seebs

Just download the client.

You are paying for an account, not a piece of software.

I think that's right. So when I19 goes live, we all download Mids at once and crash the servers.

The method advocated is definitely a complete kill of each spawn before starting the next. Most groups were pulled back to a location away from where they started, though some were gathered just by jumping in. But definitely, full kill of each spawn, then tell people to wait, then gather, then tell people to jump in.

And the assertion made is specifically that it is much faster than teams who don't have that pattern -- that no other tactic is comparable in how quickly it burns through missions. I have only anecdotal evidence to the contrary, that being that when I play traps/ on a team with these people, I can do PGT, seeker drones, acid mortar, and probably triage beacon on every spawn, while in most groups I have to do something like alternating PGT and seeker drones, or drop acid mortar a little late in one spawn and then skip it the next.

It's still there. I usually talk in character on teams, and if I do it, other people start doing it too.

RP is not, IMHO, at its best as a separate activity undertaken instead of missions or arcs. It's at its best as the way you play your missions and arcs.

Consider the difference:

/b lfm hero tips 20+
/b Hey, all you hero types! I got a hot tip that the Council is planting some pulse charges that could blow up an office building, I wanna stop them. Could use some backup.

Yeah, my argument had been that given aggro cap, this elaborate practice was just wasting time, but I was assured that it was faster, and that this SG's groups were the fastest out there. This totally fails to mesh with my experience, but I figure it makes sense to use SCIENCE!!! to resolve the question.

Since the claim was very broad -- that this technique produces faster runs, and that missions run this way are faster -- I'm not too worried about generality for now. If there's backpeddling to "well, it's faster for this specific enemy group", we can mess with that then.

Wow!

Thanks, I concede the point. Cool, never knew that.

I still don't think "mob" is an acronym, though, because it's an abbreviation of a single word. Using the first syllable of a single word as a short form of the word is not normally viewed as an acronym or put in block caps. I mean, no one says that a jazz band has a SAX player, on the grounds that SAX is the initial part of a word.

I am open to suggestions for a better mission choice. One of the people I was talking to has a "no AE" policy, so we can't just do a custom one. And you're right, we should add death counts. (But, ETA: The person specifically told me it was faster to herd.)

I've been having a discussion with someone (he's a hero you don't know) on the topic of "herding". This strategy is not just regular herding, but:

For each spawn:
* Tank either picks a spot and announces "herding to here, stay back", or "jumping in, wait for spawn to condense."
* Tank then either herds spawn to that point, or jumps in and gathers.
* Tank announces "come get some!" or something similar, and everyone attacks the spawn.

The key points to this are that:

* No one attacks or moves up to the spawn before the tank gives the go-ahead. (You use macros, not typing, for the announcements.)
* You clear the spawn, then the tank picks the next spawn and repeats.

According to my correspondent, this technique is much faster than other ways of clearing missions. I am, at the very least, skeptical. However! This sounds like an opportunity for SCIENCE!

Herewith, my proposal:

THIS OFFER IS NOW PARTIALLY LIVE. See end of post for details.

Consider the Ouro arc "The Marauder's Cell". Imagine running it with a full team (8 people), with all default settings and a fixed time limit -- say, set the time limit to 1 hour, no inspirations, everything else on default. You treat the mission as a "defeat all"; you clear every group. When you finish the arc, you you screencap the final report window, and the team window, showing all teammates alive (so rez time/hospitals are counted). We thus know how long it took.

Now... You do this three times.

In one run, you do not designate a specific tank, you just run the mission without any organized tanking.

In one run, you designate a specfic tank, and you use the "herding" strategy described above.

In the third run, you designate a tank who does NOT use the "herding" strategy described above, and who uses tactics such as corner-pulling at most five times. You run at whatever rate you feel comfortable with, you split if you want, whatever.

You then post here:
* Your group composition (AT/primary/secondary, level)
* Rough level of enhancement of each team member (SOs, common IOs, set IOs, purples -- just a ballpark figure is probably fine).
* How long each run took you.
* If you are post-I19, which toons on the team had inherent fitness.
* How many individual deaths, if any, you had on each run.
* How many team wipes, if any, you had on each run.
* For each run, how much fun you felt like you had.

In addition, you post a global handle, to which I send 25M inf. I will send that once per team which runs all three missions, but if you do it again with a different team, you can collect twice. (I leave it to you to decide how to share the wealth out.)

Starting Thursday, November 11th: Up to four teams can run the trial and collect a reward. If there are problems with methodology, I'll start over with improved methodology. If the methodology works, I'll add a few more runs without changing it.

The prize per completion of the full three-run trial will be 25M, with a limit of 100M total inf available for payouts. This will be a preliminary test of the methodology to see whether there's obvious holes we missed. After that, I hope to do either six more with the same methodology, or ten total with fixed methodology. Ten runs should be enough, I think, to have preliminary data.

Note: You keep all your loot. I am not trying to hire you to farm purples or something. You keep the loot and inf from the runs.

Please post feedback on methodology. PLEASE DO NOT ARGUE ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HERDING. We are not interested in your anecdotal evidence or your theories; we want HARD DATA.

Edit history:
Added the "defeat all" requirement.
Added death/wipe counts.
Added "all players alive at end".
Added "no insps".
Added "how much fun".
Clarified tanking strategy.
Went live for initial test runs.
Clarified that players keep loot.

I occasionally find that people don't know things about some of their powers, perhaps because some of these things are Non-Obvious. So, what are things that you know now about your powers, but which you didn't find out until long after you first picked a given power or decided not to?

My first few:

Traps/Devices:
* Web Grenade has a substantial -recharge debuff. It noticably reduces the damage output of many mobs.
* Caltrops has a very high magnitude "fear" effect (makes things run away) which can prevent things from attacking as often.

Traps:
* Poison Gas Trap is autohit, so accuracy is totally wasted on it.

Sonic Blast:
* Shockwave does NOT have the -resist debuff that the other powers do.

Fire Blast:
* Rain of Fire starts out with 2.0 accuracy, so +accuracy in it is relatively unnecessary for most purposes.

Thanks for the news, this may actually affect me.

I still haven't found any good ways to make more than 20-30M a day, but then, I'm still playing for small potatoes mostly. Not doing purples or anything.

I'm currently leaning towards the theory that this is, in fact, intentional -- that it was viewed as a problem that LotG +recharge was worth more than some purples, etcetera. Basically, the intent is to increase supply of the stuff that shouldn't cost as much as purples do.

I tend to think about that a fair bit when doing characters. Sometimes I make it a little bit of a pun. Some characters are sort of a mix, so I tend to go with the primary set. For instance, I have a fire/ice blaster whose ice powers are in theory tech, but the fire is considered "science". (That's questionable, maybe she should be mutation.)

Powered armor => technology
Regular weapons and gadgets => natural

Oh, I love super hero stuff. I just figure that gaming implies gamers.

Basically, if you always view gamers as Them, you're going to have less fun than if you identify yourself as being some kind of gamer. Maybe you're a gamer who only likes superhero stuff, but you're playing games, so you're a gamer. If "gamers" become "Us", you'll enjoy hanging out with them more.

Since CoH is very heavily built to encourage team play and hanging out with the other players, this might be pretty rewarding.

I think that may be semi-intentional.

I guess, I never cared about this. Sure, I marketeer idly, and I even have a character with a miracle +recovery proc. But I don't care much about outfitting my characters super well. I've yet to break 35th level, at all, on any character. I have a ton of characters outfitted with a mix of yellow and occasional orange IOs that are ten or so levels out of date. I group a fair bit, because it's fun.

I think the game is pretty much working; getting the super awesome stuff requires you to either play a whole lot or take time away from the Really Fun Activities to do other stuff, and that's about normal for the genre.

It's not an acronym. An acronym is an initialism (a word consisting of the initials of other words) which is pronounced as a word, but mob isn't an initialism. It isn't "Mobile OBject", it's just "MOBile".

... And yes, I personally worked on Abermud II and IV branches back in the day.

I don't think it makes any sense to play a game and object to people using "gamer" terms. We're playing a game; we are by definition gamers. We refer to a patrol as a "pat" and to an NPC we can attack as a "mob" because short names let us communicate quickly in combat.

Ahh, good point, hadn't thought of that. This was an SD tank, though. But I was definitely not thinking about that, and I should have been. WIN! I get information that will allow me to play better.

I would utterly hate that.

Look, call me naive if you want. But for months I thought the people looking for AE teams were doing story arcs and wanted to have people along so they could roleplay.

I love the stories. Go play Two Tickets to Westerly. Play through the Do It Yourself Moonbase. Heck, play everything @Twoflower's written, and @PW, and a bunch of other people. Go play those, then try to tell me the game would be better without them. You will not be able to do it convincingly.

Look, I know powerleveling leads to idiots. I got grouped with a fire/dark corruptor who did not use any of his secondary powers except tar patch. When I commented that most /dark corruptors used their heals when people were low on health, he said "guess im different lol". He had the powers you would get if you levelled to 24 taking powers from your primary when you could and something from the secondary the rest of the time.

But you know what? I know people who have a militant anti-PL policy in their group who are also hopeless. I know people who levelled on sewers who are hopeless.

In another game I played, there was really no powerlevelling. No sidekick/exemplar, so you had to move onto new content to gain levels. And you know what? It changed nothing. You still met people at the level cap who did not know how to use their classes. You saw people doing something roughly equivalent to using a power that gives you better recovery but half damage, and using nothing but brawl. For an entire mission.

The problem is not that AE allows people to be stupid. It's that it allows the stupid people to get high level characters, and frankly, I don't care -- they'd be able to get high level characters anyway.