figure out how to overcome the 10 points of confusion anyway. And if/when they do, they'll use it as much as possible.

How about if the logout timer also defaulted to zero if you were within active range of a zone supergroup portal?

I'm noticing an increase in sales volume. Anyone else? Is there "panic farming" or farmer-outfitting going on?

Many, perhaps; but the roleplaying community still heavily uses AE to create story arcs to run in roleplay groups to advance their group storylines. And these AE changes have no impact on those. In my SG discord, we discussed whether our group AE missions could be run for Tickets instead of normal rewards, and would anyone care? No one did.

This discussion makes me wish there wasn't a either/or threshold based mezz system in the game. One that had a mezz chance roll, or several grades of mezz effect (e.g., slightly confused, partly confused, confused, heavily confused, totally confused) depending on magnitude level compared to protection, and we wouldn't be in this apparent all or nothing point where either a player essentially can confuse a class of enemies completely and at will, or they can't at all. But we don't have that, and I suppose the implementation here among the star levels seem reasonable, and maybe it could be tweaked a little with Flea's suggestion on slightly lower mag but with significant duration resistance.

The principle is there should be reasonable equity in rewards between different modes of play. One should not stand out head and shoulders above the others in terms of engagement AND time investment per rewards. The most rewarding modes of play should be those that engage a player and require time investment. Farming's virtue of being low engagement (due to its low effort and fast defeat rates from easy enemies and it's being able to be done from very predictable rote or even afk action) should be compensated by provided lower rewards than content that requires just as much time, but requires the player to engage with that content with meaningful thought and process. Let's be honest, if we have people leaving this game, I doubt it's the career farmers. It's the people who look at farming and see nothing but a boring time sink, and wonder why they're being pushed to do it by the comparative reward structure.

I can say that frustration in finding good names, and expressing disappointment about good names being taken by people who never respond to inquiries about them and who are never seen with them logged in is a very common occurrence in the roleplay supergroups I've been in and in the role-player and themed-character communities I frequent. I think with warning and generous time frames for this process it should be fine. Even if few names actually end up being released, at least people will know the names they desire are not entirely abandoned.

I'm hopeful, when finally fully implemented, the name policy will be retroactive to homecoming launch. I like this overall. However, I think a couple changes might serve the community well. First, if the name of a character matches the Global Handle of the account, the name is never flagged regardless of its level. This would let everyone have one name without worry, forever; and won't have to deal with someone else playing the character that matches their own global handle on their preferred server. Second. For when this goes live create an account bound token, which is granted once per week and for which only two can be had at any time which allows a player to take a flagged name. If they choose a name which is currently flagged, and which would cause the existing flagged character to lose the name, they will be asked if they wish to spend one of these tokens to do so. This will limit how fast any one player might take over names that are flagged claimable, and prevent one player from suddenly trying all the combinations of a freshly available name they discovered to just become a new name-camper on.

I see this as support for roleplayers who wish to have discussions that are technically public but not widely overheard. I expect it will be used quite a bit, and am really glad to see it being added to the game.

Farming will continue. It might not be quite as lucrative or perfectly survivable as before. Maybe. Being more open zone than stuck in Ae might be good, but not in a market sense. One certain effect is that a lot of farming builds will get minor revisions. Perhaps that's an increase in demand for some IOs?

I like having that distance fine tuning freedom. Sometimes I may want to not hear just this one person who would otherwise be in range, and not want either of us to move. Especially with the ability to see range to target. However. The range to target displayed and the speak_range/listen_range should be in the same units.

This snippet ought to be pinned in the Suggestions and Bug Reports forums.

I don't continuously track supply and demand for my niches. But I do now and then do a deep dive on one or two. For a week I will check the numbers on a couple for about a week, and try to get an idea of how many of whatever I'm looking at are actually selling. The numbers listed for sale and for buy are not particularly interesting for most things, since the buy offers may be far too low and the sell offers far to high to ever actually move -- they may as well not exist, and I can't determine how many there are like that. It's also possible quite a few of those entries have been listed for ages, or by players who've quit and will never return.

It would come down to how many level 53 D-Sync Provocations you could fit into it; most everything else would be round off errors.

I recall back on live a number of people would add "Male driver" or "Female driver" to their bio to separate themselves from the characters they're playing. I don't see it very much at all anymore. No one really cares. I assume a bio for a roleplayer describes the character not the player, unless it specifically says so. Would some non-roleplayers not share that understanding and interpret the bio to be about the player?

I think pylons are a fine baseline provided they're equally defensed-from and resistant to all damage types, so there's not a trick build that produces a high pylon DPS but has trouble in most other content. An even better measure would be a series of foes to defeat in sequence with high resistance too all damage types but one, with each foe having a different vulnerable type, and the hit points in the foes being distributed proportionately to how often those resistances are found in-game in normal content.