Evangel_NA

That misses the OP's point imo. Like stated not all of us are hungry for xp and the need to level faster than the speed of light. Some enjoy that early content that moves a little slower and allows you to explore your character. I agree it's not for everyone - and for those people there are the new arcs and the sewer trial - but I see no reason to punish those of us that actually enjoy a slower pace.

Add new content, that's fine. But take content away?? Why??

I would love to have some evidence of this being true as well. I have tried relentlessly to get to the old contacts and whether you do the tutorial or not your first contact is Dorkashy or whatever his name is.

Even if you go into City Hall and find the contact that would have normally been associated with your origin clicking them just says "I have nothing for you" or something to that extent. Doing the "find a contact" only brings up Dorkashy and I think maybe Twinshot. If there is a way to get to the old contacts it is so buried and bass akwards that 99% of the player base doesn't even know the option is there.




I too grow tired of the forced content (and forced lackluster content at that) that is constantly crammed down our throat. It started with Incarnate release when it was a forced farming system of running the same TFs and then the same 2 or 3 trials over and over and over and over. And that model seems to have continued - why take away the individuality?

Where's the repeatability? They hammer down on people who make farms in AE but then all the new content that devs create is farms and forced repeat content for every single character you make. Pre Freedumb I made a new character once every few months and enjoyed it. I have made 1 character post Freedumb and have no desire to make another because I don't feel like running the same crappy content and don't feel like farming a sewer trial...

Release - Arc ID 530481 - "The Seventh Project"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 1 of the Howard Zaine Trilogy is here! Complete with optional objectives, hidden clues, and cutscenes! The arc is challenging but definitely soloable - albeit perhaps on a lower difficulty than your character is used to. The villain group is challenging but able to be fought at appropriate difficulties on any AT. Going above and beyond the mission objectives is encouraged as some features will only present themselves if you search for them. As with the prelude, this arc is very story-focused, but Chapter 1 is also very xp-balanced with a solid villain group and plenty of objectives.

To avoid spoilers I suggest searching for the arc via title or ID number, not by author.



Synopsis
----------------

A calm man with a piercing glare stands in the Mission Architect building. When you approach him the story begins and your destiny begins to unfold - starting with an investigation into a mysterious new criminal organization in Paragon City. Your search for clues and answers leads you down the rabbit hole as you pursue the mastermind behind a weapon program like no other!



Details
----------------

Arc ID: 530481
Title: "The Seventh Project"
Level Range: 45-50
Length: Long - About 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: Medium - Soloable but challenging on your normal solo difficulty

Alignment: Heroic
XP: Balanced - comparable to an average City Of Heroes story arc





-Evangel

Hey everyone. As a special buildup to the launch of the Howard Zaine Trilogy I'm release this little prelude arc. Details below. Feedback welcome!



Release - Arc ID 529478 - "A Long Time Ago In A Zone Far, Far Away"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a special pre-release of the Howard Zaine Trilogy, Arc 529478 - "A Long Time Ago In A Zone Far, Far Away" is a very short prelude arc that introduces the mystery of the trilogy. The backdrop of the story is introduced through a canon-related storyline. The arc is a very low xp arc that focuses more on introducing some of the concepts used in the trilogy. The main trilogy is very xp-balanced but has various missions that are story-focused with non-combat mechanics. This arc introduces those methods and prepares the player for how some of the trilogy's missions will work. The arc is very short and serves very much as a "tutorial" for the Howard Zaine Trilogy.



Synopsis
----------------

Officer Flint - the first contact your hero ever made in Paragon City - has called upon you for a special announcement: the last of the Contaminated has been cured, and it's all thanks to the work of you and other heroes all those years ago! But when you travel to meet with Flint and others for the celebration a surprise attack causes you to embark on an investigation into a brand new villain organization in Paragon City!



Details
----------------

Arc ID: 529478
Title: "A Long Time Ago, In A Zone Far Far Away"
Level Range: 45-50
Length: Medium - About 30 minutes
Difficulty: Very easy - Soloable on your normal solo difficulty

Alignment: Heroic
XP: Very low - tutorial arc focused on story





-Evangel

Release - Arc ID 530481 - "The Seventh Project"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 1 of the Howard Zaine Trilogy is here! Complete with optional objectives, hidden clues, and cutscenes! The arc is challenging but definitely soloable - albeit perhaps on a lower difficulty than your character is used to. The villain group is challenging but able to be fought at appropriate difficulties on any AT. Going above and beyond the mission objectives is encouraged as some features will only present themselves if you search for them. As with the prelude, this arc is very story-focused, but Chapter 1 is also very xp-balanced with a solid villain group and plenty of objectives.

To avoid spoilers I suggest searching for the arc via title or ID number, not by author.



Synopsis
----------------

A calm man with a piercing glare stands in the Mission Architect building. When you approach him the story begins and your destiny begins to unfold - starting with an investigation into a mysterious new criminal organization in Paragon City. Your search for clues and answers leads you down the rabbit hole as you pursue the mastermind behind a weapon program like no other!



Details
----------------

Arc ID: 530481
Title: "The Seventh Project"
Level Range: 45-50
Length: Long - About 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: Medium - Soloable but challenging on your normal solo difficulty

Alignment: Heroic
XP: Balanced - comparable to an average City Of Heroes story arc





Release - Arc ID 529478 - "A Long Time Ago In A Zone Far, Far Away"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Details
----------------

Arc ID: 529478
Title: "A Long Time Ago, In A Zone Far Far Away"
Level Range: 45-50
Length: Medium - About 30 minutes
Difficulty: Very easy - Soloable on your normal solo difficulty

Alignment: Heroic
XP: Very low - tutorial arc focused on story





Announcement Teaser Trailer
-----------------------------------------------------------

Teaser Trailer - "Remember": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFzc2duEt90



The Howard Zaine Trilogy
------------------------------------------------

The Howard Zaine Trilogy is the story of a simple man with an evil smile, who seeks ultimate power. A heroic-oriented arc, the story brings your character into the mix when a mysterious contact enlists your aid. As your journey continues you are pushed closer and closer to realizing your true destiny. Your character is challenged, tempted, and subjected to pressures that would break normal men, and if you're not careful you may find yourself falling into the darkness of evil. Building its own intricate story, the trilogy is nested firmly in the lore of Paragon City, expanding to encompass your character's fate in this "City of Heroes".

The trilogy challenges the norm of mission development, using many unconventional objectives, including non-combat missions, side storyarcs, and more. It is designed around a story-driven tale where players are encouraged to do far more than just click "Accept" and enter the mission. But despite its grand approach the trilogy leaves much of the extra content up to the discretion of the player, allowing many things to be skipped over if the player only wishes to complete the missions for xp. But at its core the trilogy is a complex tale - and it is encouraged to read everything, play everything, and search for optional objectives not listed in the navigation window…





-Evangel

You're only feeding my point though - all of these changes, every single change they are making is to please their new freebie moneybags. It's nothing about "entitlement", I don't even spawn my vet pets 80% of the time. But some people do for RP reasons or what not. It's not about the fact that things are "constantly changing" in an MMO, that's a given. It's not the fact that there are new pets coming. The point is simple:

The disregard is to the veterans who have earned things the "old-fashioned" way, and are now being punished because the devs want to keep the new moneybags spending. The reason for this change - any reason you can come up with: lag reduction included - is all an end result of greed to make more money. And yes I know the text-book argument of "it's a business you are supposed to make money" and that's a great response I applaud everyone who is intelligent enough to say that, the trouble is you cannot transition a market from one system to another without hurting a segment of your customers. And - as per usual when a game shifts to F2P - the people who get punished are the vets. Look at the prices in the market and you can easily see that these "great new features" the devs are so graciously providing for us have nothing to do with giving us new content - it has everything to do with pulling more money from pockets.


Anyone thinking I'm trying to engage in a "pissing contest" is missing the point of my statement. If you are a loyal customer of the game you are being short-changed now in the new model, and if you can't see that you're blind. When a game goes F2P the vet loses. Every time.

If you consider that vet pets have been available for 3+ years and this is the first time that any issue of "lag induced by vet pets" has been presented to us you have a bad case of falling for a corporate answer of bs.

If vet pets were introduced and a few weeks or months later large amounts of lag were being reported and people were complaining I could see the devs changing the code. 3 years later is a little far-fetched that all this time the devs have been worried about lag and are just now implementing it. The fact is they are worried about their precious new freebies getting lagged out and discouraged by vets so they yet again punish the loyal veterans for something they have spent years earning and paying.


The $1260 I have contributed is no longer important to the devs because they have new freebies who are foolish enough to spend $30, $40, $50 and more a month so let's punish those that have been players for years upon years by diminishing the set of merits we've given them to distinguish them as vets...



Sounds perfectly logical, of course I am being selfish...

False. In a F2P model there are no players, we become dollar signs.


Quantity > Quality




1. Make game free
2. Rush content so people spend more money
3. ???
4. PROFIT!

Ah, no I wasn't specifically calling you out, was using the general "you" as this thread is filled with a lot of whining about a - dare I say - minor annoyance. I agree the bug shouldn't have been pushed life and the argument that the devs made a piss-poor decision in pushing the patch live when they knew the bug existed is very valid, and no offense but the whole "there's a process and we can't alter the process" excuse Zill has dropped is a typical corporate mouthful of poop.

But the people claiming this bug is game-breaking are just doomsayers for the sake of doomsaying imo. Yes the term is subjective - but a graphics glitch falls more under annoyance than earth-shattering-game-breaking doom. It's like when the servers are down for 6 hours and somebody always comes into the forums and posts a thread about how they demand compensation for the money they're losing due to downtime. It's hyperbole.


For those having the major bug issues I'd be trying things like rolling back graphic drivers or updating to new ones. Somewhere the user's system is responding poorly to new code - the fault is on the devs but there might be something a user can do to at least ease the pain. When the devs give you lemons...

I was speaking to someone about this in-game - this bug can't entirely be server side then. It's something in the code that is effecting particular video cards more than others. At most (sometimes not even at all) I encounter this bug when logging in for the first time for the day. Changing missions, zoning into different zones, exiting missions, entering base, etc... I never have the bug repeat. I log in and fix the window setting once and then the rest of the day - changing characters, zoning, etc - it never happens again.


So yeah, it's not game-breaking... for everyone. And still - I know it seems extremely important to you, and I'm not in any way defending the devs because the bug is definitely unacceptable, but - having your window opacity reset is nowhere near the definition of "game-breaking".

It's like screaming fire in a crowded room when someone lights a cigarette. Don't use a phrase that means something entirely different to describe a bug. This bug in no way prevents you from playing the game. It makes it annoying, frustrating, and difficult to chat maybe - but learn the meaning of "game-breaking" before you toss it around and scream bloody murder.

Nah, I think I should enlighten you more with my wisdom, perhaps posting once every 5 minutes with very long-winded responses!


Sound good?!??!!??

I did use sarcastic orange...


Hate to tell you, PL'ing via farming, is - by its very definition - an exploit. Earning any form of reward at a rate higher than intended by the designer of a system is an exploit. I can provide dictionary definitions for you to solidfy that point but that would rude, don't you think?

This is an elaborate 100+ word response that could easily be done in two:


"I'm lazy"



Conserve your words! Shorter posts are always better!

Sorry, your math understanding on this - and therefore your point - still just doesn't match. Make no mistake, I'm not defending farming (as is obvious in this thread I am fairly against farming - particularly for xp) but even attempting to imply that an xp booster could come anywhere close to comparing to the windfall of xp you get from ambush and other farms is just an embarrassing comparison to make. The math has been pointed out by others so I feel no need to reiterate it, but simply put - 1 hour of a very slight xp gain, even in a farm has no comparison to the high-xp yields you get from xp farms with ambushes. Even putting the %25 boost to xp to use on a good ambush farm, you're increasing your xp gain by 25% on a gain that already is over a 100% gain to normal rating, so you're adding decimal points to an already astronomical number which means the boost is basically approaching zero.


XP boosters only benefit a player who plays the game "properly", and in that respect you are right - they are charging you to level faster. But it can hardly begin to attempt to compare to increase you get in PL'ing. Your argument has merit in a thread that's about how the devs are money-hungry pocket-pickers looking to charge you for every little thing they can. But in a thread about using ambush xp to PL your character, your argument just doesn't have any ground to stand on. This is hardly an instance of the devs saying "Oh no, people are farming ambushes instead of buying xp boosters, we should cut the ambush xp!!" Those two points of interest don't even belong in the same meeting room for the devs. 100% unrelated.

While I agree that the devs see us all as $ signs now, and while I think selling reward boosters for real money is just ridiculous, I gotta say your comparison of xp boosters to pling is apples to oranges.

The xp boost (and particularly the short amount of relative time it applies to the character) does not even begin to compare to even just one run of a "good" farm. You can walk away from an afternoon of farming with a couple dozen levels. The percentage boost you get from an xp booster is laughable in comparison. Now if you used the xp booster to farm then yes I see the argument but you are implying that playing the game the "proper way" with an xp booster is even remotely similar to pling in a farm - and that claim just does not have an ounce of merit.

imo there are two answers to this one, one of which is sort of obsolete today.


1. Farming in general - not just AE - in the sense of PLing is (or at least used to be) detrimental to the game because it leads to the potential of creating lvl 50 players that have absolutely no idea how to play their toon and therefore cause a lot of grief on trials and TFs and teams in general. You see it a lot - a person PL'ers their emp def and then when they run a TF at lvl 50 their idea of "healing the group" is auto-clicking Heal Aura and putting the tank on follow. That's not healing, that's not playing your defender properly. The point of spending the average of 80-100 hours lvling to lvl 50 is to learn how to actually play the powersets you've chosen. It's called experience for a reason. So farming XP in AE or any other mission to PL potentially creates a lot of lvl 50s that are worse teammates than a lvl 1 "noob".

Now this is somewhat obsolete in the fact that a large amount of PLers nowadays are people who have played various powersets and characters and have multiple 50s and understand the game - and are simply just lazy and don't feel like working up to 50 the traditional way. There is a whole debate within a debate about whether or not that mentality has merit but that is neither here nor there. BUT with the game now opening up to a wider market and potentially getting more players to upgrade to VIP and such, there is potential that a lot of new players could come in and see this PLing method and we could see a lot of high lvl "noobs". I've personally already teamed with a lvl 46 player that had just the rookie vet reward, and who stated he had only been in the game for a week. And needless to say his skill on the team was far less than impressive...




2. The second answer is the cheesy canned answer but still the valid point for the devs. Farming, by its definition, does violate the intended route of the game's experience. XP is not meant to be earned at that rate. Inf and Prestige is not meant to be earned at that rate. Salvage is not meant to be that readily available on the market (economy 101 teaches us a little thing about the importance of supply and demand). And AE is not meant to produce farming, it's meant to produce storytelling by the player-base. Now again, there are multiple debates within this debate on the merit of these claims, but the fact is the claim by the devs that "AE farming is not the intent of AE" is valid - as creators of the system they have the right to punish those that - whether rightfully or not - exploit their system to earn rewards at a rate not meant to be achieved.



I'm not taking a side on either of the points but the answer to why "farming is bad" really boils down to those topics. If you spend hours, months, days, and years developing a system with an intended rate of return and someone comes in and exploits it - whether its your fault in poor programming or not - you do have the right as the owner of the system to change things in an effort to realign the reward rate to the original intent of your design.

Oh I'm not talking about the practice of farming though, as is evident by the fact that you really didn't read my post.


It's not the act of farming that separates the farmer from the non-farmer - it's the mentality. I mean listen to yourself and your arrogant approach to just your post and the topic in general. Farming and not farming coexist beautifully and I would definitely agree that there is a lot of grey in the form of content and practice as to who "farms" and who doesn't. Hell, running two BAFs back to back is technically farming, so there is no argument there.

As I pointed out though originally, it's the mentality of the two sides - the inherent hatred for each other. You think you are better and that you know it all and blah blah blah, and on the other side the non-farmer thinks the same thing. Giving arcs low ratings on purpose and preaching down on others in a holier-than-thou post is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. You can argue until you are red in the face - and I'm sure you will because surely you are 100% correct and I should bow before your excellence - but the fact of the matter is the hardcore and even mediocre farmers of AE have a very very different mentality about the game than the hardcore and mediocre non-farmers. And that difference of opinion just does not mix.


I'd ask you to read a post for meaning before going on a rant next time, but something tells me you haven't read this far down my post and are already in reply mode...

I would agree with this if it weren't for the inherent fact that farmers and non farmers just do not get along in this game. This thread alone shows the arrogance each side of the debate has toward the other. And where does it stop? If Dunkin Donuts keeps expanding eventually people will be coming in to get a steak and potatoes for a sit down meal at Dunkin Donuts, and the people just wanting to come in and get a quick coffee and go will be saying "hey man, what the eff?"


For whatever reason - most likely an inherent difference of opinion on how a game should be played - farmers and non-farmers just do not mix. Hell you even have non farmers who like to go in and lower non-farm AE storyarcs just to be dicks, and to help raise farms to the top of the list. You can't have two things live together peacefully when one or both sides purposefully causes trouble for no other reason than to be a troll.



I would love nothing more than for the two to live together - it is after all your money, if you want to spend it farming, fine - but when it comes to AE the two just simply do not coexist well.

I'm normally the first to criticize the devs - particularly since they usually enjoy the "do as we say, not as we do" mantra. But here is one time where I must say the phrase doesn't work for the situation.


Devs (and some AE storytellers) use waves of ambushes to tell a story. You're being attacked by a security force guarding the whatever, or you're being overwhelmed by an onslaught of baddies trying to destroy something and you have to protect it. Whatever.

I personally use ambush waves to give a sense of large-scale battle and big end-game fights that you can walk away from going "whew, I survived!"



The people this rule is being created for don't use ambushes in either of those ways. They use them specifically to double, triple, quadruple, (is septuple a word?) their xp gain. You don't hear people broadcasting "lvl 40 malta ambush tip mission farming team forming, pst for invite!"


So yes, the devs do quite a bit - and imo way too much - "do as I say, not as I do" crap in this game. But this is most definitely not one of those instances.