Redoubtable

I agree that silence on join is a good idea, regardless of which way this goes.

I have a somewhat more hardline view on the concept of "community", but it's probably not terribly constructive to follow that line of discussion. Suffice it to say that behaviour like spamming the channel because of this change is exactly what led us to this impasse in the first place.

I'm also not big on the idea of a strict set of rules, for a few reasons:

1. They wouldn't be necessary if people would just exercise a bit of common sense and courtesy (i.e. follow the current rules).

2. Rules lawyering and the search for loopholes by the current problem children will no doubt ensue.

3. I don't feel that people who mod a chat channel in a game should be required to be absolutely fair and impartial, or to scour every line of text looking for violations.

4. We've managed to survive for many years without them. This suggests that the current problem actually lies elsewhere.

Bottom line, from my perspective: moderating this channel is currently a pain in the backside, and I would like it if this were no longer the case. My ideal solution would be for the community as a whole to unclench a bit and stop antagonising one another. Since that's probably not realistic, we will either need to split the channel or start moderating more strictly. My main objective in-game is to actually enjoy myself, so I'd really rather not have to do the latter, which is why I support the former.

Every member of the channel has an obligation to behave in a mature, responsible manner. There seems to be an evolving perception that the mods are ebil authority figures, trying to enforce our will on others. The reality is that we don't actually want to dictate what can and can't be said in the channel, because it's a lot of effort and it's not fun. Unfortunately, the repeated incidents over the last few weeks aren't leaving us with much choice - something needs to be done, and not everyone will be happy about it. Then again, you could hardly say that everyone's happy now.

Wow, that Brute was carrying a heavy load.

Both of those times are good for me, hopefully we can get a group together.

I do miss the old PvP nights, so I'll be in for this when I'm able.

The cap on RWZ is somewhat self-correcting, because people who are doing missions will drop out of RWZ 1 as they enter an instanced map. They'll then be forced to RWZ 2 if they exit their mission after the zone is filled. Someone will only really be hogging a spot if they're hanging around outdoors for an extended period without participating in the raid, which I don't expect would occur all that often.

I feel your pain on the hunts during Rikti/Zombie invasions, though. Usually you can just go and do another mission, sucks if you're running a Numina TF though.

I did some rough calculations based on the merit data from Paragonwiki. The six villain-only SFs give a total of 160 merits, which translates to a median time of 8 hours to run them all (using the stated average of 20 merits/hour for SFs). The three respec trials give 43 merits in all, which is another 1.79 hours (at 24 merits/hour for trials). Using my maths skills I can determine that this sums to 9.79 hours of villain-exclusive content that is subject to diminishing returns. On top of this you have the ITF and LGTF, which add 63 more merits and a bit over 3 more hours of content.

So the dev-calculated benchmarks give us almost 13 hours of content for villains (at median times) in each 18 hour window. I think that's a pretty good amount.

I'm sure someone will say "but I can run it faster". Good for you, but that's the reason for these limits in the first place. If you're running that much content in a day then you should have a couple of alts you rotate through to avoid DR anyway.

If you're worried about getting banned for running a single exploit-based farm mish then you probably shouldn't be. If you want to know how much exploiting you can do without risking a ban - well, nobody knows the answer to that except the devs.

History would suggest that you have to make pretty extensive use of an exploit in order to get banned, but any time you do it you're taking your chances.

To put it in more general terms: if you make the reward attractive then people who can't have it will want it. A subset of these people (or perhaps people who sympathise with them) will complain about the fact that they can't afford it.

If you don't make the reward attractive then nobody will want it, and it will be useless as an inf sink.

As an aside, one drawback of inf sinks like apartments and statues is that they'll create another have/have-not divide for the more socialist amongst us to complain about. Of course, this is no reason not to implement something along those lines. Someone will always have more, and someone will always complain about how unfair it is.

In case anyone was wondering, the Numina TF was run and won last Monday. I haven't seen Meta in the last couple of days, but if there's nothing running when I get on tonight then I'll start a heroside TF of some sort.

It would still be an improvement over the current system in terms of fairness, and if a proposed new feature causes problems with an existing one then it's the new feature that's broken. If you want to change the way Hami works to cater for a "queue anywhere" system then that's an entirely different suggestion.

Edit: just to be clear, the basic reason for preventing people from running other stuff while queueing is that it enforces game balance in the form of the time/merit ratio. I know that it doesn't maximise convenience, but convenience isn't the only factor in the equation.

I think you kind of answered your own question. If you allow people to run off and do other stuff then some will speculatively join the queue in the hope that a player will drop near the end of the raid and give them 50-odd merits with minimal time investment. If rewards were given progressively during the raid then it wouldn't be such an issue, but the back-loaded nature of Hami raids makes them susceptible to this sort of sniping.

Since trying to get into a full zone is often a form of PvP, I would add a couple of caveats in the name of fairness:

1. You have to keep the zone window open in order to remain in the queue (no queuing up and then running off to do something else while you wait).

2. Never mind, can't read.

It never ceases to amaze me how a single naive post can create two pages of people agreeing with each other at length. I'll file that under "internet forum phenomena".

I liken this suggestion to solving the problem of sour milk by shooting the cow. If most people liked sour milk better than steak, that is.

Ok, it's not a perfect metaphor.

Wow. I feel like I need to take a bath and wash off the smarm.

Re-reading your posts, it was in no way clear that you were drawing any distinction between intrinsic and extrensic changes to the market. So yes, you did do a horrible job of communicating that you were talking about a change in the nature of the market. Of course, that's assuming that you're not just shifting the goalposts of the argument so that you can pretend you won.

Cool, love to have you aboard. Just hit one of us up in-game for an invite, if you haven't already.