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Why? kill all xp exploits with 1 system. Then you can let people do things that they consider fun while at the same time maintaining risk(time) to reward ratio.
At high level the system would limit the rate at which XP is gained for a character. Since it is a rate, the only way to measure it is over time. In that time there's going to be peaks and valleys. You don't want to penalize a team because a blaster used a nuke so you have to accommodate those peaks.
With all that being said, here's one implementation. Not by any means the only way to do this.
At the time a user zones out of a mission the server looks at the xp gained. If it goes over the cap (whatever it might be) the character is issued xp debt. I figured that would be gentler then taking xp away possibly de-leveling a char. At this point the char has to work off the debt xp before new xp is awarded. While the user has debt xp, he will not gain any inf or drops. Since you gained them before.
In normal scenarios most people will not see this. This would only come up if you found an exploit, or if you have a very low level char sked up to a lvl 50 team.
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Look as far as handling missions in AE that can be handled by deleting those that are obviously there for farming and PL'ing. Other pl'ing methods are tough to handle. Your system does not handle those that in a sense pl without actually doing just that. I mean that they go the fastest way possible without pl'ing. They would go to the sewers then go the route of TF's and use normal missions when they have too in order to reach the next level of the next TF. I have no doubt that leveling in that manner may exceed the normal limit. So they would be punished for leveling just playing the game normally. Yes there leveling is faster than normal. But that is the fastest that the game gives you unless normally playing AE has become faster.
Ebony Fists: Level 50 DM/Regen Scrapper, Gloom Piston Robotics/Dark mastermind level 34, QueenFireMare: Level 34 Fire blaster (pure fire),
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Look as far as handling missions in AE that can be handled by deleting those that are obviously there for farming and PL'ing.
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That's pretty harsh and should always be a last reward. You're almost certain to lose a customer that way. But if you avoid it in the first place by having the cap in place you're better off.
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Other pl'ing methods are tough to handle. Your system does not handle those that in a sense pl without actually doing just that. I mean that they go the fastest way possible without pl'ing. They would go to the sewers then go the route of TF's and use normal missions when they have too in order to reach the next level of the next TF. I have no doubt that leveling in that manner may exceed the normal limit. So they would be punished for leveling just playing the game normally. Yes there leveling is faster than normal. But that is the fastest that the game gives you unless normally playing AE has become faster.
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Correct, because that's not PLing, that's power gaming. Could it be considered farming or grinding? sure. But that in itself isn't bad. People farm missions all the time when a mission is completed but the story isn't read. You're farming missions. Or grinding on missions. That's is and will be a standard part of most MMOs.
Bah, I meant to say 6/hour (Posi seemed to hint that 8 levels per hour is too fast).
In any case, it probably would not apply to pre-debt levels.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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Look as far as handling missions in AE that can be handled by deleting those that are obviously there for farming and PL'ing.
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That's pretty harsh and should always be a last reward. You're almost certain to lose a customer that way. But if you avoid it in the first place by having the cap in place you're better off.
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See, I disagree with this. I think putting an xp cap into place is more draconian and heavy handed than removing PL/Farm maps from the MA, especially since they told us ahead of time that it wasn't designed for that (deleting PL'd toons is another issue though). This is just another example of a solution that's only curing the symptoms, and not the disease. The real problem is that we were given the tools to make exploitable content. Remove those tools, and you don't have to do anything else.
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This is just another example of a solution that's only curing the symptoms, and not the disease. The real problem is that we were given the tools to make exploitable content. Remove those tools, and you don't have to do anything else.
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Er... huh?
The problem isn't that people can do whatever they want in MA. I mean, that's really the goal of the system. If I wanted to make a mission full of ridiculously easy enemies with lots of HP for some reason, I should be able to do that without it leading to an exploit. Ditto for a mission full of Comm officers or whatever the next exploit people stumble upon for the system is (and it's already on its way).
What you suggest really is addressing the symptom (that MArc specifically currently allows leveling at a rate fast enough that it destroys the statistical balance of the game), rather than the disease (the statistical balance of the game can be overcome). All future possible exploits would be addressed by introducing an xp rate cap, curing it with finality.
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This is just another example of a solution that's only curing the symptoms, and not the disease. The real problem is that we were given the tools to make exploitable content. Remove those tools, and you don't have to do anything else.
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Er... huh?
The problem isn't that people can do whatever they want in MA. I mean, that's really the goal of the system. If I wanted to make a mission full of ridiculously easy enemies with lots of HP for some reason, I should be able to do that without it leading to an exploit. Ditto for a mission full of Comm officers or whatever the next exploit people stumble upon for the system is (and it's already on its way).
What you suggest really is addressing the symptom (that MArc specifically currently allows leveling at a rate fast enough that it destroys the statistical balance of the game), rather than the disease (the statistical balance of the game can be overcome). All future possible exploits would be addressed by introducing an xp rate cap, curing it with finality.
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I disagree with this. Clearly, farming itself is not the issue. People were farming and powerleveling off of dev created content for years, and the devs didn't take the extreme measures that they're taking against the MA farms. Positron came right out and said that the problem is that people were using exploits to disregard the time vs. reward ratio in the game. If people can level super-quickly without using an exploit, then it's not an issue. So, if you remove the ability to create exploitable content, you remove the problem.
I never said farming or powerlevelling were the issue.
When Posi says "risk," you need to read it as "time." Because it's not like you're at risk of losing a finger or something -- what you're at risk for is getting delayed or slowed down.
So
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...people can level super-quickly without using an exploit...
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is kind of an oxymoron. How could a character possibly level super-quickly unless either a) they were substantially more powerful than the game was designed to accomodate (which means minimal or no risk inherent in their activities) or b) they were recieving rewards far out of scale with the toughness of the things they were defeating (again, no or minimal risk)?
This question isn't rhetorical.
Currently, the players who level too fast will be flagged. If you put an xp rate cap, players will figure out approximately what the cap is sooner or later by collecting statistics from the community.
Maybe it is a good idea just to let players level in whatever rate they can, such that they can fully utilize whatever tricks they have. In this way, the dev can figure out more easily where the problem lies. If there is a rate cap, people will stop what they are doing when they hit the cap, or tryng to alternate different tricks to avoid hitting the cap, these will just make it more difficult for the dev to find out the problems.
But won't there not be any problems as long as the cap is in place?
A cap on "how fast" would be difficult to put even with an overall estimate of how long one "should" take from 1 to 50. 4/5, a good 80% of the total experience a character will gain for its entire career, is found in the 40-50 range. Levelling speed, too, varies wildly, with level 1-2 often taking just 10-15 minutes (if you skip the tutorial) while level 49-50 could easily run into 10-20 hours if you're not very efficient, and more if you're a solo support AT. Any system that tries to enforce a "time per level" metric is bound to fail. Even if it designated a different amount of time, it still only succeeds in crimping levelling, not controlling it, and even then it crimps it only at level-up.
I suspect a better system would be one correlates experience earned with time played, and I've found that a simple quadratic function does this reasonably well. If we want to have "normal" levelling from 1 to 50 take 50 hours and base numbers off that, I'd put it as something like:
expected_time = 50*(current_experience/experience_to_50)^2
At zero experience, the expected time would obviously be zero. At, say, 23,400 experience, or enough to level up to 20, the time expected would be 2.98, call it 3 hours. It sounds more than just fair. Presumably, if you took less than three hours to 23,400 experience, the game would cut off experience gains until you "made up the time." However, as anyone can tell at a cursory glance, this is a stupid system, because an experience-capped character is forced to essentially wait around and do nothing, meaning people can just let the character stay logged into a mission and go to work.
I spent some time thinking up a system of "diminishing returns," just a fun mental exercise the other day, however, that could solve at least part of the problem. This system would assume an "average" time to level 50, which I'd say is around 150 hours, and a "minimum" time to level 50, which I'd put at 50 hours. As long as the time played stays above the average, nothing happens, but when the time played begins exceed the average, then the closer it comes to the minimum time, the greater the diminishing of the experience gained. A flat increase would be silly, however, as it would punish too much for too little, so again a quadratic function might serve the purpose. Essentially, it would diminish next to nothing for the most part, but would increase rapidly the closer people got to the absolute minimum.
Unfortunately, the whole idea is far too unworkable and impossible for me to bother to formulate actual equations and draw up graphs. It can be balanced and adjusted, even on a very gentle sliding scale, but the point remains that an experience cap is not something I can ever imagine in this game. If anything comes of it, then maybe I'll hit the books and come up with something more useful.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I never said farming or powerlevelling were the issue.
When Posi says "risk," you need to read it as "time." Because it's not like you're at risk of losing a finger or something -- what you're at risk for is getting delayed or slowed down.
So
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...people can level super-quickly without using an exploit...
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is kind of an oxymoron. How could a character possibly level super-quickly unless either a) they were substantially more powerful than the game was designed to accomodate (which means minimal or no risk inherent in their activities) or b) they were recieving rewards far out of scale with the toughness of the things they were defeating (again, no or minimal risk)?
This question isn't rhetorical.
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I can think of 2 or 3 reasons it could happen.
1. If you're part of a superteam. Some superteams in the past have leveled to 50 ridiculously fast (not the 4 hours fast of the AE days, but still a remarkably short length of time). It's not that any 1 team member is overpowered, or they're exploiting anything. They just use stacked buffs/debuffs to let them take on things no normal team could and beat them quickly and efficiently.
2. Double xp weekend. Unless you're planning on changing your xp rate cap for 2xp weekend, that could throw things off. I took a toon from level 20-45 in about 10-12 hours of playtime last 2xp weekend, and there was no farming involved, just big teams and TFs.
3. Sugar-daddy'd toons. If you have the money to buy primo enhancements from level 10 on, you'll be a lot more powerful and level much quicker than the average toon. Some people don't like it, but there's no rules against doing it if that's what you like to do.
I consider an exploit taking advantage of unintended bugs or behavior in the game mechanics to give yourself an unfair edge. None of those scenarios do so, but all 3 of them can lead to much faster leveling than average, sometimes almost ridiculously fast.
An xp rate cap would hurt people who are legitimately leveling quickly unless you made it so high that it's irrelevant. I think removing the exploits is a better solution, that way people can level as fast as they want, and know they won't get banhammered for doing it.
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I think removing the exploits is a better solution, that way people can level as fast as they want, and know they won't get banhammered for doing it.
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The way an exploit is dealt with is via experience reduction (if it wasn't intentional) or banning (if it was). Unless you mean, "remove the exploit before anyone uses it," in which case you're asking for perfect or precognitive developers.
You yourself point out that none of those methods level at speeds defined 'exploitative.' Clearly having a high cap would not be irrelevant. Especially if it's done as an asymptotic cap or quadratic reduction.
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I think removing the exploits is a better solution, that way people can level as fast as they want, and know they won't get banhammered for doing it.
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The way an exploit is dealt with is via experience reduction (if it wasn't intentional) or banning (if it was). Unless you mean, "remove the exploit before anyone uses it," in which case you're asking for perfect or precognitive developers.
You yourself point out that none of those methods level at speeds defined 'exploitative.' Clearly having a high cap would not be irrelevant. Especially if it's done as an asymptotic cap or quadratic reduction.
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Your first statement is not necessarily true. The ability to create all boss mobs with no ranged or armor powers has not been banned or had it's xp reduced. They just added ranged powers to them.
And for the second comment. If this were added at some really high rate (say whatever xp rate would be needed to get you from 1-50 in ten hours), I can't see it ever coming into play. I don't see the devs leaving what they see as exploits in the game just because people can't use them to level really fast. Try to remember that they weren't just exploiting them for xp either. They wanted to stop people from farming tickets so fast as well. If they're going to remove the exploits anyway, that super-high xp rate cap IS irrelevant.
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If they're going to remove the exploits anyway, that super-high xp rate cap IS irrelevant.
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Right up until the next one comes along, and more people abuse it and are deleveled or banned in consequence. Rather than banning people and losing those accounts, it seems like it would be more prudent to take the scissors (as in, the ones they're running with) out of those folks' hands in the first place.
overall, bad idea. Majority of new subscriptions that I saw came from people knowing they could now level faster. If anything, they need to increase xp gains. I still stand by my suggestion of level up tokens for new players.
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overall, bad idea. Majority of new subscriptions that I saw came from people knowing they could now level faster. If anything, they need to increase xp gains. I still stand by my suggestion of level up tokens for new players.
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How is it a bad idea if it doesn't affect you? Unless you're PLing sitting on a -5 farm at low levels or using some sort of exploit you wouldn't hit the cap.
I will say why my idea is bad though and the only reason in my mind why the Devs wouldn't implemented. People. Just about all people immediately see it as control taken away from them. They don't go past that part to figured out, oh, this would never affect my unless I was doing something wrong. It's that negative feeling that most people would immediately get that would prevent the devs from putting in this cap. People would be saying, oh, it's ED all over again, and aoe caps, and health caps, City of Caps.
I think the dev is more concerned with the methods players use to level fast. Usually, this points to something bad in the content design.
Looking at methods of leveling, or fixing exploits is putting out the fires.
Adding an xp cap is making the building fire retardant. You still have to worry about the fire, but not to the same degree.
Look at what happened with the EA. If an xp cap was in place people would be farming at the cap. Still a problem, yes, but not to the same degree. The devs would still have to address it, but people wouldn't feel like they just had a huge thing taken away from them. The xp cap is there to lesson the impact of problems. It would also act to curb things that the devs know exist, they don't like it, but there's no real way for them to act on it without affecting regular game play. IE, taking out SKing from the game for instance.
Actually, putting an xp rate cap cannot really do the job. If I have a character that hit the cap, I just need to logon another character. After the second character hit the cap, I logon the first one again. So, instead of leveling 1 character, I can alternate 2 characters to defeat your cap, unless you put a rate cap on the whole account.
And also, you can refer to my first post in the thread, it is just a matter of time that players can figure out the rate cap if it is put in. After the cap is figured out, say 4 levels under 30 minutes, then it would just be what Positron said, players will make sure that they gain 4 levels in 31 minutes.
You can't. Unless you do this every 5 seconds or 60 seconds. Which will not really defeat it. Depending on how frequently it checks your rate. This isn't something like, oh, in 1 hour you gained all the xp you can have, now you're not allowed anymore.
You would have to have the xp rate cap averaged over a pretty long time-span or the cap would have to be so high it wouldn't mean anything. Averaging it over 60 seconds wouldn't be nearly long enough. It would probably have to be like 10 minutes or more.
I think my biggest argument against this, is that it would basically be wasted effort by the devs. Sure, it would prevent people from abusing exploits, but they'd still have to spend the time to remove those exploits. So all the time that went into adding the xp rate cap would be meaningless. That coupled with the feeling that it would be too much control or "big brother" by the devs makes me really dislike the idea.
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How is it a bad idea if it doesn't affect you?
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Changes to this game affect everyone in this game, no matter the change. It will chase people away from the game, thus making it more difficult to find a team.
I quite oftem find myself on teams where the level difference between myself and the mobs is 5 or greater with some of my lower level toons. It doesn't mean I'm powerleveling or farming.
It won't be implemented because it's just a bad idea. It will chase people away from the game, and at this point with all the new content coming out, it's not needed.
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I may be reading too much into Positron's follow up MA Abuse statement, but it looks like 3 levels per hour may be the benchmark to consider.
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I don't think levels/hour works as a metric since XP per level isn't constant.
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