MadScientist

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4-stars may be "great", but it means you will most likely never get random, drive-by plays. Getting stuck down at page 200+ means that unless someone is specifically looking for whatever your arc has to offer, it'll never be seen.

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not to further drive this thread off on tangents... but I would think some of the solution to that problem may be the better MA interface tools they've hinted at, and not the ratings themselves.
For example, if they add a genre dropdown with 10 options (comedy, noir, history, mystery, caper etc, etc) then people could file away 9/10ths of the 5-star arcs in the way of the 4-star. This seems likely, given the way devs have commented on the use of tags.
I'm not going to panic too much over 4-star obscurity until we see what the devs have cooked up. They realize it's a problem (unlike other imbalances)

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Dev's Choice should be awarded to Hall of Fame arcs that the Dev's play. Meaning, fix the HoF system so that arcs can not be griefed. Once it gets Hall of Fame, it means that the players, overall, enjoy it.

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you mean once it hits HOF it can't leave?
Two issues with that.
1) Posi has already expressed a concern over ratings cartels. You could arrange to skyrocket your arc into the Hall and then it's cemented there.
2) People would just grief things on their way up.

edit: To offer a constructive alternative that illustrates overcoming those points, I've heard this idea from many people,
Refresh the listings periodically, hiding every recent rating until the refresh. So an arc doesn't get into the Hall on a single rate instantly, nor does it get removed instantly. Griefers don't know who to target until it may be very safely in the Hall, and there's less instant gratification that may remove griefing's own reward. They'd need to add a "new" listing for arcs published but with no ratings visible at all.


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From there, the Dev's can play through Hall of Fame arcs and choose from those a "Dev's Choice" arc. It be less work for the Dev's to do; meaning they don't have to sift through the hundreds of thousands of arcs.

Do I think Dev's Choice should be removed. Not in the slightest. Yes, mainly because I have it and I spent over 2 weeks making sure my arc was perfect before publishing it. But I don't think that the chosing process shouldn't be improved upon.

More people deserve the badge/title. In the past 2 weeks, I've played some arcs that definately deserve to be classified as Dev's Choice.

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... You're in a badge forum, discussing the pros and cons of the MA's search listing.

WHATEVER the system is for the search engine listing arcs, how does that affect Badges? It shouldn't.

the problem is phrases like "badge/title". The title is one thing. The title coming along with a badge is where we get into these problems. I don't think a ratings cartel to get dev attention for the Dev Choice page of the arc listings would ever be an issue - the devs could see thru it quickly enough.

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I was under the impression the goal of the supposed badging mini-game was to earn them all. If I'm wrong please enlighten me, and I'm sorry if I'm mistaken.

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The goal of PVP is not to defeat every single person in existence. The goal of the MA is not to entice every player to run your arc. The goal of the market is not to get every Inf in existence onto your one character.
The *game* is designed to be played and enjoyed, and to that end it needs to be balanced. Every opponent needs to be defeatable, every mission needs to be beatable, and thus every badge earnable.
Now if a player decides to set additional benchmarks for themself, that's fine, but that occurs after producing a balanced game environment.


The issue with Hall of Famer is that its earnability involves the opinions of others. Or for the more cynical, surviving the ability of griefers who see your progress and cut you back down. Thus, the badge is not balanced.



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And that's what I'm saying. Keep the badge, quantify its requirements, even though they may be extremely difficult for some to acquire (impossible in the minds of some, but that's a matter of perception), and keep it in game. The entire point of my post was to say that it should modified so that it cannot be awarded subjectively, and kept in the game, rather than simply removing it.

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the only issue with that is what I asked way back above: if Famer is just like the Builder line of badges, then what is it? is the Builder line a 6-badge series? Is the last one in the series 2 badges for the price of one?

We have the Recognized series, which counts raw stars awarded. How do you make the Builder line objective without totally duplicating the raw star count?
some ideas...
1) Count the number of "good" ratings. eg, the number of 3+ ratings. with the 5 badges in the line counting different amounts of them.
2) Have the 5 badges in the line each count amounts of different qualities of ratings. eg, first badge counts 1+ ratings, 2nd counts 2+, so on to the last only tracking how many 5's you get.
3) Count the number of account-based tickets earned by ratings. Since those award for only 3, 4 and 5 star rates, this is similar to only tracking "good" ratings, but has some scaling for "even better" ones. I'd like this option the most because it's something VERY easy to identify and understand.

What all 3 have in common, though, is that you can't have your progress go backwards from bad ratings. Which is the whole point about griefability and about the badge eventually adding up. You don't lose progress on the mentor badges if your SK dies, you don't lose progress on the market badges if items you've listed sell from other people for less inf, and so on.

I would have no problem with those being VERY long-term goals. Let's see, a 5 rating is 25 tickets, we're talking 100 such rates right now, assume they make this count tickets from any of your 3 publish slots (instead of the current "best arc available" setup), round up.... 10,000 tickets from ratings for the last badge would be very achievable with a bit of writing talent, and doesn't tip over that fine like from "impressive" to "some call it epic some call it crazy".

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wait, gotta be very clear when talking about this stuff.

Are you talking about the Hall of Fame CATEGORY LABEL for missions? Because that's a recognition.
Or are you talking about the Hall of Famer BADGE that accompanies getting a mission into that category?
Because the issue from a badge collector perspective is that the category is griefable and subjective and should not affect the badging mini-game. (Though I see that the category is useful for searching and such, plus enabling the Evaluator line of badges.)

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I'm talking about the badge itself.

I'm actually glad you brought this up; this is what I'm getting at. BADGES were intended as recognition for accomplishments in the game. The badging mini-game, as you put it, is something the community did by taking the earning of badges out of context. They're not necessarily there so everyone can earn them. The "gotta to earn them all" mentality that has developed ignores what badges themselves are meant to signify, and I feel should be ignored in regard to issues such as these.

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hold on here. in light of your replies about quotes and misquotes.
you've taken a comment about the badging mini-game and turned it into a need to earn them all.
I didn't say that. My statement has nothing to do with earning all of them.

to be clear: the ability to earn another badge, or all other badges, does not in any way address issues of balance and fairness with this one badge. The same as the ability to beat every other AV in the game would not excuse one AV being 100% immune to your character's attacks, that one would still be broken - whether you're out to accumulate a kill of every AV or simply take the ones that pop up in front of you.


So where do the other badges matter? for comparisons about general qualities of all badges. Every other badge in the game is an accumulation or a singular challenge. The first category being things like total kills, total healing, total missions, the second category being your MOSTF or Obos Challenges. That's not to say other types of goals don't exist - everything from beating TFs in certain times to uncovering every square of the map to winning costume contests - but those things have not had badges if they didn't meat those 2 types of very particular unbiased actions.

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Hall of Fame is intended to recognize those that have created content that stands out above the rest, as recognized by the players. If possible to prevent the grieffing and exploits that are occurring around it at the moment, it should remain for such a purpose. That will mean it would remain unavailable to many, but is that really so bad?

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wait, gotta be very clear when talking about this stuff.

Are you talking about the Hall of Fame CATEGORY LABEL for missions? Because that's a recognition.
Or are you talking about the Hall of Famer BADGE that accompanies getting a mission into that category?
Because the issue from a badge collector perspective is that the category is griefable and subjective and should not affect the badging mini-game. (Though I see that the category is useful for searching and such, plus enabling the Evaluator line of badges.)


With the possibility that the Builder line may not be subject to *total* ratings anymore, thus making it not griefable and guaranteed obtainable with the problem only being timeframe (as all badge should be) then it would seem Hall of Famer as a badge is questionable to me.
There's also this matter of the progression, the note says it would be 5, 10, 25, 50, and two at 100, live currently seems to be 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 1000 and Hall of Famer has the usual "epic" issues, neither is a good situation.

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Badges that can be actively griefed by others and are not within the control of the player are bad.

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and that should have always been not just a guideline but a hard rule for the devs.

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and not just for badges, but for any reward. and stars, in addition to being a measurement, are a reward.

the whole system should have just been the ability to accumulate quantities of thumbs up and thumbs down, not a means of my 2 cents changing a running average.

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and in this patch, they changed Master Builder to be EQUAL to Hall of Famer. (and not just equal in number, they even draw the comparison in the notes.) I'm surprised no one's mentioned that yet: what's the point of keeping the HOF badge around anymore?

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But it's not equal.

Master Builder is 100 votes, HOF is 1000.

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hmm.
patch notes say, "The Builder line of badges has had their requirements to obtain decreased substantially, so that the final badge “Master Builder” has the same requirements as getting a mission into the Hall of Fame."

the old requirement was 2,000. so dropping it to 1000 would have been a reduction.

Is Master Builder really 1,000 and the text is off by a 0? did they accidentally reduce it to 100 meaning to make it 1,000? did they intend to reduce HOF to 100 as well and forget? did they reduce HOF and not update its text? do they just not know their own requirement for HOF when they wrote the note? or do they think it's 100 and don't realize HOF is bugged?

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and in this patch, they changed Master Builder to be EQUAL to Hall of Famer. (and not just equal in number, they even draw the comparison in the notes.) I'm surprised no one's mentioned that yet: what's the point of keeping the HOF badge around anymore?

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From my perspective what they did wrong with the Architect badges:
<ul type="square">[*]Instituted "fan votes". This opened up griefing and a PVP aspect to actually earning badges. A bunch of player can look at an arc getting close to being a hall of fame, there is a wave of negative votes to prevent it from achieving it or staying there.[/list]
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Yeah. I'd be very happy if that line of badges merely counted up a number of stars over time. Or counted up a number of people who gave you ratings of 3+ stars. (heck, on that latter option, I'd have preferred if the whole star rating system had instead been a kudos or thumbs-up system accumulating counts instead of averaging, but I digress.)
They'd also better count *all* arcs together, including removed ones, so that people who publish in quantity are not going to have a harder time getting them than 1-time writers who rest on their laurels.

my take on it: pretend like the devs had done the sensible thing and put out the MA without badges and then later decided exactly what uses of the MA should have badges rewarded.

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With the sheer number of arcs in the AE, we desperately need SOME way of weeding through the available content (and lack thereof); this is as good a way as any.

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Agreed. I've been running for pretty much anyone who asks me, and that's enough to keep me busy.
If badgers aren't a subculture, we're at least a community. I'll do your arcs before some random stranger's.

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What makes me nervous is that I'm not sure you can stop unbalanced farms without removing significant creative tools to players.

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well, one could try to address some of the problems that generated unbalanced non-MA farms, too. To cite the giant one: the rewards a SK'd-to-45 gets from a +8 boss killed by the 50's on the team. The *real* issue is the general benefit from sitting there as a 45 and not SK'd to the 50 - how you get to 45, or what the 50 targets, are both beside the point (so the MA removing the need for a 46 bridge is irrelevant to the farming problems).

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Also, because (honestly) some people's signatures are... well... stupid. And not seeing them is nice.

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I might have said "braggy" instead of "stupid". but same difference.

Also, I find the signature-to-message ratio is sometimes horribly skewed, which I think drastically slows the ability to read thru threads. YMMV.


(If I haven't gotten down to your arc yet, I'm working on them with a brand new MA-only villain. So either I'm skipping a heroic arc, or I don't want to SK up too high and fight Rikti till I get more levels, or I'm just slow.)

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hey, some of you don't seem to be aware that the boards let people disable signatures.

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Seeing the side-effects of all this, I have to wonder what happened to the other idea that I often heard mentioned?
Why not change all AE Critter anti-Mez into Resistance instead of Protection?
If that was good enough to balance all the sets in PVP, why can't that fix work for AE, too?

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i was thinking that it should be allowed to ice slick to take IO set.

every earth patch can slot sets and it does not make the powerset uber powered.
iceslick is one (if not the main) of the best tool a ice control Dom can have. it should be Set-able

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Definitely an issue. Especially for people who take it assuming they'll be able to throw some damage procs into it.



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ps: oh and give chilling embrace the -Dam component! we have less hp than blasters and even tanks got it

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Embrace also does a -MaxRunSpeed for Tanks and Blasters, which Doms lack. (Doms just get a -RunSpeed, not a -Max)
On the other hand, Doms get a -50% Rech, Blasters get only -40, Tanks -32. Now does that relate to some sort of AT Mod?
Also of note, the Blaster version costs more End than the other 2.

Maybe it's worth just putting the imbalance on the list and leaving it at that?

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Or you could just not Cry and PVP,

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I'll thank you not to assume you know what my PVP habits are. I'll also apprciate you not labeling a rather reasonable question about market worth as "crying".

Let's assume for a moment I PVP a full 2 hours a day. So eventually I'll get some of these drops.
Will I get enough? Or will I have to still pick up some on the market, where the PVE demand raises their price? You see my issue? (Unless you want to somehow convince EVERYONE to PVP.)

What about when I get one? Will I use it? Or will I look at the price it fetches on the market and instead sell it? And I'm speaking from experience - I've sold things like Numina and LOTG more often than used them because of the amount of other IOs I can slot from that one drop.

My statement: the market price for these is so high, it's highlighting an imbalance, and making them less fun.
How do you address that? Well, WHY is the price bad? I'm claiming the price is bad because of PVE demand disproportionately comparing to low PVP-only supply. My PVPing alone will not fix the supply - I don't think *anyone* PVPing alone will fix it, given what we know about the percent of the game that wants to go near PVP. I suggested fixing supply by adding more supply elsewhere, which I think is better than fixing demand since the only way to make players reconsider wanting something is to nerf it.

(additionally: if you're wondering why I PVP but don't normally enter PVP discussions, it's cause they quickly take on attitudes like "stop crying" and "play with the big boys".)

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I swore I made this forum already....mine even had a sweet Dr. Suess quote...oh well seems better recieved in this post. Just got a bunch of negative response in mine...

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IIRC, the negativity was over your attitude towards people having discussions, not over your OP.

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I think the requirements should simply change.. Instead of "1000 ratings with an average of 4.5 stars" (or whatever it is), why not just make that line of badges something similar to "at least 1000 5* ratings" Then the value can't really be griefed, and it would keep it's status.

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That's an interesting way to define it without accumulating a count of stars.

So the lower ones would be counts of 3+ and counts of 4+? I wouldn't want to get into a situation where I have to write a dumbed down arc to specifically get 3's. Or would it be better just to only count 5's at differing quantities?


(and do we need to split this into 2 threads so we can be clear when we're talking about badges for running hall of fame arcs, vs badges for having written hall of fame arcs?)

If the community is using votes to voice such opposition to arcs being identified as HOF, maybe the whole concept is too elitist and ratings should just be ratings with no added HOF labeling?

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Currently, the Hall of Fame is broken. Why? Because as soon as an Arc makes it to Hall of Fame status, within 5 mins. it's hit by griefers and given enough 1- and 0-Star ratings to remove it from Hall of Fame status.

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If the issue truely stems from the immediacy, how about adjusting the system so that a rating after finishing an arc counts as two votes. Would that sufficiently downplay the click-and-run griefer votes?

Perhaps, so as to not give an edge to truely bad arcs that really deserve to be abandoned and panned, maybe this two-votes-if-completed can only calculate once an arc achieves HOF status?

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At least a 24 hour lock should be in place, though thats the short end of what I would think. 14 days may be pushing it a little far.

7 days would certainly be great. Keeps the arc in place for one week, such that even our weekend only players get a chnace.

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I'd go for a 24-hour lock if it worked both ways - you can't get into HOF by a run of good votes until those have been shown to last.

Best way to do this would be to recalculate HOF status every server reset (or if it can be done while online, every 8am)

Which brings up a good point: why not calculate *all* visible ratings at that one time? So you can't even grief things on their way to HOF status. and you remove questions people have raised about early ratings giving a bias.
In trade for making a huge amount of new arc stuck at 0 for up to 24 hours, add a simple way to search for arcs published since the last calculation run, thus drawing attention to them.

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The problem is, unless you get hall of fame (which griefers seem to be actively blocking) or Dev Choice, you get to have three arcs up. So once you've debugged those three arcs...where does the more testing come in?

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Maybe the devs expect people to stand around broadcasting "Willing to help you test your arcs!"
To which I would raise 2 issues...
1) that compares this setup giving badges to "testing" an unfinished but published arc that would be worth real tickets.
2) given the way I've tested some of my own arcs - hopping in and out quickly and rewriting a while - I imagine it'd be pretty boring for a teammate to wait for me to re-compile my arc for their test.

I think one interesting compromise might be to determine HOF during each server reset, not instantaneously.
That would prevent a situation where one could quickly assemble HOF-quality votes without a chance for some lower votes to creep in.
It would prevent losing HOF status because of a single vote at a bad time.
It would still allow a long-term amount of votes to alter the status, including after republishing.

Perhaps combine that with an icon representing "Recently Edited". So the edited arc keeps its HOF status, but sorta with an asterisk. Leave the icon there for a whole server reset and you alert people to arcs that might not still be HOF-worthy thanks to edits, while also highlighting HOF arcs that are now even better.

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These sets are a great way to reward players for using the arena and PvP zones the way they were intended. Please, PLEASE, do not give in to people asking for these sets to be made available from other means. To do so would completely defeat their purpose.

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well, the alternative to what I said above would be to remove the PVE demand. I think having more items available to PVE is better than narrowing these to PVP-ONLY recipes. YMMV.