Smurch

This. And if you're still having trouble, there's whole threads of reviews available.

Comparatively small, perhaps, but by no means insignificant. 6% is a pretty big chunk of change for corporations. If NCSoft's earnings dropped by 6%, it'd hurt their stock price fairly significantly. That'd be a HUGE drop. It may account for the smallest share of earnings amongst their other titles, but it's still a very significant part of their earnings.

If you know the earnings from CoX, specifically, you can guesstimate the numbers pretty closely. I'm not sure if NCSoft offers that level of detail in their reports, but if so, you can come probably within a reasonable margin of error.

On the other hand, I've not really found many of the dev's choice arcs to be very good. I think there are much, much better arcs in the MA than most of the dev's choice. Granted, SOME dev's choice are really awesome, but that's been a minority for me. Maybe they should say WHICH dev approved an arc. This way if you find you like Positron's Picks, for example, you can filter for those, where if you're a BaB's Choice fan, you can focus in on those, and if you absolutely KNOW you can't stand anything chosen by <random dev here> then you can avoid those.

It seems to be par for the course for us, in particular, so yeah probably. But really this whole discussion kinda hinges on semantics. It's impossible to discuss rewards without costs, and to discuss costs without value. And it's impossible to define any of that without identifying what those things ARE.

I agree, provided we also add in the "immeasurable" rewards into that equation, things which don't have direct fungible analogs.

If you have a Surplus of time, time would have less VALUE. But that doesn't reduce the COST, just your willingness to pay it. You don't do both now, because time is scarce. Hence, for you, it's value has increased. Therefore the cost associated with doorsitting is currently more than you're willing to pay. If you have a surplus of time, the value of time is lower, thus you'd be more willing to pay the cost.

Of course, this isn't even comparing the values of doorsitting and play, which we'd need to in your case, since that directly translates to your situation.

However, the cost is still there.

So, we've seen, in your case, an increase in the value of time and a decrease in the value of door-sitting, so the reason you don't door sit is because the value paid (cost) is no longer worth the value received (reward).

The cost is, however, still there.

It's really all just economics. You're making an economic decision, whether you realize it or not.

I don't know anyone with cancer. Therefore, people with cancer don't exist.

I don't see his motivation to lie in this case.

I do, however, see your motivation to want him to be a liar.

So this thread touched a sore spot with you to the point that you're taking things out of context and going "RAWR! FARMING GOOD!" without any concern for the actual subject at hand? Got it.

In this case, as long as they continue to pay up. If they stop, it's a problem for the game.

Your humanity is staggering.

No, there's definitely other psychological factors at work, ones which the temptation of farming plays right into. Since the OP started a whole thread on the topic, and went out of his way to express he's less than happy about it, I was attempting to offer him a compromise and I expressed my sympathies for him and people like him. In other words, I was trying to be both helpful and constructive. Both of which you are not being, and seem to take active offense at.

Again, you obviously haven't read the whole thread, nor the OP. The OP *was* a good customer for years prior to the AE. He is now convinced that the rewards from farming are so good it's the only way he can make any infamy now and he can't go back to not farming without losing those, but he find farming boring.

My suggestion, which you'd know had you bothered to read the entire thread, was that he should try running non-farm AE story arcs. He can still earn the tickets he's grown to love earning, but he may have more fun than what he described as a "boring" option that he saw as the only one.

I presume you don't have a problem with that? Or do you?

See, that's exactly my point! You're unwilling to pay the cost for the "free" rewards: giving up your time. In your case the "free" rewards have a cost attached of taking away the limited time you have to log in and play. Hence they're not "free" at all! If it wasn't costing you anything, then by your own argument, you'd be doing it.

The only truly free rewards are those that random players will just hand you as they're running by as a nice gesture. All others have a cost attached somewhere.

But that's exactly what this thread is about. If you're not interested in discussing THIS PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCE... why are you posting here? Because everything being said here is being said in the context of the OP.

You knew that right?

You know, it's funny because that's the exact point I made two pages back!

So... what are we arguing about again? Is it that I feel sorry for the OP and people like him and you basically don't? I'm ok with that. I still feel sorry for them, and no one is asking you to.

It's a complicated question. Not so much "who" as "what".

Um... the OP?
You know... the guy who started this thread?

or are you saying he's a liar?

You HAVE been reading the whole thread and thus actually understand the context of this discussion, right? I mean you're not just popping in here with a knee-jerk reaction to what you perceive as anti-farming, are you? ARE YOU?

Really? Then you haven't played very many MMOs nor met very many players. There's a big, big problem with people doing exactly that, enough of them that a whole new term has popped up for it called "MMO Addiction". If you see what those people say they all have similar stories, how they had to grind, how they felt obligated to make <currency> for their guild/group, how they needed to get the next bit of kewl lewt. There's a very meaningful number of these people. Some have gone so far as to call their numbers epidemic, but I think that's alarmist.

I agree!

However, there are some people who are obviously doing just that. The OP says he's become a farmer, and he finds it boring, but he can't stop because he's addicted to earning tickets and infamy. I am willing to take him at his word on all those points, and I feel sorry for him that he feels that he has to play the game in a way he doesn't enjoy when, if he were to just relax a little, he could easily earn those same rewards and actually have fun too!

You missed the point. People who turn MMOs into grinding jobs (and there's ALOT of them out there, whether you've met any or not). That leads to burn out, burn out leads to them leaving the game. How is that good for anyone?

And before you say "that doesn't happen!" just go through the boards here. I've seen more than a few "I'm leaving, I'm getting burned out" threads... and that's just from the small population that reads the forums. I'm sure there are plenty of others who've done it.

Hell, I was one of them several years back. I left the game for a year because I got bored with it (not for the same reason, though). People getting burned out and leaving isn't good for anyone, certainly not for the bean counters! And people doing something they find boring because they feel that they can't be successful at the game in any other way is a surefire recipe for burn out.

Door Sitting doesn't give "free" rewards. It gives rewards at a cost of time and, as you note, boredom. For many people, time is a precious commodity. You have noted that you, yourself, are not willing to pay the "cost" for those "free" rewards. I think most people are much the same. However, there's a conspicuous segment of the population who are willing. That doesn't make them "most" people unless we're being myopic.

If most people were just after free rewards, Progress Quest would have eclipsed WoW by now.

You're neglecting (for lack of a better term) intangible rewards, which you kind of hit on right there yourself. Perhaps Immeasurable Rewards should be a better terms since, technically, all rewards in the game are intangible. But I digress.

When you said "a sense of accomplishment", that is, itself, a reward.
There's quite a number of these kinds of rewards. One of the examples you used before, Challenge Missions, aren't usually about the phat lewt or the XP or any other in-game reward.

Until the human element is added in, any theorycrafting is simply just numbers. Where the rubber meets the road is in the mind and imagination of the players actually in the game, and that's where theorycraft usually breaks, because it presumes that the "tangible" or fungible rewards are, in fact, the universal and singular goal of all players. Which is rarely the case. Most players have a variety of goals.

More Redside Love!

Go Red!

Woo!

THIS THREAD, if you would read what the OP wrote, is by someone who FINDS FARMING BORING but feels he has to farm the AE to get tickets. He's hooked on getting tickets and infamy and feels like if he doesn't farm he can't get those things, EVEN THOUGH he's doing something that, IN HIS OWN WORDS he finds boring.

Are you telling me that IN THIS CASE, that is the relevant discussion AT HAND that the OP is actually having fun, and I'm just an ebil non-farmer pooping all over his playstyle? Because if so, I'd have to call attention to the possibility that your objectivity might just be suspect.

That's well and good, but it's all the people who say "yeah it's boring, but the <xp, tickets, infamy, influence, merits> are so good that I just feel like I have to do it!" that I feel bad for. They're not enjoying the game. They're bored (by their own account), but feel like they "have to" do certain things to get certain rewards. They've turned the game into a second job. That can't be good for them or the game.

If you're resetting the same mission and running it over and over without completing it, it's farming.

It's when people say "yeah it's boring... BUT MUST GET MOAR TICKETS" that I really feel bad for them. They're driven to get some imaginary currency so much that they'll willingly spend hours doing something they ADMIT is boring them... and they do this on liesure time. That's sad.

Now you're being deliberately obtuse.

Specifically, it's repetition of the same exact thing for rewards.

As long as it's actual repetition of content. Running a dozen different paper missions in a row isn't the same as running the same mission over and over.

I think now you're talking about power-leveling.

So little impact, in fact, that you had to go out of your way to point out how little impact it is. Because it's just that non-existent that it needs to be pointed out. How much it isn't there.

It's honestly how I feel. I'm sorry if that makes you feel condescended to.

I know thats what you view it as, but that's not what the term originated to describe. Much like a real world farmer, who sows a field, harvests the field, and then sows the same field again, an MMO farmer gets a mission, kills everything in the mission, then resets the whole mission to "harvest" it again. That's WHY it's called farming, because it's conceptually similar in focus to real world farming.

That's just crazy talk. I've done the ITF two or three times with the same character, not because I was farming it, but because I just enjoyed doing it. Much like watching a movie more than once. I didn't run it back to back (ran it a couple of weeks apart each time), nor was I doing it for the rewards. I only cared about enjoying it.

That's not farming.

That's simply not correct (and I don't... I've never found any AE missions I like that much).

Also not true. You could be arguably GRINDING, but that's not quite the same thing as Farming.

Running the SAME paper mission over and over without ever completing, but rather exiting and resetting, it IS farming. Running a series of random paper missions is NOT farming.

Words Mean Things independent if you agree or are aware of their proper meanings. We don't just get to form an opinion about the meanings of words.

FCC regulations are set according to "Community Standards". So it's still just the ignorant puritans.

Not necessarily. Revenues for Going Rogue box sales are likely to be 4-6 months out after the sales actually happen (this is typical). Revenues from subscriptions are not likely to be accounted for until 3 months after launch. Going Rogue release for the end of the year (near the end of Q4) would be a scenario that would probably not yield any appreciable income increase for this year. Expected returns would be seen in the first two quarters of 2010.

This is a much bigger problem blueside, which is yet another reason CoV is the better game experience. As if it needed it.

Go Red!

I always see it as "Serious Beans".

Yes, because it's very similar to the cheat codes in CoX.

No, REAL winners avoid a good point made by someone else by attacking that person instead.

I'd tell you what that's called, but you'd get upset because you'd think I heard it in "debate class" (I've never taken a debate class... I haven't even been in a classroom in almost 20 years).

I'd be surprised if it wasn't, given the large number of references in the game already.