dombegone_

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.....WHA???

Get a grip , dude. Perma 42 is ALOT better xp. Since when did using the "no xp" feature turn into an "exploit"?Last I read its "working as intended". You all are sooooooooo funny!!

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Everything is quickly getting labeled as an exploit. Another thread has controlling mobs deemed an exploit now.

This is beyond ridiculous now. The devs have created one heck of a mess. As the head of the maids union I keep telling them "we need more lemon pledge" and Posi has told me a I'm supposed to bring that from home.

I like to stick aim in this chain:
FR>aim>rain of fire>fireball>firebreath/or st attacks.

Is it needed? nothing is really needed in this game. It makes that aoe alpha chain hit harder, which for me is reason enough to take it. Tohit buffs also accept some very nice io sets.

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Expected them to not be there yet. Infact, I think he said as much when first discussing it.

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...so what IS on test right now?

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Issue 15? Castle never stated that dom-buffs were going into i15, and I think he specifically said it would probably be up for testing shortly after it went live.

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which is actually better for doms. If the changes suck or aren't up to snuff, or are too good they won't get jammed through with the rest of the flow of i15 going live.

Plus they will be able to listen more attentively than with the rest of the i15 noise.

Hopefully it works out very well for doms.

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Why do we even have an official powerlevelling thread?

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First I've heard about it. I have some thoughts on Pl'ing, can you direct me to it so I can weigh in on it?

you'll see. MA was just one battle, a small skirmish in the war.

It used to be pvp'ers that were the source of all evil in the game. The devs took that opinion to heart and ran them all out of the game.

Now it is the farmers that are the source of all evil and the devs are making a stand against them.

The farmers know that to kill them they need to drastically alter the game. Which, unlike the pvpers they were able to kill by changing all the rules in their confined zones and dropping a chemical weapon in there. It has no impact on pve.

The war against farmers will be long and bloody. There will be many casualties and the collateral damage will be extensive.

great work. I was under the impression that the damage buff was mostly to fix the issue with early leveling (that apparentl exists). Interesting to see it will have a pretty small impact.

Now I'm less sure of what the damage buff is really supposed to address other than the dislike of the jekyl and hyde feel. Which as I understand was the original desing of the AT.

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I even started working an arc that was ment to train stalkers but I got it on hold until I see where they are going with this ticket cap thing.

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That was you? Interesting. Granted, I was an idiot and tested it out with a Blaster (and died promptly) but when I get some time I'll have to test it the right way.

[/ QUOTE ]Its no longer up due to the whole if you make a farm you get banned thing. The initial version was an all boss mission. When I redo it, its going to be so far from a farm that people wont have any reason to think of reporting it.

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I wouldn't get my hopes up on that, ER. Folks are apparently calling all AV maps farms since a properly built team can tear through them in no time for truly ridiculous rewards.

[/ QUOTE ]The thing is I will be building the mission off using the most nastiest critters possible in terms of what they can do to players, these are typically the targets you want dead first. But when the entire faction consists of nothing but said critters there is no way anyone is gonna consider it a farm unless they are crazy. Besides its going to scale with level too from lvl 20 all the way to lvl 50 if I can squeeze it 5 missions. Thats kind of what I am wanting to do but its going to all be based on what they set the ticket cap to in i15.

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Just be careful, if someone builds a team that can crush it then it is an exploit... maybe...we don't know...

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I'm not saying I am in favor of you getting your account banned. I'm only saying that from what I've seen you had to be going pedal to the metal to get a character deleted, so I can only infer you had to be in full-frenzy mass PL mode to get your account banned. If you weren't farming that map heavily then I'd say you have good grounds to appeal the punishment and get it overturned.

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So, if someone created a character and sped their way to 50 through normal content, say Task Forces, and got from 1 to 50 in say 12 hours, wouldn't that be pedal to the metal? Should those characters also get deleted?

This is the underlying problem with that rationale.

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Exactly. If your SOLE metric is time... then you're simply trying to cover bad game design. You create something that specifically allows your players to do things you don't want them to, (level quicly) and instead of making changes to your product, you put some threat to those that might use your product to it's fullest and retroactively ban accounts for doing just that.

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Sadly enough, no matter how often I try to explain this point to people, they simply assume I am a dirty exploiting PLer who did it.

Me and my whole army of 8 50s over 5 years. Where I have seen average leveling time through normal solo play on the lowest difficulty drop from 600 hours to 175.

The devs have made leveling easier and now are complaining people are doing it too fast. It boggles my mind.

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Just have to point out.... as you noted with your 50's none of them even came close to the leveling speed you proposed in your example.

So based on your experience with the game, if you were leveling this theoretical character and you reached Level 40 in 6 hours or something, wouldn't you, looking at what the range of normal leveling speeds you have had previously think that it was odd you were able to do it at less than 1/10th of your previous fastest?

I mean, I believe that Tribal wants a challange. But his experience with game and his knowledge of its mechanics makes it hard to believe that the leveling speed of the characters is question wasn't well outside the range of his normal experience.

I just don't see how someone can level eight 50's and have the quickest one come in at 175 hours, and then would even have to wonder if leveling to 50 in 12 hours was abnormal. I could see it if you said, 50 in 100 hours, but a 50 in 12 hours would seem to fall so far outside what could be considered normal through previous experience and just plain common sense, that it is hard to believe that someone would think, "oh I guess they just decided to make leveling completely trivial in this patch."

While they have made it easier to level, the idea that the intent of MA was to make it even easier by a factor of 10 just doesn't ring true. Especially since the "we don't want people farming it" was already out there before release. Add it up and the case for "I didn't know that was too fast" seems kind of weak.

IMO.

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You misread what he said.
"Where I have seen average leveling time through normal solo play on the lowest difficulty drop from 600 hours to 175."

He's seen a reduction in leveling speed of ~3.5x over the years while solo'ing on heroic (due to game changes)

We all know teaming is significantly faster than solo, as it playing on harder difficulty. A decent team can probably best a solo heroic rate by 5x, which brings the expected time down around 35 hrs. And that is before factoring in such leveling speed boosters like farming, or mentoring.

There is a reason why he isn't surprised by ~12hrs. That reason is because it isn't earth shattering. People have been doing it in ~20hrs for years and now that we can fight much harder groups of enemies (higher risk) the reward is expectantly higher.

He noted that over time the devs have continually sped up leveling speed by a pretty large degree, but then they turn around and seem to be using that as the sole metric in determining abuse.

That seems a bit weird.

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Let's not fool ourselves here, it's not about rules or ethics. It's about people leveling too fast in a MMO that, like many other games in the same genre, bases its business model on a certain number of hours needed to reach max level.


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Yes and if that is actually the case, they need to state that and implement code in the game to make it impossible to "Level to Fast" and be done with it. The whole business about moral compasses and you know it when you see it has been little more than insults.

What truly kills me is banning people so they don't burnout.

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I'm a bit confused lately due to a lot of people supporting the notion that stating the intended rate would cause people to skirt it by millimeters.

Like by implementing an xp rate limiter or at least stating it somehow equates to no longer being able to stop exploits.

All it would do is prevent exploits (when they pop up) from damaging the system to such a large extent. No one is preventing them from repairing the errors.

If they really don't want me to hit 50 in less than 25 hrs then make it so. If I start trying to achieve that via exploits putting the xp limiter in place in no way whatsoever prevents them from fixing the exploit.

xp limit =! unable to fix exploits

Posting the speed limit doesn't prevent non-street legal vehicles from being pulled over, nor does it prevent reckless drivers from being stopped either.

So what if someone skirts the xp limit by a little bit to stay under rader. If they are doing it legitimately then perfect. If they are using exploits they still have the ability to stop that.

Weird logic the devs use imo and yet so few ever bother to question it.

I dont' want an xp rate limit, but at this point it sort of seems like the much lesser of two evils.

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OR they could fix the exploits and THEIR mistakes and not just say why fix these fast there is an xp limiter and if a player goes over that they get banned.

Damn i wish my sub wasnt paid up till sept

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About as good a chance of that happening as me getting diarrhea and crapping out liquid gold.

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dombegone_:

They don't give "bonus xp" that I know of. They do give good xp... because, as you said, they're rediculously difficult. AV's give even better xp, because they're even more difficlut. A team of 6 properly built Fire/Rads can decimate an AV in about 5 seconds. Literally.

Of course, characters level quickly in that situation. That, in my mind, was besides the point. The point was, in my mind, that "I'm not using any 'exploits'. I'm doing something challenging". I'm left to assume (since no one at the company will get back with me) that even though there were no exploits and it was difficult, challenging, and fun for me and mine, that I'd "cheated".

And as a side point... I did not get a 50 in 1 or 2 hours like those using actual exploits. It WAS quickly, but again, in my mind that was besides the point since I wasn't using "exploits". The two 50's I got over the 2-4 weeks that it was up, was for PvP. I've been here years and have enough PvE 50s. I play my 50's almost exclusively at this point. But none of that info should even be pertinent.

The point is that I wasn't using any "game exploits". I used the tools provided, made a very difficult mission, and came up with a way to overcome that challenge using a lot of skill with friends, only for them to come back and without further clarification, tell me, you were cheating... banned!

I know some of you, like a poster back a bit, that think there is "another shoe"... but there isn't.




Back on subject though... G'luck with your endevour Smurpy. It's been fun teaming with you and your's when I did.

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by bonus, I just meant higher than a normal boss.

I certainly don't think you were exploiting, but the only explainable reason I can come up with is that:

You made a very effective and efficient team that tackled content that when done at a very fast rate rewards xp faster than their secret speed limit.

It is retarded that it has come down to this but: If you are a good player and you min/max I'd avoid running missions in MA altogether. If you do decide to go there I'd go out and kill a generic mob and record the xp (ie council?) if the mob you are fighting in MA rewards more xp and you then combine it with a powergamer mentality you might be stepping in to a speed trap.

The devs are hiding in the bushes and giving out speeding tickets for people driving too fast on a hwy with no posted speed limit.

They should update their stance on MA from "not intended to be farmed" to "not intended for fast players".

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This thread has SO run its course....is there a way to ignore a thread?

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Actually it just seems to be heating up with new hot and dirty gossip.

To address your question though; do you really need someone to point out the obvious answer? Really?

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No, silly, it was a rhetorical question meant to get people to examine themselves, not turn their flamethrowers on me.

PS - This post is doing the same thing! *hint hint*

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Sorry, I missed your rhetoric, just as you missed the new developments in this thread.

Bah was going to give you a tongue lashing, but you seem friendly and everyone is already on edge, so lets just settle this by saying:

People that level pact are ebil exploiters as are people that team. Or at least that's what I've gleaned from the dev's recent actions.

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This thread has SO run its course....is there a way to ignore a thread?

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Actually it just seems to be heating up with new hot and dirty gossip.

To address your question though; do you really need someone to point out the obvious answer? Really?

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I did not have easy mobs that gave higher than normal xp. I did not have any NPC allies in the mission, much less ones that simply followed and buffed. I did not have object that blew up and killed everything while giving me xp. I did not use "the easiest mobs I could find. I didn't use any of the "PL'ers tricks". I made a map with the toughest bosses I could find.

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Did you make it using Bosses exclusively? A map filled with multiples of exactly one custom Boss enemy can afford less challenge than one with a mix of Minions and Lieutenants possessing varying attack and support powers, while at the same time providing greater payoff due to the MA's totally-inflexible-and-often-wrong one-size-fits-all XP/ticket reward scheme. Someone may have believed you arranged your mission the way you did for precisely this reason.

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No custom bosses. I used Fake Nems. I challenge you to take on a spawn of 8 fake nems. Heck, synapse made just such a challenge mission in beta!

As soon as you engage them... they bubble each other AND put up dispersion bubble effectively capping their defense. Someone earlier said luet might be harder (due to vengance) but capped defense is capped defense. It doesn't matter where they get it. Add to it, that once they're low on health (and they all have lots of health) they go into PFF and can't be touched. Add to it some more that they have a HARD hitting AOE ranged attack.

Seriously... try it. A spawn of all (8) Fake Nemesis bosses is about as hard as you can get short of AV/EB spawns.

Again, these are mobs you find in game, and Synapse even made a challenge mission using these guys.

That's it... there were NO other factors. Nothing to help us out... nothing exploitive. Just spawns of litterally the hardest non-AV/EB mobs in the game (maybe all Master Illusionists would compare)... and because we were able to do it quickly... BAM! Accounts banned!

Add to it one final thing... that NO ONE will respond to me as to HOW this is exploitive, and perhaps you'll begin to realize why my accounts have been cancelled and I'll be leaving the game when the time runs out on them and several of my friends in game have also cancelled in the wake of this.

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I was thinking more about this and I know why you were banned.

Fake nems give bonus xp due to them being ridiculously powerful and a pita for most AT's when they get low on health.

If you were running the map with some decent control (ie perma dom or 2) you could easily negate their phase powers. At which point you obviously were exceeding the hidden speed limit.

Anything that grants bonus xp is basically a trap because a min/max will likely exceed the hidden speed limit off of it. Their main criteria seems to be xp rate.

That's about the only reason I can come up with. Basically joo broke teh truce and are banned.

I have a hard time saying anything other than building a good team = exploiting the game. Evidently anyway.

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I heard that Posi isn't happy that a blaster can soft cap ranged defense. (This may or may not be true, it's forum hearsay.) But as long as that remains expensive/difficult/uncommon, he has bigger fish to fry. There will always be hyper-optimized teams out there doing tasks in one tenth the time of average teams. The key is not that that exists, but what percentage of the total it is.


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Lets hope he never gets around to it. Because it would kill the game and he would just dig in his heals while people tried to tell him he was wrong.

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I'm confident that Castle (and maybe Posi) would love to slap pvp diminished returns onto the pve game. Squishies cap out at 20% def and just shy of 40% res.

I love all the morality police that took up the chant "you know it when you see it" and damnified countless players and their actions.

Apparently the people working for the company and being given direction by the dev team don't even know it when they see it.

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The new software in I13 Beta wasn't properly set up with all the bells and whistle that it could and should have, so, to the end user, it looked bad.

Apparently, as they migrated other NCSoft forums to the new one, there were some problems. And all this happened during NC West corporate shake-up, and guess who's responsible for maintaining the forum servers? Corporate.

I'm guessing they're waiting for a real web manager to be hired at NCWest who can handle the migration and and set up of the new forums.

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They should have just pushed it through full of bugs and broken to all hell with the rest of i14

Just kidding, but seriously.

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I have yet to hear of anyone receiving any kind of warning or punishment for ticket farming, for example.

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If no one bothered to shout out how would we know ?

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People would know. Bans ARE something you know when you see it.

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Let's not fool ourselves here, it's not about rules or ethics. It's about people leveling too fast in a MMO that, like many other games in the same genre, bases its business model on a certain number of hours needed to reach max level.


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Yes and if that is actually the case, they need to state that and implement code in the game to make it impossible to "Level to Fast" and be done with it. The whole business about moral compasses and you know it when you see it has been little more than insults.

What truly kills me is banning people so they don't burnout.

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I'm a bit confused lately due to a lot of people supporting the notion that stating the intended rate would cause people to skirt it by millimeters.

Like by implementing an xp rate limiter or at least stating it somehow equates to no longer being able to stop exploits.

All it would do is prevent exploits (when they pop up) from damaging the system to such a large extent. No one is preventing them from repairing the errors.

If they really don't want me to hit 50 in less than 25 hrs then make it so. If I start trying to achieve that via exploits putting the xp limiter in place in no way whatsoever prevents them from fixing the exploit.

xp limit =! unable to fix exploits

Posting the speed limit doesn't prevent non-street legal vehicles from being pulled over, nor does it prevent reckless drivers from being stopped either.

So what if someone skirts the xp limit by a little bit to stay under rader. If they are doing it legitimately then perfect. If they are using exploits they still have the ability to stop that.

Weird logic the devs use imo and yet so few ever bother to question it.

I dont' want an xp rate limit, but at this point it sort of seems like the much lesser of two evils.

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It's not theft, you don't own anything in the game. You pay NCsoft for the privelege of using it, and the EULA means they have the right to do whatever they want with what you make.

The in-game moderators made some mistakes. Big deal. People make mistakes, they can be rectified. Positron didn't manually delete every character, some people got caught in datamining oversights, and should be able to petition support to have it rectified.

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Proly won't get those 3 days back, or even an apology, or any kind of compensation like a free character slot to offset the ill-will generated.

Then again I have no idea how CS is handling their business so maybe they are.

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I want challenge. I want difficulty. I want to fight the hardest and most ridiculous mission possible. I want all the forces of City of Heroes allied against and then I want to take my army and steam roll them in ludicrous fashion. I don't want to exploit. I want to use intelligence, skill, talent, planning coordination and a love for all things that consist of outrageous fast paced explosive action

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Careful Smurphy. I had two accounts banned for exactly this. I made a mission with the hardest possible bosses... and was able to do it.

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Owch, that's not grounds for banning IMO :-/

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Sure it is. It's in the EULA that they can do whatever they want whenever they want.

They can ban you if they don't like how you spell your name.

Sounds like they've decided to start utilizing such arbitrary rulings . Pretty dumb thing to do, but hey there has been a lot of dumb things being done as of late, so why stop now.

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I've wanted more for redsiders ever since it came out, still waiting on Trial Zones, still waiting on additional endgame Villain only content like the Shadow Shards are for Blueside, I'll just assume that Villain Trial Zones are on the famed ToDo list.

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Except, possibly, for the shard, Trial Zones are on the "DO NOT DO" list.

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Hopefully they don't waste time on a vill side Shard. All 4 people/day that use the blueside one and all.

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Yes, because you are really Playing Mission architect to play the stories.

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No, I'm not.

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BillZBubba, you're missing the point of Mission Architect if this would make you want to quit...

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The point of the mission architect is to allow me the ability to create the content that the devs don't put into the game.

Missions that actually challenge the characters that the current build system allows for. Missions with 12 different types of bosses from 12 different factions and nothing else.

Missions with 25 ambushes of nothing but huge spawns of multi-faction LTs.

YOU may wish to see it as nothing but a story telling tool, and that's your right. It's also my right to use to to create content that my main characters won't be bored to tears with.

Or are you in the camp that thinks I should remove all my enhancements if I need a challenge?

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Clearly you aren't using MA the way the dev's intended. They have taken considerable action to make it abundantly clear that they want MA used for stories and stories only.

Your playstyle might not get axed, but if/when it does don't be too surprised. I'll feel bad for you because that is mostly how I used MA too.

The argument that MA is a tool to create what we want to play has been falling on deaf ears. They want it to be a tool to create stories. But only stories that fall in to their specific set of criteria.

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I realize that you really can go wrong with any power combinations in this game.
I've recently came up with an idea for a new toon and feel like Energy Melee/Fire Armor brute would best fit it.

My playstye is mostly solo and the concept is a single target toon.
I know fire armor relies on its heal for some of its surviablilty and I'm ok with that.
I suspect ( but dont know ) that large scale alpha strikes could he hard on Fire Armor.

So what I'm really looking for I guess is just some opinions on the two and how they fit together.

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If it is a concept toon then go for it.

if you are just trying to pick good st damage with fire armor I'd pick a different primary than EM.

YES em is still near the top for st damage, but the top two attacks take 6 seconds to go through. The result is a lot of corpseblasting in teams and solo you may find that vs bosses or other tough groups you faceplant because while said attacks are animating you are locked out of healing flames.

I deleted my em/fire after the changes to EM. The toon was a fast st destroyer with very limited protection. The em changes gutted the feel and play of the toon. I also deleted my em/regen stalker, but that is because it became a toon with 3 3 second attacks (AS, ET, TF) and felt like molasses.

Unless you are absolutely set on EM then Stone melee is much better in practically every way shape and form. I'd go dark melee over EM for st toon as well.

If you are set on EM I'd make sure that aside from getting your rech and hp up nice and high you get your melee def to 25%+ through IO's and powers. It doesn't matter how fast healing flames is up if you can't use it due to be locked into one of the 5 day long animations of EM, so much better to just avoid the damage in the first place.

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so there is no end-game, is that what I'm hearing.

Is there no epic battle between the heroes and the villains?

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There is very limited end-game, but it is about 10x more than a few issues ago. 50's aren't dead in the water anymore like they used to be, which imo is attributed almost entirely to them adding gear to the game rather than the limited raiding/end game instances that exist.

There is cheezy epic battles between heroes and villains. If you mean player vs player they made the system very undesirable and unfun in i13. The rebalanced for epic battle between hero and villain rather than heroeS and villainS. Sadly the rebalanced failed anyway lol. Unless you are hellbent on making pvp work for you I'd just avoid it. (I used to pvp about 90% of my time in this game).

There is some limited pve epic battles between heroes and villains found in the late game TFs. I say they are cheezy because they are usually extremely easy to the point where most random pugs can successfully complete them.

There are a couple end game raids like hami and mother ship. Hami isn't very popular though, or particularly fun and enthralling. Mother ship is pretty neat.