Homecoming Server Update (April 24th): Anniversary!

[Gremlin]

Thanks very much to everyone who helped to get HC up and running and to keep it running. It's an impressive achievement.

[Doc_Scorpion]

20 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

But 100 per badge is insanely high cost and not in line with the spirit of this game and its casual focus during its life span. 

0.o  Dude, they're vanity badges - not the only food you're going to get this week.

[pbwill200]

Many of the changes made for Homecoming were to speed things up and avoid grind. They sped up Incarnate rewards, switching alignments, and custom exp rates. Why make anniversary badges grindy? 

[Apparition]

You had a year to save up 1,500 reward merits.  If that is grindy...  Well, I do not know what to tell you. 

[tweedledee]

15 minutes ago, Apparition said:

You had a year to save up 1,500 reward merits.  If that is grindy...  Well, I do not know what to tell you. 

not everyone has been playing a year... we just found out less than a year ago... and why would we want to grind and spend so many reward merits when were still trying to catch up with everyone else that's been playing longer?

[Troo]

29 minutes ago, pbwill200 said:

Many of the changes made for Homecoming were to speed things up and avoid grind. They sped up Incarnate rewards, switching alignments, and custom exp rates. Why make anniversary badges grindy? 

 

6 minutes ago, tweedledee said:

not everyone has been playing a year... we just found out less than a year ago... and why would we want to grind and spend so many reward merits when were still trying to catch up with everyone else that's been playing longer?

Annual badges that don't take a year to get, that's awesome!

[pbwill200]

I'm just saying make it cheaper. @Cipher could do it with a couple key strokes.

[ArchVileTerror]

There is a potential counterargument in the form of it sucking for those players who had already invested the hundreds of Merits to unlock their Badges.  Issuing Merit refunds for everyone who has the Badges is theoretically possible, but would require taking the servers down to issue it and could potentially get buggy/glitchy.

 

But . . . yeah.  I'm also of the mind that 100 Merits is PRICEY AS FU- . . . ahem.  Especially since Merits are so valuable for other purposes directly related to core gameplay. 

I'd even hazard to say that any player who says "1500 Merits is easy to get" has a skewed perspective, frankly.  

[DekayXxX]

The 1500 merit price is pretty stupid in my opinion. I have multiple badgers on two accounts and there is no way I am going to be able to get all these badges, unless these badges are available year round.

 

The Devs have stated that they needed more Inf sinks. Make the badges cost Inf. 

 

Or like I said make the badges available all the time for purchase.

[Glacier Peak]

21 minutes ago, DekayXxX said:

The 1500 merit price is pretty stupid in my opinion. I have multiple badgers on two accounts and there is no way I am going to be able to get all these badges, unless these badges are available year round.

 

The Devs have stated that they needed more Inf sinks. Make the badges cost Inf. 

 

Or like I said make the badges available all the time for purchase.

I have to disagree with your opinion on the merit requirements. It definitely seems reasonable to me. I remember back on live if you missed a year, that was that. At least the volunteers at Homecoming have thought about this and made it in to an opportunity to earn them again. 

 

That being said, you could win one of the upcoming costume contests to secure more merits if that is a concern.  

[nihilii]

7 hours ago, tweedledee said:

not everyone has been playing a year... we just found out less than a year ago... and why would we want to grind and spend so many reward merits when were still trying to catch up with everyone else that's been playing longer?

Why do you need to have all previous 15 anniversary badges,?

 

Why do you need to have them right now?

These are purely vanity things with no ingame effect. You are not losing anything by not having these badges. You could  go on a merit hunt now and have 1500+ by the time the 17th anniversary rolls around. Or even take multiple years to get them.

In may 2019, the badges cost just as much and the servers had just started being up. There was no problem then.

[Parabola]

4 hours ago, DekayXxX said:

The Devs have stated that they needed more Inf sinks. Make the badges cost Inf. 

Merits can be bought for 1m inf at merit vendors so in effect the badges already have an inf cost.

[QuiJon]

13 hours ago, nihilii said:

Why do you need to have all previous 15 anniversary badges,?

 

Why do you need to have them right now?

These are purely vanity things with no ingame effect. You are not losing anything by not having these badges. You could  go on a merit hunt now and have 1500+ by the time the 17th anniversary rolls around. Or even take multiple years to get them.

In may 2019, the badges cost just as much and the servers had just started being up. There was no problem then.

But why should they cost me anything. These badges didn't require anything but me logging into the game when they were released. The game shut down at 8 years, I had ALL of those badges and I was not invited to play on the private server so could not even get badges 9-14. So IMO we have two options, either just make homecoming its own thing and say that its the anniversary of the game last year as the first badge but that years 1-14 are not in game anymore because Homecoming didn't exist then. Put a cost of 100 merits or less for anyone that wants to catch up that first HC badge and then move forward with that cost each year for past badges when a new one is added, or find a more economical way of giving us the past badges. Like I said, I get badges for Halloween that I simply pick off a reward menu at the end of a completed event. Why is this not equally doable during the month celebration. Add rewards to all TFs and SFs so that instead of earning merits or whatever, you can pick one of these badges you don't have. Yes it cost you merits, and game play time, but not nearly as much. 15 badges that do nothing cost a player as much as 2 and a half sets of purple IOs. That is punishing players that want the badges but still want to be building their characters. 

[Neuronia]

Yeah, the price for them is a little steep, but if they will be available for purchase yearly, it's not so terrible, just tedious.
It's definitely not worth influence > Merits though, at 100,000,000 per badge. But that conversion rate has needed some revision for a while now, I think.

 

[LtlBtyRam]

I have been loving the Rikti Invasion.  I hope we will see it again in the future, so I really hope the servers don't defeat it for forever.  I have only been back 2.5 months.  I hope to get the chance to lead an invasion team as a level 50 at some point in the future.  Please don't let this be the last one ever.

[FrauleinMental]

2 hours ago, LtlBtyRam said:

I have been loving the Rikti Invasion.  I hope we will see it again in the future, so I really hope the servers don't defeat it for forever.  I have only been back 2.5 months.  I hope to get the chance to lead an invasion team as a level 50 at some point in the future.  Please don't let this be the last one ever.

You can always do a Lady Grey TF to trigger an invasion.

[Grouchybeast]

18 hours ago, Neuronia said:

Yeah, the price for them is a little steep, but if they will be available for purchase yearly, it's not so terrible, just tedious.
It's definitely not worth influence > Merits though, at 100,000,000 per badge. But that conversion rate has needed some revision for a while now, I think.

 

I assume that that price is there to function as a cap on IO prices in the AH, rather than an attempt to represent the relative value of Merits and Inf.  No IO is going to trade for much over 100,000,000 Inf, because above that price it's cheaper to turn the inf into Merits and buy the recipe direct.

[Snowdaze]

I had no problem lazily saving up 3000 Merits over the year, and I dropped 1500 on those badges like a sick Dubstep track! Now to all of you who are complaining... I could have got all the badges last year when the game relaunched if I had known you could buy them! I am a hardcore badge hunter, and thats really where it's at! Badge hunting is grindy! There is the fact! Deal with it! And if you arent a badge hunter then you really shouldn't care enough to complain. And if you are too cheep to put in the the work that OTHER PLAYERS already have, well then thats on you.

 

I do however support an effort to have Luna sell the badges year round. So there won't be as much pressure on the people that are currently complaining, that wont ever buy them at their current price tag, just because they are cheep.

[Lockpick]

3 hours ago, FrauleinMental said:

You can always do a Lady Grey TF to trigger an invasion.

Interesting, I did not know this...

[FrauleinMental]

On 5/7/2020 at 9:11 AM, Snowdaze said:

I do however support an effort to have Luna sell the badges year round. So there won't be as much pressure on the people that are currently complaining, that wont ever buy them at their current price tag, just because they are cheep.

So do I.  Just like the holiday badges are available year-round at the Ski Chalet vendor.

[Ukase]

On 5/1/2020 at 10:02 PM, DekayXxX said:

The 1500 merit price is pretty stupid in my opinion. I have multiple badgers on two accounts and there is no way I am going to be able to get all these badges, unless these badges are available year round.

 

The Devs have stated that they needed more Inf sinks. Make the badges cost Inf. 

 

Or like I said make the badges available all the time for purchase.

Look, I get that 1500 merits is quite a bit for most people. But - costing merits is the same as costing inf. If I didn't spend the 1500 merits on these badges - what would I do with them? Buy converters, of course. Even at the low price of 75k each, they're still the best bang for the inf. 

So by charging us silly badgers 100 merits each - that's 300 converters * 75k, that's over 20M per badge I'm "sinking". 

For those that haven't been playing as long as I have  - well, I waited a year to afford these badges.  I could have sacrificed last May and gotten 7 of them, I think - but I wasn't even sure the game would be around in June at that time, so why invest it?

 

Fun Fact - maybe - As far as I know, only a few people actually bought all those badges last May. So, if you haven't been playing for a year, don't feel like you're "behind". Most of us who have all the badges now had to wait until this May to get these.