Metatron_NA

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1. Cassandra Corte holds that farming is causing her to be frustrated with the game, thus ruining her ability to have fun in that game. She is also frustrated with the attitude farmers take (namely that they shouldn't have to change their behavior at all, regardless of the fact that said behavior is a cause of frustration for certain other players), because she believes that, as adults, there should be some sort of middle ground where everyone can at least be mostly happy.

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As far as I can see, there are three possible things going on that cause you distress:
a) farmers breaking rules
b) secondary effects such as having farm mission mixed in with non farm missions in AE and such as more spam in chat
c) a lack of people to team with that wants to do what she wants

A is the only real and viable problem caused by farmers - specifically rule-breaking farmers. However, I bet the majority, if not totality, of the frsutrations she is experiencing is caused by B or C.

B is a real problem, and a feel for Cassandra and others who experience, but what you all have to understand is that these issues aren't caused by the farmers, they are caused by how the game works, and as such, can ONLY be fixed by them devs changing the game - for example, to keep all AE chat inside the AE buildings and not let it out in to the city zone. There is nothing the farmers can do about how the game works.

C is not a real problem - I mean, it's a problem for Cassandra, but it is not a game problem. If Cassandra wants to do a Task Force and not enough people who are on want to join her, then it sucks to be her, but she is not being wronged in any way. Perhaps she would be better served by either finding content she wants to do that she can do with the people she has (or solo), or by learning to enjoy the content that most people are doing.

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2. Shadowstepper raises the question of mission teams under the guise of being relevant to farming (when mission teams are not, in fact, relevant to farming).

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You have just made an assertion: that mission teams are not relevant to farming in the context of his point. That may be, but first you have to demonstrate that that is in fact true.

Just my $.02

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<grammarnazi>
Hey OP, Please visit "this" site and learn a thing or two:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

You know, it's "cute" the first time, but after a while...sheesh.
</grammarnazi>

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A very funny site...

however, if you are referring to when I said have a "farm" checkbox, the word farm is in quotes not because it is being used as a euphemism, but because the quotes are enclosing a text string (think programming) that might be used to label the checkbox and/or it's associated Boolean variable.



PS. If you like funny grammar sites, the grandaddy of the all is:
http://www.engrish.com

Use sparingly to avoid rib splits from laughing too hard and too long.

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Can anyone please point at which point in the initial post anyone mentioned farming in any way, shape, or form?

TYIA!

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Teaming:
- Forming non-MA teams is incredibly hard to do at the moment.

- The constant call for MA farming teams drowns out any calls for regular team formation.

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I swear, three specific fixes would I think put *everyone* in a better mood:

1) Have a "farm" checkbox, if checked (or if the devs think an unchecked mission is really a farm), it gets listed on its OWN tab in AE (or equally workable, you could have a check box in the AE filter to filter out farms or to show ONLY farms.)

2) Make an official FARM broadcast channel. Make farming people use it.

3) Make AE/MA be it's own seprate zone, like the disco place, that you can access from each AE site - that way all broadcast stays within AE, and there's just one AE, not seven.

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Add in an additional difficulty slider that lets you set the spawned for size, in both the regular and AE missions. Farmers don't like having to ask people to pad and people don't like being bothered

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Consider it added.

Please see this thread that already is addressing most of these concerns:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...umber=13388041

I swear, three specific fixes would I think put *everyone* in a better mood:

1) Have a "farm" checkbox, if checked (or if the devs think an unchecked mission is really a farm), it gets listed on its OWN tab in AE (or equally workable, you could have a check box in the AE filter to filter out farms or to show ONLY farms.)

2) Make an official FARM broadcast channel. Make farming people use it.

3) Make AE/MA be it's own seprate zone, like the disco place, that you can access from each AE site - that way all broadcast stays within AE, and there's just one AE, not seven.

Edit: by request:
4) Add in an additional difficulty slider that lets you set the spawned for size, in both the regular and AE missions. Farmers don't like having to ask people to pad and people don't like being bothered

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<QR>

How ironic that NCSoft puts out its new box, and related advertising, to pull in new players when the game they're being introduced to is a caricature of what it was meant to be.

Regular teaming is dead. In an hour in Virtue AP I saw one LFT that wasn't AE/Farm related, and I'm betting there were zero takers for that. Is this really what anyone wants new players to see?

"Here's this cool superhero MMO. What you do is you create a character, then you go into this building in the start zone and kick the crap out of one kind of enemy. Over and over and over again. Within a day or two you'll have a level 50 character. Warning: if you DO decide to play some real missions you'll find progression unbelievably slow in comparison, so you probably won't want to do that. If you do you'd better get used to soloing."

More importantly, will they stick around if their source of instant gratification is taken away from them? Will they stick around if it isn't?

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read that as..."oh! I stood around atlas for an hour! nobody asked me on broadcast to form a team.....even if I was running a lvl 45 scrapper"

Meanwhile in PI, teams are forming all over the place because they !GASP! put on their LFt flag and started forming a team instead of being a lazy [censored] and letting someone else do the work.

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Read as: I LIKE FARMING BECAUSE I CAN'T GET TO 50 IF I HAVE TO ACTUALLY EARN IT, SO DON'T TAKE MY TOY AWAY! WAAAAAH!

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Your contribution to this thread was invaluable, thank you for participating.

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I especially agree with the "farming doesn't hurt anyone else is bogus" statement. It siphons our enemy groups, it siphons possible teammates away from other parts of the game.

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I don't *think* so, let me see...

Farming doesn't siphon the enemy groups - the devs have done that, not the farmers.

Farming doesn't siphon possible teammates away, unless by that you meant "people should have no option to play except the ways in which I play, so that I will always have people to play with."

The only way Farming impacts teaming is that it gives players a choice to do something besides teaming with *you*. If *that's* what you have a problem with, then simply asks the devs to force people to play with you. Same thing.

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The sole and complete issue I have with farmers and those who make farm maps, is that they are the cause for having certain enemies, sometimes entire enemy groups, no longer being available in MA because of their abusing them for farming purposes. This directly impacts me as an MA author in that I can no longer use content because of those people.

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Actually, you are factually wrong here. The farmer have no power to cause the things. The people you want to focus on are the devs who have the power and made the decision to do that action. Perhaps you should make your opinion known to them, that it is pointless to harm the non-farmers just to through a minor and temporary speed bump in the way of the farmers. Or at the very least, that perhaps you think they should find a way to accomplish whatever goal they have in mind without committing the game alteration you didn't like.

But let's be clear about this - the farmers did not, and CAN NOT, change the mechanics of the game. That would be the devs.

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I think all this stuff comes from the culture of self-flagellation that Statesman and his team introduced and encouraged from day one. Those exp bars full of debt, those long hours/days/months spent leveling a /SS tanker, the (previously) long climb until Instant Healing (only to have it taken away) the horror of leveling a /SR at release.

Trying to solo with defenders and controllers early on. Gradually picking up how the game worked, getting better powers, then suffering through the extended series of nerfs. Discovering HOs, doing raid after raid, then having them nerfed. Being a teleport tank until you could manage perma Unstoppable, then watching it get nerfed.

The def penalty to /Inv. The purple patch. ED. One hero equals three minions. No more perma anything. The aggro cap. Etc., etc. etc.

I mention that all not to rehash the respective whinefests, but to illustrate how people who didn't like being punished for playing the game left long ago. Some of us have come back over time, but those that stuck around have perpetuated (in my humble and only partly serious view) the self flagellant culture that we now see screaming about farming and leveling too fast.

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I think this states clearly something I have been seeing since day one. This is the only MMO in which I can play a hero - and the sights and sounds of combat can be glorious - so I also keep coming back.

But the "culture of self-flagellation" comment seems to hit it spot on. That's not the game I *really* want to play. I want to play the hero who kicks butt without ever having to suffer impossible odds, frequent death, anything that makes him feel less *super*.

After all, I can't stand Batman - but I love Doctor Strange and, Green Lantern, and the Flash.

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Exactly what is your complaint against farming and powergaming then.

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Aside from the fact that I think You're Doing It Wrong, I worry that the rest of us are going to suffer from what the Devs put in place to stop you. Because they have, and we have, in the past. So in that sense, it is about self-interest. I want you to stop pushing the game until it breaks and the Devs take something away from us to fix it.

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Then you ought to voice to the devs your concerns and ask them to stop breaking your play to combat the farmers. Perhaps even ask them to better integrate farmers to channel them into play that yields what they are looking for but solves the root problem of whatever effect they are having that is being addressed. For example, a farm tab in MA/AE would pull the farm mission out of the normal listing. But place the blame where it belongs. The farmers haven't been taking away things from CoX.

That's the devs. If you don't like it, ask them to stop.

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The worst part, as far as I'm concerned, is that whenever the Devs squash one of these "strategies", it's the people who were playing the game as intended who get inconvenienced - because they still want to do the content for its own sake, unlike the farmers who jump to the next cheap source of xp, inf, merits, and/or tickets.

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This is something that I cannot prove, but I truly truly believe. It is impossible to stop *any* kind of farmers, whether they are run of the mill ones or exploit-seeking, without having a significant and usually larger negative impact on a much larger number of people who weren't focused on reward rates.

Or in short, anytime the farmers get nerfed, this hurts the non farmer far worse, usually.

Because of this, smart people would I think be better served by calling for the sensible *integration* of farming, not the hopeless *elimination*. If you really want the least negative impacts from farming, then ask the devs to accept and allow it, and simply channel and control it better - with for example a farm tab in AE, a farm broadcast channel, etc.

Working with both RPers and farmers is the best bet to making everyone's life less problematic. The fight between them just leaves bodies on the battlefield - and because farmers are by their nature, the one's usually hurt by the actions taking in a vain attempt to curb them is everyone else.

Food for thought.

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Bottom line, if no exploits are being used, it isn't illegal. Just like it isn't wrong to use the ITF over and over to level, it isn't wrong to speed run TF for maximised merits, and it isn't wrong to circle certain areas of certain maps hunting mobs for badges.

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Quite right.

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Exploits and outliers getting removed is good and is far as things are going to go.

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Hear, hear.

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The argument seems to be that because a certain type of play cannot be entirely prevented, no efforts at all should be made to do so?

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No, the argument is that one not only *shouldn't* forbid playstyles, as a matter of fact one *can't*.

Fix any exploits, that's fine - and of course punish any rule breaking (when the rules in question are publicly known and well defined) - but don't think that it's a good idea to try to outlaw the impossible and forbid people for making choices to pursue options that yield effective rewards.

That's just silly.

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It's a simpler solution to either leave things they way they are - and to also accept the numerous requests for padding as a necessary "evil" or to permit people to pad their own missions without disturbing others.

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People can already pad their missions without disturbing others. It's called having an SG or friends. They choose to disturb others because they're lazy, and OK about leeching in that way.

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So anyone who isn't part of an SG or doesn't have 7 friends in the game is automatically a lazy person. That sounds a little crazy to me.

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Technically, there is one actual rule about farming: customer support (GMs) are allowed to remove missions believed to be farming missions from the architect system. So if you want to be very technical, the rule is farming is allowed if it's undetected and unreported.

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How about this: People blind-ask me to pad. This violates ToS, and I report them. They get suspended a few times, and eventually learn to be more discrete, i.e. leave me alone. People learn to pad their missions without spamming . Win/win.

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How about this: you quote what specific part of the ToS is violated by people blind-asking you to pad.

Not saying there isn't one - if there truly is one, I want to know - show me!

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The problem is there is no set rule about farming. There is a rule against exploits, and we all agree they should be removed once identified and verified. No matter where you set the bar, people like me will ride that line as hard and as fast as humanly possible.

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Technically, there is one actual rule about farming: customer support (GMs) are allowed to remove missions believed to be farming missions from the architect system. So if you want to be very technical, the rule is farming is allowed if it's undetected and unreported.

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Also, technically, the "farming" that is removed is likely to be farming as defined as exploitative. After all *every* mission can be a farming mission for the right group.

Always remember that what we call colloquially "farming" is probably not the same thing as used in a more rigid and rule-breaking sense. Imean people "farm" task forces, and they haven't gone nuclear over that.

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Extreme? Maybe, but it sounds like everyone wants this to stop NOW. I’m not one of them but I’m getting tired of watching people argue in broadcast like we used to argue in PVP zones. No I shouldn’t have to turn off my broadcast :P That’s like the doctor saying “well don’t do that!”. :P

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Incorrect - a vocal minority wants this to stop, but (as is clear when you are actually in the game, reading broadcasts and search for AE missions) there is probably a majority of players what ARE farming, to some extent.

This is a clear example of either throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or worse, attempting to punish playstyle preference.

/unsigned.

My reason are here:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....=0#Post13388041

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Well you know what would make the game more enjoyable for those of us who get asked to fill? The devs giving the team leader the option to spawn a map *as if* his team was bigger.


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The devs have had ample opportunity to implement adding a "players 8" a la diablo II type of command, and this is what we thought we were getting when mission difficulty was added to test. They specifically avoided this as best they could instead.

Clearly, the devs want to reward party size to promote teaming, and they added team xp multipliers and team oriented ATs and power sets to this end. So the correct thing to do would be to fix padding. That is, base spawn size on team members in the mission, and have spawns dynamically match team size. Of course, with every correct solution, the tech probably doesn't exist to accomplish this, and as an overall priority, it's probably low enough that it will never see a fix.

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It's non fixable by tech I think. Consider, you start a mission, get 7 more people to pad the mission, and run around the mission causing all the spawn points to spawn. The 7 people leave the team. Now what you are suggesting is some kind of tech that would depopulate and unspawn baddies? I don't think that is possible/feasible.

It's a simpler solution to either leave things they way they are - and to also accept the numerous requests for padding as a necessary "evil" or to permit people to pad their own missions without disturbing others.

Which should we choose?

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Perhaps a better response - "Yeah, filling is good, but howsbout I just come in mish and leech instead, you cool with that?".

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I think that's a pretty good response, however:

This proves my earlier point - the goal of CoX isn't to stop farming, it's to make the game more enjoyable for *everyone*.

Well you know what would make the game more enjoyable for those of us who get asked to fill? The devs giving the team leader the option to spawn a map *as if* his team was bigger.

This does have a downside - every choice does, but does anyone really think that stopping the ebil farmers from running an 8 person mission with 2 people is worth putting up with the spam? And I know for a fact, NOT having that option is NOT stopping farmers from doing it anyways.

It's like the other suggestion that the farm missions in AE just be segregated to their own tab, its pure win-win.

It's unfortunate that so many people who are complaining about the negative impacts farms have had on them don't simply embrace creating ways to enable farming in a controlled manner that impacts non-farmers the least.

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So did you show them? Or did you just point and laugh making them want to leave that much more?

You can't have it both ways...you can't complain about people not being in the zones and then ridicule those who step out of the AE and ask you questions about the game.

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Touche.

Interesting point.

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As I've said many times, never attribute to malice (or "cheating", in these cases) what can easily be attributed to stupidity.

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Stop it, I'm falling in love with you!

Well, "in like" at least.

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Actually, since this game takes place "in the present" and theoretically COULD crossover with a lot of modern life, you can be 'immersed' and still discuss out of game stuff.

So I'd not think current events discussions to be immersion-breaking - your character is paying attention to the news.

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Okay, think instead of current events, discussion over chat about the merits of /kins and /rads and the varying numbers the set's powers have.

I guess that would be a better example of breaking the fourth wall. I am fine with a server where that isn't permitted (I just won't be on it), but not fine with having to act "in character" all the time on all servers.

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That's what bugs me about the uberfarming. It's turning out characters at the level cap, with players who are still stuck in Outbreak trying to figure out how to find a waypoint.

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Although it's possible that the somehow missed a feature of the game and are knowledgeable about 90% of it, I understand what you mean. However, I do not think the answer is punishing these people. I think the answer could be a kind of rating system, kind of llke how eBay let's you see a seller's rating and read the comments of other people who have used the seller.

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But I don't care anymore how y'all play. Just stop spamming, please. It's totally immersion-breaking. Thank you.

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The thing is, so many of us don't care about immersion. But I understand that you do. On the one hand, you should be permitted to pursue what you like in this game, on the other hand, your pursuit of that shouldn't control *my* pursuit of the same.

For example, I might be enjoy the game as a place to chat with other people who like supers. I might engage in a short conversation in broadcast about for example, this whole swine flu thing that is happening.

Now, your first option, to protect your immersion, is just to mute me, which you can do, but if quite a few people start chatting about it, you would have to mute a lot of people.

Perhaps what you could really use is an officially designated RP server, where folks are expected to not talk about current events, to name their characters non goofy names, and to generally stay in character. I would ne fine with you having and playing on such a character - but I am not OK with being forced to stay in RP mode myself throughout this game.

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Not a good idea, and ultimately, not fair.

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Perhaps. But do you deny that everything I said there would happen?

Draw a hard line, and rules lawyers immediately start trying to blur it again, in their favor. And the ones who aren't trying to weasel around it are all going the speed limit plus their best guess of the error margin of the cop's radar gun - faster, if they think there's no cops around. (How close can we get to violating the spirit of the rules without actually breaking their letter?)

I've seen it before in other games and outside games too. It's a certain kind of player, a certain kind of thinking, and it's everywhere. Which means, I suppose, that it's stupid to try to fight it, but I'm strange and idealistic that way. That just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should.

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The possibility that what you describe would happen may be seen as some as a negative outcome. In my opinion, having a secret strandard that you expect people to obey without letting them know *what* they should obey is tantamount to ebil - it is much much worse.

To continue to use my metaphor, sure, if you post a specific speed limit, you may get a lot of people driving exactly at that limit.

To my way of thinking, the fact that people drive the speed limit on the road instead of less than that is not in general much of a problem. Not compared to the unacceptable alternate choice of having blank speed limit signs, and having arrests of people for speeding when they weren't given the option to know beforehand what the limit really is.