hedgehog_NA

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pvp's last night with new patch for 3 hours straight was a 4 on 6 us on the team of 4. got a total of 14 rep out of 3 hours of steady back and forth. No one on our team got a drop at all.

Unless I am mistaken with each rep kill all 4 of us on the team get a chance, for a chance to get a drop.

As in team mate "A" kills enemy "B" to trigger rep. this kill allows each of us on a team to get a chance for a dop. butr since we are on a team that chance is diluted between us all.

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I think the Developers will see that the drops need to be changed after a few days/weeks of virtually no drops now that this patch is live. I'd expect a patch/change at that point. It seems they would rather see the results of their most recent patch before correcting what appears to be very obvious mistakes to most forum posters.

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6 months to a year at the earliest. Or sometime after they fix the COP.

Griefing: you will know it when you see it lol

The game is being balanced with IO's in mind. Look at merit drop rates and realize the datamining they use to set those does not exclude fully IO'd purple toons.

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It seem to me that talk of adjusting the rewards is beside the point. What MA has really done is shown that a lot of the game content isn't actually fun for the players, at least not after the first couple of times.

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... but killing hamidon mitochondria that can't fight back is fun again and again and again?

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to some people, yes. to others, no. we dont all find the same things fun. I dont particularly like golf. others do. I'm not about to tell them they cant golf.

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Someone else's game of golf shouldn't prevent me from playing a game of baseball though.

The inflation alone from the rapid leveling and disposable income (without real money sinks) has prevented me from even thinking about getting into inventions seriously. I've poked around with bubbling on one of my old characters to see what it's all about, and from what I've seen, the rate that you can gain infamy/influence in bubbles compared to regular missions is ridiculously disproportionate.

Twinking would naturally contribute to this, much like it does in every MMO--however, the ability to earn crazy amounts of money through exploiting at early levels isn't often there like it is here. Bubbles are an exploit of the games mechanics, and it has a drastic effect on those who don't bubble themselves.

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Gasp, I am 1 man short of my 4 man golf team, better cancel your baseball game so we can force one of your players to fill in.

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You misunderstand the point.

The amazing amounts of MONEY people are making playing power golf is driving up the cost of sporting goods across the board... apparently because a good Louisville Slugger makes a great 3-wood and people are using baseball hats as sunshades.

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As people would quote over and over in days gone past. The market is player controlled. Things sell for what people sell them for. The devs dont set the price. If the devs want lower prices, up the drop rate. Much simpler than butchering the game to stop farming.

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Who says you HAVE to transfer EVERY character you have? Oops, there I go, telling you how you have to play. Sorry.

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Freedom's a horrible server anyhow. Its hardly a solution to tell people "omg, just leave the server you like to satusfy a gameplay type that the devs fail utterly at"

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If their server is the problem, perhaps they should leave was the advice in a nutshell, if it's not the server, then it's the person, unless there's a third party to blame (usually people will blame the devs :P)

-C.A.

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except in this case, the devs made a stupid change. So yes, blaming the devs is appropriate.

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The devs tend to make changes based on data, not just throwing a dart. Perhaps if someone messaged a dev instead of calling them out into the open like some sort of BARFIGHT, you'd get a better response? o.0

-C.A.

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The devs happen to still be human. they make mistakes. And like many humans, they refuse to deal with their mistakes.

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Who says you HAVE to transfer EVERY character you have? Oops, there I go, telling you how you have to play. Sorry.

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Freedom's a horrible server anyhow. Its hardly a solution to tell people "omg, just leave the server you like to satusfy a gameplay type that the devs fail utterly at"

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If their server is the problem, perhaps they should leave was the advice in a nutshell, if it's not the server, then it's the person, unless there's a third party to blame (usually people will blame the devs :P)

-C.A.

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except in this case, the devs made a stupid change. So yes, blaming the devs is appropriate.

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It seem to me that talk of adjusting the rewards is beside the point. What MA has really done is shown that a lot of the game content isn't actually fun for the players, at least not after the first couple of times.

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... but killing hamidon mitochondria that can't fight back is fun again and again and again?

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to some people, yes. to others, no. we dont all find the same things fun. I dont particularly like golf. others do. I'm not about to tell them they cant golf.

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Someone else's game of golf shouldn't prevent me from playing a game of baseball though.

The inflation alone from the rapid leveling and disposable income (without real money sinks) has prevented me from even thinking about getting into inventions seriously. I've poked around with bubbling on one of my old characters to see what it's all about, and from what I've seen, the rate that you can gain infamy/influence in bubbles compared to regular missions is ridiculously disproportionate.

Twinking would naturally contribute to this, much like it does in every MMO--however, the ability to earn crazy amounts of money through exploiting at early levels isn't often there like it is here. Bubbles are an exploit of the games mechanics, and it has a drastic effect on those who don't bubble themselves.

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Gasp, I am 1 man short of my 4 man golf team, better cancel your baseball game so we can force one of your players to fill in.

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Except this isnt how the game is at all. MOST of the community is playing other stuff than the AE. They just arent standing around in town zones screaming in broadcast for pugs. the pugs are in the AE. the rest of us are gladly doing whatever we please.

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This is what I do. Well, ignoring for a moment the fact that I nearly never join pugs any more, if I wanted to, I'd join them from server global channels I hang out it.

There is one possible problem here, though. A new player has no way to learn about those channels except from other players. New players almost certainly start using /req and /b to find teammates, because those features are obvious and in the manual. (Geez, did they update the manual at all for the AE edition box?) If they don't meet a more veteran player or a "newbie in the know", they won't find out about these alternate (and IMO better) ways to find a team doing other things.

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I've been making visits to the AE in Atlas periodically letting new players know about our global channels on Triumph. Some join and use it, others don't.

Veterans who care for the game and community should be doing this on their home servers. It won't help or interest every new player, but it will help some.

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DING DING DING we have a winner!!!!!

Be proactive. team with some of these people and show them the ropes. You dont know, some of them may still be in your sg 2 years from now when going rogue comes out.

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Well if you make a group for these Story MA missions, make sure to tell people its not a farm beforehand or you will be constantly loosing people mid missions.

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It's depressingly hard to get people to join a non-farm AE team, especially with this huge list of good arcs I've built up through my reviewing.

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The only AE I will do is farm(and then only rarely) I mostly do arcs and tf's. I have played enough AE story arcs to know many authors couldnt write a suicide note much less an interesting story.

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ok, tonight on Liberty... Synapse TF PUG team....

a troller on the team.... I have 2 lvl 50s... I have been playing 6 weeks....

at least he was on a TF trying to learn somethign about the actual game....

something has to be done about it

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Play with them. that way something is being done. In 6 months if he is still playing, it will be a net + for the game. People that are [censored] to them hurt us all.

i remember being in atlas and complaining that I had outleveled all the mobs and couldnt find this kings row place. Someone showed me how the tram worked and made a difference. That was 3 years ago this month. i have 16 50's and none pl'd. I am glad that guy showed a noob how to zone rather than just loled.

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It also doesn't help that Issue 15 is lackluster and most players are on the WAIT UNTIL GOING ROGUE RELEASES mode.

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what he said

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It seem to me that talk of adjusting the rewards is beside the point. What MA has really done is shown that a lot of the game content isn't actually fun for the players, at least not after the first couple of times.

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... but killing hamidon mitochondria that can't fight back is fun again and again and again?

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to some people, yes. to others, no. we dont all find the same things fun. I dont particularly like golf. others do. I'm not about to tell them they cant golf.

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n00b: Me and my buddy want to level really fast. Can you do it for us?

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Not seeing how this is AE's fault.

I've been getting PL requests from total strangers almost as long as I've been playing the game.

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quoted for enormous truth.

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It wasn't? My sg went ti a secluded area and just smacked each other 750 times, and save a few people trying to give us a hard time by griefing us, we got it in maybe an hour?

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Yeah cause ya know attacking someone in a PvP zone is considered griefing

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Attacking someone repeatedly could be construded as griefing especially if they announce their intentions in a civil manner in english :P The only thing gained from any pvp attack is a reputation increase and now recently a recipie. Every five minutes? Fine o.0 But since you attack a person over and over, the ONLY thing you get from it is the satisfaction of impeeding their progress.

Unless I'm mistaken, what else do you fet out of it reward wise?

However, we managed to get some civil pvpers to come over and beat on them while we worked on our base


-C.A.

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no, killing you over and over is not griefing. its pvp. I dont have to get a reward for it. If its red, its dead.

If your hero gets in my villains sights, im gonna take a swing at ya. No fancy shmancy rules. ally fight till one of us is going to the hospital. Begging for your life wont work. Bribery might. I decide who I smack down and who I let live.

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If you PvP on a low pop server and the drops are that rare than no one will have the PvP IO on the low pop server and there will not be any balance issues. I can see the main reason people farmed them in the arena is to sell them for outrageous prices on the market.

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good thing you cant transfer toons between servers.

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The Dev's are in a tough spot.

1 - Everyone loves to level. Related to that is the idea that L1-L20, especially the teens, can be quite boring/frustrating especially if you've done it before.
2 - They don't want to lose a whole crop of new paying customers.
3 - They don't want to lose many existing customers.
4 - They want the AE to be popular.
5 - They don't want the AE to dominate the game experience.

I don't know what they could do that would satisfy everyone. The speed of farm-leveling is way beyond anything any of us have ever thought possible, and that defines it as "not working as intended", therefore taking advantage of that to go from L1-50 in a day is by definition, an exploit. Of course, it's tough to tell someone what "fun" is supposed to be in a game.

The Dev's are in quite a pickle...

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They are, but the solution is to man up and do something like the following (these aren't the only things they could do, of course):

1) Force some standards on AE missions: i.e. missions must spawn like normal mission content. Custom groups must have at least one minion class mob, one lt. class mob and one boss class mob;

or

2) Nerf the rewards;

or

3) Set a minimum level to use AE or otherwise gate it;

or

4) Be absolutely ruthless in taking action on accounts that set up farming missions.


All of these will cause people to quit, will result in doom threads, etc. There are other solutions that are even worse. But really the devs have to get off the fence and decide what they want AE to be.

If they don't want it to be a farming tool, then they need to stop screwing around and fix the system. OR just let people farm and accept that their game experience will be a laughingstock.

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I said it before and I'll say it again.

The MA mission system should offer one set of exclusive rewards (ex. prestige).
The non-MA mission system should offer a completely different set of exclusive rewards (ex. xp).

As long as there's overlap, participants will always gravitate to the easier "attainment" system. A bunch of folks on my team this weekend discussed the pros/cons of each and most preferred not having to do zone runs when they can get the same rewards at a convenience in AP (and I agree with the original OP - it was a mistake to have lowbies/high levels co-exist in AP - an absolute quick fix would be to take the MA out of the lowbie zones completely and resituate them in "mid-level" zones that don't see a lot of traffic normally).

Personally, I like seeing the zones. War Witch and others put a lot of great effort into these common areas and they really add much-needed atmosphere that you just can't get from the MA mission room. Its a shame to overlook them completely in light of the MA buildings.

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Or, they could man up and go fix up some of those pita story lines that send you to 5 different zones. And pick 1 tf per issue to update. Start with posi. Just a gesture to show they do actually give a damn.

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Since I can find a lowbie team pretty much 24/7 without leaving my global channel, I trump your completely unverifiable evidence with my own!

Also, since we recruit actual "new players" (not just people with 4 years in-game making new characters) and treat them like gold, walking them through what's great about this game like proud little parents, I call BS on that too.

My anecdotal evidence beats yours so I win!

Stop giving solutions to a problem that doesn't exist and go form a task force or something, people.

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quit stealing my anecdotal evidence!!!!!

News flash! inviting people to a team and showing them what is fun in the game helps make friends that will stick around longer than AE is shiny!!! Nudes at 11

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Just saying. We were told more info for I16 in July, now it's July.

MORE I16 INFO NAO!

Er umm... More Issue 16 info please?

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*Stares at the design docs on his desk*
*Laughs evilly*

Soon(tm)!

*Leaves without answering the original question*

Edit: To Obsidius, Does that make you Sgt. "Big Toe" Hulka?

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I want a Hulka burger now. And a combat RV....

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Frak me. Another AE Doom thread?!

IBTD +1

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No if you had bothered to read it you would realize it wasn't a doom thread.

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I did read it. It's another "ZOMG fraking AE PLing... blah blah blah."

One of a gazillion threads of AE DOOOOM.

Start your own normal team, avoid AE and AE noobs, and carry on.

IBTD +2

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It is the same idiots trying to convince the devs to make people play with them.

Rping is not playing in the "spirit of the game" Please ban RPing and make those lazy catgirls go out and arrest people.

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MMOs are about balance and even if you take farming out of the equation, AE is not balanced.

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Your post pretty much sums it up nicely.

AE is a system with no downfalls, while the current dev content has them.

As much as we might hate running from top of IP to the bottom just to let a contact know you finished a mission and want another, or hate having to do 3 paper missions before a broker will give you a contact, those things give some kind of cohesion to the game experience. You're seeing the city, you're getting a chance to look at zone events. In COV, you might come across an unlockable contact you didn't know about.

We may hate some or a lot of things about how the devs choose to present the game content and some of it may need revamping after all these years...but it should never be made irrelevant simply because it does not get you uber-leveled or offer enough phat lewtz in comparison to AE stuff.

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It comes down to an absolute refusal by the devs to update old content. To have the contacts give you their phone number after 1 mission. To clean up and fix old tf's. People have been asking for this stuff for years. And were ignored. Instead of fixing the tf's, they added merits to them to bait you into doing the unused ones. They were unused for a reason.

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What you're proposing is actually more restrictive than simply removing the buildings from the lowbie zones. In the removal idea a player can simply choose to run to the nearest AE and go about their merry way the exact same way as before. Your idea will force them to run certain contacts or hit a certain level.

I believe something needs to change but I think it's too late to level-gate AE.

Edit: It's also too late to tie AE access to a Vet Reward. How would you like to buy a game called "City of Heroes: Architect Edition", get home and read a pop-up "Oh by the way, Architect is a Veteran's Reward you'll get in 3 months, enjoy!"

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Oh, I'm not proposing this. It's just an effort to think along the lines of what others are bemoaning in this thread without absolutely hamstringing everybody.

Personally, I think AE is fine the way it is. I don't see the need to remove it from the starter zones; if forumites are concerned that newbies are somehow missing out, maybe we should be creating new characters and inviting said newbies to regular teams rather than coming to the forums and trying to make the devs force others to play our way.

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I see a lack of veteran forumites volunteering to form low level teams to help newbies along. They like to complain but refuse to be part of the solution.

do away with AE, it was a bad idea and all sorts of people that want to run other people lives and recreation time are unable to do so

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whenever I try to do TFs allI get are "sorry doing AE".... then when I can't get like lets say a brute on the team... people get pissed off and leave the TF/SF and we can't do it, just becuase people don't wana get off their butts and do something other than AE...

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stop trying to tell other people how to play!! sorry YOU can't find a team, but it doesn't mean that the game is dooooomed, it means you aren't happy, and honestly, i'm so sick of these threads that i hope it makes you leave.

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<breaks out the Traegus tranquilizer gun>

What? What do you mean that this thing could stop 14 elephants? You say that like it's a bad thing! This'll barely get him tipsy!

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Ill take one of those if you've got extra...will it make you have the munchies?

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Do we need yet another one of these type of threads? Really?

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Read it for the children.


every time some one makes one of these threads a corruptor gets his wings.....And then the huge flyswatter smacks them down,

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I use the market quite extensively, so I can tell you you're flat out wrong here. The market trends clearly and inarguably indicate that a substantial portion of the player base has returned to playing regular content.

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No it has not. If you use search, you see almost every zone is barren. The only common salvage I have seen really drop in price is that which most common to lowbies. Mostly because they have gone back to doing sewer teams on blue, and Kalinda/Burke on red. I belong to four chat channels: one for finding Teams/TF's on Protector, Liberty, Pinnacle, and a cross server channel. The Pinnacle use to always have 200 to 250 people, but now it is in the mid 100's. Protector which use to be 125 or so is almost dead. The Liberty channel, which use to rank in the low 300's is low 100's. The cross server has dropped and mostly are asking for AE teams. Realistically, we can argue these pseudo facts and numbers for our point, but NCSoft has the real stats, and if it was not a huge problem, they would not have made it such a public problem and implement dramatic measures. That is a business fact no one can ignore.

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My wife and I made new toons on freedom last thursday. Level pacted and already at 18. I see a bunch of lowbies sitting in ae atlas trying to get on a team(and failing) a few vastly overleveled toons forming ae teams with other overlevel toons(not inviting the lvl 2-15's). Occasionaly someone will attempt to start a posi tf(but not often) ITF and LGTF and KTF are starting every now and then. Whole lot of solo'ing going on around them. If the lowbies in atlas would start a sewer team, they could be lvl 8 in an hour. They choose to stand there and bleat looking for AE farm. NOT finding them from all appearances.

So do we need to eliminate xp or institute a IQ test in outbreak?