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This thread went from interesting to disturbing in a handful of posts.

Personally, I role-play all of my characters when I get the chance. If I'm on a team of non-RPers, then I won't bother noting that I'm going OOC.

Story-RP hasn't really worked from me since Ultima Online. It seems that anytime you have an open storyline (meaning anyone is welcome to become a character) then someone comes into it and is (forgive me) a terrible roleplayer. Maybe they're an attention-hog, or someone with a poor imagination, or a very lonely person just looking for human contact of any type.

I role-play for me. I enjoy stories. I enjoy reading them, writing them, and participating in them.

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If you didn't leave your bid up for 24 hours, you didn't actually try to buy something.

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QFT

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Yes of course it was just a mistake, that made it through extensive beta testing - that disabled drops in pvp only...

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What else has made it through extensive beta testing... let me think... what could possibly have been beta-tested for a long period of time, and had certain aspects of it reported both publicly and privately, and STILL managed to get into the live release? Just off the top of my head... I think I'd have to go with exploit-oriented missions in Mission Architect.

So, again, quote something official or it's all just wild speculation and trolling.

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imo they just have to make it hard enough to make it look less attractive for farming. this is as good a chance as there will ever be to do this, if it just goes back to the i14 way it wont ever change.

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Nothing will make farming less attractive. No one ENJOYS doing it. (Except maybe real-money traders) If you make it MORE difficult, then farmers will be the only ones reaping rewards.

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so you serioulsy believe all the changes they make are in the patch notes? lol.....

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Absolutely not, and never did I suggest that was my belief.

When a change this broad-sweeping is brought down as a punishment, I would expect, how did you put it, a "Positron-like post" that slapped all the abusers into submission. As you've pointed out, there's no such post. In fact, Castle has publicly stated it's a bug and that they're working to correct it. This tells me that your speculation is unfounded.

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Yes of course it was just a mistake, that made it through extensive beta testing - that disabled drops in pvp only...

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What else has made it through extensive beta testing... let me think... what could possibly have been beta-tested for a long period of time, and had certain aspects of it reported both publicly and privately, and STILL managed to get into the live release? Just off the top of my head... I think I'd have to go with exploit-oriented missions in Mission Architect.

So, again, quote something official or it's all just wild speculation and trolling.

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imo they just have to make it hard enough to make it look less attractive for farming. this is as good a chance as there will ever be to do this, if it just goes back to the i14 way it wont ever change.

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Nothing will make farming less attractive. No one ENJOYS doing it. (Except maybe real-money traders) If you make it MORE difficult, then farmers will be the only ones reaping rewards.

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Depends on how you do it - you can get as much as 3 drops per toon in 30 mins, but the fix was to limit pvp io drops in arena.

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The "fix" you're referring to isn't in the patch notes. Are you best friends with a dev and they happened to leak that information to you?

Either quote a source, or stop with your speculation. Farming PvP recipes is bad, but that's no reason to start rumors in the hopes that some dev will listen to you and think "Wow, that's a good idea. We should do that!"

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i hope this bug forces castle or whoever is working on this to put in some supression timer and up the drop rate to make it less farmable and more likely to end up in the hands of actual pvpers.

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Isn't there already a timer? Something like ten minutes after a drop is received? Maybe increase that timer...

As for drops ending up in the hands of actual PvPers, the farmers still SELL the drops they get. And influence/infamy is a joke in this game.

I'm not a fan of farming, by the way, but I think any reduction in PvP drops hurts honest players more than farmers.

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I wonder if they perma banned people farming ios in arena before the KNOWN EXPLOIT was fixed.

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Are you saying that removing ALL rewards from PvP is a "fix" to PvP farming?

I didn't see anything in the patch notes, but it seems like Arena Duels no longer reward prestige or influence for kills.

If I put Achilles Heel: Chance for Resist Debuff or Lady Grey's Chance for Negative Energy in a pet (Example Thugs Enforcer) would it proc the 20% chance every time they use their attack that debuffs defense?

I'm not too sure about the arena match drops myself. A friend and I racked up over 120 kills tonight (between the two of us) and didn't get any drops. It started out as fun, and then it became an experiment to see if drops actually happened. 300 kills later and still nothing. 30 minute matches, battle royale, unranked, and mostly in the cage map.

He's level 47 and I'm level 50. Does it need to be a ranked match? Or is the drop chance really that low?

I think it's mostly the laziness of people with so much money they just don't care, and a smaller group of people who don't know.

PS - You just blew someone's niche. =)

I had forgotten all about the permissions issue, actually, since my SG and VG are both a small core of RL friends. I'd say the permissions could still be retained. If Rack 3 is for officers only, then putting a piece in that rack makes that piece officers-only.

In a base with 16 salvage racks, it's a pain in the butt to find the right rack that happens to have the particular piece of salvage you're looking for.

I'm sure people will argue that better organization is the answer, and I agree with them. But I also don't see any harm in making the suggestion. Some possible ways to make it easier:

- Make the salvage auto-sort alphabetically in each rack

- Make all salvage racks access the same pool of salvage, and additional racks in the base increase the maximum size of that pool by 30 each.

- Make the crafting tables auto-pull from the salvage racks for any missing ingredients.

I'm sure it's a complicated process to achieve even one of these suggestions, but I'm sure crafters will agree that they'd all be nice to have.

The biggest thing I've noticed with my zombie/pain MM is that every team I've joined expected me to be the primary healer, which meant they expected me to focus on the Pain powers over the necro powers. I ended up making my second build into a "Support Role" and passed on all the necro attacks and even the soul-making power (forgot the name, but the one you cast on a dead pet). For soloing, though, I kept my original build which is very, very light on the healing.

I also have to agree that the zombies seem to be too fragile. I'm losing a zombie in almost every fight, but I think it's because the grave knights stand back too long and use their ranged attacks. I imagine this is something I can correct with better binds.

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when we collect more data points, we can make more solid assumptions.

For now, a high profile challenge the devs failed to respond to leads to certain fairly obvious conclusions.

I'm guessing they've recovered from their temporary MA-induced insanity and will respond to this thread the traditional way- by changing the rules to make it impossible without lining players up for the guillotine.

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To state that the conclusions are "fairly obvious" is flat-out ridiculous.

First of all, this is posted in the MARKET forum, not the AE forum. If it were a true "challenge" to the people in control, it should've been posted in the category where Mod 8 would most likely be the first to see it.

Secondly, to pretend like this power-leveling is some bold challenge is fallible. People are still power-leveling every hour of every day in Mission Architect. It may have slowed down after Positron dropped the proverbial hammer, but when I see broadcasts asking for "boss farms" anytime I leave a mission door, that tells me all I need to know about whether people are still doing it.

Third, the big technical debate wasn't over people leveling fast. It was over people using ABUSIVE missions, such as the crazy-XP trial comm officers, imps, and bomb-clusters in order to minimize the risk while maximizing the reward. People will always find ways to level quickly, and nothing they do is going to stop that. What the devs are trying to do is stop the exploits and minimize the "easy-route" to 50. It's a daily struggle, as people are ALWAYS looking for the easy route.

And finally, if this were a true challenge, the exact technique and mission arc numbers would be posted. I understand the problem with doing so, because it would get insta-reported by the volunteer AE-police (players), but it would offer us, the observers of this experiment, full transparency and not just status reports.

In parting, I want to say that I actually have no opinion as to whether or not this exercise is good for the people or just some elaborate troll attempt. The only reason I'm responding at all is because people on both sides of this argument are drawing the conclusion that they want to. If you want an actual conclusion to an actual experiment, the obscurity has to stop.

PS - The argument over the definition about "direct" and "directly" was a waste of everyone's time and bandwidth.

Just curious... but how do you get a level pact between more than two people? Tells me maximum number are in when I try to invite a third.

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Where is the proof they didn't? Where?

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What kind of response is that? Where is the proof they did? None of us have access to the level history of the entire playerbase, so this is a pointless argument.

I know that I, personally, didn't level to 50 overnight. Neither did any of the six people I group with on a regular basis. So, from my perspective, the "majority" didn't do it. And, using an insane logic on par with your argument, I will assume that you DID level to 50 overnight, since you seem to think that the majority did. And if you leveled to 50 overnight, you obviously used an exploit.

Positron... take him away.

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What would the Internet be if it weren't full of ridiculous, pointless arguments?

Sorry if this has been answered in another post, but the Search button keeps telling me it can't search at this time.

I lucked out and got this last night, and am starting to worry over whether it does what I think or not.

If I slot it in health, I know that it will will tick every 120 seconds. (At least I think I know that)

If I slot it in Heal Other (or Absorb Pain, whichever has my Numina pieces in it) will it still proc every 120 seconds, or will it only proc 120 seconds after I use that particular ability?

Grammar will not affect my rating of a story, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to mention it in my review. I see college graduates writing on a fourth-grade level every day. If we don't try to correct people's grammar now, what will it be like in another twenty years? (It's all the Internet's fault, of course.)

I would rather them create a new co-op zone for pre-35 (with background story and fluff) than to turn Pocket D into a maelstrom of RP-spam combined with AE-spam.... *shudder*

They aren't deleting boss farms. They're deleting farms that give you an unfair advantage and make the content (which should be challenging) trivial.

If they wanted to curb boss farming, they could make custom groups have a requirement of at least one minion.

In olden days, a lot of people would power-level by sitting at the mission door, or tagging along ineffectually, just mooching XP. This would result in a high-level character who didn't know what all of their powers did, or how to use them. AE made it even faster, thus producing even more of these high-level, yet ineffective, characters.

Last night, when all the power-leveled characters realized AE wouldn't give them their XP fix anymore and started creeping into "normal mission teams," I teamed with:
- an empathy defender who had NO IDEA that he could heal other people
- a blaster who would launch his area-effects over and over, and then complain when he died because no one rooted the mobs (We had no controller, and tried to explain this)
- a tanker who didn't even train taunt, and then yelled at everyone else for stealing his aggro

Having said that, though, I want to state that I don't care how you play the game. It's your money. But if you join my high-level group and don't know how to play your character, expect to get booted. It's not a punishment for power-leveling. It's just that I'd rather spend my $15 a month playing the game, not teaching someone else how to play.

It's not a farm. It's a four-mission story-based arc that I'd like some folks to test out for me. The villains are custom, so I imagine lowbie characters will find it extremely difficult.

Anyway, I'm not even looking for people to rate it. I just want people to run through it and let me know (through feedback or by posting here) what they think, good and bad, so I can make changes as needed.

The arc ID is 136281. Thanks!

I'm making a mission the requires you rescue a person before the bad guys finish a ritual to trap her soul. I want a custom named boss to be the leader of the group that is performing the ritual, even if he's by himself.

It's an Escort mission objective, because you need to get her out without getting her killed.

What I've tried so far:

Made a custom group with one member, an Elite Boss that is the named - This resulted in a full group of elite bosses spawning. (And boy, was that painful!)

Added minions to the above custom group - This made only minions spawns, regardless of what difficulty I tried the mission on

Moved the Elite Boss down to boss level and left the minions - Only minions spawn, regardless of difficulty

Removed minions - A group of named bosses spawned.

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Secondly, I want an Ambush to occur as soon as the escort group is cleared, so that they can charge in and try to kill her before the escort can be led out. Exactly which condition should I set for this, as I've tried both of the options and neither seems to trigger until I get the escort to the exit.

In my testing, I found that bosses won't spawn solo if you're set to level 1 difficulty. I had to up my difficulty rating to get them to start showing up. (And boy, did it hurt!)

I'm working on my first arc after being out-of-game for six months and have a million questions, but I'll keep my first question on topic.

What would be the best way to make a Custom enemy that isn't too powerful for low levels, but not too easy for high levels?

I want my arc to be friendly for all levels, but I really want to keep my custom group.