Mind Forever Burning

Doesn't the offline mission planner have that info?

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My first 3 have sold at 350M each. Two via PM one via game tells. I need to receive the monies via the two from PMs. I guess I'll have to ask for more monies on the next batch

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So all the pacting is done on Freedom?

I think there is going to be demand for other servers.

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1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme.

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I'm curious. Do you mean the actual formulaic division, or the regime by which it is determined who should get XP?

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I'm not sure I really understand the distinction you're trying to draw here, so let me just explain further what I mean and maybe that will answer the question.

There's a thought experiment I run when analyzing this problem, which I call the "two scrapper experiment". Put two scrappers on opposite ends of a large map and let them defeat enemies as fast as they can. Assuming the scrappers have equivalent capabilities, and ignoring for the moment the team XP bonus and the fact that they're fighting slightly larger spawns, the two scrappers should earn roughly equivalent reward rates teamed as they do solo, no matter what their relative level.

In practice, this isn't true. The higher level scrapper always gets screwed and the lower level scrapper gets a partial free ride.

That's the problem I'm talking about. When someone's camped at the entrance and letting a teammate defeat things that are +7 to them, they should only get the relative rates they could earn on their own fighting +7s - which given the purple patch is pretty slim. Instead, they get per-defeat rewards as if they'd fought the +7 on their own (and taken a long time to do it). Voila, the essential imbalance ingredient that generates PL schemes.

The two solutions available are: 1) try to rebalance the reward rates at all values of relative level that generate XP (which Arcanaville told me in PM she thinks is impossible, but it seems to me to be just a giant linear algebra problem with datamining as the source of the constants); or 2) change the SK rules so that teams simply never have wildly divergent combat levels. Number 2 is very tempting because it's so conceptually simple, but I think some additional flexibility needs to be added to the challenge settings so that the game doesn't become overly flattened.

Writing up these two proposals is the meat of the PM I'm thinking I will someday send to Synapse.

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The primary limiter on our reward rates was not any limitation on our own capabilities, but instead limitations on the availability of foes in quantities who we could defeat at our fullest potential speed.

Turning around and adding to this situation a tool whereby players with such capabilities could now actually create challenges worthy of those capabilities was asking for ... what happened. Throw in some folks finding honest-to-goodness loopholes and you had a recipe for PL extraordinaire.

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Yes, you've exactly captured what I was trying to express, though as I mentioned there is also the rock-paper-scissors effect which encourages MA farming even in the absence of significantly above par overall abilities.

I got this error when I tried to publish from a 2nd account that had not unlocked the appropriate factions and maps used in a mission.

The scheme would somewhat help rebalance in that situation too. As I said though it's more a "rule of thumb" kind of solution and only trims the extreme outliers (part of the appeal - the goal was not to disturb "regular" gameplay very much if at all).

Get as much of other people's inf as you can. Every time you reach the inf cap, bid on non-existant item. Once you have a stack of 10 bids, reclaim. That's 18B inf burned.

By the way, my analysis of this is that there are three game-balance issues in play, and no exploits per se.

1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme. There are two fixes for it that I can think of, one of which is complicated and requires a lot of careful analysis, and one of which is a giant sledgehammer.

2) Characters progress beyond the point where PvE combat is even slightly challenging. Increased reward rates have been exposed by providing opportunities for harder combat where none existed before, allowing more powerful characters to earn rewards faster instead of everyone being "flattened" to an arbitrary limit governed by existing PvE spawn rules. This is the balance issue I'm not sure should be fixed; re-flattening the game makes it less interesting IMHO.

3) Combat in CoX has many elements of "rock-paper-scissors" to it where equivalent factions may be vastly harder or easier to defeat based on player powerset choices. The MA inherently allows players to design "paper" enemies for their "scissors". I have a solution for this too, believe it or not, though it would need some careful implementation to avoid loopholes, and even then would mostly be just a "rule of thumb" kind of solution that would discourage but not eliminate this kind of setup.

I've been writing out in my head a PM to Synapse regarding all of this, including my suggestions. (Even assuming he were interested he'd clearly have to take it up with Positron, but my faith in Posi even reading a PM of mine is basically zero.)

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So I'm going to ask for 350M in either Infamy or Influence on any server. Some people did bid more than that on Virtue. I value both relatively the same at this point in time. If I get 3 buyers then I will collect the money, create the level pacts and crank out some 50s. If not then I will lower my price and try again. Since the characters would be level pacted and there would be 3 lowbies on the map it will take me roughly 10-14 hours of effort. I am an insomniac and I do get bored at random times of the night, Crushing things at outrageous speed is a good way to pass the time.

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Just to be clear - you're offering the service on Freedom, yes? Or do you have similar characters set up on other servers?

That was 6 hours non-pacted, so a pacted toon is presumably 2x that. Still, a 50 in 12 hours is very fast indeed.

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Devestation Regeneration 12%
Numina's Regeneration 12%
Numina's Regeneration 12%
Numina's Regeneration 12%
Numina's Regeneration 12%
Luck of the Gambler Regeneration 10%

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What you have here is five copies of "Huge Regeneration Bonus" and one copy of "Large Regeneration Bonus". You're fine.

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Mako's Health 1.5%
Devestation Health 2.25%
Numina's Health 1.88%
Numina's Health 1.88%
Numina's Health 1.88%
Numina's Health 1.88%
Efficacy Health 1.13%
Miracle Health 1.13
LotGambler Health 1.13%

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This is one copy of "Huge HP Bonus", four copies of "Large HP Bonus", one copy of "Medium HP Bonus", and three copies of ... I think "Small HP Bonus". Again, you're fine.

You see where I'm going with this?

The tricky thing about LotG 7.5% +Recharge is that it's called "Luck of the Gambler +7.5% Recharge" and not "Huge Recharge Bonus" like you might expect. So you can have five of that, *and* five of the IO set bonuses that give +7.5% recharge, and still be OK.

qr

I thought it was pretty obvious from the final Ouro intro mission that the "Coming Storm" is a Shivan invasion. You're sent into the future to head off the invading party's scouts, and they're Shivans.

The fact that Going Rogue talks about space means to me (if there is a tie in at all) that the space station is of Shivan origin.

Well, let me know.

So when can we talk about the results?

There might be people who think that any mission with all-boss or all-lieutenant factions should be banned. So it's not entirely clear to me that this was a matter of griefing rather than someone getting on their high horse.

Not that that makes it right.

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Your average player probably doesn't care too much if he can't use the burning forest map in AE anymore, but if you cut his experience, he's going to notice, and he's going to be pissed...

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I guess I'm not "average", since I very nearly drove down to Paragon Studios in person to [censored] at them over this one. Seriously, if they pull that [censored] again people will quit writing stories. After a point it becomes just not worth the hassle to rewrite every patch.

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Defendable objects will be getting a nerf too ... It's unfortunate since I really enjoy fighting 100+ enemies at once. It makes my toons feel super.

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That's odd, I thought they had already been nerfed. The patch notes that upped the ambush limit to 6 claimed that ambushes from defendable objects would be counted in that total.

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So i have this mission with some Praetorian in it. There is no custom mob at all and here what i got:

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This story has received the following complaints: * Mission makes use of 'children' versions of popular heros such as Batman, Spiderman, Invisible woman, and Wolverine. The names resemble the grown version of the hero as do the costumes. Only difference is size, even powers have been matched.

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I've heard of incidents where reporting story arc A actually flags arc B. I have to wonder if that's what happened here.

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WHOAH! This is a surprise. I actually "don't" think they should add those things for AE.

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Why not? The limitations I listed do nothing to deter power-farming.

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What's the difference in getting a reward at the end of the mission vs on the fly like now?

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I've been stewing on this one quite a bit for a while now. Having gone back and forth between AE and regular PvE several times on several characters, my personal experience is that PvE is *significantly* more rewarding for solo play.

There are 3 main reasons, all of which ironically affect people people playing through missions to the end more than people farming or PLing:

1) No patrol XP in AE. This is a big one, and IMHO should be a priority fix. The fact is that anyone using the AE to power-farm is going to blow through their patrol XP in no time flat, so this really only affects the "regular" players.

2) No mission XP bonuses. In theory, mission bonuses cover travel time between missions, and since there is no travel time in AE, this should be a wash. But not so fast: much of the "travel time" is actually load time, which the AE has just like regular PvE. Actual cross-zone distancing is significant but not as dominant as you might think. In addition, the mission XP bonus is larger than travel time accounts for - this is why newspaper missions were (and still are, sometimes) such a popular choice for high-XP-rate teaming for so long. Again, though, power-farmers aren't loading maps very often anyway, so this change really disproportionately affects people running short missions in quick succession.

3) No story arc bonuses. This one's obvious - PvE gets it, it's inconsistent in magnitude but adds up over time, story-playing AE players get nada and power-farmers never cared anyway.

IMHO, all three of these should be changed.

EDIT: I forgot #4, allies steal XP in the MA but not PvE. For arcs like the RWZ arcs, this is a huge penalty for running equivalent content in the MA rather than in regular PvE.

In this particular case I estimate that were I to recreate the RWZ arcs in the MA (which I can't due to some missing features, but set that aside for a moment) - the result would only grant 1/4 to 1/3 the amount of XP as the PvE version (presuming a full level of patrol XP). That's a pretty stiff deterrent.

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Your average player probably doesn't care too much if he can't use the burning forest map in AE anymore, but if you cut his experience, he's going to notice, and he's going to be pissed...

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I guess I'm not "average", since I very nearly drove down to Paragon Studios in person to [censored] at them over this one. Seriously, if they pull that [censored] again people will quit writing stories. After a point it becomes just not worth the hassle to rewrite every patch.

Venture, have you seen "Timecrimes"?

It's a really interesting movie, and I think I'd enjoy you dissecting it.

The map location placements (front, middle, back) are often pretty messed up, depending on the map.

As for the "clue on first glowy" problem - yeah, that bugged me too. The best workaround I found was to hide the one real glowy among 7 red herrings - if you give them all the same nav text they all show up as one set of objectives in mission.

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Like what? What "great" things have we lost?

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The only two "great" losses I cite are 1) the ability to create a custom boss that is LESS than the standard; and 2) the mission reward of MA tickets (not experience or prestige) that were lost because of complaints about farming.

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See, this (bolded part) is where I think you're off the mark. I think the devs would have made those changes whether anyone had complained or not. The devs aren't blind, and they have datamining hooks to tell them things that happen when they're not personally online. The exploit potential for MA is obvious from the get-go, and it's really just a question of how big the holes are and how fast they can close them.

So now we're blaming the whistleblowers? Sorry, but that sounds like hogwash to me.

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tremor takes 3 seconds to cast, and most of us dont bother to take the power at all

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I would love to see you make a poll for that. Seriously, I'd find it fascinating, regardless of how it's presented.

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I definitely respeced out of it on my stone/elec brute.

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Show me a society that has carried a consistent set of goals for that kind of period of time. Especially one whose numbers are consistently winnowed due to this never-ending war you're creating.

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I was just trying to explain what I saw as a miscommunication.