GadgetDon

[ QUOTE ]
I'm hoping mine prove to be popular enough to make Devs' Choice so I can get the slots back.

As for how I made the blueprint environment... it involves the inspired use of four judiciously demorecorded/demoedited maps, Leandro's Splasher program, getting the "Issue 14: Architect" logo off the CoH site, the right RGB colour code, two very specific Sony Vegas Movie Studio filters, and a metric a**load of patience, trial, and error to get it right.

All for a five-second shot. Am I insane or what?

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[/ QUOTE ]

Not at all. The 5 second shot payoff is the sort of thing that carries a sequence. And fantastically done. I absolutely loved it.

I hope you're not only applying to CoH. Even if they are so foolish as to let someone else get you, that sort of "I've got an idea and I'll do what I can to make it superb" drive combined with real skills and a great sense of pacing, you should be working in video production.

There's differing levels of "speed". For example, take the Manticore TF. Several of the stealthable missions would be just boring slogging through huge maps of Crey to get to the target. So I do stealth whenever possible (even when I'm doing it for XP on my path to 50). On the other hand, I got caught on a speed ITF, jumping from crystal to crystal ignoring the ambushes, and that wasn't a lot of fun.

I'm not a big fan of the Merit system...but to be fair, the "speed" focus was there before merits, it was just focused on a few exceptionally speedable tfs (Katie, Eden). Katie for the badge, ITF for the 35-50 range xp and influence...and on rare occassions other TFs for alts coming up. I am seeing a lot more other TFs running these days.

The closed beta is probably testing the new forums.

[ QUOTE ]
The situations with Brainstorms ar mistakes on the part of the Devs, as they admitted.

The Crafting system was designed wih a rate of reward gain in mind, at the degree to which the 'maximum intended reward gain speed' was exeeded by using brainstorms was huge enough that they actually did something about it.

So they made a mistake when they designed the badging system in the first place, then compounded it by not thinking the fix through, as they admitted.

Demonstrably, stealthing the change was a mistake in that we just found out about it instantly, making the stealth moot.

But it should not have been announced prior to go live in any case. That would have undermined what they were intending to fix in the first place. They might as well say, "Everybody craft Brainstorms now on Live, they are going away in the next patch." Which would eliminate any datmaing they could do on the impact of the change. What they should have done, IMHO is put in a patch note that reads something like:

"Datamining shows that we accidentally set some rewards far higher than intended. The rewards for those activities have been removed temporarily until a better solution can be found. Specifics on which activities will be released with the live patch notes."

Heck, maybe they should append that note to the bottom of all future patch notes.

Hmmm: what if they kept a list of the Closed Beta testers from each patch, and ran ideas by those people secretly, under an NDA, when they pick up on stuff like this? "Hey guys, we just discovered that Brainstorm farming is giving way bigger rewards than it should. It HAS to be nerfed because of upcoming changes to the badging system. How should we go about it?"

Maybe they do this already...dun dun DUN!

[/ QUOTE ]

Or maybe what they should have done was

(a) Say "OK, we told people that Brainstorm conversion would count, there's a finite amount of old base salvage that could get turned into brainstorms and then to salvage, and it's just a badge, it's not giving them free purples or anything, so we'll go by what we said and let it count"

or

(b) Realize while still planning I13 that people would be quickly converting base salvage, and maybe done something clever like shelve the whole illthought trainwreck of an idea as it was.

I'll add one more thing...if the devs saw a sudden rush of conversion of base salvage to brainstorms, it WASN'T "ZOMG! I can get those crafting badges now!" In most cases, it was "Damn! I have to convert all this stuff to brainstorms now, so my storage isn't pilfered by someone who wants random rare salvage!"

Leading up to I13, I had really locked down the storage in the POWER base, because the previously-nearly-useless base salvage became a target. I don't know that anyone in POWER would have stolen it, but I don't know everyone personally. This meant that most members were blocked from the inspiration storage (we have a lot of inspiration storage units, including third tier inspirations for tough tfs). So, when I13 first went live, I spent a couple exceptionally boring hours converting all that base salvage and component salvage into Brainstorms. And trust me, there was no rubbing of my hands thinking "Mua ha ha ha ha, crafting badges, you are mine!" But once that work was done, I was able to give access to storage again.

And on other characters, when I saw they had base salvage, I converted it, just to get it over and done with. Just to simplify my "all salvage" tab.

The problem with datamining is that it tells you what was done, not why.

[ QUOTE ]
Wow. I'm just not seeing why it's as big a deal as you're making it out to be. I have no problem with the Dev team getting rid of exploits however they see fit. Sure, admittedly they sometimes are a little overzealous. They're human after all. It's hard sometimes to read tone in one's posts, but yours came across as angry and bitter. I understand it's just a game....but that works both ways. Why take it so personally?

[/ QUOTE ]

My disagreement with so many of the so-called exploit changes is that most send to either involve collateral damage or "that's better than we thought, we'll call it an exploit". One thing we're always told about changes on the test server is, "Remember, it's only on test, it still could change" and some things have changed based on feedback...but when things aren't on the patch notes, there's no chance to say "Look, this is why it isn't a problem" or "Look, this is the impact of that, how about this instead."

More...in most cases, the things that are left off of the patch notes on test, are left off of the patch notes when it goes live. So people who have come to expect a game to operate in a certain way, make choices based on that, are wondering why it doesn't work that way any more. And that's just wrong.

I'm not angry or bitter. I'm just explaining why I think what Positron has said is wrong.

Part of the problem is that there are three things lumped under the name "exploit".

One, the clear-cut case, is where there's a bug that allows people to do things that clearly were not intended to work that way. For example, there used to be holes in the walls in the Eden trial that would let you just move past them instead of taking them down. This case is easy, no notice is necessary, fix the bug and give a general patch note ("Close holes in maps for Eden trial")

The second is where there's an existing behavior that, in a specific situation, causes rewards that anyone would know shouldn't work. Example: Rikti Portals that are damaged but only despawn instead of being defeated still grant full rewards. Not sure if this was intended (you don't want someone fighting a portal, working it down, and see it go away withouth a reward because the comm officer was killed) or just "well, no big deal, they still have to be in battle and take down the comm officer", but it was known, talked about. Only when the RWZ was added and people could go from spawn to spawn, triggering portals and nicking the portals and then pull back, waiting for the portals to despawn, that it was a big issue. I still think they went for the wrong solution, that instead a despawning portal should give no or partial rewards, but so be it. For these cases, where they're changing a known behavior that people encounter to fix a specific situation, I think they generally SHOULD document the behavior they are changing, unless the situation is so game-breaking that a few more people doing it will do real damage (the situation allows griefing, like the use of confusion to allow people in non-PVP zones to be killed, it gives a huge disparity in PVP, or similar issues).

The third type of "exploit" is where people are taking the game as it came, in the normal situations, and devs go "ZOMG! They're making mad expees and drops from this! We gotta change this or this game is going to the Americas!" For example, the discovery that people would farm foes that summon killable foes (the Rikti that come through portals, the Zombies raised by Death Shaman, etc.). Or for what I think is an example, people actually were working on crafting badges by converting base salvage to brainstorms or brainstorms to invention salvage. In this, I'm calling bull on the description of these as "exploits". I'm not saying the devs can't choose to say "OK, the rewards are out of whack, we're changing this". But it's a balancing change (common parlance: nerf), it's not fixing an exploit.

And when Positron talks about "the integrity of the game"...when it comes to speed or effort to level up or gain influence/infamy, the game really doesn't have that much integrity. Even though I choose not to, I know enough farmers and power levelers that I could create a character today and have him to 50 for a hami raid this weekend. As for Influence/Infamy, I know of people who create tons of Inf by just playing the market, something I neither have the desire nor patience to engage in. I also don't farm, but I know people who do and they've got so much more influence than I do. And then there's the wild variance on drops from the RNG...a few prime purple drops, and in a single ITF you can get more than weeks and weeks of non-stop TF running with less luck. The "integrity" of the game is a game that is fun, reasonably fast active combat, and living out fantasies of being a superhero. Positron GOT that, when he talked about giving players what they want within reason. But I13 seems more like "giving the players what they want so long as it's what we want them to want."

Bravo! Bravo!

Actually, the thing I was thinking about as I converted all that bleeping base salvage POWER had into Brainstorms so we could open up access to the storage to most members, is something that couldn't be said in game without risking its T for Teen rating. To the extent that it occurred to me, "at least you're making progress to Fabricator", my response would have been a rather hollow laugh.

Trust me, I was well aware of the use of conversions to badging, and did just about anything I could to stop that illthought trainwreck of a change. To now be told that during the hours I was converting salvage, just click click click click go refill click click click click, that I was engaging in some exploit, is really rather insulting.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


So, screw the honest players if there's any chance of someone getting more reward than they should?

[/ QUOTE ]

I apologize if this sounds harsh, but if you (general you, not you specifically) are using an expoit, knowingly or not, then you are wrong.

Just wrong. Period.

It's not up to us as the gamers to decide what is or is not an exploit. It's up to the developers. It's their game, and they get to decide such things.

[/ QUOTE ]

You misunderstand me. Many of their "fixes" for exploits have real impact beyond just closing the exploit. And other things only become exploits after the fact, "wow, they're doing what we said they could"

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Right now, the numbers for the five badges are 50, 100, 500, 1000, 10000. Change them to 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000. Yeah, some people who spent the time getting the badges in the hold system will be better off. So? Your future is in the new characters being created now. Don't screw them over out of fear that someone might get a badge they didn't "earn". Even if it might help them avoid a step or two in a future dialog tree.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know that their is an idea that some badges should be 'epic' and hard to get. But if you then attach those badges to special dialogue trees, you've just made a lot of people who can't grind out the epic badges - and grinding is what you have to do - very annoyed. Especially since crafting takes up such a large amount of in-game resources that new characters who won't be gifted huge amounts of inf will be left out of any of these changes.

It's great to have a non-combat system in place, but please make sure you consider the way it can be accessed.

[/ QUOTE ]

You've put the finger on something else that bothered me about it.

Most badges either require a specific type of play, or various levels of boring grinding. I don't pay that much attention to badges on all my characters (never found the accolades that much to dig into) but every once in a while I decide "this guys gonna be a badger".

My last badger has been quite effective at getting the badges. For the most part, the only badges he's missing are day jobs (still working on those), most PVP badges (I don't PVP), the six skiing badges from the winter event (there's a reason I don't play twitch games), most of the anniversary badges, and some that just require afk farming or didn't feel right (oddly enough, I didn't work to get Reformed, because it didn't feel right).

A lot of it was really boring work, particularly the crafting and ouroboros badges. I'd hate to think I'd have to go through that for most characters to get the full experience. As I recall, either Statesman or Positron once defined an exploit as doing something repetitive or boring to get a reward. Well, a lot of badging is that, and if we have to do it for something in-game... may be something to consider.

No problem if there's some text flavor that recognizes the badges. But right now, the only reason I don't participate in healing farms is because, the badge isn't worth it. Making it artificially worth it may not be an improvement.

[ QUOTE ]
Could we please get some rethinking done on the "No Badge Credit for Mobs in Mission Architect Missions" thing? There is no practical reason why they shouldn't give badge credit for Defeat badges.

It would DEFINITELY ease things Villainside for things like Weatherman, Regenerator, and the other hair-pulling-must-farm badges.

Of course, I realize this is falling on deaf ears, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually...now that we have an official ear to bend about badges (Synapse)...can we have a discussion issue about badge issues?

[ QUOTE ]
We’re going to see what this does to the numbers of characters earning the Crafting badges through datamining. If, by the time Issue 14 is getting ready to launch, we see that it is now too hard to achieve those badges, then we will make another change to them (not saying that we will make the conversion count again, but that remains an option on the table in that case.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Unless I14 is way behind schedule (meaning the hopes of I15 for the fifth anniversary are out the window and more so), you aren't going to have enough data to usefully mine.

As I said in another thread, the issue of base salvage conversion wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention, it was the slimmest glimmer of a sliver lining in the cloud that was this change in salvage that was thrust upon the players. There was discussion that, among all the other reasons that made it such an illconsidered change, it would make the crafting badges so much harder to get (the loss of both refining base salvage into components, and converting invention salvage into base components being a key part of getting the 4th and 5th badges). When it was pointed out that converting the base salvage to brainstorms and brainstorms to invention salvage would count towards the badge, well, that was good for a few people who had access to base storage system and could use it until they ran out.

So if it was suddenly a surprise that, oh wow, this sudden burst of conversion makes it fast for some people to get the badges, well, shame on your people for not reading that it was discussed, and for not thinking of it even before we did.

In the end, it doesn't really matter if the conversion counts or not. Yes, those who had saved up their base salvage or brainstorms for their next badger are frozen out, but in the end, it's a very limited supply. Some people got the badge because of conversion before the patch in question, and if you revert some more people will get it, but it doesn't change anything about how much more impossible you've made the fourth and fifth crafting badges with this illthought change in salvage. The only real annoyance factor is that, even after it was openly discussed and not a hint made that this was not an appropriate thing to do, that one bit of good news with the hassle and annoyance of the change was turned into an evil exploit, so game-rending that it couldn't even be put in a patch note or lo, the servers may explode in a burst of hellfire.

The real solution? Now that you've removed the methods everyone I know used to get the last two crafting badges (base salvage to component, invention salvage to component), the numbers are just too damn high. Lower them. In I14. Don't wait for datamining where the results will be wiped out by those who got the badge before this last patch or still have made most of their progress with the old trading rules, don't make people spend a year or so saying "damn, I'm crafting every day, where is that %@#$#ing Master Craftsman badge". If you doubt me, ask around the office, find out who has Master Craftsman or Fabricator, and ask them how much of their progress was with the methods no longer available.

Right now, the numbers for the five badges are 50, 100, 500, 1000, 10000. Change them to 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000. Yeah, some people who spent the time getting the badges in the hold system will be better off. So? Your future is in the new characters being created now. Don't screw them over out of fear that someone might get a badge they didn't "earn". Even if it might help them avoid a step or two in a future dialog tree.

[ QUOTE ]
I disagree.

Players should not be alerted to the future nerfing of a possible exploit, even if the exploit is more commonly used in some game-intended way. That only encourages abusing the exploit.

When there is time, the exploit should be fixed in a way that impacts the non-exploitative uses as little as possible. But if time is short, or if an elegant fix is not possible, the problem still has to be fixed, even if by stealth.

The altenative is announcing the exploit and then spending a lot of time trying to weed out those who 'innocently' exploit it from the intended exploitations and banning accordingly, which would be even worse than stealth fixes.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, screw the honest players if there's any chance of someone getting more reward than they should? That's exactly the wrong mindset. The exploiters will just find the next exploit (or just go back to the farming missions, teaming, whatever), maybe be a bit slower in rolling up the rewards, but the normal players are left high and dry.

And I'm not saying lay out exactly the exploit, just the change. For example, with the Rikti Portal issue, they wouldn't say "well, you see, people are getting massive XP by nicking portals in the RWZ", they'd just say "Rikti portals summoned by lieutenants give no XP, influence/infamy, prestige, drops, or merits". People will ask why, some people might even figure out the exploit, but so what? There are always exploits people are using. And maybe we could have gotten a better solution like, you only get proportional reward based on the damage you did. Or at least, immediately, we might have gotten Comm Officers to con as lieutenants.

Now clearly, severity has to be an issue about the exploit as well as impact. If it's an exploit that lets you grief others (like the change they made to keep people from stealing stuff out of base storage), that has a higher justification for secrecy. But "oh noes! They are getting more xp than they should be getting!" is a lousy excuse to screw up the legitimate rewards of the normal players.

And even if you can make a case for not documenting on the training room, there is ZERO excuse for not documenting it when they go live. Part of the process of saying "OK, this doesn't go into the training room patch notes" has to ensure "it will be highlighted in the live patch notes". The problem is that most things that are withheld from the training room patch notes don't make it to live either.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Does this mean the eventual use of Paypal to pay for in game store items?

[/ QUOTE ]


If you mean the market? Like for IOs or salvage? I can honestly say; I do not think that will ever, ever happen.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm guessing he means things like renames, move character, slots, buying respecs.

A "pure" exploit, behavior that only would be done to achieve an invalid reward and where the fix is tightly focused on changing that pure exploit, you can justify not including it in the patch notes.

The problem is that in some cases, either the fix isn't tightly focused, or the question of whether it's really an exploit comes into play.

Two examples...one was the removal of XP from the portals summoned by Rikti Comm officers. Now it turns out there was an exploit of "get rikti in the rwz to summon the portals, nick them, wait for the groups to despawn, collect xp and influence". But the fix negated what we were given when rikti that come through the portal lost their rewards. So the standard (if you could do it) was allow the comm officers to summon, and take down the portals. That behavior, rational and non-exploitive, was made not to work it only after people were reporting it as a bug was it revealed it was "working as intended".

I'm guessing the brainstorm conversion was another example. Except that it was part of the discussions about removing base salvage. And if you were really surprised how easy it made the badges to get for a brief time...you really didn't think that through did you? It was the only bit of silver lining in the dark cloud that was thrust upon players as a fait accompli of "we're killing the usefulness of your base salvage and putting basebuilders into competition with the io crafters", and was expressed as so.

So nope, I don't think "well, it's an exploit" is enough to say "naw, we don't have to tell the players this". Because very often, non-exploitive gameplay is affected by these fixes, and what was once "used as intended" gets recast into an exploit. The barrier for "let's not tell people" needs to be very high.

[ QUOTE ]
Your conclusion doesn't fit with what Ex said. "At this time" doesn't imply that they don't want to comment at all. It means exactly what it says. Like I said before, when they've had time to gather themselves and their information, and tear themselves away from the task at hand, they'll comment about it. Ex said exactly what she needed to say. They'll get to it later, because invariably, there'll be a similar issue with another badge or something, and it will have a similar reason behind why a change was made. It's happened before.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe Ex Libris's comment doesn't rule out commenting at a later point, but it doesn't promise one either.

And for those of us still awaiting a rational explanation for the whole removal of base salvage in the first place, the view of "oh, well, I'm sure they'll explain themselves sometimes" seems like wild optimism.

Oh, and "because invariably, there'll be a similar issue with another badge or something"--that's what we're worried about. Two bad changes that do nothing but say "no badge for you" with no explanation of what's wrong giving people those badges makes us wonder what other badges will be removed or made harder without any real reason. What IS next? You don't get credit for a kill unless you get XP for it?

[ QUOTE ]
Personally, I think this issue is more about the players being too stubborn to accept the reasons that were given for those particular changes. I don't think there's very many people that could honestly say they were completely happy with pre-I13 PvP. When the Devs made steps to change it, players suddenly cried foul. They cried knowing that the Devs were only partially done with said changes (still working on Zones and Raiding). When you get yelled at for not doing something, and then yelled at again by the same people when you do do something, isn't that a confusing message the players are sending to the Devs? How exactly are they supposed to respond to that? The only way that makes sense is to stick to their guns about their intentions for the changes, and assure us that when the product is in a more finished and complete form, we'll have a better idea of what they're doing and why.

[/ QUOTE ]

And if the devs have completely messed up, if they're working from either a bad understanding of what players want or some view that they can successfully churn most of the current players and replace them with a targeted playerbase (which would seem insane except its been done before), then "Oh well, it's a fait accompli, nothing to do now."

[ QUOTE ]
Didn't realize this was official. That's good, but they're both still dealing with the aftermath of Lighthouse's departure, and the things he left for others to take over.

[/ QUOTE ]

Lighthouse has been gone for a while, in this economy with all sorts of companies laying people off or shutting down, finding qualified people should not be an issue, and while community coordinator is an important job with skills necessary to do it well, it doesn't have the technical "learn how to use our tools" ramp-up time that programmers need.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
No offense BaB's i know its not your fualt but you need to tell the "Man" you guys need to slow it down and fix things that are broken before jumping 10 issues ahead of whats currently on live.

[/ QUOTE ]
Slow down? With Champions Online slated for "Spring 2009", and DCUO slated for release before the end of the year, what should the production schedule be?

Also

[/ QUOTE ]


im thinking they need to do what i in retail "have" to do..work overtime.

[/ QUOTE ]

I suspect there's a LOT of overtime work being done. I may disagree with some (OK, a lot) of the decisions they make, but I know just enough to realize how much stuff they're biting off, and it's not something they're doing on a 9 to 5 job.

BAB, I understand the chaos, I understand the business. What I don't understand are the reasons for the changes made. And the only conclusions I'm coming up with from these changes are pretty negative ones.

If there's no time to explain why something is being taken away...it shouldn't have been taken away. If there's no time to say "this is why we thing people getting redeemed is a bad thing"...then don't remove it until there is time. If there's no time to stop giving progress on crafting from brainstorms, then don't remove it until there is time.

Nope, it is a bug. Only the missions given from contacts in a coop zone (and present, the two new ones in Cimerora) are supposed to have their missions flagged, but all arc missions got flagged.

After all this, aren't we about due a "The developers are aware of these concerns but choose not to reply." I wouldn't be happy with it, I think we deserve something more, particularly given the quotes found from Positron and that old bit about "give the players what they want within reason", but doubt we'll get it. But I really did expect at least something recognizing the unhappiness over this.

To be fair, Retilian, there have always been moderators who are only here to make sure the rules are followed, and a higher level of community coordinator like Ex Libris who would make a reply. It's Sunday, and if Ex Libris is online, I suspect she's far busier dealing with the stresses of double xp weekend, and any reply would only come after talking with the developers.

So I would assume that we won't hear any response until Monday at the earliest. Whether we will hear any response at all is to be seen.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
As to the Brainstorm conversions: in light of this change Fabricator should be reduced to 2,000 crafts. The 1,000 to 10,000 jump never made much sense anyways.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not at all.

I got it well before brainstorms ever existed. So did every other person who really wanted it. Fabricator is an epic badge. It was obviously intended to require epic level effort to receive. So a later issue has a feature that makes it much easier to get the epic badge, but that ability was unintended, how does the removal of that feature somehow retroactively mean that the badge was never intended to be epic in the first place? Heck, when Fabricator's requirements were set the Devs probably hadn't even considered removing base salvage yet or creating the whole Brainstorm system.

The badge is still available (not like some >cough&lt. Anyone can still get it the same way everyone else got it prior to i13. Easy-mode for this badge has been removed, that's all.

But I do agree that it should have been in the patch notes. A little prior warning from test server notes would have been nice too.

[/ QUOTE ]

Those who got Fabricator...how much of that progress was converting invention salvage to base component salvage, and how much was refining raw base salvage into components? Every guide and everyone I've talked to, even talking about Master Crafter, made significant use of those no-longer-available options.

And as the leader of a SG with a good-sized collection of base salvage--the conversion to brainstorms wasn't that great in making progress, and converting to invention salvage means you just quickly have more salvage than you can put anywhere.

Master Crafter is pretty much epic as well, making the final badge twice that after removing the best tools for achieving it is a poor trade, but at least it's something.

Removed for snarkiness on my part, bad form

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I reported as a bug and petitioned the following as well:

Last night I stumbled across base to brainstorm conversions and brainstorm to invention conversions were not counting towards my crafting badges (Artisan, Master Artisan, etc.). No news there.

But what also happened was my villain who had done all that brainstorm work didn't get credit for 12 enhancements he crafted from his memorized list. I popped over to a hero on another server and crafted one enhancement from his memorized list which also didn't give him credit.

This afternoon the hero has his count increased by 1 but the villain's count remains where it was before I did my crafting last night. So while the hero may have been a lag issue, the villain remains a mystery.

Perhaps because he had done brainstorm conversions and the hero hadn't?

[/ QUOTE ]

Or they may have tweaked something, added bugs, and in the process, broke stuff, so it might all be a bug. Wish we could get an official answer on at least how it's supposed to now work.

[/ QUOTE ]

We are currently investigating this issue. It does look like a patch note was missed in regards to brainstorm ideas not translating to badge counts. We are looking further at whether the overall badges have been affected by this change.

I'll keep you updated.

Ex

[/ QUOTE ]

Patch note missed sounds like "working as intended". And let me guess, the devs will not choose to comment on this either.

Do the devs think that they've got a big bunch of new people coming in so they don't need the old players?