Rodion

It doesn't look like there are any hairstyles for female characters in the Superscience pack. I was so hoping for that Bride of Frankenstein look.

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Bolded for an amazing point. Devs, no matter what happens in this game, people will always farm. There will always be an FotM, there will always be the better mission, there will always be the better something so long as this game exists. By trying to reduce the farming, you are only creating trouble and discouraging PvP even more than you already have. This game does not need any more inflation that it already has to encounter. Please reconsider.

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The devs are trying to stop people with an unfair advantage from getting easy rewards.

A while back I read about someone with two accounts and his estimate of the drop rate for PvP recipes based on getting one every hundred kills or so. As I recall, he was getting a PvP recipe every half hour.

Now, there was no skill or risk or anything remotely resembling a game being played when he did this. He just had his two characters hammering on each other and getting some of the highest-demand rewards in the game.

This is the problem that the devs are fixing.

Is this the best of all possible fixes? It is if their target is a 1 in 100 chance of a PvP recipe drop a minimum of every 5 minutes. Did the devs do the statistical analysis to see if this is really what they want? Instead of just complaining, we should make some calculations to see if this is reasonable.

As a rough guess, if 100 pairs of players are optimally farming these recipes under the new rules there will be one drop every five minutes (assuming that the drop rate is 1%). That's 288 recipes a day for 200 players PvPing nonstop. If there were 1000 pairs of players were doing PvP nonstop, that would be almost 3000 PvP recipes a day. For a particular individual, I estimate you'll have a 50% chance of getting a PvP drop in 68 defeats. Yeah, that means you'd have to PvP with a defeat every 5 minutes for almost 6 hours to have 50-50 chance of getting a drop.

In actual play, it's unlikely you'd be getting a shot at the recipe every 5 minutes. Only cooperating groups of farmers can reach these numbers.

The real problem with rewarding PvP recipes is that they are so easily gamed. A player can intentionally throw the fight and allow the opponent to win. It's the easiest exploit in the game -- you don't need an uber build, you don't need a hokey AE mission filled with buff-bots and wimpy bosses. You just need a second account or another player to take advantage of the exploit. And so, the drop rates are low.

If we can come up with better ways for the devs to detect gaming the system, they could raise the drop rates or lower the rep timer. But that seems next to impossible. For centuries people have been doing this sort of thing -- usually in the form of betting on fixed fights or football games. We still have no way of accurately determining whether someone is "really trying" to win a boxing match. But even if we did come up with some complex algorithm that analyzes the behavior of the fighters, it boils down to a longer fight.

The rep timer does that with minimal complexity. So they just went with it.

Yes, this was my surmise from the way I hit an enemy when I targeted the Oilslick. And there's no question it's a bug. When it behaves differently in the streets of Talos than in an AE mission, and no longer works as documented, something's obviously wrong.

It looks like the "Ally" bit is still set on the betraying escort. It seems to be an enemy and an ally at the same time. That seems to be the same sort of problem with Oilslick -- it should be targetable as an enemy, but it's only targetable as an Ally.

I tried the Escort with a Gravity/Force Field controller. When Dispersion Bubble is up a bubble appears around the betrayer, and when it's off (I have PFF on, or when I leave), the field goes away and the betrayer suffers the effects of my holds (floats in the air immobile).

If this is the case, I bet that an Empathy defender could still heal the betrayer while attacking them.

From this weirdness it looks like the AE missions have basic differences from regular missions. It's like they've written a completely separate "mission interpreter" for AE. Probably not a bad idea, considering that all this weird stuff would be happening in regular missions if they had used the same basic code for regular and AE missions.

I've just noticed two weird problems in my AE missions and was wondering if anyone else has run into these.

I was running a mission with a Kinetics defender. I have an Escort objective (Fusionette) who has Aggressive, Follow and Betrays on Arrival options set.

When I use Transfusion and Transference on her after the betrayal, I am healed and have end restored, but the powers also heal and restore her endurance. This makes it really hard to defeat her.

Running the same mission with a Trick Arrow defender, I used Oilslick. Then I tried to target the Oilslick with Blazing Arrow. I have to click it to select; I can't tab to select the slick. If there are no enemies in the slick, I get the warning "INVALID TARGET" when I try to fire Blazing Arrow and I can't ignite the slick.

If there are enemies in the slick, I wind up hitting one of the enemies at random, even though I have the slick targeted.

I see the same behavior in other AE missions I've tried (including the Johnny Sonata DC arc #1001). It fails whether I take standard rewards or tickets. This makes doing AE missions with Trick Arrow a real pain, as Oilslick is a signature power of the set.

The slick works fine on the street in Talos and in other missions.

I've seen people make the first 20 levels in an hour (judging by the progress of global friends in AE missions).

Question: you had a level 50, and what level were the rest of you auto-SKed to? Were you SKed to 50, 46 or 45?

These abusive problems could be remedied in much less drastic fashion if the way auto-SK worked differently.

For example, if everyone less than the level of the mission holder is auto-SKed to one level less than the maximum character level in the mission, this problem would pretty much disappear.

I'd like to see such a solution game-wide. This would eliminate the problem of not having enough mentors when playing regular missions. This would pretty much torpedo all the PLing scams, whether based on AE or perma-46s.

The devs might want to adjust experience awards upwards for SKed characters to maintain current leveling speeds. But the silliness of 20/levels per hour could be eliminated.

While I share your pain, I identified this as the biggest problem AE is going to have way back in the beginning. By giving us the ability to write our own missions, the devs have co-opted us as software developers.

We're essentially writing code for a "mission interpreter," which is pretty much the same as a basic interpreter or a Java Virtual Machine, only its primitive functions are the animation of a 3D MMORPG. And as software developers, every time the underlying code changes it has potential implications for the software (missions) that we've developed to run on the mission interpreter.

One thing software developers know is that you have to do regression testing whenever the system changes. This is just a fact of life.

And there's no easy solution. Right now there are a lot of bugs. When the devs fix them it may "break" your mission because the new, correct behavior may not be what you're expecting, and you'll need to adjust for that.

It will get better over time as the number of changes goes down and bugs are fixed. But if we get our wishes, that will be a long time off, because we've been asking for a whole lot of new features. And any changes in a running system can have ripple effects that have to be tested for.

The recent changes to test mode make this testing much, much easier. So the devs really are dedicated to giving us the best tools to do our testing. But we're always going to need to do that testing.

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In essence, institute a maximum number of levels gained per hour.

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This idea only resulting in breeding mediocrity and incompetence. It's been shown to be true historically time and time again. If there's an artificial cap on reward and advancement, people will simply stop trying to be efficient. There's no point to doing your "best" to achieve a goal quicker since heck, that only means you'll hit the pre-determined cap sooner. For the remainder of the time, you'll just be twiddling your thumbs.

Lastly, this idea seems to be a rather subtle attempt to balance the playing field between power gamers and casual gamers. I'm definately against this, not because I play 10 hours a day but because I don't believe in enforced fairness.

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So, your position is that teams that run AE missions with one level 50 running a level 54 boss map with 7 autoSKed lowbies standing around doing nothing promotes excellence and competence? You think old-style doorsitting lowbies SKed to perma-46s are doing their "best?"

When characters are getting to level 50 in a couple of hours, it's not through efficiency and skill. It's through gaming a broken reward system. Characters that gain 20 and 30 levels an hour are not doing so through their own initiative; they are getting a free ride and using the SK mechanics to scam giant rewards.

I'm not talking some ridiculously low level level cap. I've not even suggesting what that level cap should be. I'm suggesting that one is needed. 20 levels an hour is obviously broken. Five levels an hour might be too low at level 1, but fine for level 10 or 15. It needs analysis and discussion, not out-of-hand dismissal.

Seriously, it's the only solution that will put a nail in this coffin once and for all. The exact levels can be adjusted as needed, just as the devs have adjusted the leveling rate up and down in the past.

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Outside of farming, the MA is definitely worse than normal missions.

For the loss of travel time, you also lose:
-salvage
-recipes
-end of mission xp bonus
-end of arc xp bonus
-unlocking of new contact
-some temp powers

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You missed Patrol XP: it doesn't get used in AE missions.

On the other hand, in AE you get tickets which can be used to buy rare salvage and random recipe rolls. If you want a specific piece of rare salvage and you don't have the inf required to buy it on the market, you can play a few AE missions and get exactly what you want without having to fool around.

Because of AE's popularity with the farmers, the prices of different kinds of medium to high level rare salvage have more or less equalized at between 500,000 and 1,000,000 inf. That is, some have come down in price (Prophecy) and some have gone up (most of the tech rares).

Similarly, the Bronze Recipe reward roll is quite nice. For a few hundred tickets you typically get recipes that you can use or sell on the market for millions.

The real point is that people shouldn't focus on a single aspect of the game. You should do some AE, some TFs, regular missions, PvP, make a cool base, etc. And you should play a few different ATs so you understand how they work (so you know how to work with them better on teams).

If you focus on one thing you'll burn out in a couple of months.

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In my opinion, the problem isn't an All Boss Spawn, or all lieutenant spawns, the problem is that nothing in this game actually rewards the players according to how easy or difficult it was for them to defeat their enemies! That is the root cause why PL'ing is even possible, that is the root cause why farming is possible, and that is why AE will always be even more exploitable than the other in-game content is.

If you truly care about this issue and are truly looking at ways on how to fix this issue, the answer doesn't lie in restricting All Boss Spawns or what-not. The answer lies in giving rewards proportionally to the direct effort each character had to invest in the fight to defeat a groups of enemies. That's my opinion at least, YMMV.

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You are exactly right. Problems with excessive rewards have sprung up time and again in the game: the Winterlord, farming Rikti portals, and now AE. The problem isn't AE per se, it's that the game allows excessive rewards from any source.

The idea that you can get experience at an essentially infinite rate is fundamentally flawed. The best way to resolve this issue is to institute an reward cap on the rolling average of experience/minute. In essence, institute a maximum number of levels gained per hour.

There shouldn't be a cap on the amount of xp or tickets you get per mission -- there should just be a limit on the maximum rate. It's harder to implement, I'm sure. But if you make this change, the damage from any exploit or bug that pops up in the future will be limited to some reasonable value automatically.

It does seem that a lot of authors feel that anything less than a 5-star rating is griefing. In fact, several people have essentially stated that it is griefing as a matter of practicality.

I'll often play an arc that the author took a lot of care in writing. But I just don't like it. For whatever reason, what he thought of as fun or engaging does absolutely nothing for me.

My inclination is to give it a three for effort, but I know that it will torpedo the arcs's rating. So I just don't vote.

Perhaps the three people who played your arc had the same reaction, and gave you threes out of deference for your effort, but really didn't like the arc at all.

Obviously the rating system needs some kind of adjustment. One thing that would help would be display the number of plays an arc has received, in addition to the number of actual votes. That data would only show up on your story under your published tab, the same way that the new Comments button does.

It would also be nice if authors got some number of tickets (maybe 1 or 2 per mission) each time a player completes the arc, in addition to any tickets received for a 3+ rating. Think of it as "profit sharing" with NCSoft for providing other players some entertainment.

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Just FYI, I did a massive overhaul on emotes and encounter animations during I15.

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Is this why several of the Captured (Fire Cage, Energy Field, Floating Struggle) emotes don't work for captives now?

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Actually... I think you're right, in this case the level slider doesn't do anything. All that matters is the level range you click on to get the recipe roll - if you grab the 26-30 random roll, for example, you'll get a shot at sets that cap at 30, regardless of what the slider is set to.

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I can verify that it works this way. When my level 50 does the 30-34 bronze recipe roll I have received a level 50 Crushing Impact and a level 30 Steadfast Protection. The slider is only used to control what items are displayed, not the level of the selected item.

Which makes it kind of confusing if you're looking for common recipes in the AE ticket reward window. If you happen to be something like level 27, the slider defaults to that, and there is no entry for Recipes in the left panel. You have to move the slider to 30, at which point the the recipe entry appears and you can click on it to make the common recipes appear in the right panel.

They will show up on the store when you log into the game proper (which is what they did on the Training Room during beta). There's probably some backend work they need to finish to hook up the live servers to that accounting computer before they can enable buying more arcs.

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You think "all the travel" in this game is bad, take a look at other MMOs (to be fair the only other I've really looked at was WoW, which left me feeling me very "unWow'ed" - but I hear stories).

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Yeah, games like LOTRO and WoW require you to walk everywhere, and buy or rent a horse. That's right: you have to pay money to go from point A to point B at anything faster than a trot.

But the instant gratification thing is two-edged. There are a lot of cool things to see in the city. Talos Island at sunset is actually very pretty. If you sit in the AE building in Atlas from level 1 to level 50 you will see only a tiny fraction of the whole game.

And, honestly, the game will lose a lot of people if it consists of nothing but boss farms in AE and getting to level 50 in a couple of hours. Would those people have stayed around if they got out and saw the world? Hard to say.

But it's bad PR. The game seem rather pointless to an outsider when people leaving it say things like, "Yeah, I tried CoH. I played for a week farming the same mission and had four level 50 characters. It was kinda boring."

I agree that AE is really cool. If people don't want to get out of their shells, that's fine by me. The only problem is the abusive leveling speeds -- and that's not a problem of the AE concept, that's a problem with the implementation of a reward system that's been allowed to get out of control on more than one occasion: does anyone remember the Winterlord?

There does seem to be a difference now in that if you have the singular text in place it will place the objective in the nav bar. I had a misison that had a non-required objective that now shows up in the nav bar because it had singular text. However, my guess is that this is an improvement and not a bug.

The reason is that the way it works now provides more flexibility while taking nothing away. If you wanted all those non-required objectives to appear in the nav bar there was no way to do that before. Now there is, and if you don't want them to appear in the nav bar, you just don't specify any singular or plural text.

How many times did you test your mission? I've noticed that the random spawn generator can get "stuck" and generate nothing but minions, or sometimes nothing but LTs.

I do basically the same thing you do, and I get a variety of spawns on Challenge Level 1 with a custom group: three minions, 1 LT, 1 LT and 1 minion. When I'm only CL 2 I even get an occasional boss.

Try it five times and see what you get each time. The new Architect options make it really easy to zip through the mission.

One improvement I'd like to see for test mode is the ability to set the level, team size and challenge level when starting the arc. That way I can see how things spawn under all conditions.

For example, I've got a mission that, when run at level 41 on Heroic, spawns a level 46 Snake patrol. I'd been running it at level 50 and didn't see that problem, but when I switched to my 41 blaster the bug appeared. If someone reported this issue to me in a comment and I didn't have a level 41 character, I'd have a much harder time duplicating the problem.

Several of the Captured emotes are not working in my AE missions for Allies. Am I missing something?

I select Captured (Fire Cages), Captured (Energy Field), Captured (Floating Struggle) and the ally just does the standard cowering emote.

When I select the desired emote in the MA editor it usually (though not always) displays the correct emote (with the attendant fire, sparks, glow, etc.).

This happens if the ally is the only objective in the mission, or one of many.

This is occurring in the second mission of my arc, 97393. The missing emotes make a hash of my story line.

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On the Mission Architect: Not everyone reads the forums, after all, and not everyone might realize that the Rikti Communication Officers were out of whack. But you'd have to be incredibly, pants-on-head retarded not to know that leveling at that speed was broken ~Justaris


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The quote in your sig identifies the problem and the solution. The leveling speed is broken. This is what should be limited, and there are many ways to resolve this.

Just as the Winterlord caused excessive level gains, so is AE. There should be a limit on XP/minute gained over a rolling average of the last 20-60 minutes. The values should be chosen so that the typical XP we expect are still obtained. But the 20/levels per hour we're seeing in AE should be stopped. Other rewards (influence, tickets) should be limited in the same fashion -- not a cap per mission, but a maximum rate.

Five-seven levels an hour at lower levels should be fine, less at higher levels. But 20 levels an hour? This is broken and bad for the game.

If you fix the problem in this way, it will be forever fixed. No matter what gimmick or exploit someone comes up with, they would always be limited by the xp/minute cap. Winterlords, AE, PLing with perma-46s, the method won't matter. You just won't be able to get XP, influence, tickets, etc., faster than is reasonable

AE should be made to work like Ouroboros combined with Radio/Paper missions: that is, you start the TF, then you have to run all over the city to do the missions. The missions should be assigned random locations in level-appropriate zones. You should get the contact's cell number immediately so you don't have to run back to AE.

This would alleviate the crowding in the AE buildings to a great degree. It would also mean that those auto-SK to 46 farms would all be assigned random (dangerous to lowbie) locations in Grandville and PI. Might cut down on the PLing speed a bit.

There's really no need to trash AE completely to eliminate the PLing problem. The devs just need to create some mechanism to throttle down the rewards to some reasonable amount per minute. In reality, there's not a whole lot of difference between AE now and PI on Freedom server before AE.

It's silly for people to make 20 levels in an hour, and it's silly however they do it: AE, the Winterlord, the Family or Demon farm in Portal Corp, SKing to perma-46s, doorsitting, etc.

The real problem is the mechanism that allows so much XP to be obtained so quickly with little risk.

First and foremost, if you're doorsitting you should get no XP. If the mobs never check to aggro on you, you should never get any XP.

There should be some threshold amount of XP per minute (based on a rolling average over the last N minutes). Once you hit that threshold, diminishing returns kick in and you get, say, half the amount of XP above the normal amount. At another threshold there's another halving of XP. At some point you'll reach an effective maximum level increase per hour. That should probably in the range five levels per hour at low levels, less at higher levels.

If you're doing regular missions, where you spend a lot of time running between missions, waiting for other players to come back from smoke breaks, upgrading enhancements, etc., you would never run into this threshold because you're just not getting enough XP/minute. It's important that this rolling average be over a fairly long time (like 20 or 30 or 60 minutes, the length of a mission and its typical travel time to the next mission).

The attractiveness of AE is that there is very little overhead in doing missions. You don't have to waste 5 or 10 or 20 minutes running from one zone to the next. This is where the diminishing returns on XP/minute would kick in. And also in the farming missions at Portal Corp in PI, where they used to do their PLing.

One thing I've always disliked about the conceit of AE is that it's "not real," that these missions are phony and they keep shoving it in your face constantly. But by preventing story arc writers from having "real" missions in real locations, they have created the optimal PLing tool.

If AE missions were constructed like real TFs, where you had to run out to some location in the real world to actually do the mission, it would alleviate many of the problems that people are complaining about: less crowding in the AE building, the incentive to PL with AE would be decreased, players would see more of the city, etc. You could also add Defeat N Enemy in Open Zone missions to AE arcs as well. And they would be included in your defeat counts.

Furthermore, if AE randomly assigned zones based on the level of the missions, it would further inhibit AE's ability to PL. That is, all those level 54 boss farms would be some random place in Grandville or PI (and not inside safe and comfy Portal Corp), and it would be a hassle to get PLed lowbies to those locations.

And you could "explain" this in game terms by just saying that AE's simulation technology has been improved drastically by providing a complete world simulation, not for just each mission.

I used a defeat all on a small map because there were several objectives and the nav bar was several lines long. Since it was nearly impossible to complete the mission without defeating all, I figured it wouldn't hurt to make it a defeat all and get rid of the mess in the nav area.

But in general, I'd avoid defeat alls, especially on maps where mobs can get lost behind lots of junk -- in the CoT caves and warehouses, in particular.

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I'm sick to death of farmers ruining everyone's fun, but I think a couple of simple changes could solve the problem for everyone.

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I have suggestions for two different solutions that would solve these problems in general, as well as have other benefits. They don't have the tremendously bad effects of a mission XP cap. A mission cap doesn't really solve the problem, because the rate per minute is what matters, and farmers don't really care if they have to switch missions a little more frequently.

One of CoH's major problems is that characters who are just sitting inside the door of the mission doing nothing get full rewards. Door-sitters have no risk and should therefore get no reward. Right now 7 auto-SKed-to-46 lowbies can sit there doing nothing while one level 50 character runs through the mission defeating level 52 mobs. The rewards from defeating +6 mobs are quite generous.

Solution 1 is to give no experience to characters that are doing nothing. The reason the devs haven't done this, I assume, is that it's non-trivial to decide whether a character is "doing nothing." There seem to be two heuristics that could pretty much determine this: 1) has the character (or the character's pets) recently used any powers to attack enemies or buff allies, and 2) has the character recently been considered as a potential target for aggro by an enemy. "Recently" could be adjusted as need be, but two-three minutes seems to be a reasonable value. An additional heuristic for preventing characters from following other characters and spamming a healing aura might also be needed.

In open zone defeats there seems to already be some kind of decision being made to avoid giving XP to characters who are distant from the defeated mob. I seem to recall playing around with this a few months ago in PI -- it's something like a 120-140 yards. You still get credit for a defeat, but no XP or influence if you're beyond that radius. Maybe this works inside missions too, but it could be easily gamed by selecting appropriately sized maps for your farms.

This would also kick in for characters whose players go AFK in the middle of the mission.

The second part of the problem is the exorbitant rewards for lower-level characters defeating higher level mobs when it usually isn't warranted (i.e., getting credit for +6 mobs as above).

Solution 2 is to auto-SK all lower level characters to the mission holder. I.e., if the mission holder is level 48, characters lower than level 47 are automatically SKed to 47. This would be good for any number of reasons: it prevents PLing abuse and it also allows you to team with anyone without having to worry about finding appropriate SK/Mentor pairs.

Either one of these solutions would drastically reduce the abuse we see in all PLing scenarios, whether running AE missions or standard fare. Implementing both would pretty much eliminate the incentive for farming exploits. It wouldn't eliminate farming, but it would change the way it works: players would actually have to run some kind of risk, and actually play their characters.

Most typical teams (characters of similar levels with a couple of sidekicks) would notice little difference. People who solo would see absolutely no difference.

What we would lose is the ability to run at more than one level lower than the mission holder. I.e., if the character with the mission is level 40 running on Heroic, you'll get XP for defeating +1s and and +2s, instead of +5s and +6s. But since you're running at level 39, you're gaining additional to hit, damage and hit points. If you want more XP, run at Invincible and you'll get credit for +3s and +4s. The devs might want to readjust the XP rates to account for this change as well.

These solutions are far better than imposing artificial caps on rewards. No question, something is being taken away. But we're getting something in return (the auto-SK to the mission holder).

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Custom critters will be filling a good deal less in I15

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Wait, what? Where is that annouced? I think at this point each CC takes up like...6.25% or something. How much less? Sources, man, give me sources!!

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There hasn't been any announcement that I'm aware of. People have learned this by observing the decrease of reported arc sizes in the I15 beta on the Training Room. Recent patches report smaller sizes for arcs than they used to.

Also, it's not actually the input file size that's limited. It's the size that the MA computes that matters. One day, before a patch the reported size was 98%. After the patch it was down to 68%. The file itself was about 120K. During the beta process reported sizes have fluctuated between being much smaller and much larger. Right now, the computed size of an arc is usually smaller than the size the live system reports for that same set of input files.

Thus, the computation of the internal size is what matters, not the actual size of the input file. That means you can't say for sure what the effect will be on any one of your files, it depends on what's in them. The devs may be "giving us more space" by computing the internal size differently, upping the internal limit, or doing something totally different.

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Well, I'd reconsider the all-boss theme. That is a common tactic for player-made farms. I don't know of any official content within the game where everyone is a boss, so it could be considered exploitative since there's nothing official to which you can compare it.

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This is not quite accurate. There are many open zones that effectively have all-boss spawns. In particular:

<ul type="square">[*]Croatoa has a place where 12-16 Red Cap bosses are standing around on platforms. There are a couple of minions hanging around too.
[*]Croatoa has another place that has pairs of bosses just standing around waiting to be harvested.
[*]Crey's Folly has a couple of square miles of 3-4 Freakshow boss spawns.
[*]FBZ has dozens of places where you can get 2-4 bosses of all stripes, just milling about all over the place. In particular, it's very easy to get soldiers of Rularuu bosses out your ears in the Storm Palace.[/list]
A properly outfitted character can easily solo these spawns and make oodles of rewards. These spawns are sufficiently distant from one another that a solo character can make a route that takes you through non-stop bosses. The presence of minions and lieutenants in some spawns are icing on the cake; they all just die off from your AoEs without you ever attacking them directly, dropping inspirations like mana from heaven, allowing you to become essentially invulnerable.

While tanks have the easiest time of it, most scrappers, blasters and controllers can solo the FBZ spawns at level 50, and many defenders can as well. I don't know of locations like these in CoV, so if your experience is limited to redside that may be why you're not aware of these locations.

I'm not sure what ticket bonus you get on failed missions. I seem to recall that with regular missions, you get a reduced influence/experience bonus if the mission fails. So you might want to check out whether you get the ticket bonus on failed missions before you decide to this.

If you don't get the bonus, people doing your arc will get half the tickets they would on other stories. That will probably earn you a lot of low ratings.

EDIT: Just tested this on Training Room. I got the normal number of bonus tickets when the mission failed due to a boss fleeing.