Rodion

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
By requiring that you spend some amount of time in the mission or complete at least the first mission before you can cast a vote, the devs would eliminate most of the opportunities for griefing.

[/ QUOTE ]

With the changes recently made to custom critters, for some this would be impossible.

Again NO.

If an arc creator hasn't tested his arc to make sure that the first mission doesn't require a tank, scrapper, or brute to be even completable, that's not something that deserves to be played before it's rated down.

[/ QUOTE ]

Perhaps I was insufficiently clear. I said, "By requiring that you spend some amount of time in the mission or complete the mission" I mean that as an either-or.

If you gave it your best shot and spent five minutes in the arc and found that you couldn't get anywhere because only scrappers and tankers have a chance, then your vote would be registered. I also said that the amount of time required is a good topic for debate. Even a time as short as one or two minutes would be sufficient to put a crimp in griefing.

The autocomplete on entry missions are just a bug in MA that should be fixed. An Ally goal set to to Single is not a legitimate goal, and arcs containing them should not be publishable. If there are similar immediately completable goals they too should inhibit publishing.

The goal is not to take away your right to poke someone in the eye. It's to eliminate griefing and voting cartels who can vote up undeserving arcs that they never even entered.

I'm afraid that problems with changes affecting the playability of the mission are inherent to the whole MA concept. As long as the devs are changing the system, those changes will affect the way our missions play. It happens to their missions all the time, and they know how they use all those resources.

One of the major problems is the devs have to make changes in a matter of hours to terminate exploits or remove missions that cannot be completed because of bad spawn points. So they have to yank a map, or an NPC, or an emote from MA instead of fixing them because they don't have the time to do it "right."

Over time the problems will be less intrusive, but for a while they're going to break a lot of missions with every patch. And it won't be possible for them to document all the possible ways things will break because they don't know how every mission uses the things they're changing.

If they change one NPC by adding or removing a power, there might be 100 missions that will be affected adversely in the minds of the authors. Another 500 authors might not think it's a problem. The only way to avoid it is to stop changing things. But we all want new features and fixes all the time.

Software maintenance is a fact of life. Every time software is changed, someone should run a regression test to make sure that things are still working the way they should be. NCSoft isn't going to run regression tests on our missions, so we're going to have to do that ourselves. Yeah, it sucks. Welcome to software development!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Bah, where is that listed? I thought Dev's choice was the safst place to find missions where I wouldn't have to worry about the recent crackdown and find dev approved material. Bummer.

Thanks much for the info!!

[/ QUOTE ]

hrm...

You really don't have to worry about the recent crackdown if all your doing is running missions with a team. If you were happy to run dev's choice missions, you're probably not looking to farm an exploit, which is the only way you can get in trouble.

[/ QUOTE ]

Indeed. You have work at earning 1500 tickets a mission, it doesn't happen unless the mission is constructed to make that happen. MA arcs that are constructed like regular missions will give xp and tickets in the measure the devs intend.

I've never gotten more than 500 or so tickets in a single mission. But I find clearing out an entire map to be kind of dreary. I'd rather smash everything that gets in my way while completing the mission's goals, and then move on to new territory.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but this could be done with a lot fewer changes. All you really need is to add two or three options to the current test mode:

<ul type="square">[*]Select the number of players.[*]Select the level of the mission, and your effective level (which you can set to something high like 57).[/list]
You want to stomp things flat and get no aggro, set the mission level to something low and your level to something high. You want to fly, get a character that flies, or get a raptor pack from one of the numerous places they are available (safeguard/mayhem missions, FBZ, Grandville day job, etc.).

This would utilize all the existing functionality without changes, except for the way they're initialized.

Since so many missions use randomly selected maps, and spawn points can change over time, the devs should not encourage missions that rely on exact placement of automatically spawned goals (because those missions will be broken when the devs fix anything). If we really need that level of control, then we should be able to directly indicate the spawn points ourselves. Otherwise the devs should concentrate on fixing the maps so that we get reliable random spawns in the front, middle and back locations on all maps.

Having lots of special modes and flags is a source of bugs. You add something like "in the special test mode hitting the mob knocks it down to 3/4 hits" and the next thing you know, some "genius" figures out how to do that to an AV in a regular mission and then we go through another emergency patch to fix an exploit that everyone is getting billions of levels from.

Software suffers from a form of "metal fatigue:" if you bend it back and forth enough times, you will eventually wear it out and break it. You want to change it as little as possible, and in ways that use existing functionality.

[ QUOTE ]
How do people feel about being exemped for a single mission out of a longer arc?

[/ QUOTE ]

I really hate it. And I'm someone who likes a good story. All the rationales they give for exemplaring are essentially bogus.

If it's only a few levels (like down to 40), it's not so bad. But when it's down to 11 or 14, I have to rearrange powers in my trays because none of them work anymore.

The level of disruption also depends on the AT. It's not so bad with blasters and scrappers, because they're pretty much all attacks and they get those early. But it's a real drag with tanks because they often don't have many attacks to start out.

If you're doing it to get a particular NPC, just remodel that NPC as a custom character as closely as you can. It doesn't really matter if it's identical. The conceit is that it's just an MA story anyway, and they got another actor to play the bad guy .

I've had conversations with authors who insist that the mission MUST have this EXACT map, and MUST have EXACT character at this EXACT level. Even though the rest of the arc scales to any level. They're missing the point (especially considering how likely it is that the special maps may be yanked at any time). It's more important for it to be fun and have people play at the pace they expect to play at. There's a HUGE difference between running a level 50 character and running a level 14 character.

However, I'm not doctrinaire on this point: if you say that one of the missions is low-level in the description, keep that mission short, and have a reasonable explanation for it, no one can reasonably complain about it.

Ultimately this is a problem with MA and the system in general. If a boss designed for level 14 is too weak at level 50, they should make that boss an LT at level 50 and give less experience.

[ QUOTE ]
Just a minor question...

Are the villain missions going to be a bit more villainy? I'm not asked for the whole "MWAH-HA-HA Watch me boil puppies and skin orphans!!!" thing, but as a villain, I seem to spend the majority of my time fighting other villains more than those costumed buffoons of Paragon City.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you look at crime statistics like the murder rate, it becomes obvious that criminals wind up fighting each other over turf far more often than they shoot it out with the cops. Fighting with the cops brings way too much unwanted attention from organizations that have far more resources than fellow criminals.

So it makes a lot of sense that a pack of greedy, vicious, back-stabbing crooks would spend a lot of time plotting how to viciously back-stab other crooks and steal their stuff.

Logically speaking, then, it makes sense for criminals to keep a low profile and maximize profits by first eliminating the competition that can be more easily eliminated.

Morally and ethically speaking, as designers and consumers of an entertainment product, it's a lot easier to rationalize committing hideous acts against vicious criminals than against people who are just trying to protect the innocent.

As a rule, the comics genre doesn't foster sheer mayhem without some moral and ethical qualms for the protagonists. Even the dark heroes are conflicted when they do terrible things. When they aren't, it's usually a manifest lesson about why they should be and what happens to them when they aren't. The truly bad guys don't usually come to a good end.

If you want to maim and kill, go find a game that lets you maim and kill. Don't demand CoX change to suit your whims when the end result will be bad for the game in general (a more severe rating, bad PR, etc.).

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Unless I'm doing something wrong with my mission, they made a change to the way Force Field (and maybe Sonic Resonance) allies act. I have an FF ally in an arc I'm testing which is supposed to follow you around with the big bubble on to provide some semblance of mez protection for squishies (since the enemies are mez-heavy). However, when I rescue the ally, they turn the bubble off. When I move away from them, it comes back on - but turns off again as soon as I get close.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this a new "feature?"

[/ QUOTE ]

That was an exploit that has been fixed. While a few poeple were using it correctly and only haveing one helper with the bubble, others would have multiple spawn and after you rescue a few of them you did not have to worry about petty things like getting hit.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is getting really annoying. In order to gain a few quick levels, the nitwits are doing everything they can to make the MA completely worthless. MA had the potential for being a fabulous addition to the game, but these jerks are forcing the devs to make it worthless and bland.

These guys complain bitterly about how there's no new content, and then when the devs provide a mechanism to produce an infinite amount of new content, they run the same stupid exploit map over and over again, ignoring the thousands of missions of new content that has been added in just the last month.

With luck this change is only temporary till I15. The FF defenders should work normally if there's just one, but if there's more than one only one should have the FF up at once. Or allow only one ally with FF/Sonic Res to be added to a mission. Or something like that.

[ QUOTE ]
... Third, it's not griefing to give someone a low rating. There are a lot of reasons why someone might have given your friend's arc a low rating. ...

[/ QUOTE ]

It is griefing to give someone a low rating without even entering the mission. If casting a vote required some kind of time investment, even as small as five minutes, the number of potential griefings would be drastically reduced.

Right now someone could hack the client, the way they seem to have done for sending in-game email spam, and automatically grief every arc in the system.

By requiring that you spend some amount of time in the mission or complete at least the first mission before you can cast a vote, the devs would eliminate most of the opportunities for griefing.

I'd rather have the devs just fix the problems with exploits in MA, and have them work just like regular missions for experience and influence. It may take a while, but why totally gimp MA because of some bad apples?

[ QUOTE ]
So when I load up a mission, get into it, decide it's not to my taste, exit, and exit without giving it a rating, it's actually giving it a 0-star rating that counts against the average?!?!?

That is borked. I have no idea how many people I have unintentionally 0-starred.

[/ QUOTE ]

I tried this on the Training Room (I didn't want to zero-star someone's live arc), and it works the way it should. If you exit without clicking any stars no vote is recorded. So, unless it's broken on live, you haven't slighted anyone unintentionally.

Any time there's any sort of material gain involved in these games there are people who will abuse the feature for their benefit and attack those who are in competition with them.

Giving arcs high ratings provides a very tangible benefit -- tickets. Giving arcs low ratings provides a less tangible detriment to the recipient -- a low rating -- but a tangible benefit to someone who is direct competition with the person receiving that low rating-- a higher relative rating.

I have seen quite a few instances of well-written arcs that are given zero or one stars (you can tell this when they start with a five which changes to a three on the second vote). These arcs function properly, have clearly stated goals that are attainable, are well-written and basically do what the description says.

The possibilities are: 1) someone accidentally rating it zero, or there is a bug that causes zero ratings if you just exit, 2) someone is intentionally running around rating arcs zero for whatever reason, 3) some aspect of the arc really ticked the person off and he zeroed it out of spite.

To my mind, if an arc delivers what the description promises it should get at least a three. The only time it should be zeroed or oned is when it uses some hideous gimmick (the infamous 5 chained AV spawns on a huge outdoor map) that makes it unplayable or excruciatingly frustrating, is socially or morally offensive while lacking any artistic merit, is so poorly written and constructed so as to be unintelligible, is a blatant farm with no story, and the like.

If we wanted honest ratings and comments about the arcs, the comments would be anonymous (to us, but traceable back to the original writer by the devs). There would be no tangible benefits from ratings (no tickets, no badges, no Hall of Fame, nothing except Dev's Choice to allow good arcs to become permanent additions to CoH). There would only be the rating, and nothing else. That still wouldn't make the ratings "fair," but it would remove the motivations for many abuses of the rating system.

Yes, there would still be people zeroing competing arcs out of spite to have a higher rating, voting cartels, vote swapping, etc., but it would just be for the ego boost and not to get tickets or badges.

But now that they've implemented this system, I don't see them retracting it. It should be adjusted in some manner. One change that should be made: if you never actually play the arc your vote should not be recorded.

Right now, if you click the PLAY button and then immediately quit the arc and vote, your vote is recorded. This is patently wrong. Players can just run through their "enemies" list and zero vote dozens of arcs in minutes. Similarly, you can easily run through your friends list and give them 25 tickets per arc every week (at least the last I read that was how it worked).

Your vote should only be recorded if you actually played at least part of the arc. How much you have to play is a good topic for debate. Basically, it should take long enough to make it not worth your while to grief or unfairly reward people. My guess is it should be one mission (considering that some arcs only have one mission).

Will people still grief others and unfairly reward their pals? Sure. But at least it will take longer, and that will make it self-limiting.

[ QUOTE ]
I have a higher level toon with a bunch of tickets. At the ticket vendor he was able to purchase SO enhancements no problem. My lower level toons, however, do not get the enhancement option at all. Is there a minimum level for enhancements?

[/ QUOTE ]

You have to set the level of thing you're looking for to a multiple of 5 for things like recipes. Not sure if that's the case for SOs, but I was confused when my level 21 character couldn't find any common recipes, until I changed the level to 20.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
well, apparently you can do it with 'custom' characters, but based on the recent buffs to custom characters, it looks like that minion you have in the center of the group is going to slaughter the entire lowbie team.

(Yes, my defender yesterday got two-shot by a 'custom' +0 minion.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, ran into that a lot on my own missions. No wonder everyone's afraid of this thing now.


[/ QUOTE ]

Authors need to exercise some care when designing custom mobs. It's hard to make mobs easy.

Generally, standard/standard minions with scrapper or blaster primary and secondary sets are fairly equivalent to minions that appear in the standard groups. But when you start using hard and extreme, and (paradoxically) tanker attack sets like Super Strength, Mace and Stone, you start running into problems with characters getting one- and two-shot.

The MA really needs an automatic calculation of difficulty based on the presence of EBs, AVs and bosses, and the sets/levels chosen for the mobs, number of ambushes, etc. Right now you have absolutely no idea how tough a mission is going to be, unless the author deigns to tell you in the description.

One thing that would really help players would be to get and use powers that stun and immobilize, and not just focus on damage and defense. If a mob is stunned or can't touch you, they're not going to do much damage. Especially at low levels, an immobilize is almost as good as a hold for the majority of standard mobs.

[ QUOTE ]
<ul type="square">[*]And finally there will be a forum thread called ‘Dev’s Choice: For Your Consideration’ where players can post arcs they think should be considered for Dev’s Choice. The two guidelines being, you can’t promote your own arc (that’ll likely happen in some other forum somewhere else) and you can’t disagree with anyone else’s suggestion (again, that’ll happen in some other thread).[/list]
[/ QUOTE ]

Not everyone comes to the forums. The best place for this sort of thing should be in the MA interface itself. I'd suggest the following changes for comments:

<ul type="square">[*]Have user comments on arcs attached to the arc itself in the MA, rather than sending a tell to the author. That way they won't get lost in the general spam, and they will persist past the current session.[*]Allow other users to see the user comments on arcs.[*]Allow the author to delete comments on the arc.[*]In the comment dialog have a flag that indicates the player thinks the arc should be considered for dev's choice.[/list]
When publishing an arc the following additional flags should be settable:

<ul type="square">[*]The arc is "ready for prime time", that is, it has been completely vetted by the author and is intended for general consumption. Ideally, that's what publishing an arc should mean. But that's not how it's playing out -- people have to publish an arc to allow other people to test it in their absence. Many authors also create arcs that are just tests to see how the publishing works, or arcs intended for their own use, or their SG's, etc.[*]The author wants the arc to be considered for Dev's Choice and gives explicit approval for it to taken as such. This would eliminate the need for trying to get hold of an author to make sure they actually want their arc to be taken.[/list]
Finally, the devs should prepare a "technical and mechanical" standards document for arcs that explicitly states the minimum standards for an arc to be considered for dev's choice. For example:

<ul type="square">[*]Properly phrased singular and plural forms for mission details must always be presented.[*]The presence of AVs must always be mentioned in the arc description, and in each mission introduction where they occur.[*]Any time limit must be mentioned in the mission introduction.[*]And so on....[/list]

[ QUOTE ]

By "broken" here, I only see people refering to the "unplayable" arcs. What about all of the arcs that are "broken" because the changes to powersets suddenly made their custom critters as assininely difficult to defeat as understanding what the hell has kept devs from hiring someone who knows something about "Usability studies and public relations" is to the common player.

[/ QUOTE ]

Two of my three published arcs no longer worked after the patch. One was easily fixed, but the other was very messed up. The Captured (Energy Field) change didn't work, and for some reason one of the allies simply refused to use the right animation even though it was set to the same value as all the other allies. Changing to a different animation worked, so it wasn't the toggle problem.

This is going to be a problem with every patch. Hundreds of arcs will be broken every time they make any change to anything used in MA missions. Unfortunately, the only way they can avoid this is to stop fixing things.

When it was just their missions they could do enough QA to make sure everything was okay. But with thousands of MA arcs that will be impossible. They cannot possibly test them all.

What they can do is make it more obvious what's going on. When you click PLAY on an invalid arc it looks like it works, but you don't actually start the arc. The system should tell the player that the arc is invalid, and then notify the author of the problem.

The invalidated arcs should then be "grayed out" or otherwise be made inactive.

[ QUOTE ]
I didnt mean from the launch of the game. I mean from where we are right now. Removing all the boss/comm farms and what other types of farms were out there, to go back to regular leveling, do they think that makes us want to play longer? I guess its kind of like if you semi HAD an "I Win" button, and you enjoyed, but then it is removed and you go back same ole grind.

[/ QUOTE ]

The reason is that the "same old grind" is all there is. If you make three level 50 characters in three days of play, what's really the point? You're spending all your time on the same MA map killing comm officers. You don't learn how to play the game, you don't learn any of the game's back story, you aren't participating in any of the seasonal events, you aren't participating in the wider community.

Nothing special happens when you reach level 50 (the epic ATs are just more of the same). You're just done with that character and time to start another one. If you don't like playing the game, then why play the game? What good does having yet another level 50 on the mantel do?

Players who instafifty on the same tedious maps are either selling PLing services to other people, in one form or another, or have no long-term commitment to the game and will leave when the novelty wears off.

If the devs were dead-set against PLing, they would have shut it down long ago. They're not stopping anyone from PLing or farming. They're just stopping obscene exploits.

You can find "boss farms" just standing around in the RWZ (spawns with two and three Rikti bosses abound by the saucer), Peregrine Island (pairs of Nemesis and CoT bosses are easy to find), and there's an infinite number of bosses in FBZ. You are free to farm those bosses to your heart's content and no one will complain.

The reason? They provide a challenge. They're not exploits. They have been tested and provide reasonable returns for the risk involved. The MA boss farms that give tons of XP but no real challenge? Those are exploits.

People say they like the feeling of wading into a mob and taking out tons of enemies at once. When these mobs are totally gimped, what does that prove? It's like being proud of being able to beat up first-graders.

The MA is a fabulous new addition to the game. If people are so bored with the standard content, why do they choose to play the same MA mission over and over that provides no challenge, instead of playing the hundreds of new MA missions that they've never seen before?

[ QUOTE ]
Its fine to earn xp in MA farm mishs, but the level gains should be for MA only.

Just like I can't earn real life experience from playing CoX, I shouldn't earn real game experience from Architect.
XP and level 50 used to have some value in the game. Lets bring that back. Shout out if you agree.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just because some players are abusing exploits to make fast levels doesn't invalidate MA.

MA is a really cool feature that is getting a bad name because some people are impatient, greedy and lazy.

[ QUOTE ]
I agree with OP and what others have stated as a good way of dealing with broadcast spam. I resubbed a few days ago to see what the commotion was about, and the AE spam in broadcast is HUGELY annoying. It drowns out CCs and ppl looking for sewer teams. Personally, if they don't do something about this soon I won't renew my subscription.

[/ QUOTE ]

One fix the devs could make would be to make any broadcasts from inside the AE building stay local to the AE building. They did something similar for /local chat in Pocket D.

The lag in Atlas could be fixed by further optimizing the way information is transmitted to the client. Currently the server seems to send data about other characters to your computer when you come within about 150 yards of them.

Since you can't see inside the AE building there's no reason to send data about characters in there to characters outside the building. Doing this would remove the huge "lag spike" you see when you approach the building when it's crowded.

The data wouldn't be sent until you actually entered the building.

Another way they could "fix" this would be to move the interior of the AE building to a location, say, 200 yards below the ground. This is where most building interiors are actually located. You can see this by selecting a team mate who's inside a building -- you'll see they're far below you. They've also played this trick with the "quiet" room in AE -- it's not really where you think it is, it's actually many yards below that.

They probably don't want to move the AE interior below ground because one of the nice things about AE is that the interior is actually where you would expect it to be -- you can look out the windows and see the zone around you.

So, to sum up:

* There is apparently no process and no well-defined criteria for getting Developer's Choice designation. It does not even include getting a lot of 5-star votes.

* The devs are stuck using the same haphazard searching methods that the rest of us use to find new arcs.

* It appears that additional arcs will be tagged DC when a dev has "spare time."

* In the three weeks since release two additional arcs have been added.

* The vast majority of arcs seem fall into one of these categories: 1) "tests" by people playing with MA, 2) farms, 3) incomplete arcs published so that other people can try them out, 4) arcs people make for themselves or their friends with no interest in becoming anything more. In short, many of the authors have no desire for their arcs even to be considered for DC status.

* A minority of arcs seem to be stories that people actually intend for other players to run for fun, and be considered for DC status.

My hope for the MA and the DC status was that it would be an alternate source of high-quality, non-repetitive content. This does not seem possible, because there's no way for the devs to find and evaluate such content. The problem is prolific writers will wind up unpublishing good content to make room for their new work. That means we'll lose their previous work.

To alleviate some of this, I suggest that one or two flags be added to arcs when they are published, which can be searched on along with the number of stars and DC status:

1) A "ready for prime time" flag. This arc is intended to be played by the general public. It is complete and debugged. It not a test version, a farm, or a player- or SG-specific arc.

2) A "submitted for dev's choice" flag. The author of this arc wants it to be considered for DC status and gives prior consent for it to be taken as is. The devs will only look at DCing arcs with this flag set.

Second, a set of technical and mechanical standards should be drawn up for arc authors based on common mistakes that the devs see. This would include things such as providing proper singular and plural text for goals, criteria for the mission's dialogs (such as mentioning team requirements for AVs), etc. It will help writers satisfy the currently unspoken criteria that the devs are looking for in new content. My guess is the devs already have a set of these standards for internal use that could be massaged for general publication.

Finally, the devs should appoint either an NCSoft emloyeee or "trusted representatives" in the fan base to look at arcs requesting DC status and recommend good ones to the devs.

This seems to be a limitation of MA.

The standard critters you included in a custom group will spawn in the mission or in the mobs surrounding a boss when you name that custom group. But when you specify an ally, captive or boss it seems to include only the custom critters in the group. The MA seems to insist that custom allies, captives and bosses be truly custom.

I have bugged this, as I want the group name to be custom but to use standard critters for bosses, much the way you do.

If there is a workaround, I'd sure like to know it!

They are different. For example, an AE Bronze recipe reward roll at 25-29 will never give you a Crushing Impact recipe because the range of that recipe is 30-50.

You get the recipe at your level, or the closest level possible to it. If at level 50 you roll on Bronze 30-34 and it picks Steadfast: KB protection, you'll get it at level 30.

[ QUOTE ]
The only problem with that is most of those suggestions require a fairly large amount of Dev effort (they have to build textures, geometry, etc... for the mall), and the devs just don't have anywhere near the kind of time to do it. I mean look at the past few issues (and the upcoming one!), it's clear that they haven't had anybody on zone (map!) construction duty for a long time now, and all of the art resources appear to be directed towards costumes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Developing new maps is expensive. The system already contains many square miles of fun and interesting maps that exist right now. I'm talking about all the exterior zones throughout the city and Rogue Isles.

You want a shopping mall? That little area in Faultline near the Skyway entrance where the trainer stands is a shopping mall. You want a nuclear power plant? There's one in Terra Volta. You need beaches and islands? There are lots in Talos and PI. Forests? Bloody Bay has tons of neat looking forest you can run around in. And who hasn't longed for a version of Atlas Park that isn't a smoking ruin and doesn't have an Arachnos flier?

There are already tons of maps that are just sections of existing zones which have been divvied up (the bank job maps, Statesman's TF locations, the Villain Eden mission, the Croatoa missions, etc.). This capability needs to be generalized.

I'd like the devs to figure out a way for us to demarcate a section of an existing outdoor zone and specify our own spawn points. This would give us an incredible amount of variety, for a relatively small investment.

I'd suggest they work on this before investing tons of money in new art.

[ QUOTE ]
In the accounting aspect, this is a good way to keep a constant flow of money via repurchases of codes and things like that.

Lets say that on average we have 5 new accounts a day, meaing we have 35 a week, at [u]20 bucks[u] a crack thats an additional [u]$1,820.00[u] in additional capital

[/ QUOTE ]

NCSoft is almost certainly not making any money off the spammers. They are almost certainly buying their accounts with stolen credit cards, which means that NCSoft is not getting a nickel, and most likely is losing money on each such account created.

That, or they're hacking the system somehow, in which case they're actively stealing services from NCSoft.

Either way they're a scourge. The only real way to stop them is to stop buying their services. If we all boycott the for-pay PLers and influence peddlers, they will dry up and blow away.

[ QUOTE ]
Funny thing is, I keep seeing the people on high levels toons wanting high level teams and staying in atlas...Am I the only one that see's a problem here? Move to founders or PI and eliminate all those low level broadcasts.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, you're not the only one to see the problem. But when I suggested that the system be changed to require players to start AE missions in level-appropriate zones, exactly the same way that you have to go to zones of your level to start Radio/Paper missions, I was roundly shouted down.

Having so much lag and obnoxious broadcasting going on in Atlas is not good for the game. New players will see that zoo and will think the whole game is like that. And that's not good for any of us.

I've done some additional experiments, and it looks like the system sends you data on other characters when you come within about 150 yards.

Does anyone recall the depth of store and other building interiors? My guess is that just beyond that threshold.