Eiko-chan

Last time I made this suggestion, I got neg-repped with "yet another "give me now!" request". These forums crack me up.

Ha! Someone already neg-repped me with pretty much verbatim that.

It is not false from our standpoint, because we do not play blueside. We are redside players. Large rewards for TFs isn't the issue; the imbalance of rewards between TFs and SFs is.

Not my assumption at all. I think Task Forces have approximately the right Merit rewards - including the co-op task forces. My group runs on the ITF tend to be around two hours* - slower than the median, but not grossly outside the curve.

On the other hand, our runs on the BSF and LRSF both tend towards three+ hours of time, with the same players and more-or-less the same characters as the ITF runs. If the SFs are simply "better designed", rather than poorly measured, why such a difference in performance for what, according to Merit formulas, should all be approximately equal tasks?

* Assuming we win; the Nictus Romulus fight has mechanics that make things tougher if you have MMs on the team, which we, as villain players, tend to like playing.

Untrue. The mechanic for in-combat and out-of-combat already exists in the game, as demonstrated by the powers granted by the Clubber and Caregiver/Pain Specialist Day Jobs.

I didn't conflate them. Dechs, to whom I was responding, did.

Why?

This game isn't a competition. Why do the devs have to account for the fact that some people play the game faster than others? For some reason this is always taken as a given in game design, and yet I've never understood why. Why does it matter than someone else can get twice as much stuff as I can? Why do I have to get half as much to compensate for them doing so?

If you're looking for a simple, one-look never-worry answer that requires no thought and can be simply plugged into a spreadsheet for an answer, maybe.

Median time ignores a large swath of factors, however - success rate (it ignores failed attempts altogether), repeat success (the same team doing the same task five times is going to bring down the median time without really being reflective of relative difficulty), preparation time (if your speed run takes an hour of prep in Warburg or Bloody Bay to result in a half hour run, the task really takes an hour and a half) - that all factor into the "difficulty" of a given task.

Median time is a pretty poor metric, especially as it over-represents repeat success by a large margin, and as median time is lowered, those that would produce off-sets on the longer side to bring up the median time are increasingly discouraged from even starting the task, let alone finishing it, because their time is poorly rewarded.

Median time is a simple, but not particularly effective, measure of difficulty.

The issue is that the devs have decided that "time completed" is the proper metric not for rewarding merits, but for how many merits are rewarded. This is the issue.

A strike force should have an amount of merit award based on some metric set by the devs - not player performance - and stay static there. How slow, or fast, one team or another completes that task should not play into it at all.

If another team completes tasks faster and thus earns more merits/minute than another, that's fine. So long as the slower team is not being penalised because the faster team is doing things faster, which is currently the case.

Well, I wouldn't go that far. I do play a super model bunny girl, after all.

I also have a tough punk girl that has an outfit with nothing on top but a leather jacket, but that is a specific attempt on my part to make a character that doesn't care about that sort of thing.

Might be why my experience with the LRSF is so much longer than the "median"; I've never done an LRSF with Shivans, nukes, or any other of the tricks. The two times I've completed it have been using the "Sleep them all" tactic and an attempt at "Sleep them all" that failed, so we just huddled inside our FFGs and slowly whittled them down.

The whole reason defence for ranged characters is a broken concept is because all current ranged characters do large amounts of damage with their ranged attacks. Blaster-level damage with Scrapper Defences is broken. The flaw with defence caps and invention set bonuses is not that ranged characters get defence at all, but that ranged characters get defence that the devs never accounted for when first developing them.

VEATs and HEATs prove that ranged/defence is not inherently unbalanced. If planned for and accounted for, ranged/defence can be a perfectly viable archetype. The problem with our current selections for ranged/defence is simply that such characters are right now tied inexorably to particular power sets - light/dark blasts for Kheldians, or mace/claw/gun for Arachnos.

Considering the one thing this game offers that all other (successful) MMOs
currently do not is the high level of customisation available to even starting characters, taking the existing, non-broken ranged/defence idea and allowing for more customisation in options could only serve to highlight how much better at that CoHV is than any other product on the market.

Wow. Insightful. Really explains why I feel so uncomfortable with those patterns and thus never dress characters in them.

I do. It's definitely not my preferred play style, and I avoid doing speed runs whenever possible.

That said, before speed runs actively affected my rewards for my playstyle, I didn't mind them beyond not wanting to do it myself. Now that they adversely affect me to the huge extent they do with Strike Forces, it bugs me.

I really don't care if someone can get a rare recipe roll every ten minutes, frankly. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't affect my game. Having my merit rewards diminished because they are doing that, however, does affect me, and does bother me.

I'd be heavily in favour of a system that tracks a percent completion - number of foes on the map defeated and so forth - and that then deducts merits for completing the technical mission parameters while bypassing most of the content (or, alternatively, tacks on extra merits for completing most missions more completely.)

I'm not suggesting you'd need 100% completion to get full reward, but if you only take out 10% or 25% of the opposition, you really shouldn't get the same reward as a group that takes out 50% or more, whether both groups get the mission objectives done or not.

To prevent a small minority of players from messing things up for everyone else.

Or do Blueside TFs at my usual pace.

Hence the issue.

Hey, look, it's the same old answers that weren't convincing the other eleventy-billion times!

Okay, the "new reward every three months" carrot argument is new, and a good one. Still doesn't explain why one couldn't just pick the reward they wanted from the full list instead of waiting X time for X reward.

Not if the "just hack and slash" has substantially superior rewards to the richer parts of the game.

The guy you're bashing has been around a full one month less than you, according to your respective join dates.

Just for the record.