MadScientist

follow that one to its logical conclusion

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So.... I didn't see any base changes for i15.... bummer...

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Broken banner art, broken wall items, overflow of item limits, broken AES, broken rez rings, the cross-faction swapping exploit that required they disable storage for a few weeks, the storage permission hack, disabling raiding, teammates kicked from your base, the FedEx PL exploit with the Cathedral, losing all SG badges, losing a whole base.
Yeah, some of that got fixed relatively quickly, but it all broke during issue releases.
Will I15 be our first patch that doesn't actually break something about bases?

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Looking forward to grinding / farming / dual boxing for these new badges.

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looks at post... looks at poster's name... looks at post... looks at poster's name... nah, I won't ask.

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My main badge character's survivability rate will plummet with Issue 15. With my Ill/Emp controller, I was able to stalemate a Fire/Fire/Fire Tank (not win, but not lose either) in a 1 on 1 match. Without the ability to control my opponent beyond 4 seconds, I guess I'll have to consider myself a punching bag in the arena.

I already can't do enough damage to win a match and I don't have the defenses to protect myself from any other AT, so losing the ability to control means I will lose most of the time.

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well, you don't need to beat a fire/fire/fire tank to earn the badge.
you could fight another ill/emp, or an ill/FF.
you could also, in theory, find someone who's at the low end of the weight class and you'll be at the high end. that's always been considered a "fair" match, and the devs have added a badge for that with (unless I miss a patch note for I15) no added balances enforced. So, for example, find a level 22 to challenge your exemplared-to-26 character in a Lightweight match.

even so... as I alluded to above, what is a "challenge"? If IOs are unneeded for the game, and I use the 2nd build of my 50 f/f/f tank to create him with only TOs, I wonder how you'd fair. If our little experiment is done with all the effort either of us can muster - I promise to try to kill you with my TOs - and it yields a badge for you, is there anything the devs can complain about? the badge isn't for a non-experimental arena win. but I digress.

It's a good thing we only have to do this once for the badge. Because it's apparently OK to do one time, but if we had to do it twice we'd be considered farmers and that would not be what they intend us to do to earn this badge.

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who said anything about "trading" wins?
I'm going to fight. With my Energy/Stone brute. It will be nice to use him again with his "improved" Energy Transfer, he's had no purpose in life since that fix.
The fact that it will be a team match and I ended up with no teammates doesn't mean I'm exploiting the arena system at all, nor is your whole team of 8 winners exploiting anything by beating him up in his moment of loneliness and mis-placed bravado.

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I fully intend on earning my badges by fighting against friends that will be trying to beat me.

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that's exactly what I said. I will be trying to beat everyone who's earning badges.
The fact I'm grossly mis-matched shouldn't bother the devs, right?
Just like I could... oh... I dunno... run your MA arc slotted with only TO's. or I could cross Steel Canyon at level 10, take the tram to Founders, and find a few level 36 targets for Silver Bullet. Those things are not forbidden, and there's never been an issue with them before, so it should be perfectly fair if I want to take on 8-v-1 in the arena, and thus equally fair for the 8. I15 has not created a new action to yield a badge, the devs have decided to add a badge to award an existing action. You can't nitpick that behavior because of a badge addition, they must have already decided it's a fine action.

My only hope is that when I decide that my main badge hunter, who's not quite so good in PVP, wants to get these badges that there will be fellow badge hunters to help join up with my team in a match that's more ... handicapped ... towards my not quite so good in PVP character. He just needs his fair chance, and if that means a teammate or 7 to make it fair for him considering his viability in PVP, then that's what it is.
(yeah, the fact my main badge chaser is a squishy corruptor built for team-oriented play kinda explains why I'm still lacking the 400 Rep badge on him but I have it on other people.)

Post deleted by MadScientist

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The idea of someone quitting over a badge change is hilarious to me, in an absurd sort of way.

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I'll say it again...

I quit every month. So do you. So does everyone. (month, or whatever billing cycle.)
The question is if there is enough content and interest to get you to renew.

If there are fewer badges enticing someone to renew, I don't see quitting as overreacting.

The confusion is people who are too used to auto-renew and do not take a critical stance of where their money is going. This is why some people still have land line phones.

who said anything about "trading" wins?
I'm going to fight. With my Energy/Stone brute. It will be nice to use him again with his "improved" Energy Transfer, he's had no purpose in life since that fix.
The fact that it will be a team match and I ended up with no teammates doesn't mean I'm exploiting the arena system at all, nor is your whole team of 8 winners exploiting anything by beating him up in his moment of loneliness and mis-placed bravado.

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There may also be a badge called "Contender" but I haven't found what would earn it. The Accolade is awarded by earning the five Victor badges shown in the first link.

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Contender got removed, instead all we get is Bum.

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Players feeling like they have to farm for badges has always been an issue with me.

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Admittedly "count" badges are the easiest to design. You figure out what you want to count, then design a series of badges around progressively higher numbers of those counts. This is why we never abandoned them in the past, when we probably should have.

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Positron's post. (for those who may not have seen it)

I didn't mean to give the impression that they were removing high kill count badges; but if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't be in there to begin with. Also, I doubt we'll see any new ones from here on out.

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you miss my point. There's that word again, "high".
Read the quote you used from Positron again. He does not limit his stance to "high" at all. He says "This is why we never abandoned them in the past, when we probably should have." referring to ALL COUNTS.

So any post that's taking a stance of "this is why it's OK something high goes away" is missing the point that *not-high stuff is disappearing, too!* That means lower kills, moderate kills, and (in the case of the previous poster who said "high kills" and not just "high") it means non-kill counting such as clicks, hostages, mission runs, etc., etc. Now if you want to talk about click badges, there shouldn't be a 1-click badge, and that's still not relevant to a counting badge change.
(plus most of your argument comes down to clicks being team-unfriendly, which is a problem in their implementation, not their theory.)

yeah, I'll be setting up an arena match swapping cartel as soon as the issue launches.

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I'm obviously not a Dev, and talking for them is kinda dangerous, but let me explain what I think they are thinking with the desire to remove high "kill count" badges.

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This is the important detail,
the devs are not removing high kill count badges as you claim.
based on the MA list, the devs are removing all count badges.
not limited to high; not limited to kills.

thus, a lot of the rest of your post only applies to a small subset of what the devs are taking as their new badge direction. What do you think about the rest? to cite just one counter-example, what do you think about the removal of the low glowie-click count badges?

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The fact that it is only 6 badges makes it even less desirable to modify the system. If you wanted to do this with 1000 badges, there's a compelling argument to make the change. Doing it for only 6 badges requires special code to program in the exception. This requires more documentation, more code, more effort, more testing, more time, more manpower, and more money. And as you say, "we're talking a grand total of 6 badges." Not worth it.

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I doubt it's very complex.

We have code for account-wide badges. They can exist. So create a new account-wide Anniversary 1 badge. Leave the old one for a moment, we'll come back to it shortly.

We have code that upon login checks the status of all account-wide badges. That is how if you get Jackpot on one character, the next character finds it awarded when they log in.

So all that's needed is to know when to award that new badge to the whole account, and the rest will take care of itself. They could do that with a database script (which would make it easy to then remove the old badge completely) or could compare to each character when you log in and award the account if you log in a character with the badge.


as to some other questions, they have easy answers...
Don't like villains having Anniversary 1? OK, make that badge Hero-only, since there were no villain characters at that calendar time.
Too much fuss over Account vs Character? Then put the new account-wide anniversary badge in the Veteran tab instead of Events. (and for those who are really nitpicky, suggest a broader name for that tab) That way an Anniversary is clearly an out-of-game event, not an in-game event like the Halloween stuff. It's not relevant to the point that missable badges suck, it's just a consideration in the design to fix them.

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What if anniversary badges were account-based originally? They had the tech, it's no different than VIP.

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Close, but I don't think it is exactly the same.

All the pre-Issue 14 account wide badges looked for something outside the game to award. Either a serial code (VIP/Destined One and Pocket Gold Club) or Vet Reward tied to account date.

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Passport is account-wide and was triggered behind the scenes as part of the transfer. Triggering a similar badge during a date range could have been done.

What I14 added was the ability to track *progress* from multiple characters on the same account.

course, that doesn't at all relate to the point of a hypothetical. How about "what if they had coded that back in I2?"

I suggest that if you did a bit of research into what OCD actually is you'd realize that there really is no comparison.

This is another of those questions that's easily answered by considering the opposite setup.

What if anniversary badges were account-based originally? They had the tech, it's no different than VIP.

Now if they had started account-wide, would we be hearing the people who want them character-specific? Would that option ever get off the ground? "I think characters should lose this badge if they didn't actually exist at the time."

Not every situation falls into this easy analysis, but in this case it's so obviously better the other way that this helps illustrate it.

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So 10% of every item price (or 20% if it was flipped) was destroyed. So every newly created infium [singular of inf] in the system was spent ten times before it got destroyed in market fees.

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nitpick from my physics knowledge...

Inf has a half-life of approximately 7 market transactions.

That's not going to average 10 transactions to remove it.


now what number do you want to use? I dunno. 7 transactions give you a 50% chance it's been removed from circulation. So to the first order, that's 14 transactions to an average guaranteed removal. 13 transactions is a 75% chance of removal using half-life as a measure, so you could use 17 cycles to "guaranteed" out of circulation. 22 cycles get you down to 10%, that says 24 total. I think you get close to an asymptote there, let's say 25 and if it's actually more that can be hand-waved away as money spent on other sinks like costumes and crafting.


What does all that mean? Well, the decay is slower than you account for. Is that saying the decay is too slow? Not sure. I'll leave that to you.

(on Evaluator)
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It's also unfair to anyone trying to get it, since ratings griefers can pull an arc out of HoF and prevent you from getting the badge.

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Well that's a mechanical flaw. The badge is broken, compounded by some flaws in the very system the badge is trying to be based on (ratings shouldn't be that vulnerable even without a badge involved).
If the badge was functioning as designed, I think the badge would be "fair". However, I would still think the badge would be a very poor design.

I guess what I'm saying is:
something like the griefablity of the Arsonist badge are not the same type of "fairness" that I thought this thread was referencing.

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But you're right, it does encourage people to vote a single arc into HoF NAO, rather than trying multiple arcs in the hopes that there will be many HoFs further down the line.

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What I was trying to express was more the problem of getting your own arc played. If people need to do HOF arcs for a badge, how does a new arc even get voted into the HOF? There's an imbalance of reward towards those that are already HOF, in the form of extra badge progress.
Imagine of HOF arc produced more tickets than non-HOF, would that be fair to authors if people running arcs had a choice of more rewards from established arcs?
I guess a way to sum it up: HOF should be a label on an arc, it should never factor into the system itself.

Now, badge progress for running Devs Choice... that I don't think is imbalanced vs no progress for other arcs. Devs Choice have enough of a difference in reward mechanics that different badge rewards on top of that is either unnoticable, or simply viewed as a trade-off.
(Course, I don't think the system should have a Devs Choice category anywhere near the ticket system. I think Dev Choice missions should be yanked out of the MA list entirely and given to normal contacts.)

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The other 87 are, ultimately, fair. Except the "play x Hall of Fame" line, as the system currently stands, since other people's actions can keep you from getting them. Some of them are still pretty dumb, namely the higher-end virtual ones.

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we're talking about the Evaluator line.
I think that badge is unfair to the authors, not to the badgers. The added reward for HOF arcs favors running those arcs on the merit of their existing ratings, instead of running any arc on its own merits.
It's a "rich get richer" mentality, and that's a lousy side-effect of the badge, so the badge is a bad design. The same way a badge for kill stealing would be a bad design even if fairly available to anyone.

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My chances at Dev's Choice and Hall of Fame are entirely dependent on how many friends I have, whether I like the same stuff as the Devs, and luck. In other words, a lot of factors besides my ability to create a good arc. If my arc is as good as yours but a Dev just happens to play yours instead of mine, you get Dev's Choice and I don't. Not fair.

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Agreed. Completely in agreement with you on those two badges. Not the other 87 though.

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well, technically, the Recognized line is just as unfair as Hall of Famer. So that's up to 7.
and I could make a case that the Author line is just as bad, unless you can grind your own arc on an alt in order to get those badges - and at that point they're at least "pointless" grindy badges and no one would miss them anyways.

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From the second half of the original post:
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Architect:
* Mission High Inquisitor: This badge is for completing 100 MA arcs in test mode, not just missions as the text says.

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The same problem exists for all Architect badges stating "mission completion". The game treats all MA arcs as a single mission. What I am saying is that this needs to be fixed before your suggestions get put in place.

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When, exactly, does the badge progress?
If it progressess when you talk to the contact the final time and get the end-of-arc popup, then the MA is actually moving the badge on the whole arc, not treating the missions as a block as you say. It's actually triggering on a whole different item.
If the progress is when you get "mission complete" on the last mission, then what's happening is that only the last mission of the arc is picking up the code that generates badge progress. That would be like the TF missions, where the rewards are merely a drop keyed to the last mission itself.

Not that it matters anymore, though.

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archiving this here, based on an idea in the MA Badge Revisions thread,

This is an idea to fix the objective count badges.
The problem to address is that people create missions with artificial objectives, or very short arcs, just to farm these badges.
Note as a side effect, this setup would also remove the team unfriendly aspects of the badges, too.

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And until such a time the game can count [u]missions[u] instead of [u]arcs[u] these would be a bad idea.

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huh? the game can count missions - it counts them just fine for Thwart the Thorns. (whichever actual badge that is.) It also counts them for Broker progress, which may not be exactly the same, but then again may be close.
so I'm really saying 50 missions, not 50 arcs, for these.

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Extractor, Destructive, Poor Impulse and Workaholic...I think those changes would make them more tedious.

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How so?
Tedious if you're trying to complete it today? Sure. But of course, that's the problem of farming that is trying to be addressed.
Tedious if you're going to be running 50 MA arcs anyways to get some serious amount of use out of the system as it was designed to be played? Probably you won't even notice, you'll just eventually have done enough of that type.

Say you run 50 arcs. an average of 3 missions per arc. You'd need to average 1 mission in 3 having each objective. Doesn't seem to ask you to go far out of your way, especially if you can peek at the mission spoilers ahead of time.


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Gamer - remove the 'defeat all enemies' tag to it and I think it's good.

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well, I kinda figure that a simpler subset of the other badges would be a bit too trivial. so the option is to either make it more specific (and there was only one option for requirements left to use), or raise its number. The former made more sense given the Obos Mender comparison to keep the number at 50.

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because you know as well as I do that a gold title or special power would get just as many screaming angry "me too's"

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As I already stated in my post, I cite the permanent costume powers as an example of a non-equal distribution of a bonus that doesn't have nearly the problems Bug Hunter has had. I feel a non-badge reward (on top of the "hey, look, my name is on the Dev Choice arc" reward in itself) would not have as much fuss.
Can you point me to a thread about the anniversary gold titles being unfair? If there is, is it as bad as what's in Positron's thread about I14 badges that started the Chosen One debate immediately?
Is there *any* example of another type of reward that the game gives that has had the amount of complaining that Chosen One or Bug Hunter get? Even the horribly unpredictable drop distribution of Purples isn't much of a serious problem.

archiving this here, based on an idea in the MA Badge Revisions thread,

This is an idea to fix the objective count badges.
The problem to address is that people create missions with artificial objectives, or very short arcs, just to farm these badges.
Note as a side effect, this setup would also remove the team unfriendly aspects of the badges, too.


Extractor line - rescue 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 hostages
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions that require rescuing a hostage.

Destructive line - destroy 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 objects
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions that require destroying an object.

Poor Impulse Control line - click 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 objects
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions that require clicking an objective.

Workaholic line - 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 optional objectives
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions when having completed an optional objective in that mission.

and in light of those, these other 2 series would become rather mundane, but could be improved with similar changes...

Gamer line - complete 1, 10, 25, 50, 100 arcs
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions that require defeating all enemies.

Heroic/Villainous line - complete 10, 25, 50, 75, 100 of your faction's arcs
change to: Complete 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 missions that require defeating a custom boss.

(I think that covers all possible objectives one can create.)


Why scale them to a max of 50?
Ouroboros Mender is for 50 and no one seems to have complained.
Yes, not every mission will progress all those badges at once, but remember Obos is counting *Arcs*, which could be 150-250 missions total, or more. So even progressing only 1 badge per mission this should be scaled just fine.

And remember, the MA description tells you in detail what type of objectives a mission has. So like using a list of story arcs to optimize Obos badge chasing, you can still optimize this system, though it can't really be "gamed". Unless someone wants to actually make a case that *completing* a mission is an evil form of farming.