End PL allow characters to begin at 50

[golstat2003]

11 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

 

No argument, no matter how well reasoned, is going to get you past the fact that you are asking to be able to skip a large chunk of what the game actually consists of.

And ultimately the only argument for it is sheer laziness, you can have a 50 in a few hours (as opposed to the more numerous hours of actually levelling through the game), but even that is too long for you.

It's not going to happen.

i would be very careful with continuing to say “it’s not going to happen”. Some of the recent changes like level streamlining and insta pvp 50s were said to “never going to happen”.

 

At this point I personally don’t care if we do or don’t get insta pve 50 or start at level 25 characters. If it happens I’ll use the feature when I want. If it doesn’t, /shrug, nothing lost.

 

But recent history and dev posts have taught me to never say never when it comes to HC. Just saying.

Edited October 27, 2022 by golstat2003

[Wavicle]

2 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

i would be very careful with continuing to say “it’s not going to happen”. Some of the recent changes like level streamlining and insta pvp 50s were said to “never going to happen”.

 

At this point I personally don’t care if we do or don’t get insta pve 50 or start at level 25 characters. If it happens I’ll use the feature when I want. If it doesn’t, /shrug, nothing lost.

 

But recent history and dev posts have taught me to never say never when it comes to HC. Just saying.

Fair

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, Wavicle said:

No argument, no matter how well reasoned, is going to get you past the fact that you are asking to be able to skip a large chunk of what the game actually consists of.

I already skip that chunk. I have for years, as have probably a near majority of other players. When Homecoming came back, there seemed to be this general attitude amongst the playerbase that the game was amazing because it allowed players to follow their bliss in different ways. Sadly there's been a sort of move back towards a weird nostalgic orthodoxy lately.

 

1 hour ago, Wavicle said:

And ultimately the only argument for it is sheer laziness, you can have a 50 in a few hours (as opposed to the more numerous hours of actually levelling through the game), but even that is too long for you.

 

The argument is that the end result is the same. I will have a 50 either way.  If I have 10 hours in a week to commit to actually playing, it would be better for me to spend that 10 hours playing that 50 on teams  rather than grinding on a farm. And better for other people that are looking to fill their teams. And if you will permit me to get real for a moment--sheer laziness is not skipping the farm phase in making a 50. Sheer laziness is playing this game in the first place when there are thousands of more productive things that any of us probably should be doing. Anyone getting on my ass about not earning things or being lazy--is barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong forest, in a galaxy far far away.

[biostem]

I don't know if you can reconcile the 2 schools of thought:  "I have the most fun whilst playing the 50+ content" vs "Each 50 should be earned".  Related, or possibly intrinsic to this argument, is whether any degree of gatekeeping should exist between character creation and the endgame.  Even if you get PL'd to 50, it's some time that you must choose to invest in the process.

[Luminara]

59 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

1. Everyone is going to do this. The entire playerbase. Immediately.

 

I said there were 1000-1500 players logged in at any given time.  You're mistaking that as the entirety of the population.  It isn't.

 

59 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

2. Everyone is going to immediately buy up everything from the market. Bullshit. First of all you go on a lot about purples. Those are what I need the least. I have a bunch of them in storage or spread out on different characters.

 

You do realize that I said, "as an example", because I was using purples as an example, to illustrate one segment of the market which would be impacted?
 

59 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

The number of enhancements on the market is not the same as the number of enhancements in the game.

 

And the number of players currently logged isn't the same as the total population.

 

59 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

Secondly, if you don't have a lot of enhancements on hand--you probably don't have a lot of inf either. If you cannot afford things, you're not going to buy them on the market. Thus you're not going to be driving up demand. That means the ones buying all the stuff up on the market would be the people who are already sitting on a pile of cash and can mint a new 50 whenever they feel like it.

 

And when the people with the big bucks are throwing it around, prices go up.  They go up because the people with billions of inf* can afford to pay whatever they have to for what they want. whatever it takes to out-bid others, whatever the sale price is on that last item.  And, again, we're talking about recipes or enhancements with a low or no drop rate, so they're not being replenished as quickly as they're being removed.  

 

Going deeper, you're dismissing a key facet of this.  It doesn't matter if everyone doesn't immediately type /ah and start buying enhancements, there are restricted supplies of the rarest enhancements.  There aren't enough of these enhancements for 10% of the currently logged in players to purchase everything they want, much less the entire population.  After the first 50-75 people empty the market of those enhancements, everyone who goes shopping has to go home empty-handed.  How many enhancements you have stored, or what types they are, doesn't alter the basic fact that there wouldn't be enough on the market to go around.

 

Supply and demand.  Increase demand several times over without increasing supply and you have inflation.  Yeah, some players have some enhancements stockpiled and could take care of their freefties.  Others don't.  New players wouldn't.  Regardless of what a limited sub-sect of the population might have, "Fuck 'em if they're too poor or too slow or didn't start sooner" isn't a solution that flies.  The HC team won't go for a system which benefits the wealthiest players, or those who hoard the most shit, and screws over everyone else, no matter how hard you advocate for it or sweetly you phrase it.

 

59 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

3. You don't address the most basic question: How many new 50s are created right now over say the course of a month?

 

Every 50 created under the current system generated drops which could be vendored, listed on the market or saved for use.  Even if they ran with the 2XP buff, they still generated drops.  Regardless of whether they were leveled the slow way, soloed with 2XP, teamed the entire way or stood inside a farm and waited, they all generated drops.  They all at least partially supplied for their own needs.  Freefties wouldn't.  Freefties would exit character creation with nothing but their dicks in their hands.  There's no equivalency between leveled 50s and freefties in this context, and that makes your question irrelevant.

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

Supply and demand.  Increase demand several times over without increasing supply and you have inflation.  Yeah, some players have some enhancements stockpiled and could take care of their freefties.  Others don't.  New players wouldn't.  Regardless of what a limited sub-sect of the population might have, "Fuck 'em if they're too poor or too slow or didn't start sooner" isn't a solution that flies.  The HC team won't go for a system which benefits the wealthiest players, or those who hoard the most shit, and screws over everyone else, no matter how hard you advocate for it or sweetly you phrase it.

 

The HC team doesn't have to go for anything. The market, any fucking market, will always benefit the wealthiest players. How naive are you? The whole point of playing the market, as people on these boards constantly reminded me during page 4 arguments, is to redistribute wealth, not generate it. The reason this, as a playstyle, is allowed to be more lucrative than other types of grinding is that it destroys inf through fees. But this is a large part of the reason you have so many billionaires running around to begin with. 

 

Yes, new players wouldn't be able to purple out their fifties. The also can't really afford SOs either unless they....dun dun dun!...play the market. Or ask other players for money. 

 

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

Every 50 created under the current system generated drops which could be vendored, listed on the market or saved for use.  Even if they ran with the 2XP buff, they still generated drops.  Regardless of whether they were leveled the slow way, soloed with 2XP, teamed the entire way or stood inside a farm and waited, they all generated drops.  They all at least partially supplied for their own needs.  Freefties wouldn't.  Freefties would exit character creation with nothing but their dicks in their hands.  There's no equivalency between leveled 50s and freefties in this context, and that makes your question irrelevant.

 

The amount of resources that are generated while leveling a new 50 is trivial. Maybe a couple purples and a few other useful recipes. And there is certainly better content that you could've been running with the 4 or 5 hours you spent pling that character in order to pay for enhancing. You seem hung up on the idea of a 50 earning for itself, which is meaningless. Pay for it with drops earned by other characters, do hardmode content, play the market, whatever. 

 

All of this is dodging the question anyway, which is not irrelevant. You're painting this nightmare scenario based on supply and demand. People are leveling 50s all the time. What is the demand right now? If it's high, and the market remains stable, then your reasoning fails. People might not be willing to shell out that much for enhancements. Or they are content to use merits to buy things, or just incremental enhance things as they get the drops. 

[Ghost]

If I understand correctly, you want to skip over the low/mid level content with an insta-50, so you can…..play the low/mid content?

 

[twozerofoxtrot]

14 minutes ago, Ghost said:

If I understand correctly, you want to skip over the low/mid level content with an insta-50, so you can…..play the low/mid content?

 

 

I think you understand it correctly. 

 

Fully kitted 50s exemped to lvl25 (for example) retain a lot of power because of all the set bonuses they can have active, on top of a few other odd duck things like a lvl 49 Kick power pick still boosting a level 16 Crosspunch pick.

 

The argument seems to be less about playing the content (or not) as opposed to playing the content at the point when your character feels the most absolutely powerful. 

[MoonSheep]

On 10/25/2022 at 7:02 PM, Akisan said:

I've said this on a previous thread: this is a live server, not a sandbox. Farming and PL'ing already push it closer than I'd like to sandbox territory, and this isn't a good enough reason to make that worse.

 

@El D made several good points about the community impact of allowing this change, and I'll add a few:

 

This could seriously hurt sub-50 teaming.  Pretty much the only people adding non-50s into the pool of characters would be roleplayers, people running challenges, and people that disagree with the instant 50 option.  And yeah, you could fill teams with a few exemp'd 50s, but a surprising number of 50s just... run off, and solo the missions.  I know a few people that don't invite 50s to teams, just because of that.

 

Secondly, part of the reason I don't like PLing is because a good chunk of PL'd players don't know how to play that character effectively. One of the big reasons to play a character through normal content is that you (hopefully) learn the synergies between your primary and secondary sets, as well as how they respond to certain buffs/debuffs.  You just don't get that player experience getting PL'd.

 

And yes, it builds character (pun intended).  I've found that I'm far more attached to things that I worked hard for, and things that are just given to me tend to be shelved and (eventually) forgotten.  I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that regard, and I while I may not have many alts (and only one 50), I challenge you altaholics to name all of your 50s, without looking at a list of them, and see which toons you remember more easily.

 

(And yes, @UltraAlt makes a very valid point about the name reservation system - this would absolutely allow name-squatters to just fill their roster with a thousand names, then *maybe* come back to them when they feel like playing that powerset combo)

 

agreed on both points

 

CoH is not The Sims, people are playing the wrong game if they want a sandbox experience

 

becoming bored with the game is okay, it doesn’t need to be changed for all players because a few people don’t want to play anymore 

[battlewraith]

7 hours ago, Ghost said:

If I understand correctly, you want to skip over the low/mid level content with an insta-50, so you can…..play the low/mid content?

 

No. You don't understand correctly. The point is that people have builds in mind that are possible at lvl 50, but not earlier. They want to skip the content that is decades old and they have done probably a million times in order to get to the actual build phase. They may or may not exemp and play that lowbie content.

 

7 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

The argument seems to be less about playing the content (or not) as opposed to playing the content at the point when your character feels the most absolutely powerful. 

 

The character will not feel the most absolutely powerful. It doesn't even have the alpha slot unlocked yet.

 

6 hours ago, MoonSheep said:

becoming bored with the game is okay, it doesn’t need to be changed for all players because a few people don’t want to play anymore 

 

It wouldn't be changed for all players. Nobody is forcing anyone to take an instant lvl 50. It would be completely optional..

That's why these objections are so ridiculous. Implicitly everyone here knows that we're not talking about a few players. And we're not talking about people who are bored with the game. The anxiety is that people would be able play the way they want without having to pay the 4-5 hour grind tax. And this is upsetting to people who have really bought into the retail philosophy of early 2000s MMOs and see everything as a pseudo job and their characters as flexes on what they've earned.

 

This is not The Sims. Right, and it's also not 2004 COH. Which is good. You can't go back and you shouldn't go back. Imagine what the market would look like if all the sandbox people up and left.

[MoonSheep]

1 minute ago, battlewraith said:

It wouldn't be changed for all players. Nobody is forcing anyone to take an instant lvl 50. It would be completely optional..

That's why these objections are so ridiculous. Implicitly everyone here knows that we're not talking about a few players. And we're not talking about people who are bored with the game. The anxiety is that people would be able play the way they want without having to pay the 4-5 hour grind tax. And this is upsetting to people who have really bought into the retail philosophy of early 2000s MMOs and see everything as a pseudo job and their characters as flexes on what they've earned.

 

This is not The Sims. Right, and it's also not 2004 COH. Which is good. You can't go back and you shouldn't go back. Imagine what the market would look like if all the sandbox people up and left.

 

we are an online community who all exist within the same digital world though, battle -  changes to the game impact all of us

 

we’re all older and more boring now, i expect a lot of us have less time to play CoH, but i don’t think that means it should be changed

 

for individuals who want a quicker levelling experience the devs have provided permanent double xp, tolerance of AE farms and permission for multiboxed accounts. i personally wouldn’t have any of these as i believe it creates burnout quicker, but i’m not all playstyles

 

i think auto 50’s however is too fundamental a change to the game’s genre though and not the right fit 

 

CoH as a creative, artistic artefact should be respected for what it is and preserved regardless of the amount of free time we have or the amount of people that want to play it

[Oklahoman]

I hate to rush things, everyone, but I think we're already overdue to start another thread on this same topic. Can we wrap this one up?

[Yaliw]

Guys, what about a compromise? Free level 25's for everyone! /s

[Mopery]

 

[Ston]

I got bored of the leveling experience and play almost exclusively on beta now to benchmark and test builds. I usually build 2-3 characters per session. That’s probably over 275+ IOs and HOs between those characters.

 

I stopped playing on live because I got bored of farming and playing content before lvl 50. Now I just get on live to join TFs with friends or PVP. 

 

However, the ONLY way I’d be able to make even one new build a day on live would be to either AE farm 1-50 and use the drops/inf OR level the normal way and use all the merits from arcs/TFs

 

Either way I would be putting lots of IOs back into the market.

 

I can only imagine the AH crisis if everyone was starting at 50, like others have explained. 

 

I think this would be horrible for the game. Like… complete ruin it. I also suspect it would change the culture of the game and make the community less fun. 

[GM Impervium]

I don't see anyone budging on this issue, and we're circling the drain at this point. So, no point in continued discussion.