Mind Forever Burning

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Oh, and I do enjoy having fun. So much so that I take fun very seriously.

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+1 internetz for making me snort beverage out my nose.

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AE already gives high rewards

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Only on farms. Story-focused MA content lags regular PvE on the reward rate scale because there's no patrol XP.

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I only have one nit to pick - $himher and similar tags sometimes showed up as the $ tag instead of the proper text, and that always seemed to be because the critter was speaking too early, without having you as the focus of their attention yet.

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I have to lay this problem squarely at the feet of the devs. The only option authors have is just to not use those tags at all in critter dialog, which seems unfairly limiting.

So when I run into this, I mentally edit the proper terminology into the text myself and just play on.

I rolled a character on Triumph after doing most of my other playing on Virtue, and was very impressed with the quality of the player base there. Just make sure to join whatever the current flavor of the TriumphWatch global channel is.

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I don't quite get where this notion of the difficulty slider not applying to the AE is coming from. The current difficulty slider applies to the AE, why wouldn't the new one?

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Because a) they can prevent it

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Just because they can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea.

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b) it would actually nudge people back into farming normal game content and decrease AE farming;

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I believe it would also dramatically decrease AE participation overall. Providing such a huge feature to the PvE game but not to AE would kill it for me, and I believe for many others as well.

EDIT: Let me elaborate a little. Right now, it's very difficult to create an AE mission that expresses the full range of difficulties players might want to experience. The tricks you use to make AE missions more difficult - all-lieutenant or all-boss factions, extreme critters, etc - make them more difficult for everyone.

With the improved difficulty settings this problem goes away. You basically only have to balance the difficulty around what you think the minimum should be for the level ranges you're targeting; if players want more challenging - and more rewarding - content, they just bump up the sliders. Viola, problem solved!

To me, giving the new difficulty slider to the AE would be the best way of ensuring that the SFMAs get the attention they deserve, because people wouldn't have to choose between farm-oriented high-challenge/high-reward missions and story content - they can get both.

No, I think giving the new difficulty settings to the AE is far and away the better option. It's also much simpler conceptually (and presumably therefore easier to implement) because it only requires one difficulty setting system and not two.

Were you only running farms? My own experience is that SFMAs are slower than regular PvE due to the lack of patrol XP (and to some extent the lack of mission and arc bonuses, but mostly it's the patrol XP).

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DA is more efficient than regular mission play, but MA is yards more efficient than DA.

Which is pretty hilarious, considering the dev's daydream that we not use it for farming.

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You know, I had this revelation a little while ago that I keep thinking about posting, but the other threads on MA farming are too depressing, so I'll say it here where no one will care.

The canon explanation for the MA is that it's a combat simulator. Of course people are going to ruthlessly farm it - RP almost demands it, particularly villainside.

And of course I had to write a story with that as the theme, which turned out to be Power Progression.

I don't quite get where this notion of the difficulty slider not applying to the AE is coming from. The current difficulty slider applies to the AE, why wouldn't the new one?

Gratz!

PMing Synapse with this info now...

EDIT: Synapse is having pohsyb look into it. He mentioned that he couldn't reproduce the behavior. There may be something more complex going on than just the team position - maybe the specifics of these particular characters matter somehow.

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The floor should be set realistically. Looking at the last review, if a level 35 character hits the following mission with a 41 floor he's going to be missing two powers and 12 slots, which is significant. He'll also be missing the tier-9 from his secondary.

It also suggests the Architect is using factions from differing level brackets, which in turn suggest a disjointed story.

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The difference between a 35+ faction and a 41+ faction isn't that great IME. But that aside, I assume what you're saying is that instead of:

35-54/41-54/1-54/1-54/1-54

the arc should be

41-54/41-54/41-54/41-54/41-54

The interesting thing about this is that, if it changes the difficulty at all, it makes the mission sequence harder, not easier. So I guess the point is to make everything the same to make the decision easier for the player?

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But either way, the market is still mine!


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So how did you come to have so many PvP IOs? Are they just saved up from the period before the first round of changes to the rep timer?

That's pretty damning. If this happens again, take some screenshots along with any other relevant data. Outside of pacting I can't think of any reason this would happen.

I remember the file the OP is talking about - it was on GoogleDocs and there was a corresponding guide. So in theory it should still be around. No time to go hunting for it though, so I have no link.

Erm... this whole forum is basically for what you just listed. There's also the already-stickied "Announce Your Latest Creation" thread at the top of the forum.

Removing an item from a list can cause indices get get screwed up by virtue of the list now containing a hole. If I had to guess that'd be where I'd look. Of course, I have no access to the code so this is a total wild guess.

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There was a famous aggro problem in one of the EQs that had to do with character sorting, which was based on invisible ID tags. Some characters got aggro more frequently than their peers because of the characteristics of their ID tags which sorted them higher on some list.

There is also the RNG bug from last year where drop results became predictable under some circumstances, and could be manipulated.

So, things like this are definitely possible. The mechanics of ticket awards actually make these things easier to analyze than other kinds of rewards, since you get aggregate data pretty quickly.

I would suggest PMing Arcanaville to help you do a mathematical analysis on your results.

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Another disjointed level range. Come on, people.

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I have to admit I'm still baffled as to why you care. If the top level range varies widely, yes, that affects what powers and abilities you'll have as you progress through the arc. But if the lower limit varies, all that happens is the bad guys may get a little beefier - AFAICT it doesn't really materially affect how easy or hard the arc is overall.

I never quite understood how the devs "protected" DC arcs from being invalidated when changes were made. My guess is they flubbed it somehow and the faction got changed unintentionally.

I always have to do this kind of thing with direct file editing. There are multiple places where the MA editor stores critter and faction references, and it seems to restore them if any of them aren't trimmed.

One workaround, if you encounter this in someone else's arc, is to target through pets. (Of course if you have pets, you maybe don't need to hit it yourself at all... but it does work.)

Note though that some players get really annoyed if the nav bar hint doesn't tell you what kind of thing you're looking for. If the circumstances (map and placement) are such that the clue might be hard to identify, you risk ragequit if people don't have enough information to narrow down the search.

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now more than ever I am filled with rage about the misleading instructions that led me to create a new CoV account when I bought the game, instead of just adding it on to my CoH account.

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Hm, strange. I don't remember that. Was that a common problem back at the time?

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Yeah, a bunch of people I knew on the forums had the same problem. The instructions were very vague. The CoV boxed set seemed to assume you'd never purchased CoH and gave instructions as if that were the case.

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I'm not much of a market hound, but I'll be running my aoe toons like this:
Spawn for 6-8, difficulty 4, conning -2.

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Here is how I presume the new difficulty settings will be implemented:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Team Size
---------
Even
+1
+2
+3
+4
...
+7
.
Enemy Level
-----------
Even
+1
+2
+3
+4
</pre><hr />

Note that there'd be no concept of "difficulty" anymore - it'd be split into "team size modifier" and "enemy level modifier". (Our current system basically gives team sizes of up to +1 and enemy levels of up to +2, though not both extremes at the same time.)

This is why I think it would necessarily apply to the AE; there's no longer anywhere to record what the AE should give you.

Huh. Why would removing the Fog of War be useful?

... unless... Maybe you can use it in the Shadow Shard?