That's a terrible, terrrible idea. Now, drop it already........................................... ..
cartophilis....it's a terrible idea, just drop it already. Seriously. Please Devs, don't ever even consider it. The one person who has a problem with high levels hunting in low level zones is this guy. I'd love to see you try and figure out how to code that one too cartophilis... (P.S. it's called exemplar...not exemplify)
For the datamining...it stinks for those that did the TFs...but I never figured they would which is why I never did those TFs (too much time for too little).
Badge menu definitely needs a clean-up so things are a bit more clear and consistent.
I'd personally like to see the Illusionist numbers cut just a little since so few mobs spawn in PI...or else bump up the spawn numbers (so glad I haven't gotten that Carnie hunt mission yet because of this). The fact that I kept a MI busy for a ridiculous amount of time and got very little movement on the bar is crazy...
Other than complaints about awarding of monster badges...that's about all I have.
"A good Defender is the battle hardened Corpsman who will kill a Nazi with a tongue depressor while putting a splint on your leg, then hand you a fresh clip of ammo." ~Jock_Thompson
Repeat Offenders, TNT Profile, My little hero
One comment:
All the Shard TF badges and the moonfire badge are the same icon as exploration badges.
Ugh.
Any chance of new art?
Chief Hamster of the Fist of Justice / Shadows of Victory
Victory Server: Join Victory Forum for team forming and general game chat and IRC Chat: irc.hashmark.net #victory for offline chatting.
Rock, rock on Hamster.
So not only couldn't they datamine the badges, but the Justin Augustine TF is currently bugged, and even when they fix it, they can't give the badges retroactively even though I provided a time and date as to its completion. So that's the third time I have to complete this TF, thanks!
If it was Quarterfield's, I would have been extremely pissed off....
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Please ensure that anyone who wishes to obtain a badge accrued by defeating a numerical amount of members to a villain group must /exemplify to a level where these villains are also worth experience.
Also, it might be good to note to any observer at what "objective level" a badge was gained and what date. By objective level, I mean the character's normal security level at that time, as opposed to the character's modified level from /exemplar and /sk functions.
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How about... no.
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Otherwise:
1. It becomes far easier to have "badge completion" in third party sales, although most hunting badges are not actually worth anything within the game, most people who buy these characters aren't familiar with the game or only scantily familiar with it.
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Third party sales? You mean artificially inflated ebay character sales? Caveat Emptor. People who buy their high levels characters do not need any sort of catering to. especially since character sales are against the TOS.
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2. Badges are worth less to distinguish a character's focus and interest if they can be very easily obtained at higher levels.
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In and of themselves, yes. However, what badge you display gives an extra little bit of flavour to the character. Not only that, though, some badges take distinctly more time to obtain (Trailblazer, for example) and do denote focus (or just level 50 boredom).
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3. We have hordes of high level characters swarming upon an area and eliminating bosses much to the chagrin of lower level characters of newer players, older players who are trying to work with a lower level character without exploiting, and players who genuinely try to /exemplar to gain lower level badges.
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So we can have hordes and hordes of people competing heavily for badges for a long time or have sweep-and-clear level 50s fly in, get what they need, and get out. This will result in a *much* faster return to normalcy and reduction of competition for the people who are normally found at these levels. Such activity is usually clear within a week as those who have high levels interested in badges will get them quickly and those that aren't interested won't bother.
Badges really aren't worth much (with the exeption of the Accolades). Why such a fuss?
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P.S. As to datamining badges, I suggest that you limit these datamining to characters who were of a level to recieve that achievement badge from the time the achievement badge existed and any time thereafter. A series of qualifying modifiers to this datamine might exist...
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Datamining is already a difficult process for something like this. This much has been made clear. What you're suggesting makes it even more complicated and lengthy. Essentially you're suggesting devoting manpower and many, many manhours and/or processing time to something that's almost a non-issue in game. I can sum up my entire reason for having a badge hunting character in two words: "oooh! Shiny!" And this is really all that badges are worth (with a few exceptions).
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1. Only gather characters who were (x) level when achievement was released. (Yes, I know, this isn't fair to people who were /sk to gain these achievements, but it swiftens datamining)
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This would reduce the datamining required and has been suggested elsewhere. While it's a reasonable response for tf's, especially before auto-exemplar, it's still only effective to reduce the numbers when looking for level dependant features. Other things have a very wide level range (6-50 for CoT mages, for example) and would not really reduce the numbers to datamine at all (statistically).
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2. Only gather characters who have the contacts necessary for the achievements with finished missions that indicate they recieved the achievement.
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So no rewards for teammates on badge missions. This would restrict almost every origin from getting the Atlas Medallion (Spelunker is only available through Magic Origin contacts that not everyone gets by level 10)
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3. First, only gather datamine information on characters who are of active accounts. Secondly, of these, gather information in initial search on characters who are "most active" of a character's roster and that character (or characters) of highest level. Thirdly, all other characters who might have been left out from this but fit other categories, might be datamined once the initial results have come in.
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No good for those who have multiple high level characters. No good for those that are on any sort of break or leave from the game (a couple of people in my sg are currently on leave from the game... I think one of them is serving in Iraq, but I'm not 100% on this). No good for too many people, really. Discriminating against one customer in favour of another customer is not always a good business tactic (especially since this can be illegal in some places). Sometimes, yes. In this case... I see no benefit. Especially since this option will require datamining to determine who to datamine.
Combined with your other suggestions... your reductions in who to datamine come at the cost of an increase in datamining and database architecture (isolating and flagging specifically who to datamine for what) to the extant that it may be more efficient to not datamine using your methods at all in favour of the previous method that was already deemed too inefficient to use.
Summary rundown of what you would have to datamine (without the reasons of why it's a bad idea beyond the technical):
Account activity - easy enough to do by determining who has active billing. Would still be time consuming as there are over 150,000 active accounts. Combined with inactive accounts I'll say that there's about 220,000 total accounts (extremely conservative number).
Flagging said accounts for filtering purposes - may entail special modification to database. Especially to re-flag inactive accoutns that reactivate as eligible for datamining.
Character Activity - Characters on different servers will likely present the first comlication. What basis character activity occurs is the second complication... what if you have two characters and one is more active in one way (total hours) over another (recent activity)?
Flagging said characters - this would likely require a special tag (most active character). Modification to the database required, especially since this would have to be dynamic and check against all your other characters in future datamines.
From there doing a check against every contact and every mission and every enemy kill to determine level eligibility for the badge at time of release. Including filtering too high (many mission badges aren't offered to people who outlevel the contact). This is probably the killer one for time concerns... combing through logs to determine the level ofteh character at a given time, then the relative level of an enemy at a given time. From there the datamining has to occur to see if they did the badge or not. All of a sudden one datamine becomes three (even if you're reducing the numbers to be datamined this will still be a horrendous number.
Your time-reducing solutions are welcome suggestions but highly unfeasable, especially when considering how much work is involved for how little it honestly matters (they're just freakin' badges... At most the shard tf's represent 30 hours lost player work. At least the decision not to datamine represents zero hours of lost player work).
Just ask yourself the important question; would you rather they devote man-hours to game development or to datamining for badges that really don't change the game in any way? Hiring more people isn't an answer because you then have to choose to hire people for datamining or for programming. Same dollars divided a different way.
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This would constitute mildly emergent datamining, datamining through exclusion of characters that are not frequently used, do not seem like they were focal during the achievement, and do not appear to be unplayed at present.
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*mildly* emergent? That's a *mild* understatement. I want you to think about how someone would go about flagging a character for this.
Not frequently used? How non-frequent would be non-frequently enough?
Non-focal? Now, try and determine this one and how would one quantify it *for the purposes of a database*. Quantify something that even in the heart of a situation wouldn't be easy (in some cases) to determine. Would a character that heals as being focal to the achievement count? What if those heals were spammed onto full-health characters? What about controllers against hold-resistant enemies? Too many situational things to datamine, especially since most of these aren't being tracked currently and would require massive change to begin tracking.
This brings the final point that appears distributed throughout the post; Is it worth it? Now, honestly ask yourself this... Is it worth their time (months) to award a handful of people 5-6 badges that have *zero* effect on game other than effort put in, completion, and bragging rights?
Is it game breaking enough to warrant massive database changes? What if this means taking the databases offline for massive maintenance and upgrades? Would you want to see 8-12 hours of downtime just so you can have a few extra tin bits displayed under your character?
To me the answer is no. Sucks for some people, yes. Is it worth the work which would likely take longer than the total time it took for every player that did said tf's to complete said tf's? Ask yourself this honestly, and try to do so without personal regard.
I have a long-winded question, and i apologize in advance if this topic has been brought up elsewhere in the thread, i just don't have time to go through the whole thing.
As far as i know, you can't have a sidekick until level 10. Assuming that once you hit 10, you have someone who is your sidekick every single moment you are logged into CoH, and you take your hero to level 50, and then hunt down every single other badge in the game (including the new damage badges and mezzed badges and shadow shard tfs and everything else). . .
Would you even be CLOSE to achieving the sixth sidekick time badge?
Because i find this badge to be the most ridiculous of them all. Even Paragon (the badge ) seems nigh unattainable even if i spend tons of time sidekicked just for the purpose of running up the badge timer. I dont mind that there are 6 sidekick badges, or that the sixth takes an obscene amount of time, but theres a difference between obscene and impossible.
If the times required for the sidekick badges could be looked at, i would appreciate it.
Thank you for your time. you may now go back to your regularly scheduled rantings about the shadow shard tf badges.
Edit:
P.S. Why is the Nigh Indestructible badge for taking more damage than the Indestructible badge is for? That's just silly.
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I have a long-winded question, and i apologize in advance if this topic has been brought up elsewhere in the thread, i just don't have time to go through the whole thing.
As far as i know, you can't have a sidekick until level 10. Assuming that once you hit 10, you have someone who is your sidekick every single moment you are logged into CoH, and you take your hero to level 50, and then hunt down every single other badge in the game (including the new damage badges and mezzed badges and shadow shard tfs and everything else). . .
Would you even be CLOSE to achieving the sixth sidekick time badge?
Because i find this badge to be the most ridiculous of them all. Even Paragon (the badge ) seems nigh unattainable even if i spend tons of time sidekicked just for the purpose of running up the badge timer. I dont mind that there are 6 sidekick badges, or that the sixth takes an obscene amount of time, but theres a difference between obscene and impossible.
If the times required for the sidekick badges could be looked at, i would appreciate it.
Thank you for your time. you may now go back to your regularly scheduled rantings about the shadow shard tf badges.
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/ignore fusion blast
Hey, FB. Sals and I looked at the sixth badge and figured it out. A character would literally have to spend six months (yes, it's that many hours) doing nothing but having someone SKed, 24 hours a day, to achieve the sixth mentoring badge.
How's that for keeping the badge whores subscribing?
this is assuming your information on how long it takes to get the badge is correct. We don't know for certain and I think it's wrong.
I am 3/4 of the way to the 5th sk badge and it hasnt taken that long.
Ill keep you posted.
If task forces were set to give badges now instead of souvenirs, why not just run a script first that converted souvenirs to badges? That would have really been very simple.
You've invented a broken system, and now in this instance refuse to support it.
Definitely not something I would consider an honorable business practice.
Need... Need to get a badge for the 3rd Shard TF.
Chief Hamster of the Fist of Justice / Shadows of Victory
Victory Server: Join Victory Forum for team forming and general game chat and IRC Chat: irc.hashmark.net #victory for offline chatting.
Rock, rock on Hamster.
Need... Need to get a badge for the 3rd Shard TF.
Chief Hamster of the Fist of Justice / Shadows of Victory
Victory Server: Join Victory Forum for team forming and general game chat and IRC Chat: irc.hashmark.net #victory for offline chatting.
Rock, rock on Hamster.
Need... Need to get a badge for the 3rd Shard TF.
Chief Hamster of the Fist of Justice / Shadows of Victory
Victory Server: Join Victory Forum for team forming and general game chat and IRC Chat: irc.hashmark.net #victory for offline chatting.
Rock, rock on Hamster.
i have a question and let me say sorry in advance is someone has already asked it, but im not scrolling thru 30 pages to find out...
I have been running the shard taskforces here this last week, and i have already gotten the honorary peacebringer badge. I went to view them and they look just like the exploration badges, is this how they are supposed to look or is it a bug? and if its a bug, when should we expect a patch to fix it?
oh and of course there always the arbitrary plea for the isolator badge!!!
Lvl 50 - Inv / SS Tanker
Freedom Server
Please ensure that anyone who wishes to obtain a badge accrued by defeating a numerical amount of members to a villain group must /exemplify to a level where these villains are also worth experience.
Also, it might be good to note to any observer at what "objective level" a badge was gained and what date. By objective level, I mean the character's normal security level at that time, as opposed to the character's modified level from /exemplar and /sk functions.
Otherwise:
1. It becomes far easier to have "badge completion" in third party sales, although most hunting badges are not actually worth anything within the game, most people who buy these characters aren't familiar with the game or only scantily familiar with it.
2. Badges are worth less to distinguish a character's focus and interest if they can be very easily obtained at higher levels.
3. We have hordes of high level characters swarming upon an area and eliminating bosses much to the chagrin of lower level characters of newer players, older players who are trying to work with a lower level character without exploiting, and players who genuinely try to /exemplar to gain lower level badges.
P.S. As to datamining badges, I suggest that you limit these datamining to characters who were of a level to recieve that achievement badge from the time the achievement badge existed and any time thereafter. A series of qualifying modifiers to this datamine might exist...
1. Only gather characters who were (x) level when achievement was released. (Yes, I know, this isn't fair to people who were /sk to gain these achievements, but it swiftens datamining)
2. Only gather characters who have the contacts necessary for the achievements with finished missions that indicate they recieved the achievement.
3. First, only gather datamine information on characters who are of active accounts. Secondly, of these, gather information in initial search on characters who are "most active" of a character's roster and that character (or characters) of highest level. Thirdly, all other characters who might have been left out from this but fit other categories, might be datamined once the initial results have come in.
This would constitute mildly emergent datamining, datamining through exclusion of characters that are not frequently used, do not seem like they were focal during the achievement, and do not appear to be unplayed at present.