Secrets of the Ticket Bonus System Revealed!

It seems a lot of people don't know how the Ticket Bonus works in MA arcs. Synapse told us some very useful stuff back in Beta:

When you complete a MA mission, you get a bonus equal to the number of tickets you earned in the mission (plus modifiers). If you defeated loads of bad guys, you'll get a big bonus. If you didn't defeat any, you won't get any bonus.

So, every time you see the message flash up that you earned 14 tickets (or whatever), just bear in mind that if you finish the mission, you will earn those 14 tickets AGAIN.

Obvious Conclusion: the way to get lots of tickets from MA arcs is to defeat everything on the map before finishing the mission.

But wait! There's more. The ticket bonus is subject to a bonus multiplier. And the further along in the arc you are, the bigger the bonus multiplier gets.

Mission 1: x1.0
Mission 2: x1.05
Mission 3: x1.1
Mission 4: x1.15
Mission 5: x1.2

Obvious Conclusion: To get the hugest ticket bonus possible, defeat everything on the map in Mission 5 of a 5 mission arc before finishing the mission.

But wait! There's even more. The Architect day job ALSO adds a multiplier to the ticket bonus. Architect adds 5%, and Experienced Architect adds 10%.

You can find all of this information conveniently summed up here.

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QR - that title is hilarious. You crack me up, L_S!

And good to know this stuff, too.

Eco.

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)

NEWS: The bug that was causing groups to get fewer tickets than they should has been squished on Test.

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Fixed bug that lowered the amount of tickets dropped as the group size increased

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[ QUOTE ]
NEWS: The bug that was causing groups to get fewer tickets than they should has been squished on Test.

[ QUOTE ]
Fixed bug that lowered the amount of tickets dropped as the group size increased

[/ QUOTE ]

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That's awesome news and should help MA teaming. I was pretty much forced to solo the first few days to get the unlockable content.

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Thanks for the info and the link, Lady S.

One thing on the wiki that reads a little confusing, to me, is that it mentions "it was a huge kill-all with lots of bosses, the mission complete Ticket bonus is rather large". This is actually misleading. It doesn't matter if the mission is a 'defeat all' or not, it only matters if the player treats it as a defeat all /before/ completing the last mission objective.

To me, this was the one truly disappointing thing about the MA design. The mission objectives have no effect on the number of tickets you get, other than affecting the number of spawns and how large they are. Your tickets are based solely on the mobs you defeat. Yes there are 'bonus multipliers' for a badge, for which mission in the arc it is, and for completing the mission, but for earning the tickets these bonuses are based on, its just what you 'kill'.

I understand the potential for abuse that has kept them from rewarding players for rescuing a hostage, finding a critical clue, accomplishing the mission within a time limit, etc. I just hope hey are able to find a way to overcome the problem so that we can offer players something other than 'beat on this bag of HP' for a challenge that has a reward. I hate running through a mission that really captured my imagination and had me hooked on the story, only to complete it and realize that my mission 'bonus' was 17 tickets.

Maybe they could add half a percent bonus to the mission bonus for each objective you completed, up to a maximum of 10% bonus? Or, give the autors the option to mark 5-10 objectives as "critical" and add 1% to the bonus for each critical objective completed. *shrug* I don't know, just throwing a couple of possibilities out there.

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This is something the MMORPG world has struggled with since day 1, really; how can you tell how much work the player really did to accomplish a task? Pen and paper games have a live GM there to act as the judge and arbiter, and that makes a world of difference, IMHO.

There are a lot of variables I would want to see go into the ticket award determination: difficulty of enemies, bonus multipliers for ambushes, non-combat details, etc, etc. All these things are reasonable factors, but it's hard to balance them out a priori. Not sure there's a good solution other than continual effort put into tweaking the formula.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

hmm, so shorter missions should be first, longer missions at the end for more tickets.

I was thinking of adding a padding mission - something very short to meet a contact as a break from the long missions. I can still do that as mission 4, it makes the tickets for the final mission worth more by being mission 5 instead of mission 4.

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I thought the "Secret" of the ticket system was:

1) Visualize that you are going to get a bunch of tickets.
2) Express gratitute to the Devs for giving you this tickets.
3) Never doubt for a moment that you wasted good money on the "secrets" book.

This dates back to the Freemasons, so it has to be true.

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That blue thing running around saying "Cookies are sometimes food" is Praetorian Cookie Monster!
Shoot on sight, please.