Another_Fan

Yes it should be rolled back till they find a good solution. The permanent solutions tend to be worse than the problems.

This, and just a note I evaluated the farm missions I was doing with allies without the allies, and my speed to cap had actually gone up by over 15% (15 minutes without 18 minutes with). Mostly because I wasn't worried about managing the allies.

I have to agree with frosticus, on the obfuscation issue. Arcanaville trys and often succeeds at conversational origami.

This business of the difficulty thresholds is a good example, of her using a term that conveys one set of meanings and implies a bunch of other things but when you get to pulling it apart, things really aren't quite that way.


The 12k powers to be examined is also very good. Its a number tossed out that is meant to impress but has very little bearing on the actual problem. The same way that the storage of power information in excel spreadsheets, is a throwaway. The data is there and unless the server is operating directly off the spreadsheets, the ability to manipulate it is there

Edit: And if the server reads the spreadsheets directly the ability to manipulate them is even more there.

First concerning the "Threshold system", you have pretty much destroyed your point that there is a difficulty threshold for task rewards. What you have done is explained in quite an enormous amount of detail, just how rewards are ground down to the average time. Which was my initial point.

What you have described are categories, not thresholds that tasks are placed in arbitrarily and then assigned a modifier.


If it were truly a difficulty threshold system, you would see things that are assigned a category but have a degree of difficulty that exceeds the difficulty of other tasks given higher modifiers.

just for example this goes from lowest to highest category

Defeat Requiem from Unai
Hess task force
Lord Recluse Strike Force
Cavern of Transcendence

HUH ??? Cavern of transcendence rates the highest modifier ?

Hess over takes Unai ?

As I said repeatedly difficulty may be a concern someplace somewhere but its not second after reward/ time

Pardon me I used ally targeted interchangeably with ally affecting. Mea Culpa, I thought the meaning was clear.


So you are at 107+67=174 ?? and I was saying there was only a few hundred powers to evaluate and it should be able to be done in less than a day.

Whats more it took you 1/2 an hour to winnow that to that number ?

Vs

Implementing diminishing reward returns based on ally inclusion in code on the server side ?

Whatever

Radio Missions ? Contact Arcs ? Badging ? What do you mean? Almost all my time is spent trying to get better times on task forces.


The only way I can discern intent is by looking at what people actually do and the results of those actions.

The same way that the only way I can understand your statement that "Reward rate/Difficulty threshold" is by looking at the consequences and comparing to things in the game.

If you want to disregard my rankings of difficulty thats fine.

Here is a list of items in exactly the same category
Now just looking at these Positron can be completed in about the same amount of time a STF can but has nearly double the merit return. So by your description it should have a significantly greater threshold of difficulty ?

Oh and Positron is a no fail tf. You can lose all your team and still finish, all it requires is persistence.

We get Manticore at about a similar time to the RSF (Manticore is if anything faster) having a significantly Higher Threshold of difficulty ?

We have Reichsman at 20 merits which when you compare it to the other TFS is just mind boggling, and is why for most of the people I know its badge only or help out a friend that needs the badge.


12K powers a player can use to create a buffing ally ? You are making the problem much more complicated than it needs to be then throwing up your hands at the lack of a solution.

Lets break this down as if we were interested in solving the problem rather than making excuses about why it can't be done.

First lets describe the problem. Problem: Allies can be included in player generated content that enhance the players combat effectiveness by enhancing player abilities, or by decreasing enemy abilities while not doing damage to the enemies.

So now we have two sets of powers to worry about.

1. Powers that target allies.
2. Powers that target enemies but do no damage.


Now for the sake of argument lets say there is some sort of electronic list or filing system that has a record of the powers critters posses and is somehow amenable to mechanical manipulation of some kind or other. If you were to have such a list, you could immediately discard all the items that did damage to their targets. You could discard all the items that only affected the caster, and you would be left with a nice list of just the critters that actually needed review.

I really wish that someone would come up with mechanical marvels that could take the drudgery out of such tasks.

[ / sarcasm]

I have no idea how many developer created critters there are that have no attack powers, and only buff/debuff powers that do no damage. I would be real surprised if it was a large number. I would be even more surprised and shocked, if the information wasn't actually in a database.


I point that out because its the strawman you so gleefully created. The developers can't have any way to sort or categorize the powers or critters in their game for your scenario to be accurate.

Now actually taking a look at the list of powers that players can include with their custom allies. We get a somewhat smaller number than 12k to examine on the primary side there a 73 potential powers from control primay that could concievably fit the description and less than 100 additional on the secondary side.


Just how long and difficult was that supposed to be to look over ?

You are saying if something has significantly higher reward rates/time it should have a higher difficulty threshold ??

Well lets look at that

In order of decreasing difficulty

Hamidon Raid ( involves organizing and coordinating over 30+ players in general can and does fail)

ITF/RSF/STF/Abandoned sewer trial (Involves putting together a team capable of completing the final tasks, can and does fail frequently)

Freedom Phalanx tfs, Villain side similars (Tarikos, ice mistral etc), Hess, Moonfire. (Can be run by pugs rarely if ever fail)


Now if you order it by reward/minute

Freedom Phalanx tfs, Villain side similars

ITF/RSF/STF

Hamidon

Abandoned Sewer trial

It seems your statement is still not supported by the facts.


So what you are talking about is a days work or less for someone to go through them note which can buff the players, and dissallow them. After all we are talking about the player selectable powers from the creation screen for allied groups.

Just by example how long should it take you to decide ranged shot is not a player buff power and is fine ?

15 seconds ? 30 ? a minute ?

If that were the case, the developers have done the most horrendous job imaginable of implementing it. To the point where it is more often seen in the breach, rather than the observance.

Lets take a look at the glaring examples.

1. Master of task forces do not reward more than regular tfs except for that initial badge.

2. Task force difficulty has never had a bearing on the final reward and as far as anyone knows was not factored into the calculation of rewards.

3. The Lord Recluce Strike Force, and Statesman's Task Force arguably the most difficult TFs in the game give very paltry merit rewards indeed.

4. The abandoned sewer trial once again one of the things that can be failed and frequently is, gives very small rewards.

5. Hamidon and Mother Ship raids, which outside of the holiday event raids are the most difficult things in the game to get organized, and I can point to numerous raids that failed to thrive, give a reward that is somewhat lower per minute than a decent team can achieve on one of the freedom phalanx tfs.

6. In Ouroboros as in tfs the difficulty settings on power restrictions and limits do not affect the reward.

Edit: 7. Purple drops are of course the great elephant in the room for this discussion. They fall as readily from green con foes as they do purple.


About the only place difficulty is a factor is the level difference between you and what you are killing. When you think about it, that is just about the broadest expression of difficulty you could have. In the few instances where they have tried to refine it, it seems to have been on the basis of time not difficulty. Freaks have more hp they get a bump. Comm officers can bring more minions they get a bump but nowhere near what they should on the basis of added difficulty. (In a normal grp etc). If you have a toon with no enhancements, one with SOs, and one enhanced maximally with sets the difficulty is very different for them in any particular task.

Actually that was based on Nerfs/fixes that had been implemented in the past and had seemed to be put in quite quickly. For the latest fix code actually had to be implemented to apply a decreasing reward modifier for allies . It may not have been done now, and it may have already been laying around but it still had to be done. Other fixes could be done by adjusting tables, the simplest would have just involved subtracting out problematic powers.

You are right, this may or may not be easy, but if it isn't easy to do it begs the question "Why not ?".

Teamfarming really kills your ticket rewards and if you have deadweight on the team it knocks down the others as well.

Risk vs Reward was always a smoke screen, just a phrase that people assigned meaning to when there was none inherent in it. Merits demonstrate they have a Reward/Time envelope, not a Risk/Reward envelope and are perfectly willing to hammer down on anyone that gets clever with how they do things, whats more they don't particularly care about the collateral damage that occurs.

The colorization says much about the man wielding the crayons.

The vision needs to be an inclusive one. You may not leave but lots of other people have been.

That was my point, the impact on regular farmers is minimal. The impact on mission creators is large. The developers protestations that the fix will be here soon, is falling on deaf ears. There are very easy fixes that could have been deployed instead of this, or they could simply have waited till soon, and just deployed what they considered the good fix.

Saying that you should have soloed so you could have seen what things were is the opposite of implying soloing. Strange farm teams you played on btw. If you are going to have nothing but blasters and scrappers you might as well solo, its more efficient.


In what way are you using the word worse ?

And as their vision becomes more known to the people it impacts they leave. Usually they just leave, sometimes they do a fade out, very rarely they will come to the forums and express their displeasure. Usually it just isn't worth the effort.

Will this patch trigger an exodus of farmers ? I doubt it. Will it cause would be Authors, game creators, level designers to seek elsewhere for a creative outlet ? Definitely maybe.

As to the rest you really needed to have soloed some of those farms while your description may seem good from a theoretical level, from a practical level it misses much. The people that still want to farm those will just do so with tanks and scrappers or they may dual box in a kin that's about all the change that will be there.

Tomatoe vs Tomato ?

Actually the reason is much simpler. The people who play but have a very different vision of how they like to play than the developers are still paying their 15/month and still there to help others have fun. WHY OH WHY WOULD THEY OPEN THEIR MOUTHS AND ALIENATE THEM ? See positron ae letter for example of a dev being reigned in for doing just this.


Actually it was just certain defenders that were unneeded before, now its blasters and certain types of controllers as well that are unneeded. Its not the improvement you think it is.


As to the timing question, that is pretty obvious. This was something they were notified a long time ago about, if they are going to take this long to fix it, you would expect it to be fixed correctly not like this

Aren't you the guy who posted the 2009 third quarter numbers and found no decline in player numbers worth worrying about ?

These things get tested ? No seriously, I am surprised some apologist hasn't tried parroting Fred Brooks yet on this.

Devs hate villains, villains are clever therefore the devs hate clever. In seriousness though I am still trying to figure out what the risk is in this game. Dying ??? People regularly use it to speed up tfs. Who hasnt seen a corpse teleported around the map. Heck I know people that use the hospital as a faster way to get back to contacts

Its amazing what happens when you completely ignore what your beta testers are telling you. This goes back to that whole QA testing thing etc.

This situation has me chuckling every time I look at it. They made the market overwhelmingly the most important part of the game, for a game that people came to play because it didn't have loot. Then they made the most bizarre and screwed up market that could be designed and are surprised that people have used it to accumulate enormous amounts of inf.

Then they are shocked that people actually spend the hordes of inf on rare items ??

It also doesnt help that the enhancements come in three categories. Total crap that isn't worth lugging to the vendor, things that are barely worth slotting, and finally things actually worth including in your build


I really have to agree about the micromanagement issues here. MMOs are meant to be worlds not television shows.

If someone could bring Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" to the AE, I'd gladly play it if it didn't even give one inf. But as long as no matter how you dress it up its kill things till you run out of them and there is no chance of failing, rewards are going to rule.

The ones that were applying debuffs to enemies were a royal pain to have around. They would go around randomly aggroing spawns, never follow you properly and in general just make a nuisance of themselves. The bubblers were the best of the lot and there was always the problem of people putting so many of them on a map the bubbles would merge go opaque and you couldn't even see what you were doing.


The commentary on farming, illustrates a process that is slowly strangling the game. The institutionalization of intolerance. Farming isn't a playstyle that appeals to everyone but it is perfectly valid for those that do. You can make the argument, that people feel compelled to farm, but the paradox of this is that because of the way the market works, the more people that farm, the less compulsion to do so

Saying it again. This really did nothing to speed up farming. What it did was allow people that normally wouldn't get a bite at the apple have one. If you really really wanted to go insane, you could build a toon for all recharge no defense and then try it with one of these maps, but really its much easier to just bring a kin and use an empowerment buff.

Nope, these aren't them. If anything trying to get to 50 on maps with the types of buffing allies that were available would teach you how to play your character very very well.

Too late, Too Slow, and you really don't understand what the actual impact of this is.

If you think a farmer can't come up with a character that can't run the same maps without the bots, you are sadly mistaken. I pointed this out way way back, when the hairshirts and whips came out for the critters with no ranged attacks. It was no different than having someone take their softcapped ranger in the mission and run it. Now the people that have characters that don't need the buff bots, own the farms.

All this does is divide the community into those with the privilege of doing this and those without. Well it does also highlight the relative lack of importance "Story" content embedded into missions has for most people.

Its less than those that take 1 slot.

No bait and switch there. If anything is bait and switch, its the nerf for everyone that used Botz and enjoyed playing with them.

The point was using slot efficiency for one criteria only ignores everything else you have to do with your character to make it work.

Replying to all at once and I should do this as a guide it seems to come up.

1st What is the cost of gaining a bonus ? How should you assess it ?

Lets take Botz, New Botz , Thunderstrike and kinetic combat, Steadfast Unique, Gladiators Unique, Gausians Synchronized Fire Control.


The common way of looking at this is to say Set X gives me bonus Y for Z slots and then say the cost is Y/Z

This is very very simplistic. It completely ignores the fact that sets give you bonuses for every IO after the first and those bonuses may or may not be needed for your build. But lets look at the numbers


Lets rank these

Total Positional Defense/ Slot

9 pts/slot
Steadfast
Gladiators

2.08/slot
Botz Old

1.25/slot
Gaussian

.625
Thunderstrike

.48
Kcombat


You look at the above list and you can only say wow BotZ had to be nerfed. Its much higher in its bonus than gaussian which is a six slot and a unique.

One of my favorite movies is my cousin vinnie, for one scene. Joe Pesci is talking to Marisa Tomei about how Legal arguments are like magic tricks.

That is exactly what the slot efficiency argument is. It is an illusion a magic trick. I love this quote because it explains in a few lines that have taken me days or weeks to try and show people. If you understand what it is saying , it lets you understand how headlines in news papers are distorted, and it fosters a healthy skepticism that seems to have disappeared from the world.


Now that I have performed the magic trick that other people are saying is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, let me perform my own magic tricks.

Instead of efficiency/ slot for defense Lets look at in terms of positional defense/ Slot you wouldn't normally take in a power.

Steadfast goes in a resistance power and in addition to providing defence it actually acts as an enhancement

So lets call steadfast 1/2 additional slot (it provides resistance but not as much)

Gladiators. The IO provides TP and and positional defense. I have never needed TP protection call it 1 slot.

Gausians.

There are a few ways I look at this. For powers Like aim and build up normally my only concern is that they are available. 3 slotting for recharge would be the approach. The other choice would be be slotting for recharge and bonuses. Adjusted targeting works well for this and you can get the desirable bonuses for 5 slots and still have maxed recharge.

So gaussians comes in (for the cases of aim and buildup) at either 3 additional slots or 1.

Blessing of the zypher old and new

It goes in powers that I would not normally put more than the initial slot. So for the 2 piece bonus it is 1 slot, and for the full bonus it is 2 slots.

Kinetic Combat goes in an attack power 4 or 5 slots so it needs no additional slots.

Tstrike, goes in a ranged attack power The first defense bonus at 3 is for all intents purposes free. The second at 6 is a 1 additional slot cost.

So lets rank the sets on the basis of how many additional slots they require.

Free positional Bonuses
Tstrike 1.25
Kcombat 1.88

1/2 additional slot bonuses
Steadfast unique 9 points

1 slot additional bonuses
Gladiators 9 points
Gaussians 7.5 points
Tstrike 2.5 points or 3.75 points depending on how you count
Bots 3.13 points
Bots new 1.56

2 slot additional bonuses
Botz 6.26
Botz new 3.13


Abracadabra
That line the botz sets were breaking seems to have vanished.


Well you can say, I really wanted to build for defense That defense/slot number is really really important to me and the value of the set should be decided on that.

Thats true but you still have to slot other things because if you don't having all the defense in the game isn't going to make you more effective.

If you are going to build a character you are going to want a mix of bonuses, recovery, recharge, accuracy, health, regeneration all come to mind and you want it to enhance powers that are meaningful to your effectiveness. Botz provides no set bonuses except for defense and just defense.

So when you say something is X/slot efficient and that is your criterion for saying it is overpowered you have effectively said, Accuracy, regeneration , recovery, recharge, hitpoints, damage etc are worthless and contribute nothing to power

Yes that is one heck of a magic trick and quite the misdirection. This is often happens when you try and reduce multidimensional data down to a single number. It also happens when you try to compare apples and oranges.

You have to wonder if and when the S/L nerf is coming. BotZ was never out of line in terms of enhancement values, but it was out of line, in terms of letting squishies build survivability.

Just from Castle's post

Read as too many people were doing it.

You also have to wonder how many of the apologists for the current nerf will be coming up with new and even more extreme excuses for why X IO is out of line and had to be nerfed. And how it won't be punishing the players for playing the game.

Sorry I wasn't clear if you look at the numbers I used they are the scrapper values. Seeing as it was SR against Resist I thought the purpose was to compare a scrapper to a scrapper not a tank.

As to what you gave up the powers you slotted for defense could have been slotted for +recharge, or other bonuses or extra damage with procs.

The SR can softcap, get quickness and take other things, A non SR or shield scrapper can't

I would look at it again. It just says defense and leaves open the question of enemy group.