firespray

I'm with fury, why do it if it's not needed? There's plenty of changes that ARE needed, so why waste time on this one?

/signed

This is definitely needed.

Did anyone else just mapserve and then was not allowed back in. I managed to get to the server screen once and saw everything was now green, when freedom had been yellow when I logged in. Anyone know what's going on?

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I wonder if Epic ATs would be able to switch sides.

Warshades being villains, peacebringers being villains?
And the Arachnos EATs going rogue.

My Warshade is one who must switch sides.

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Seeing as how warshades are already evil nictus who became good, that would be a lot of side-switching for them.

Actually, that brings to mind something else. Can we switch sides more than once? Can we start as a hero, become a villain for awhile, and finish up as a hero?

In any case, this sounds freakin' awesome and I can't wait.

You would have to have the xp rate cap averaged over a pretty long time-span or the cap would have to be so high it wouldn't mean anything. Averaging it over 60 seconds wouldn't be nearly long enough. It would probably have to be like 10 minutes or more.

I think my biggest argument against this, is that it would basically be wasted effort by the devs. Sure, it would prevent people from abusing exploits, but they'd still have to spend the time to remove those exploits. So all the time that went into adding the xp rate cap would be meaningless. That coupled with the feeling that it would be too much control or "big brother" by the devs makes me really dislike the idea.

Absolutely not. I feel like the vet rewards are getting a little too close to a line of being too powerful already with the 60 month reward. This would be WAY over that line.

I'm not against this, but I'd rather see full side-switching so that we could play any AT on either side.

There are lots of good reasons NOT to implement this game, and I haven't heard any good reasons why it SHOULD be implemented, so /unsigned for me.

Female Brutes have chest hair!

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I think removing the exploits is a better solution, that way people can level as fast as they want, and know they won't get banhammered for doing it.

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The way an exploit is dealt with is via experience reduction (if it wasn't intentional) or banning (if it was). Unless you mean, "remove the exploit before anyone uses it," in which case you're asking for perfect or precognitive developers.

You yourself point out that none of those methods level at speeds defined 'exploitative.' Clearly having a high cap would not be irrelevant. Especially if it's done as an asymptotic cap or quadratic reduction.

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Your first statement is not necessarily true. The ability to create all boss mobs with no ranged or armor powers has not been banned or had it's xp reduced. They just added ranged powers to them.

And for the second comment. If this were added at some really high rate (say whatever xp rate would be needed to get you from 1-50 in ten hours), I can't see it ever coming into play. I don't see the devs leaving what they see as exploits in the game just because people can't use them to level really fast. Try to remember that they weren't just exploiting them for xp either. They wanted to stop people from farming tickets so fast as well. If they're going to remove the exploits anyway, that super-high xp rate cap IS irrelevant.

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I never said farming or powerlevelling were the issue.

When Posi says "risk," you need to read it as "time." Because it's not like you're at risk of losing a finger or something -- what you're at risk for is getting delayed or slowed down.

So
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...people can level super-quickly without using an exploit...

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is kind of an oxymoron. How could a character possibly level super-quickly unless either a) they were substantially more powerful than the game was designed to accomodate (which means minimal or no risk inherent in their activities) or b) they were recieving rewards far out of scale with the toughness of the things they were defeating (again, no or minimal risk)?

This question isn't rhetorical.

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I can think of 2 or 3 reasons it could happen.

1. If you're part of a superteam. Some superteams in the past have leveled to 50 ridiculously fast (not the 4 hours fast of the AE days, but still a remarkably short length of time). It's not that any 1 team member is overpowered, or they're exploiting anything. They just use stacked buffs/debuffs to let them take on things no normal team could and beat them quickly and efficiently.

2. Double xp weekend. Unless you're planning on changing your xp rate cap for 2xp weekend, that could throw things off. I took a toon from level 20-45 in about 10-12 hours of playtime last 2xp weekend, and there was no farming involved, just big teams and TFs.

3. Sugar-daddy'd toons. If you have the money to buy primo enhancements from level 10 on, you'll be a lot more powerful and level much quicker than the average toon. Some people don't like it, but there's no rules against doing it if that's what you like to do.

I consider an exploit taking advantage of unintended bugs or behavior in the game mechanics to give yourself an unfair edge. None of those scenarios do so, but all 3 of them can lead to much faster leveling than average, sometimes almost ridiculously fast.

An xp rate cap would hurt people who are legitimately leveling quickly unless you made it so high that it's irrelevant. I think removing the exploits is a better solution, that way people can level as fast as they want, and know they won't get banhammered for doing it.

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This is just another example of a solution that's only curing the symptoms, and not the disease. The real problem is that we were given the tools to make exploitable content. Remove those tools, and you don't have to do anything else.

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Er... huh?

The problem isn't that people can do whatever they want in MA. I mean, that's really the goal of the system. If I wanted to make a mission full of ridiculously easy enemies with lots of HP for some reason, I should be able to do that without it leading to an exploit. Ditto for a mission full of Comm officers or whatever the next exploit people stumble upon for the system is (and it's already on its way).

What you suggest really is addressing the symptom (that MArc specifically currently allows leveling at a rate fast enough that it destroys the statistical balance of the game), rather than the disease (the statistical balance of the game can be overcome). All future possible exploits would be addressed by introducing an xp rate cap, curing it with finality.

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I disagree with this. Clearly, farming itself is not the issue. People were farming and powerleveling off of dev created content for years, and the devs didn't take the extreme measures that they're taking against the MA farms. Positron came right out and said that the problem is that people were using exploits to disregard the time vs. reward ratio in the game. If people can level super-quickly without using an exploit, then it's not an issue. So, if you remove the ability to create exploitable content, you remove the problem.

If it's doable, that would be really cool to be able to get all that information on the character load screen.

The run speed boost is part of the power. If you don't want it, then ask whoever's using SB not to use it on you. Simple as that. I don't really think the devs need to spend time on adding a sliding run-speed cap. It's not necessarily a bad idea, it's just way, way down the list of important things the devs should spend time working on.

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Look as far as handling missions in AE that can be handled by deleting those that are obviously there for farming and PL'ing.

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That's pretty harsh and should always be a last reward. You're almost certain to lose a customer that way. But if you avoid it in the first place by having the cap in place you're better off.


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See, I disagree with this. I think putting an xp cap into place is more draconian and heavy handed than removing PL/Farm maps from the MA, especially since they told us ahead of time that it wasn't designed for that (deleting PL'd toons is another issue though). This is just another example of a solution that's only curing the symptoms, and not the disease. The real problem is that we were given the tools to make exploitable content. Remove those tools, and you don't have to do anything else.

I'm not a fan of the idea. I'd rather not have more things in the game based on the lowest (or highest) common denominator. There are better ways to curb farming if that's what the devs really want to do.

You're right, it's been suggested several times before. The basic response is that it's not going to get changed, because some people like it, so changing it would just leave the same situation. Some people would love the new animation, and some would dislike it and want it changed (back). So basically the work it took to change the animation would have 0 net effect on the amount of complaining done about the hasten animation.

I tried it out on my Asus 1000HA with an upgraded 2GB of ram. With the graphics settings on minimum, and in low-traffic areas, the performance was moderately acceptable for solo play. My biggest beef was that the screen resolution was too small. The power tray/nav bar/target bar/menu bar/chat bar etc. took up way too much room.

I didn't try using follow on it, but I tried standing everywhere I could to try to get to it. I'll give it another try using follow later on, maybe that'll fix it.

I was playing my Fire/SR scrapper and was looking for more AVs to solo. Someone recommended the Mender Silos task force, since it has tons in the last mission. I was happy, and got to add mako, scirocco, and ghost widow to my list. I was looking forward to adding Jade Spider too, but I found out as I started fighting it, that I can't reach the thing. I tried everything I could think of, including luring it to one of the oil platforms nearby, but even then, I couldn't reach the tiny part of it that you can actually hit. Every other really large creature can be hit from ground level (giant monsters for example), but unless you have flight, you can't engage Jade Spider in melee.

I'll add my name to the list of people running into this. I crash 2-3 times on an average night since I14 dropped. I'm running Vista 32-bit and nothing about my system has changed. Every other program I have works just fine, it's only CoH that has problems.

I vote no on this. Founders falls can be a pain if you're at the lower edge of the level range because of all the high-level snipers.

Just leave PvP alone and let it die with some dignity. The poor guy is in a coma and he's not coming out of it. Let's pull the plug and let him go, it'll be better for all of us in the long run.

Hm, I didn't consider the effect of the scaling ticket cap on the overflow badges. It wouldn't really break the badges though, it would just make them a little bit harder to get. And some of that could be mitigated if you made the ticket cap based on actual level instead of combat level, so you could keep your cap low by not leveling up if you were just trying to farm tickets for the badges.

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The MA isn't 'removing a vast majority of the population of players into farms.' The people farming now were the same people farming before the MA. They just had other ways of doing it. They can do it in a more condensed fashion now. The farmer population didn't grow, it just consolidated.

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I don't have any way of proving it, but my gut feeling says that this isn't the case. I think there are more people farming now, since it is a lot easier to do (there are tons more maps, and the auto-sk function means no searching for mentors). The ability to create all-melee custom critters, or mobs of nothing but comm officers makes for greater rewards in less time and with less risk as well. I think all this added together makes for more people farming than there ever were before. I certainly see more broadcast requests of people forming and looking for farms now in AP than I did before I14 in PI.

I agree that overall this could be bad for the game as a whole. I'll admit to running several AE farms to get some characters to IO levels, and I definitely got burnt out. I realize that it's my choice what I do in the game, and I'm not running farms anymore, since it took away the fun for me, but overall I think the OP is right and we could see a drop in subscribers as people get burnt out with too much farming and either leave or take breaks for the game.

I think most of the problems could be fixed without reducing xp or rewards as well. First off they could simply make it so that custom groups must have at least 1 minion, 1 LT, and 1 boss, so no more mobs of nothing but custom bosses or comm officers. Second, just make it so that custom enemy groups cannot have 2 of the same kinds of powersets. So they couldn't have 2 melee sets, or 2 buff sets, or 2 control sets. That would eliminate the masses of boss farms filled with custom bosses with 2 melee sets and no ranged attacks or defensive sets.