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Heh, I doubt if any rewards for custom criters are going up until months after the Devs feel absolutely sure they won't be farmed.
On the other hand, jacking up the rewards on a particular critter would be a great way to locate any farmers they wanted to get rid of...
[/ QUOTE ]On the third hand, leaving them as is would (and I know I'm going to get flamed for this) tend to discourage building Farm Missions full of nothing but Custom Bosses. Thus reducing the need to identify and punish individual offenders.
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Building a mission with all custom bosses is not a punishable offense. Castle's all AV mission would be an example of this.
Custom boss farms are kind of funny to me since they are harder and slower to clear than using the standard BM mobs for the same reward. People are such sheep.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
You do realize that we will NOT be able to pick powers from the ground up. "Adding" powers to an already overpowered standard custom critter roster of powers is in NO WAY a remedy to the issue of them having too many powers already.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
Understood. I am hoping that datamining will result in a reduction of the minimums for each difficulty level.
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!
Understood.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
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]I would be surprised if all the punishments for past offenses haven't already dropped. I'd also be surprised if anyone fessed up to losing an account, or even just levels, because they'd be identifying themselves as one of "the worst of the worst".
[/ QUOTE ]
I see your point, but it seems to me if characters were getting locked than the boards would be full of people complaining. There were people swearing up and down they would leave if they heard somebody ELSE's character was locked, they were so upset.
So I agree that any pending punishment has probably been executed, but right now there's no evidence anything happened. Good.
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Heh, I doubt if any rewards for custom criters are going up until months after the Devs feel absolutely sure they won't be farmed.
On the other hand, jacking up the rewards on a particular critter would be a great way to locate any farmers they wanted to get rid of...
[/ QUOTE ]On the third hand, leaving them as is would (and I know I'm going to get flamed for this) tend to discourage building Farm Missions full of nothing but Custom Bosses. Thus reducing the need to identify and punish individual offenders.
[/ QUOTE ]
Building a mission with all custom bosses is not a punishable offense. Castle's all AV mission would be an example of this.
Custom boss farms are kind of funny to me since they are harder and slower to clear than using the standard BM mobs for the same reward. People are such sheep.
[/ QUOTE ]Again, you're reading more into my words than is there.
I didn't say it would discourage ALL Custom Boss missions. I said it would discourage building FARM Missions with them. Though not specified, my reasoning was identical to yours. A mission full of very tough enemies is the antithesis of a "Farm". Anyone who tried to farm that would earn every point of reward they can pull out of it, fair and square.
It's not a Farm if your first reaction is "OMG, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!"
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Since we will soon be able to pick individual powers above the minimum for each difficulty
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While I know they are planning to allow this to some extent, I did not read into what was said that it would be that granular.
I am primarily expecting them to isolate "problem" powers out, with Aim, Build Up and their cousins being frequent examples. I'm sure there will be more, but I am still expecting bulk settings.
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Just a point of reference: during closed beta I suggested (perhaps "suggested" is not quite the word, but we'll use it for now) that the devs implement a system whereby a minimum set of powers from each primary and secondary powerset would be considered the minimum required to prevent exploitive critter designs, and then all other powers would be optional for critter designers to add or subtract.
What I was told at the time was that it would take too long to implement such a solution, and the compromise interim solution was the difficulty setting(s) we have now. I don't have direct knowledge, but because of that I believe that the I15 settings will be basically discrete settings for individual powers.
Actually, the ability to customize critter power selection has a rather twisty trajectory, which unfortunately I don't think I can repeat (the phrase "blanket immunity from prosecution" comes to mind).
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While I think that story tellers are going to love that, I really do think it's unfortunate for story players, because I consider it really unlikely that they can create a systematic way to give better reward for scarier critters under that design. Without a systematic approach, I think that means custom critters will default to baseline mob rewards, no matter how challenging they really are.
I think that's very unfortunate, because I think that increased challenge with appropriately increased reward really does attract a noticable part of the playerbase. However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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While I think that story tellers are going to love that, I really do think it's unfortunate for story players, because I consider it really unlikely that they can create a systematic way to give better reward for scarier critters under that design. Without a systematic approach, I think that means custom critters will default to baseline mob rewards, no matter how challenging they really are.
I think that's very unfortunate, because I think that increased challenge with appropriately increased reward really does attract a noticable part of the playerbase. However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm not sure that view of critter rewards is really completely valid. Outside of the MA, *most* standard PvE critters of the same rank have the same XP value regardless of difficulty: its only highly exceptional critters that have different value, or entire classes of critter that collectively have XP bonuses. Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.
Consider what you'd consider to be, on paper, a reasonable differential in XP between a Master Illusionist and a Freak Tank Swiper. Now compare to what they are actually set to.
I also don't think the underlying premise is entirely valid either. Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.
Beyond that, there is the fact that MA missions offer virtually travel-less mission running, AE tickets (which separate from debates over their award level have intrinsic advantages), and often much more streamlined mission objectives (its possible to avoid defeat alls, rescues, and other problematic mission objectives). All of those factor into the calculus of reward per unit effort that players will be considering when deciding whether to run AE mission arcs or not.
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Okay, I've said it before. I'll say it again.
It is NOT a binary "risk vs reward" equation.
It's a trinary equation. "Risk + Time vs reward"
The devs have hammered this point home with the advent of merits, then ripped it out and hammered it home again with the ticket nerfs in MA.
(Note: Not [censored] about the ticket nerfs, 1500 a mission is still a HELL of a lot of tickets. Just saying.)
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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It is NOT a binary "risk vs reward" equation.
It's a trinary equation. "Risk + Time vs reward"
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Actually, oversimplified a bit, its always been "risk vs (normalized) reward rate" since the beginning of time for this game. And the oversimplification implies a specific falsehood: that the relationship is linear, monotonic, or continuous.
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As of current definition by the devs themselves, time spent is a factor.
Trying to refer to rewards as "normalized" is, in and of itself, inaccurate. As rewards are still mutable through either randomization (drops) or merit/ticket adjustment.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
[ QUOTE ]
As of current definition by the devs themselves, time spent is a factor.
Trying to refer to rewards as "normalized" is, in and of itself, inaccurate. As rewards are still mutable through either randomization (drops) or merit/ticket adjustment.
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1. Specifically with regard to reward earning, the devs datamine reward earning rates. They do not balance anything against "rewards" per se.
2. Those earning rates are normalized** around a centerline earning rate which, depending on context, is either the average earning rate computed across the playerbase or a theoretical earning rate (typically when the entire earning curve is itself being evaluated).
Its actually possible to earn rewards at a non-zero rate and still be underperforming, because that earning rate is actually negative relative to the balance point.
3. All of this is not speculative, because its logically deducible from the devs prior statements on both how they datamine and how they balance based on that datamining, even going back to pre-release, and is consistent with everything I've ever been told about the process up to this point.
Time spent is ordinarily only a factor insofar as it obviously impacts earning rates. But the directly factored and directly balanced quantity is earning rate, not earnings.
** In mathematics within this context, normalization usually refers specifically to scaling some quantity or value to 1, adjusting all other quantities in relative proportion. More generally and somewhat more colloquially, it usually refers to proportional comparison to a standard. "Rewards" don't and can't have the property of being normalized on their own, but the measurements of reward earning rates can be. The phrase "normalized reward rates" can only be parsed as the numerical values of the rates themselves being normalized to some external standard, not as the rewards themselves being in some way "normalized" literally, for that reason.
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I have to agree with Arcanaville's observations and conclusions. MA missions are so much more convenient than standard missions it would take an obvious and large decrease in rewards to get me to stop playing them.
I have been referring to the "Reward Level" or the "Reward Ratio" of a given task, defining it as the ratio of Reward to Risk and/or Time (to borrow Posi's phrase), or the ratio of Reward to Effort.
However it's measured, I have been saying it's a variable figure even for a single task, because the composition of the team, the builds of the individual characters on the team and the skill/ability of the players behind the characters all affect the actual value.
Is that a valid assumption, or am I barking up a tree that doesn't even exist?
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I have been referring to the "Reward Level" or the "Reward Ratio" of a given task, defining it as the ratio of Reward to Risk and/or Time (to borrow Posi's phrase), or the ratio of Reward to Effort.
However it's measured, I have been saying it's a variable figure even for a single task, because the composition of the team, the builds of the individual characters on the team and the skill/ability of the players behind the characters all affect the actual value.
Is that a valid assumption, or am I barking up a tree that doesn't even exist?
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Well, sort of. As far as I know, the devs don't have a literal earning rate target they expect *everyone* to have. Rather, they have a target they expect the average of all players to hit, within a certain margin of error. They do, however, look at things like solo performance vs small team performance vs large team performance, drilling down to see if there are anomalies that the large averages might blur or hide. And they look at powerset combinations individually. So there are different numbers that can crop up under different analysis situations. Do they do the full matrix of everything under every condition? Probably not: its probably more selective than that.
While every single player and team will extract a slightly (or significantly) different earning rate from any given activity (and even the same player or team from day to day) that's just the nature of the game. The devs aren't concerned that much about that sort of variability. The important thing to them as far as balance is concerned is that the average of all players lands near the expected target and the distribution curve of all players is clustered mostly around that target without too many extreme outliers or other weirdness.
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Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.
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No**, but the inverse may be true - that critter difficulty is adjusted up or down (at design time) to match expectations for reward rates based on the averages for other groups.
For the MA, it seems like the devs have to make the "floor" for custom critters match the expectations for reward rates of regular PvE critters. Making the custom critters harder from there but not adjusting reward rates seems skewed to me.
I once wrote a long diatribe on how to reformulate the game based on balancing complexity and reward rates rather than "risk" and "reward", to which you responded saying "I think it's as simple as saying the game should reward according to skill" (I'm paraphrasing, but I think that was the gist). In the current situation, you can create custom groups that require skill to fight, but the game won't reward the effort. Or you can create custom groups that are deliberately as easy as you can make them, and the reward rate is the same.
That to me is a problem.
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Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.
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It's interesting you chose that example, because for a long time radio missions did significantly divert players away from story arcs. Positron complained about that effect specifically on the forums. IIRC, the response was to generally up the defeat rewards, and possibly up the story arc completion bonus, while leaving mission bonuses untouched.
PvP zone missions were even worse for a while. I remember getting a brute to level 50 in something like 140 hours using PvP missions almost exclusively (I didn't really care about doing "content" because his only purpose was to tank on LRSF runs), solo. At that time the average to get to 50 was around 200 hours for a good soloist doing other things, so the disparity was pretty significant. Then the devs decided that wasn't good for the game and took PvP zone missions mostly back down to normal with a boost every 30 minutes, and as far as I can tell, people then stopped running them.
Overall, I think the devs are faced with a problem they must solve one way or another - either by somehow normalizing critter difficulty, or by scaling rewards based on difficulty. Neither approach is easy. The latter is possible given massive amounts of data to mine, but we don't have that much data yet, I don't think, and maybe never will.
** Actually, though, I think there have been instances of critter XP being tweaked to match difficulty. I'm specifically thinking of Devouring Earth XP being adjusted at some point to account for their lieutenants dropping buffs. Your point stands, though, in that this is an exceptional and rare case rather than the norm (no pun intended).
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
Thanks!
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I'm not sure that view of critter rewards is really completely valid. Outside of the MA, *most* standard PvE critters of the same rank have the same XP value regardless of difficulty: its only highly exceptional critters that have different value, or entire classes of critter that collectively have XP bonuses. Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.
Consider what you'd consider to be, on paper, a reasonable differential in XP between a Master Illusionist and a Freak Tank Swiper. Now compare to what they are actually set to.
[/ QUOTE ]
I think there is plenty of evidence of mobs that are "hand tweaked". All we need do is review Culex's guide on the matter.
It's presumable that the only reason to tweak the rewards of a mob (up or down) is because of some feature of that mob which suggests to the devs or QA team or someone that that mob should not be worth it's rank's standard XP.
Freaks are a great example, because in my own testing of what "factions" I could earn inf the fastest against, Freaks actually came in on the low end of things, even though they are worth extra. My conclusion is that Dull Pain is a significant factor - if you cannot defeat them before they use it (or prevent them from using it) they take a lot longer to beat down. Apparently, someone internal noted that, or a designer surmised it, and the XP rewards for some freaks was set higher.
Whether the reward tweaking has been applied in a reasonable fashion in the rest of PvE is a completely different question. The evidence is in that they do consider it, whether or not they then choose wisely. I would be one of the people cheering loudly if they bumped the reward of MIs. I consider their current reward absolutely brutal.
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I also don't think the underlying premise is entirely valid either. Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.
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I'm not sure what part of my premise that counters. That's almost an example of the opposite of what I was describing. Consider the bonus difficulty settings on Ouroboros missions or TFs. The only time I see people use them is when they are trying to earn badges, to see what their character performance limits are, or to get bragging rights.
I consider "hard" and "extreme" MA mobs to be a variation on this. People may poke them just for the sake of the challenge now and then, but I think that letting them ride with standard rewards is going to mean that most people will avoid them, because the lesson seems to be that a lot if not most people are playing it for the end, not the means.
I think that if the MA could be both harder and appropriately more rewarding it would be vastly superior product for consumers of arcs, and a lot superior for authors interested in aspects in aspects beyond strong storytelling/creativity.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
[ QUOTE ]
For the MA, it seems like the devs have to make the "floor" for custom critters match the expectations for reward rates of regular PvE critters. Making the custom critters harder from there but not adjusting reward rates seems skewed to me.
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The problem is that its not trivial to "autocompute" the difficulty of a critter. Adding powers doesn't always make them stronger. Removing powers doesn't always make them weaker. The way the AI works complicates matters even more. The PvE game strongly suggests that a critter (or critter group) has to be exceptional in some way just to get the devs to even look at it, much less increase its rewards, probably because the act of reviewing them is always a rather nebulous and potentially risky process. Consider the XP bonus of Rikti Comm Officers. You don't think that's actually computed in some way, do you? Its a wild-hair guestimate, and probably wildly wrong. But wildly wrong doesn't matter too much when players can't predict, control, or modulate access to that wildly wrong guestimate. Its just a conceptual bonus moreso than a "difficulty" bonus. But when players can predict, control, and modulate access to those wildly wrong guestimates, you have the RWZ in the best case, and meows in the worst case.
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Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.
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It's interesting you chose that example, because for a long time radio missions did significantly divert players away from story arcs. Positron complained about that effect specifically on the forums. IIRC, the response was to generally up the defeat rewards, and possibly up the story arc completion bonus, while leaving mission bonuses untouched.
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Although radio missions did divert players in significant enough numbers for Positron to take notice, it didn't do so to an overwhelming degree. (See next post below).
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Overall, I think the devs are faced with a problem they must solve one way or another - either by somehow normalizing critter difficulty, or by scaling rewards based on difficulty. Neither approach is easy. The latter is possible given massive amounts of data to mine, but we don't have that much data yet, I don't think, and maybe never will.
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I believe the generalized problem is intractible at the moment. In my opinion the best solution currently available is the solution I proposed in beta (and one I made a very strong case to the devs on), which is to punt the problem to the authors by giving them tools to regulate the difficulty of custom critters. Custom critters are optional, and making them difficult is optional. Authors and players can then resolve the issue of "risk/reward" on their own, without the devs attempting to manipulate them, possibly incorrectly, with the reward system.
If critters become more predictable at some future point, I think the issue would be worth revisiting. However, unless someone can propose even in theory a workable way to autocompute difficulty for critters and translate that into a reward structure that isn't exploitable, I'm likely to be skeptical it can be done at all. If a workable system is proposed, I'd be willing to consider it and change my mind.
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I also don't think the underlying premise is entirely valid either. Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.
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I'm not sure what part of my premise that counters. That's almost an example of the opposite of what I was describing. Consider the bonus difficulty settings on Ouroboros missions or TFs. The only time I see people use them is when they are trying to earn badges, to see what their character performance limits are, or to get bragging rights.
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I was responding to this assertion specifically:
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However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.
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This suggests that given two choices, one with a higher reward earning rate, only a small percentage of players will willingly choose the lower earning rate activity, and even then only temporarily. However, that situation does not appear to be the case with regard to radio missions. Both activities attract a significant number of players.
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I consider "hard" and "extreme" MA mobs to be a variation on this. People may poke them just for the sake of the challenge now and then, but I think that letting them ride with standard rewards is going to mean that most people will avoid them, because the lesson seems to be that a lot if not most people are playing it for the end, not the means.
I think that if the MA could be both harder and appropriately more rewarding it would be vastly superior product for consumers of arcs, and a lot superior for authors interested in aspects in aspects beyond strong storytelling/creativity.
[/ QUOTE ]
In theory I think that is laudable, but I think in practice this methodology has only two possibly outcomes: balance perfection, and exploit-city. I don't think the reward systems or frankly the critters themselves are sophisticated enough to reach balance perfection.
Consider the case of a critter that can be manipulated into using mostly mezzes. Very dangerous to most players, but it actually makes them weaker against the mez-protected. That's one of those weird ironies of melee characters: they aren't just immune to mez, they often make a complete mockery of mezzers because the mezzers spend too much time trying to use useless mezzes rather than actually attacking. More generally, it seems to still be possible to give a critter a boatload of powers and then trick them into using only a few of them. The system appears to be not just too easy to game, but gameable in ways not everyone can take advantage of equally. That's double-trouble when it comes to detecting balance problems.
Basically, the moment I discovered in beta I could make a mission with nothing but AVs that spammed web grenade (despite having a boat-load of powers) I knew that autocomputed rewards was a non-starter in practice.
Even when the situation appears obvious, its not always quite so obvious after reflection. Build Up is one of the most lethal powers you can give a critter, and yet it doesn't always actually increase the difficulty of the critter in actual fact. Controllers can nullify the advantage of BU simply due to mez (even something like immobilizes can significantly reduce the impact of BU for primarily melee oriented critters). Is stealth always problematic? Or confuse? Some powers have such radically different effects on different players that they are sometimes incredibly problematic, and sometimes virtually worthless. When that happens, how do you decide how much to modify the XP of that critter by? And regardless, how do you prevent players from rolling just the right character to nullify all of those advantages and yet still reap the increased rewards?
In the regular PvE game, the Malta are harder for some players, while Carnies are pushovers. For other players, its vice versa. The PvE rewards associated with them are similar not because they actually *are* similar in difficulty to anyone in particular, but because in the PvE game those differences largely average out. You can't rely on anything averaging out when you allow players to create their own content.
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[ QUOTE ]
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However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.
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This suggests that given two choices, one with a higher reward earning rate, only a small percentage of players will willingly choose the lower earning rate activity, and even then only temporarily. However, that situation does not appear to be the case with regard to radio missions. Both activities attract a significant number of players.
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KeepDistance addressed this. At one point this was not the case. It only became the case that the player focus normalized after changes were made that lessened the reward difference between the two activities.
Game populations are not difference engines. They do not act like fluids and automatically univerally seek the lowest ground. [Edit: I point this out not because I believe you think players are this mechanical, but to make clear that I don't think they are like this.] Social interactions combined with individual preferances and moral compasses create various counter forces or potential barriers to players always seeking the optimal path to the "end goal", whatever that is. We see mass migration to a particular behavior when that behavior is so rewarding that it overcomes all those other forces. This likely has some degree of cascading effect - for example, social interactions that might keep some people away from greater exploration of exploits now become an attractor for for people who might not normally have gotten involved.
Because of this "fuzzy" nature to how the aggregate population behaves, all that is needed to limit egreggious use of most exploits is to make changes that put them close to other behaviors in terms of reward, whether that be by striking down the "exploit" or improving the alternatives. This appears to have been the case with paper and scanner missions. They remain a very optimal way to level, and some people choose to to use them nearly exclusively because of that. However, they are not so much better, or perhaps more importantly, so much more perceivably better that the general population does not give them special focus.
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In theory I think that is laudable, but I think in practice this methodology has only two possibly outcomes: balance perfection, and exploit-city. I don't think the reward systems or frankly the critters themselves are sophisticated enough to reach balance perfection.
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I agree that we can't get perfection, but I do not think that perfection is required, because I disagree that the only alternative is exploit city. I need only point to our existing PvE mob groups, some of whom offer increased rewards on the basis of (presumably) greater "challenge" or at least time to defeat. If those can exist, in theory so can MA critters. The challenge is in limiting how easy they are to "game" under player placement control.
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Consider the case of a critter that can be manipulated into using mostly mezzes. Very dangerous to most players, but it actually makes them weaker against the mez-protected. That's one of those weird ironies of melee characters: they aren't just immune to mez, they often make a complete mockery of mezzers because the mezzers spend too much time trying to use useless mezzes rather than actually attacking. More generally, it seems to still be possible to give a critter a boatload of powers and then trick them into using only a few of them. The system appears to be not just too easy to game, but gameable in ways not everyone can take advantage of equally. That's double-trouble when it comes to detecting balance problems.
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Again, I have to appeal to the existing PvE game. Is it imbalanced to the level of requiring action that some factions use fire or smash/lethal damage almost exclusively, yet some characters can be nearly immune to such attacks?
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Even when the situation appears obvious, its not always quite so obvious after reflection. Build Up is one of the most lethal powers you can give a critter, and yet it doesn't always actually increase the difficulty of the critter in actual fact. Controllers can nullify the advantage of BU simply due to mez (even something like immobilizes can significantly reduce the impact of BU for primarily melee oriented critters). Is stealth always problematic? Or confuse? Some powers have such radically different effects on different players that they are sometimes incredibly problematic, and sometimes virtually worthless. When that happens, how do you decide how much to modify the XP of that critter by? And regardless, how do you prevent players from rolling just the right character to nullify all of those advantages and yet still reap the increased rewards?
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Which is why I oppose (fully) piecemeal creation of custom critters. It would be the responsibility of the devs to create well-rounded powersets for the critters, much as they presumably do with their own mobs. The primary restriction placed on the MA would relate to the fact that every mob must have self-contained threat capabilities to guard against placing only that mob on a map, where the devs can design mobs that are weak on their own, but will reliably spawn as part of a larger group.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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We see mass migration
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My point is not that any of what you describe doesn't occur, but rather that my experience suggests it doesn't occur in as large a quantities as you're implying. Even in the case of PvP missions which awarded even *higher* rewards than radio missions ever did, there was never a mass-exodus towards them, and the risk of forced PvP when running them was extremely low to zeo.
*Most* of the difficulty settings, with a few exceptions, are not *massively* stronger than the strongest critters in the PvE game. The few (BU, Confuse, Stealth) are likely to be very infrequently used once players have access to the ability to remove them selectively. What's left is stronger, but not so much stronger that I think you'd see a mass migration away from AE missions.
The thing is, with better difficulty tools the players will very likely find the balance point for us in terms of difficulty vs play. This was only a critical problem when there were no such tools, and in effect every AE mission (with custom critters) would have been an Extreme one.
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I agree that we can't get perfection, but I do not think that perfection is required, because I disagree that the only alternative is exploit city. I need only point to our existing PvE mob groups, some of whom offer increased rewards on the basis of (presumably) greater "challenge" or at least time to defeat. If those can exist, in theory so can MA critters. The challenge is in limiting how easy they are to "game" under player placement control.
...
Which is why I oppose (fully) piecemeal creation of custom critters. It would be the responsibility of the devs to create well-rounded powersets for the critters, much as they presumably do with their own mobs.
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This is a question of design philosophy, and I stated it when the architect was first introduced. Control creates exploit opportunities, which requires restrictions on rewards. The more flexibility you want in the reward system, the less control you can give to players. I will always side on the side of giving control to authors in exchange for rewards.
If players want a way to get higher difficulty missions that then generate higher levels of rewards, that's cool. But the only way I can see to do that without removing authorship control from the system, which I would oppose, is to advocate for a parallel system whereby players and devs could somehow cooperate to create "custom-critter templates" that generated dev-approved custom critter powerset/power combinations that would then grant a dev-approved higher level of rewards. But that is at best a very downstream suggestion.
Your perspective seems to be that missions have to be reward-balanced first, and its up to the AE to guide authors to creating such. Under that philosophy, removing options that cannot be reward balanced is not problematic. However, I see the AE as an authorship tool in which the primary goal is to provide players the opportunity to author missions, and the rewards associated with playing them are only added where they cannot be exploited. Those two priorities are not trivially reconcilable and probably ultimately mutually exclusive to at least some degree.
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My point is not that any of what you describe doesn't occur, but rather that my experience suggests it doesn't occur in as large a quantities as you're implying. Even in the case of PvP missions which awarded even *higher* rewards than radio missions ever did, there was never a mass-exodus towards them, and the risk of forced PvP when running them was extremely low to zeo.
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There seems to be some sort of threshold that has to be overcome. The difference between radios and arcs could just be at a level that isn't noticeable or isn't considered significant.
While I have no idea how this factors into the reward calculation you are speaking of, ARCs offer other rewards besides inf and drops. There are temp powers to be had and badges to gain.
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Since we will soon be able to pick individual powers above the minimum for each difficulty
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While I know they are planning to allow this to some extent, I did not read into what was said that it would be that granular.
I am primarily expecting them to isolate "problem" powers out, with Aim, Build Up and their cousins being frequent examples. I'm sure there will be more, but I am still expecting bulk settings.
While the near-totally dynamc version is going to be best for authors interested in making interesting NPCs, it will make any sort of reward standardization very hard if not impossible. I think it's important that harder things give better reward, and I believe that losing some flexibility is worth being able to quantify that.
What we have right now is too restrictive, but because of the above I think that going to the other extreme is also poor.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA