You lost me when you said "Two of my other friends tell me they have cancelled their accounts because of what statesman has done."
Statesman has not been a part of this game for a couple years now.
My question is this....why should a power gamer be punished for playing the game better than average and bringing in more reward of any type?
As long as no exploit is used, you are being punitive to those who excell.
Also your numbers are very weak...we have marketeers who deal in 100's of millions each day. I know, I do too.
First off, I don't know who Statesman or Positron or Superman or Ironman is and if they are active members or ex employees or what ... I'm simply relaying a whisper I got last night. Excuse me for not googling his information to see if it was accurate.
Second, my numbers are weak? Sorry, you must have missed the (if a player matches 3/4 of these flags) they will be banned. So are you saying that every marketeer also has farms labeled "Ticket Paradise" and leveled up a newbie 1-50 in less than 10 hours?
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My question is this....why should a power gamer be punished for playing the game better than average and bringing in more reward of any type?
As long as no exploit is used, you are being punitive to those who excell.
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the devs agree with you.
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenth ur-
nuk!
The sticking point is that no one has told us where the line between "optimized play" and "exploit" is, since many people (and some devs?) seem to consider min/maxing the available environment to be equal to finding a bug and exploiting it.
Being banned or not may end up entirely hinging on whether the GM whose ticket queue you end up in had a bad evening, or a fight with his girlfriend the night before.
It comes down to the definition of farming
farm-ing Pronunciation [fahr-ming]
noun
1. Producting Experience And/Or Infamy at a higher rate than another player, thus making that player whine you are exploiting.
2. Having a mind set that working harder should earn more rewards. Sounds like blasfamous republican slander.
3. Spending time researching and reading to further your ability to maximize your time and effort.
You did great on the first half of that post. The second half where you try in vain to come up with the proper level where banning should occurr etc.. well leave that stuff to the devs mate, players are tranditionally worse at this kind of thing than the devs and that is saying something.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
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You did great on the first half of that post. The second half where you try in vain to come up with the proper level where banning should occurr etc.. well leave that stuff to the devs mate, players are tranditionally worse at this kind of thing than the devs and that is saying something.
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let's say that we denote a number/type of MOBs as: N
The Devs will NEVER explicity state that "N = AE Farm", ever. Why?
Beacause, once they do every AE Farm creator will make sure their mission is N -1; and scream , "See, I'm under the limit, it isn't a farm."
It will always be subjective because the AE is designed as a story telling tool; and their may be cases that come close to the Devs 'Farm' threshhold here or there, but because of other considerations of the story and other intangible elements, teh Devs would say - 'not a farm'.
Farming is 'doing the same thing over and over'. As if you were hoeing rows in a field on a farm. The devs usually try to stop farming more than just powerlevelling, because it's boring and people tend to burn out and stop playing the game.
It's like, EVE. You'll be there focused on maximizing your ISK with missions or whatever, and then one day you wake up and say 'this is boring, I'm just doing the same thing over and over' and never play again.
MA farms are especially nasty because people are using exploits to make them a lot more *effective* than normal play. If farming is 20% or even 100% faster than normal play that doesn't bore you to tears, most people aren't going to bother with it. If it's 10000% faster, people get hooked on the crack and it's hard to find people doing anything else.
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Farming is 'doing the same thing over and over'. As if you were hoeing rows in a field on a farm. The devs usually try to stop farming more than just powerlevelling, because it's boring and people tend to burn out and stop playing the game.
It's like, EVE. You'll be there focused on maximizing your ISK with missions or whatever, and then one day you wake up and say 'this is boring, I'm just doing the same thing over and over' and never play again.
MA farms are especially nasty because people are using exploits to make them a lot more *effective* than normal play. If farming is 20% or even 100% faster than normal play that doesn't bore you to tears, most people aren't going to bother with it. If it's 10000% faster, people get hooked on the crack and it's hard to find people doing anything else.
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The regular farms (radio missions) are okay, Because the devs said its okay, and they know best. Just like Statesman knew best.....
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Two of my other friends tell me they have cancelled their accounts because of what statesman has done.
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Apparently your friends are suffering from post tramatic stress disorder. 
If Brevity is the Soul of Wit, Why are You Reading This?
Or, they could be players from long ago who were lured into giving NCsoft their money once again, only to return and find dev behavior indistinguishable from Jack Emmert's.
Just saying perhaps the substance of his observation could be discussed, rather than falling into pedantry.
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It's like, EVE. You'll be there focused on maximizing your ISK with missions or whatever, and then one day you wake up and say 'this is boring, I'm just doing the same thing over and over' and never play again.
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Congratulations! You just described how Im feeling about the entire dev-content side of the game!
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You did great on the first half of that post. The second half where you try in vain to come up with the proper level where banning should occurr etc.. well leave that stuff to the devs mate, players are tranditionally worse at this kind of thing than the devs and that is saying something.
[/ QUOTE ]
let's say that we denote a number/type of MOBs as: N
The Devs will NEVER explicity state that "N = AE Farm", ever. Why?
Beacause, once they do every AE Farm creator will make sure their mission is N -1; and scream , "See, I'm under the limit, it isn't a farm."
It will always be subjective because the AE is designed as a story telling tool; and their may be cases that come close to the Devs 'Farm' threshhold here or there, but because of other considerations of the story and other intangible elements, teh Devs would say - 'not a farm'.
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My question would be, who cares if it is right up on the line...as long as the line isn't crossed? The line is just that, the line. This side is good, this side is not.
I log in last night and the world is on fire. I'm getting tells from several of my buddies saying "the good times are over!" Two of my other friends tell me they have cancelled their accounts because of what statesman has done.
Being unaware of what this is all about I go to cap to test out my farming missions. Standard Outdoor all melee boss farm. Along the way I see the constant flames in broadcast.
So I load up my map for an 8 player spawn and go to work to see the changes. There are 3 noticable changes:
1. Mobs have a ranged attack and shoot once before entering melee range. This adds 2 seconds to my per spawn kill rate.
2. Mobs hit harder. When I engage a full 16-18 pack, i have to use 1 small respite.
3. Ticket Cap is lower. No sweat, I can use a smaller outdoor map now and get to the 1.2x bonus on the 5th mission faster.
From a farming for infamy perspective, I don't even notice these changes, they are so minor.
Who I feel for is the non MIN / MAX non hard core gamer out there. Standard 8 player PuG are having a tough time with these missions now. Dominators are casting immobolize on the packs before they are on the tank and their ranged attacks are chewing people up. Players are attacking too quickly now because brutes need more time to round up the packs which is causing more deaths.
From my perspective the people being impacted with these changes are the non-hardcore casual players. That's a shame since that's probably the majority of the player base.
Am I worried about the "rollbacks" and punishments? No, not at all. Really who is going to be flagged and what will be the criteria? From a developer perspective I would do the following:
1. IF Experience Points divided by hours played is greater than X, player flagged.
A. Ratio should be something like 3 mill per hour played and less is safe. Run the check against data from database restores for each day since I14 was released.
2. IF Ticket generated is greater than 50000 per day player flagged.
3. IF player published an arc that matches farm crieria (Rikti Comm Officer, Keywork "farm" "ticket" "powerlevel") player flagged.
4. IF Infamy spent is greater than 100,000,000 per day for X consecutive days, player flagged.
IF any player matches 3 / 4 of the above criteria bann account and any accounts that match the credit card payment information or Billing Address.