Andreah

This is my preference of the poll alternatives we have. I think my proposal brings Veteran Levels back more in line with their original intent from the Score server -- to make it practical to get incarnated in a very small population community, but as someone said, that's probably not going to happen now that's been the way it is for so long. I don't really like either option, to be honest, but neither affects me. I don't farm in AE or otherwise, and I don't convert emps to merits either. Each poll option has a very negative effect on someone, but at least the No Veteran Levels from AE option is more focused on those who're (presumably) the concern of the devs. The other option hits a lot of other folks, who may never even touch AE, very hard.

The original I posted was here: Veteran Merits would be awarded one-for-one instead of Empyrion Merits at ever vet Level that Awarded Emps, and one-for-twenty instead of Threads at veteran levels that awarded threads. Veteran levels would only award these new, non-convertible Veteran Merits. And, if I've added the numbers up right, getting to veteran level 99 would award a total of 458 Veteran Merits, and that would be enough to make a tier-4 boost for every incarnate slot, and even have a handful left over in case a person made a mistake or two along the way. Empyrion Merits could only be gotten from running content that specifically awards Empyrion Merits. Emp merits could stay as flexible and convertible as ever.

I must not have been clear enough, sorry. In my proposal, these entirely new "Veteran Merits" are not the same as Empyrion Merits; they cannot be converted into threads; they cannot be converted into reward merits, they cannot be transferred. They can only be used to craft incarnate components that are also character bound. Everything received from veteran levels can only be used to craft incarnate abilities for that character alone. However, real Empyrion Merits would still be earned the same ways they are now, and would remain convertible into threads or reward merits, and be emailable to other characters on the same account.

Has anyone on the Beta server played a Posi-1 or Posi-2 with characters "at-level" and evaluated how the aggro changes impact it?

Oh yeah, I do have a third option, for what it may be worth. Veteran Merits. VM's are awarded from Veteran levels instead of Empyrean Merits. Veteran levels which awarded threads now award additional Veteran Merits instead, at a rate of 1 VM per 20 threads. Veteran Merits can only be used to craft common (1 VM), uncommon (3 VMs), rare (8 VM's) and very rare components (30 VM's). Veteran Merits cannot be converted to any other currencies, and are bound to characters. Veteran levels, from whatever source, could then only be used to speed up incarnating the character that earns those levels, from whatever activity the player enjoys the most.

What fraction of the actual players who login and play on homecoming servers on a daily/weekly/monthly basis read the forums? What fraction post? I doubt it's very high. No poll is going to measure general playerbase sentiment.

If there was a shard where AE just gave no rewards at all, I'd probably join it. I wouldn't join one that had no AE at all. AE is a very commonly used and effective tool for carrying out RP stories in-game. Or maybe AE only gave out tickets, and tickets were changed so they could only be used to pay the tailor. Or maybe tickets could be used in a special store to buy character bound / unsellable enhancements. But this is just a thought experiment; there's no way they're going to make shards with special rulesets. That's a huge new overhead to manage for very limited benefits, if any.

The devs, behind the scenes, could be tracking unique concurrent login IP addresses to get an indicator of how many accounts are multiboxed. Not perfect, but since there's not point to using multiple IPs to multibox, I doubt a lot of people bother.

There's already an effective upper limit for IO prices. All IO set recipes can be bought for Reward Merits; 20, 50, or 100. Reward Merits can be straight out purchased for 1 Million Inf, as fast as you can click the button. If IO set prices ever exceeded 20 million for uncommons, 50 million for rares, and 100 million for very rares; then just buying the merits and then buying/crafting the recipes would be cheaper. And if they exceeded them by any margin much greater than 10%, marketeers would be crafting them en masse to sell.

What's interesting, is this adds time and tedium-friction to the production of pack contents. Fewer people being willing to put up with the tedium ought to put a little upward pressure on the prices of the things they drop, especially the ATOs.

I use these macros. They won't open cards any faster than the rate limiter allows. In the past, I was able to open packs as fast as I could click the macro. That would occasionally cause it to stop opening them for a long while. In recent months, I have not been able to open another pack until the fourth card in the current pack is turning over. I can click the macro, but nothing happens. It still may stop opening packs for a while, but this is less common than before. It also makes opening cards much slower and more tedious.

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.