Discussion: Changes to Task/Strike Force Missions
By
Acid_Reign,
Posted on: 2008-02-14 15:00 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
Problem with dropping recipes from Tf's is that the markey will crash now rather than later and the number of folks bugging you to fill for their farms will go insane.
Farm the Mender Silos TF. It takes 20 minutes to do and there seems to be pretty good drops. You also get around 3 mil per run.
THIS IS AN EXPLOIT, PLEASE FIX IT ASAP!
And fix the bugged tech while you're at it.
LOL.
People keep calling those who disapprove of this change the vocal minority. When does the minority become the majority, because every single person I know in real life, and nearly every person I know in game, disapproves of this change as it was implemented.
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I'm so sorry to hear you're having this dreadful problem, TonyV. Luckily, I found some advice that might be of use. It's such good advice you'll almost think you must've written it yourself!
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find better teammates. I've done it, it's easy, and you can do it too.
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I have some mighty fine teammates, people I've known for a long time and have played with a lot, who I run task forces with on a regular basis. This change hasn't affected us at all.
However, these exploits have affected the game as a whole in a negative way. I know it, Positron knows it, and people posting here know it and aren't willing to admit it because it negatively impacts their ability to farm.
And "find better teammates" unfortunately doesn't help the new players much. It certainly doesn't help the great pick-up groups I used to be able to get for task forces.
Look, I just don't know how much clearer the developers can make it. Exploiters unmercifully gamed the Katie Hannon task force, and they put a timer on it. That didn't work, so they changed it again. Then the soft-loading exploit became rampant, so now they've nerfed that. Lighthouse explicitly said that these task forces are a team-based activity, the manual says that it's a dangerous series of missions that require commitment, and every task force contact tells you up front how many team members you'll need. Would a brick upside the head help? I mean seriously, what will it take for people to get it through their thick skulls what task forces were designed for and what they're meant to be?
But by all means, go ahead, don't listen to me. Exploit it for all it's worth. You're going to anyway, and as I said above, every time you do, you're emphasizing with crystal clarity the exploit that need to be tackled next. My only regret is that you're seriously damaging the spirit of the game in the process, but hey, it's worth it for that rare recipe that you can sell on the market for 300 influence, right?
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People keep calling those who disapprove of this change the vocal minority. When does the minority become the majority, because every single person I know in real life, and nearly every person I know in game, disapproves of this change as it was implemented.
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That's totally bogus. I have yet to run across a single person on a task force that has a problem with it at all. I'm sure they're out there, they're probably the ones who keep broadcasting "LF speed Katie" in the global channels, but as you can imagine, I diligently avoid those teams.
The only people I've seen complain vehemently about the change have been right here in this thread and literally nowhere else.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
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The only people I've seen complain vehemently about the change have been right here in this thread and literally nowhere else.
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Wow, and the people you've spoken to personally represent a majority of the players....you must be popular.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
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I watched Taxibot Belle run a Positron task force just yesterday. It took just under five hours, and everyone seemed to enjoy it just fine.
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no more groups of 3-4 casual players...
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*sigh...* Task Forces are not "casual" activities. Read the manual for a description of what they're supposed to be.
Or in tl;dr metaphor-speak: If you're having trouble finishing task forces as they were originally designed to work, look for better teammates. Don't ask for exploits to be reintroduced to the game.
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*sigh...*
It was not an exploit. If it was an exploit, it wouldn't have taken them more than 4 years to fix. It was working exactly as intended. Remember, recipes didn't exist when TFs were introduced.
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The afk timer doesn't work on TFs.
The person logged themselves off.
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REALLY!!! NOW I AM PISSED, I AM GOING TO PUT THAT DEFENDER ON IGNORE!!! 
Thanks for telling me this.
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It's also possible that their computer crashed, their internet connection went out, a parental unit or a spousal unit said "You're quitting that game and coming to do this and I mean now."
My arcs are constantly shifting, just search for GadgetDon for the latest.
The world beware! I've started a blog
GadgetMania Under Attack: The Digg Lockout
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Here's what it has said about task forces from the very beginning, and continues to say about them to this day:
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A task force is a team up of powerful Heroes that comes together to undertake a long series of dangerous assignments, which usually culminates in a battle with one of the citys Arch Villains. Task force missions require a great deal of commitment, and are very risky .
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You're right. I guess they need to correct the manual. It says, but the reward for success is proportionate to the risk. That is an incorrect statement. Looking through the rewards you can select, I don't see where any of them are worth the risk now.
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This game CAN tell the difference between someone thats logged off and someone thats QUIT the tf.
Therefore a better solution to softloading is to set spawn size to team size including logged off.
If someone quits the TF spawn sizes should adjust because they are not coming back.
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This is a change I'd back. Ideally, you'd combine it with adding an ability to kick offline players from the TF. Sometimes people dc and don't come back.
This change would actually fix sotfloading, and make getting 8 recipes for a TF run by one or two considerably harder, while at the same time not hurting regular players who just want to run keep running TFs even if they lose a few.
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Anyone wanna take Bets on when Positron's gonna make a blurb or statement about this? I'm betting we won't see him at all even though he was obviously the one who made the call. Gawd I love it when that Power-Gamer shirks responsibility ...He finally caves to the Casual Gamers' overwhelming demands for fixing the 30-40 grind and wins some huge brownie points with this community, and then flips around and pulls this Epic-Fail "Fix" in the same patch. HUGE Lolz, son.
BtW, if anyone wants to know his thoughts on the matter, just go read the Market Forum. Those 1337 100t "flippers" are all cut from the same stone he was. The more these recipes cost, the bigger their E-dilz get, and the happier they are. That's Positron's "Fan Base" and the only justification he needs for being a total Miser.
[/ QUOTE ]if positron knows what is good for him then he needs to not touch this thread with a 1000 foot pole. I dont see how any answer he gives will be acceptable at this point.
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The answer he should give is "In the next partial patch, we'll be tweaking the minimum numbers of these task forces (insert list here) and we'll be watching to see what happens on completion rates of Task Forces".
Actually, the answer should be "we're reverting this for now. However, there will be some form of this returning in I12, so please be ready to test this and suggest ways to make this work." But he won't.
I could even live with "We're reading the feedback, we're looking to see what the affect is on task/strike forces being formed and how many complete. We will make adjustments in I12 or before if the numbers say it is necessary." I wouldn't be happy, but at least there'd be some sense that we're being heard.
My arcs are constantly shifting, just search for GadgetDon for the latest.
The world beware! I've started a blog
GadgetMania Under Attack: The Digg Lockout
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As I keep saying over and over ad nauseum but the vocal minority here keeps ignoring, if you cannot invest the time and effort into completing such a task force, this content is not for you.
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No Tony, you are the one who keeps ignoring the point. It is unfair to the people who are willing to commit the time and effort it takes to run a TF to the end by penalizing them for the actions of another player.
A player should never be penalized for the actions of another player.
If a TF requires 8 people to start and 6 hours into it 2 of the people drop, it is completely unfair to penalize the other 6 people who fully committed their time to finishing the TF. The spawns remain set for 8 people.
Your official title should be "Dev Apologist" because that seems to be your role in every single thread you join. Maybe you should actually read the content of the thread before jumping to the defense of the developers without knowing if what you are defending is what people are actually talking about?
Just a thought.
BTW, Positron just posted a reply on the reasons for the changes. And has said nothing about the problems except "well, maybe some TFs could have their minimum reduced"
My arcs are constantly shifting, just search for GadgetDon for the latest.
The world beware! I've started a blog
GadgetMania Under Attack: The Digg Lockout
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No Tony, you are the one who keeps ignoring the point. It is unfair to the people who are willing to commit the time and effort it takes to run a TF to the end by penalizing them for the actions of another player.
A player should never be penalized for the actions of another player.
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This is a team-oriented game. As such, you are almost always impacted by the actions of other players. Even if you're standing around outside minding your own business, someone can pull enemies to you. If you're on a team in normal missions, someone can slack off. Or they can be great. Your experience is constantly at the mercy of other people in this game.
I know how frustrating it is to have a task force fail because too many people drop out. But you know what? It's not the end of the world. Even on failed task forces, I have typically come out with a lot more experience, a lot more influence and/or prestige, and even maybe a character or two added to my friends list.
Do I sit around and cry about how awful it is that we weren't able to complete the task force? Sure, for a few minutes, such is the nature of disappointment. Then I go on and do something else. Shortly after, I'm completely okay, because I know that this is the nature of task forces. You will sometimes fail. It will sometimes be because of other people. Life goes on. This is a relatively rare occurrence, most of them succeed.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
There are way too many pages to sift through and I have no doubt I have nothing new to add. Having said that, I do want to give a +1 to the camp that says "this is a terrible change and this paying customer is not at all happy".
Mostly, I can't believe with all the real problems in this game, that this is the sort of project that gets resourced. Hey, can you maybe make it so a mob doesn't get stuck in a wall? No, I suppose not, it's far more heinous that someone, somewhere is softloading a tf/sf.
From my own personal experience, two of my most satisfying moments in game have come from tfs that were long, arduous ordeals that ended up with 2 hardy survivors that needed to really coordinate to defeat the AV. Those two moments would be impossible today.
Listen to your customers and roll this back.
Global = Hedgefund (or some derivation thereof)
I think Crimson's and Tony's points are a bit of the same except from different vantage points.
Crimson thinks that the team shouldn't be affected by players dropping from the TF because what they start as a team fighting spawns of 8 shouldn't change because someone leaves. The team is affected by the loss of a member by losing their assistance. That's real. Adjusting a spawn size during a TF is totalitarian and shows too much control over a miniscule aspect of the game and robs the experience a player should have going through the loss of a teammate. The main point of this view is that the team's reward is affected, which I wish wasn't the case.
I agree.
Tony thinks that since everything is so team oriented, every aspect of your gaming experience in a TF should reflect the "team" and that if someone leaves, you should feel the penalty of losing a member by forcing the game to adjust to your new group size. This makes complete sense and follows the old Statesman's desire that COH be team oriented. This forces people to stay on the TF (another difficult thing to do, this game isn't exactly for kids who have all the time in the world) and in essence on a personal gaming level, affects you socially as a team.
I also agree... but Tony is addressing more on a social level, when Crimson is addressing it on a more game-based level.
Say hello to the Devs and the never ending dichotomy of providing either a great gaming experience, or a great social gaming experience. In order to achieve this they have to weigh both of these ideas.
Social gaming experience requires rules to keep everything "social" related.
Great gaming experience means having to make the game as such to provide riveting gameplay that may or may not stress you out enough to where winning a level or beating a mish gives you satisfaction in your efforts.
Because either way, you will be affected by losing a member. The only real difference between these points of view is that Crimson is willing to accept the added difficulty of a TF if a member drops because that's a team dynamic he wants to be able to experience if that be the case.
So here's my simplistic idea that will prevent manipulating the TF mob loads based on team numbers and still keep a reward system that is attractive for teams to do the TF. (Feel free to make this more complicated)
1. Instead of auto-adjusting mob size to fit team number... keep it the same size mob so that the experience of losing a member is felt by the added difficulty. This is a great gaming experience.
2. If the team drops below a certain number let's say 3. Enable the TF to automatically fail.
These two concepts solve both Tony's and Crimson's desires...
Tony gets his idea that team members dropping should affect the TF in terms of win or lose in regards to the importance of "teaming" by making the reward not so significant or easily attained. Blame your team if you fail.
Crimson gets to keep his idea that mob size shouldn't be affected by an 8 man team that drops down to 4 or 3 committed players. With the penalty being for 2 or lower being an auto-incomplete.
Thirdly, the TF gains its rightful reputation for being something that you and some friends must commit to, and that it is not intended nor should be allowed to be some kind of solo-able stack of missions that can be exploited by anchors or farms.
***I know... I personally wish that if my team drops to just me, I would like the opportunity to finish the TF by myself with my tank and try to grind through the seemingly impossible.
***At the same time, PUGs (least good ones) seem hard to come by unless you are a certain AT and it seems rare to find people who actually want to play the game and not just farm all the time.
All in all this is a big beast to fix, and I think that the game is back on track in terms of IOs, and I think the Ouroboros addition opens the door to some other good things in the future.
This game was very forgiving on players. WoW has fixed spawn rates, fixed mobs and *shudder* respawning mobs. Sometimes you could not finish the damned raid/dungeon.
CoH had the ability to reduce the number of spawns to the number of players present. I did a lot of Task Forces and most of them lost 2-4 players due to any number of reasons. One time we were running Manticore and Miss Liberty was bugged. We petitioned it, to no avail, and four hours later, everyone logged off. The next day I logged in, we were bumped to the next mission and I found 2 teammates at the mission, ready to take on Hopkins. We lone 3 defeated him in a glorious battle.
It looks like that won't be possible again.
I have already expressed what I think about this change. I find Posi's post bordering ludicrous. Why? Because just MAYBE I don't want to play how he wants me to play. I could give a good gotdamn about the " pride of accomplishment that comes with completing a tf//sf". I WANT MY REWARD! Not a damn badge. If I want to feel "pride" I'll go to a PTA meeting or volunteer at the foodcupboard at my church. Maybe I will volunteer at my daughter's school book fair or accompany 30 10 year olds to the zoo as a chaperone. I don't play this game to feel " pride" in my accomplishments. THIS is a game.
I posted earlier about selling a miracle for an exorbitant amount. Know whats sad? To date I typically list uniques( when I sell) for around 1-5 mill depending on my mood.You know that Miracle that sold for 500k a month ago?
** raises hand*** I listed it for 10k cause that was my old mindset. Share the wealth. Spread the good Karma. What goes around comes around. Forget that mindset now.
Damn straight you people are gonna start paying through the nose. Thank Posi and his "idea" of how we all should play. I think I may enjoy becoming a money grubber. It was fun to spend that 100 mill from my last Miracle sold finishing my third dom"s sets.
Bottomline there are a few different factions of players affected by this "blanket" change . The factions connect and overlap at some point. So how about coming up with a 'fix' for all faction s of players and NOT just the ones who do it like YOU say?
You want to make a minimum spawn based on team size? Fine. I think EVERYONE can live with that. In fact? Noone so far in 68 pages has complained about the 'softlaod' fix. Providing you dev's fix the dumb tech in Rsf.How about taking some of the really good player suggestions regarding drop pools and research implementing some of those?
Thank you much and have a great day! 
Teaming is important. Pvp is balanced for teams. The devs should set it so you cannot enter a pvp zone unless you are on a team of at least 4 and you are debuffed until it is a team of 8. If at any time your team drops below 4, you should be kicked from the zone. Thusly, teaming is enforced and pvp is balanced. Ending the exploit of unbalancing pvp by solo'ing.
Lots of 50's yada yada. still finding fun things to do.
Cthulhu loves you, better start running
I�! I�! Gg�gorsch�a�bha egurtsa�ar�ug d� Dalhor! Cthluhu fthagn! Cthluhu fthagn!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages
I'm all for the addage, "if it ain't broke don't fix it." No one really had complaints about soft loading. if you did it okay good for your...here's a cookie. If you ground it out with 8 people okay good for you...here's a cookie. How someone else wishes to play, if it just constrains to themselves should not effect me and how I play and inversely how I wish to play if it only applies to me shouldn't matter to anyone else.
Sometimes I like the social part. Sometimes I like getting through a TF/SF/Trial/whatever as fast as I can since I've been on it for hours at a time and I swear if I see one more defeat all four zones away from where I currently am I'm going to snap. If my team agrees with me on that then we do it fast, we all end up happy and everyone else on a different server or zone doesn't care because it didn't conern them.
There are more important things to work on in TFs and such that people have been actually complaining about then soft loading. The ability for missions to accuratly reflect the team size was a good thing because real life happens so if it happens to someone on my team why should I suffer for it. Now the gameplay of others is affecting me and that is not cool.
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Tony, the point is the manual -- even the updated version -- contains a lot of inaccurate and outdated info. The updated version only covers up to Issue 4. what does it say about ED or Inventions or dozens of other things? Nothing.
The manual is not a good authority on the game any longer because CoH/V, like any MMO, evolves. Address the game as it is, not as the manual professes it to be prior to it even shipping.
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I'm sorry, but a lot of people seem to have this notion that just because an exploit is popular, it's part of some kind of evolutionary process and shouldn't be fixed. I have zero sympathy for that attitude. The task forces were not working as designed. They took an important step in fixing it.
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Lots of other stuff...
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I hope you didn't type all that for my benefit. My only point was that the manual does not provide a good foundation for discussing the game because it is a static document that does not reflect any changes in the game, that's all. I wasn't addressing the actual specific TF changes.
Ok, since Posi wouldn't post his reply in the thread that was actually talking about it, and chose to post in the "For Fun" Section...... here goes:
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Ok, I have been watching the boards and a lot of people are confused as to why we changed the spawn behavior in Task/Strike Forces to work for a minimum team size.
CoH was never designed to have a "Raid" in the original game. However, we saw a desire for a group of friends to get together and do some hard, lengthy content for good rewards. This is how Task Forces were born. They are the "casual" raid, something you can plan with your buddies that you are going to do on a certain day and for a certain amount of time, but you didn't need 30 or 60 people to pull it off.
That said, TF's (and SF's) have grown into their own. They are no longer the casual raid, but are run by pick up groups and nearly every character wants to get them done during their career. Personally I have no problem with the difference between how they were designed and how they are actually being played.
Where the problem comes in is where players are using our spawning system to reduce the challenge to trivial levels. When you load a map it places spawns on the map appropriate to your team size. If you have a team of 8, you will get huge spawns, if you have a team of 1, you will get a couple minions and the occassional lieutenant. Some of the "back end" spawns may not be spawned as soon as the map is loaded, it's a proximity thing. As you move through the map more and more spawns are loaded. If you ever wondered what the "trigger" for a cut-scene was it was simply "that is when that spawn was created."
Now TFs and SFs were made for the casual group of friends. This means that the group could persist over several game sessions. To do this we made it so that when you logged off, or lost connection, you didn't drop out of the group. Coming back into the game you would find that your character was still on the TF. This way you could run a TF "every Friday night from 8 to 9" and if all the participants agreed, you could progress the TF a little bit every week.
Now when you combine the spawn size system with the "you don't drop from team on logout" system, you have a system that is ripe for abuse. Players can start a TF with a team of 8 (or whatever the minimum number is for that TF), and right before entering every map, have all but one player log off. This single player can then stealth through the map (or simply run through it as a superspeed or high damage mitigating AT), and, when all the spawns have triggered for a team size of 1, tell everyone else they can log in now.
Suddenly the team of (x) is blowing through the map and its tiny spawns, getting the badge and Task Force reward at the end! Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns? I didn't think so either.
So we went back to the drawing board. We didn't want to change how TFs worked intrinsicly, but we did want to have a challenge remain. So we looked at minimum team size to start. Since you needed that many players to "commit" to starting the TF in the first place this was an excellent point at which to set the Minimum Spawn Size in the TF maps. So if you ran a TF with a minimum team size of 5 and you had 8 players, you would find that, when all 8 players were on line, you would get 8 person spawns. When one dropped out, it would fall to 7, another would go to 6, but if the team size dropped below 5, it would still spawn as if 5 people were on the map.
Now that said there are probably some "8 person" TFs that do not need to be spawning for 8 people all the time. The Shadow Shard comes to mind, and those will get looked at in a reduction of how many players it takes to start (and therefore how small the spawns will be at a minimum).
I hope this better explains why the change was made.
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I was VERY irritated that this was not in the patch notes. Our patch notes were a mess a couple years ago and I spearheaded a new check-in system that essentially forced someone checking in a change to write a patch note for that change. The developer would literally need to "opt-out" of writing a patch note when they checked in something.
However, this change was entirely a code change and didn't get checked in through the normal check-in process, and thus no patch note was written. This is the first time in 2 years that this has caused a problem for us and we are now correcting that check-in process so it doesn't happen again.
As for the other "stealth" fixes that we have made that have had missing patch notes: It has been explained that when we fix an exploit, there is NO patch note when it goes to training room. This is done on purpose and will not be changing. The TR patch notes are read by everyone, and if we explain an exploit we are fixing there, it could be anywhere from 2 days to 6 weeks before the fix gets to the Live servers where the exploit still exists. We would basically be advertising the exploit to all the live users, and that is something we don't want to do.
Although when the patch went to live the "hidden" notes should have been revealed, but in this case were not. Primarily because it had been so long since the changes were done (December 4th in one case) that it simply wasn't noticed that the final version of the patch notes were missing the exploit fix notes.
We will be re-examining the check-in and patch note process yet again in light of these recent failures.
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All Pool C recipes have the same weighting in the table, they should all drop equally over time.
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i freakin lol'd
As if people farmin' these things wouldn't just Dual-Box their way through it anyway?
Hell... 3 of the 4 guys I do it with can solo 8-man spawns @ level 20. I can solo 4-man spawns.
Until Posi fixes Pool-C itself, this is only going to get exploited harder and harder.
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BTW, Positron just posted a reply on the reasons for the changes. And has said nothing about the problems except "well, maybe some TFs could have their minimum reduced"
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Positron's post unfortunately suffers from the fallacy of "you must be disagreeing because you don't understand". Whereas in fact many people are disagreeing despite (or perhaps because of) understanding what the change was aimed at.
@Mindshadow
I actually Keep one of my toons parked in the ice mistral TF now. Its good money.
When something good happens to me, I can never enjoy it....
I am always too busy looking for the inevitable punchline...
BEHOLD THE POWER OF CHEESE!
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Since rare recipes are given out for completion now, though, attitudes have shifted and about the only people who run task forces now are farmers on "speed" runs. It was genuinely hard to get on an "honest" task force because even those who wanted to work on them usually got recruited into the "speed" runs. The default had shifted to using exploits to finishing task forces.
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I'm so sorry to hear you're having this dreadful problem, TonyV. Luckily, I found some advice that might be of use. It's such good advice you'll almost think you must've written it yourself!
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find better teammates. I've done it, it's easy, and you can do it too.
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