UberGuy

Most of my Defenders have these as priorities, along with several of the following at a lower rank

• +Recovery. Not so much as a set bonus, but the various +recovery uniques and the Performance Shifter proc can be transformative in how you play.
• +HP. This is very useful in PvE and is a high priority for every PvP player I know who plays a "squishy" in that environment.
• +Damage. This may seem like a strange thing to prioritize on a Defender with their low base damage, but I look at all my bonuses in terms of improvement over baseline, not compared to other ATs. All my Defenders are intended to be able to solo effectively. Including Assault, most of my Defenders have around +30% to +35% damage bonus at level 50, which is a very noticeable increase that definitely benefits solo capability.

Agreeing with the answer given already. Actual team size overrides difficulty settings.

I don't know.

AV scaling only works downward. In other words, if you create an EB, it will always be an EB. If you create an AV, I believe it can be downgraded using the team settings. Boss settings will only serve to downgrade bosses to LTs.

I don't unpublish it. I load up the published copy from my list of edited arcs, edit it and publish. Then I load up the published copy again, and do nothing but hit "publish and exit."

Sometimes in the past, if I did not do this, my edits would not appear in the published mission.

Also, sometimes when editing my mission, I would not load the published copy, but seem to have a cached copy of it from the previous time I edited the published version. I would have to exit the editor and chose to edit my mission again. Sometimes it seemed to help with this latter problem to refresh my list of published arcs before clicking "Edit".

I don't know if these issues remain, as I have done little with the MA since I16.

I love this reward. It's quite possibly the reward I use most after the attacks. I probably get more utility out of the slots than out of the team teleporter, and I use that all the time.

In response to several other posts in the thread: I'm sorry, but asking the devs to stop the veteran's reward system because you'll always be behind is ridiculous. The rewards are for whoever does get to that mark, regardless of whether anyone ever gets there again. If you get to any given mark, you get that reward. Someday, there will be people who don't get all the rewards because the game will close down before they can be subscribed long enough. That's OK - they'll get the rewards for the time they were subscribed, and that's what they're supposed to be for.

If you're the outlier, all you have to do is balance out your own best times. If you are running a 2 hour average TF in 30 minutes, all you have to do is make sure you add about 4 hour run per 30 minute run to basically erase the effect of your own best times. In fact, you'll slightly deflate the average doing that. If you make the offsetting runs 8 hours long you only have to do it once every 5 or 6 times to erase your fast times, meaning that you could run the TF most nights of the week and finish one spent logged in overnight just once to counter your efffects on the average. Of course most people would turn "logged in overnight" to logged in for 24 hours, which would erase the 30 minute runs if you did it only once every 16 times.

If that sort of thing became common knowledge, I think enough people would do it that they could keep a TF from being adjusted to reflect gradual increases in speed. Of course, if it became common knowledge, the devs would probably notice and try to do something to the calculation to adjust for it, either tossing out gross outliers or coming up with a way to tell if characters were logged out or sat in bases for most of their TF run. If the devs don't do any of those extra steps today, that would all take either greater analysis or new tech, or both. It becomes easy to see why they might try to pick an algorithm that does this work for them. Whether they succeeded or not is, obviously, up for debate.

The straight mode calculation seems an unlikely candidate, as TF times are likely to all be unique. They could round values to something like nearest minute or nearest 5 minutes and find the mode of that. You still need a tie-breaker if you end up with a true multi-modal result.

The median was said to be chosen specifically because they wanted something that would be less sensitive to outliers than the mean.

It's notable that all the standard tools for collapsing a distribution to a single descriptive number (or just a few numbers) provide poor representations of multimodal distributions.

From what they've said, which isn't much, it sounds like it's based on completed runs. It doesn't seem like it's anything to do with individual players. Failed/incomplete runs may be counted separately and considered as part of the difficulty fudge factor for merit rewards.

If people thought gaming the distribution for profit was easy, I feel certain they would do it. A simple average calculation would be relatively easy to game. Addressing that ease would require the devs to make it a not so simple average, doing things like trying identify and then discarding outliers. My guess is that, rather than figure out the right model for that, they went with something that purportedly did that "out of the box".

Where did we get off onto a tangent about TF content? This all started because of a claim that people only run the ITF because they're farming it for merits. I say that's ridiculous not because people don't run the ITF for merits but because I say most TFs are being run either for merits or XP. (Anyone who thinks the LGTF isn't farmed for merits is uninformed.) You're not agreeing with me, but you are disagreeing with the idea that everyone is farming for merits.

Before I9, the only time I saw people running TFs was because they'd never done a given TF before, or for badges - especially the ones needed for Task Force Commander. The only TF I saw run repeatedly pre I9 was the KHTF, which was run for XP and (amusingly in retrospect) the 10 SOs. In non-badge server channels, there were calls for non Katie TF teams maybe once every 2-3 days.

Now, I see calls for TFs many times a day. The difference is very dramatic, and I'm definitely not the only person to notice it or comment on it in the past. I mean, hell, people run Positron a lot now. I think anyone who doesn't think a 66 merit reward has something to do with that has their head in the sand.

If this was all about what's fun content, then why are KHTFs so rare now? I don't just mean what people will join, but also what TF leaders are willing to offer to start?

Wow, 200 TFs. Let me guess, with a core of like minded players?

How many did other people form? How many calls for TFs did you see in, say, global channels? How many strangers sent you tells asking if you wanted a TF team?

Now, how many TFs a day do you think are run now?

Edit: No, you answered for you, and some people you know. The question was more general than that.

If you really think you'd get a team for that all the time if it didn't have a merit (or similar) reward at the end, there's a bridge in New New I'd like to sell you. Seriously, think back to before I9. How many TFs did you see forming compared to now?

This is called a straw man - set up an argument your opponent isn't making that's easier to shoot down than your opponent's actual argument.

How many TFs that people run more than once aren't being merit farmed? Why do you think people ever do TFs more than once? Why do you think non-badge rewards were added to them in the first place?

You're misstating the argument. It's not simply a popularity contest, where the most popular features succeed, and the less popular ones fail. However, there's a threshold of popularity below which a feature on which significant effort was spent should be considered a failure. That's two dimensions - level of adoption by the players and level of effort to create. If the AE had been like a week's worth of after hours coding and design by a couple of the devs then its having poor adoption rates by the wide player base wouldn't be a big deal. However, it took what certainly appeared to be a great deal of effort, had rather huge media presence in CoH terms, and now is pretty clearly not widely used at all by our player base.

And I don't think anyone here is arguning for that definition of failure. People need to stop trying to take the argument places it's not going. The problem is not tht the feature doesn't appeal to everybody. It's that it doesn't seem to appeal to much of anybody in terms of our total active playerbase. It's not just about who's out there writng arcs - I'd expect there to be fewer people writing arcs than playing them even if I considered the AE a wild success. The problem is that there aren't more people playing those arcs.

I don't think it should go back there either, and I've not suggested it should in this thread. The feedback effects I've talked about earlier is going to make finding the balance point tricky, but I think the devs can do it if they're able to prioritize spending the time.

We have been told by the devs as recently as I16 beta that there's no such thing as a "faction" of NPCs that has better drop rates than the others. Rikti have the same drop probabilities as Malta as Hellions as Warriors as Freakshow. All that determines their odds of dropping something is their rank (minion, LT or boss). If the mob doesn't con at least green to you when you defeat it, it won't drop anything.

Rikti are potentially interesting for another reason - many of their units give better XP than equivalents in other factions. It can be hard to see why this might be when fighting them on traditional solo settings, but if you ramp up your effective team size it becomes a lot more obvious. However, if you can manage to take them on successfully, it's a quite nice bonus.

I don't think a lot of people who actually PvP would have a problem characterizing PvP as the top-ranked failed feature in the game.

Apparently, Super Speed must not be a real travel power in your opinion. Because you can use Ninja Run with other run speed buffs to hit the run speed cap.

Oppressive Gloom, perhaps?

Once their shields are out and they are next to one another, they are protected from stun. OG won't do anything unless you're fighting just one guy, in which case it's not needed anyway.

Cloak of Fear is a bit better in that they aren't protected from fear - my Dark Defenders and Corruptors do well against them. But at +4 you're going to have a hell of a time hitting them given CoF's low accuracy and their mad +Def, and the duration is going to be really low. So while it'll probably help, I'm not sure it'll make enough of a difference. Edit: Yeah, I see Werner already confirmed this.

It does when solo, but team division is performed before the cap operation.

You misunderstood, or I wasn't clear. What you have suggested there is an extreme version of what using the median calculation already does - gives low weight to the outliers. There is a difference in ignoring outliers and making them not matter in the broader context of the game. Dropping outliers still allows fat cats to get fatter, which means outliers still matter. What I meant is that there's no algorithm we can devise which makes outliers magically go away or get smaller in reality - only balance changes can do that.

Now, here's a dimension of all that which I didn't touch on earlier ... effort to implement. Some ideas there are going to be pretty easy - some of those non-combat hazards, or using mobs that can see stealth, for example. (Stealth may not actually be that big a deal, actually. I speed missions on an Invuln Scrapper with no stealth and his taunt aura on. People speed the LGTF all the time, and those damn drones see everything. But all that's an aside. ) Anyway, the devs would have to be convinced that making outliers shrink is important enough that they would prioritize some of those kind of non-combat challenges, or just make enough of a TF non-combat oriented.

One of the challenges facing them there is that people really seem to like heavy combat. When it came out, the ITF was widley hailed as the most fun TF the devs had created to date (except for the lag). The ITF contains what would seem to be speed throttles in the form of very large foe defeat count requirements. But raw combat is one of those areas people can speed up a lot.

Somewhere the devs have to balance what they think people enjoy against both what they want median (or whatever) times to look like and what sort of outlier distribution they want. If they are satisfied that the median times represent most of the playerbase, they may not put in direct effort to shrink outliers.

There's a difference in "viable" and "desirable". To use an obviously extreme example, it'd be hypothetically possible to level up on the rewards for exploration badges if there were enough of them. It'd clearly not be a way to level most people would choose to use.

Acknowledging that it's a fundamental human nature and "catering to" it aren't always the same thing. I don't think the devs should have created something that herd mentality would keep the significant majority of players out of. I expand on this more below.

There's an aspect of what you're calling the "herd mentality" that I've observed several times both here and in completely different contexts. If any given activity gives a really, really good reward, people will flock to that activity even if they claim they don't want to. Basically, people consider the opportunity cost of not doing whatever it is so high that lots and lots of them will all perform it, even if they don't actually find the activity itself that entertaining.

If you don't actually want everyone doing just whatever the thing is, the trick is to reduce what's so rewarding about it until you find the breakpoint not where everyone stops doing it, but where almost everyone stops doing it exclusively. The best middle ground is where a significant number of people still perform the activity, but not all the time. You want those doing it to do so because they think it's fun and/or just right on rewards compared to alternatives. You don't have to stop everyone from using the tool for rewards, or even stop everyone from considering it the most rewarding activity. You just have to make it so that many more people consider the opportunity cost of not doing it to be reasonable.

Your example is a ridiculous extreme (and I'm sure you're well aware it was). Not everyone runs paper missions, because they aren't so much better than everything else that enough people want to. Not everyone farms, because traditional farming is not instantly accessible to everyone (you have to go get certain missions rather than just walk into a mission editor in the 1st zone you enter in the game). The AE was so good that anyone who considered leveling speed an important play factor at all was basically nuts not to use it. What the devs needed to do was to fix that - they needed to make the opportunity cost of not farming or PLing in the AE lower.

The devs overshot (undershot?) that point significantly. There's an old joke around here from the days of Statesman and Geko that the devs would come up with 3 different solutions to a balance problem and then implement all of them. I think they basically did that here, but the number of solutions was a bit larger than three. I'm somewhat hopeful that they will still address this later, but it's likely to be a while. They already devoted a ton of resources to the AE, and I'm not sure how much they can continue to devote with other ambitious efforts underway.

This is misleading. There's no reason to compare "casual play" in the AE with "decent play" outside it. That's apples and oranges. We can keep this apples and apples.

If you play story driven content in the AE you are quite likely to progress more slowly compared to other content with the same players (or solo).

That's a big disincentive to a lot of players. It is so because of a social reinforcement loop that exists around such behaviors. People who are deeply concerned about leveling speed avoid the AE and claim it sucks. People who are mildly concerned about leveling speed tend to avoid it in part because they know the deeply concerned people avoid it studiously. The people who just want a team end up avoiding it because the other two groups do. The people who really want to AE may end up avoiding it because the other three groups do.

In the end, those reinforcing feedback effects force a rather binary transition, swinging the populace from "nearly everyone does it" to "almost no one does it" as you cross the XP equivalence point with canon missions.