New Level Pact Squad to face the Toughest in CoH
By
10100101,
Posted on: 2009-05-22 19:36 in The Market and Inventions
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By the way, my analysis of this is that there are three game-balance issues in play, and no exploits per se.
1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme. There are two fixes for it that I can think of, one of which is complicated and requires a lot of careful analysis, and one of which is a giant sledgehammer.
2) Characters progress beyond the point where PvE combat is even slightly challenging. Increased reward rates have been exposed by providing opportunities for harder combat where none existed before, allowing more powerful characters to earn rewards faster instead of everyone being "flattened" to an arbitrary limit governed by existing PvE spawn rules. This is the balance issue I'm not sure should be fixed; re-flattening the game makes it less interesting IMHO.
3) Combat in CoX has many elements of "rock-paper-scissors" to it where equivalent factions may be vastly harder or easier to defeat based on player powerset choices. The MA inherently allows players to design "paper" enemies for their "scissors". I have a solution for this too, believe it or not, though it would need some careful implementation to avoid loopholes, and even then would mostly be just a "rule of thumb" kind of solution that would discourage but not eliminate this kind of setup.
I've been writing out in my head a PM to Synapse regarding all of this, including my suggestions. (Even assuming he were interested he'd clearly have to take it up with Positron, but my faith in Posi even reading a PM of mine is basically zero.)
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Even regarding #3, players have long avoided certain enemies because they were harder for them even before MA. Now you could pop into MA, eventually find someone easier for your character or you can choose radios full of ones weak to your character.
I've been churning "easy" enemies in papers/radios for a long time now once I have finished the arcs with them.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
The scheme would somewhat help rebalance in that situation too. As I said though it's more a "rule of thumb" kind of solution and only trims the extreme outliers (part of the appeal - the goal was not to disturb "regular" gameplay very much if at all).
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
I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised... 
"Facing the Toughest in CoH" was just hyperbole from the very beginning. The point of the thread was always to tune for xp/time and sell pacts.
Truly facing the toughest in CoH is to create a custom group with only AV Ghost Widows and Lord Recluses, or maybe one with nothing but an extreme/extreme Fire Blast/Ninjutsu AV, and to play against it on the highest difficulty. This, however, will not be economically lucrative.
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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You apparently didn't read his post correctly. He said he specifically tuned them to make them harder. I don't think it's "the toughest in CoH" but he did mention that he died several times.
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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Link please. That's not what I can find in Smurphy's post. Unless you are talking about Keep's and my posts.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Post deleted by Chaos_Creator
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***
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Sorry, I forgot. 
[edited to add] But I bet mine (ignore list) is bigger than Smurphy's... 
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Did the Bunny hollar at you for quoting Ogon? He did that to me a couple of times cause then you have to see what he posted and Smurphy was right you don't want to.
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Average Joes FAP THE MENTOR PROJECT Justice Events
No, the Bunny didn't scold me. Yet. C_C did a teeny tiny bit I guess.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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I dual boxed my Super Strength Fire Brute and my Fire/Kinetics Corruptor
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I have an ice/kin corr and a ss/wp brute on 2 different accounts and was thinking of trying something very similar... although I barely play atm and have no real need to jam to 50, but doing it in 5.5 hours is hotness. In my cursory attempt to keep up I must have misread, because I thought they made it so you could only play through the same MA map 3 times (or only get rewards for it three times?)
Or maybe I imagined that.
Anyhow, congrats, that's an awesome feat. I haven't experimented with finessing MA yet, but I know I'd have lolled myself half to death if I'd done it in 20 hours, let alone 5.5.
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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Link please. That's not what I can find in Smurphy's post. Unless you are talking about Keep's and my posts.
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Well, I don't want to get you in trouble by actually talking to you. (Maybe you should think about how pathetic it is that people think this would actually mean something to me?)
I don't need to be quoted for the other 99% of the forums that just lurk to see the truth of a thread whose title includes the quote about fighting the "toughest in CoH".
This obviously doesn't even live up to its title.
I'm sure it won't stop the sycophants from trying to hand wave away the difference. Do carry on with your worship.
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1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme.
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I'm curious. Do you mean the actual formulaic division, or the regime by which it is determined who should get XP? (In this game, it essentially assumes everyone gets an equal share no matter what, and fudges from there to account for other factors.) If it's the latter, I'm not sure how wise the devs would be to attack this problem, as it definitely has significant implications for the casual nature of the game.
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Characters progress beyond the point where PvE combat is even slightly challenging. Increased reward rates have been exposed by providing opportunities for harder combat where none existed before, allowing more powerful characters to earn rewards faster instead of everyone being "flattened" to an arbitrary limit governed by existing PvE spawn rules. This is the balance issue I'm not sure should be fixed; re-flattening the game makes it less interesting IMHO.
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This, I believe, is extremely fundamental to the entire brouhaha with the MA. Even before Inventions, it was possible for certain builds to exceed the baseline challenge afforded by playing the game "normally" (non-padded missions of dev-assigned spawns). With inventions, it became possible (note the emphasis) for nearly any character to exceed this challenge.
The primary limiter on our reward rates was not any limitation on our own capabilities, but instead limitations on the availability of foes in quantities who we could defeat at our fullest potential speed.
Turning around and adding to this situation a tool whereby players with such capabilities could now actually create challenges worthy of those capabilities was asking for ... what happened. Throw in some folks finding honest-to-goodness loopholes and you had a recipe for PL extraordinaire.
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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1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme.
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I'm curious. Do you mean the actual formulaic division, or the regime by which it is determined who should get XP?
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I'm not sure I really understand the distinction you're trying to draw here, so let me just explain further what I mean and maybe that will answer the question.
There's a thought experiment I run when analyzing this problem, which I call the "two scrapper experiment". Put two scrappers on opposite ends of a large map and let them defeat enemies as fast as they can. Assuming the scrappers have equivalent capabilities, and ignoring for the moment the team XP bonus and the fact that they're fighting slightly larger spawns, the two scrappers should earn roughly equivalent reward rates teamed as they do solo, no matter what their relative level.
In practice, this isn't true. The higher level scrapper always gets screwed and the lower level scrapper gets a partial free ride.
That's the problem I'm talking about. When someone's camped at the entrance and letting a teammate defeat things that are +7 to them, they should only get the relative rates they could earn on their own fighting +7s - which given the purple patch is pretty slim. Instead, they get per-defeat rewards as if they'd fought the +7 on their own (and taken a long time to do it). Voila, the essential imbalance ingredient that generates PL schemes.
The two solutions available are: 1) try to rebalance the reward rates at all values of relative level that generate XP (which Arcanaville told me in PM she thinks is impossible, but it seems to me to be just a giant linear algebra problem with datamining as the source of the constants); or 2) change the SK rules so that teams simply never have wildly divergent combat levels. Number 2 is very tempting because it's so conceptually simple, but I think some additional flexibility needs to be added to the challenge settings so that the game doesn't become overly flattened.
Writing up these two proposals is the meat of the PM I'm thinking I will someday send to Synapse.
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The primary limiter on our reward rates was not any limitation on our own capabilities, but instead limitations on the availability of foes in quantities who we could defeat at our fullest potential speed.
Turning around and adding to this situation a tool whereby players with such capabilities could now actually create challenges worthy of those capabilities was asking for ... what happened. Throw in some folks finding honest-to-goodness loopholes and you had a recipe for PL extraordinaire.
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Yes, you've exactly captured what I was trying to express, though as I mentioned there is also the rock-paper-scissors effect which encourages MA farming even in the absence of significantly above par overall abilities.
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
My first 3 have sold at 350M each. Two via PM one via game tells. I need to receive the monies via the two from PMs. I guess I'll have to ask for more monies on the next batch 
I really wish I had that kind of money lying around, Smurphy, or I would have taken you up on this
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My first 3 have sold at 350M each. Two via PM one via game tells. I need to receive the monies via the two from PMs. I guess I'll have to ask for more monies on the next batch
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So all the pacting is done on Freedom?
I think there is going to be demand for other servers.
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
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The two solutions available are: 1) try to rebalance the reward rates at all values of relative level that generate XP (which Arcanaville told me in PM she thinks is impossible, but it seems to me to be just a giant linear algebra problem with datamining as the source of the constants);
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I don't believe I said it was impossible, I think I said it was intractible. And not because the problem you're mentioning is not solvable, but rather because the problem as you're describing is functionally limited: it only encapsulates one point of view regarding XP splitting.
The "two-scrapper experiment" unfortunately dodges the main problem in the way its described. In the way its described, its presuming that the two players do not actually assist each other, and therefore their overall team contribution can be expressed as the linear sum of their individual capabilities.
That doesn't work in all cases, because it undervalues other contributions. Consider this hypothetical: imagine a level 35 (buffing) defender following a level 35 and level 40 blaster. If the defender buffs damage, then the defender's team contribution is actually *higher* when teamed with the level 40 blaster than with the level 35 blaster, simply by virtue of buffing a stronger ally. In this case, the primary contribution isn't offensive, and therefore isn't trivially scalable offensively.
If you choose to pick an XP splitting mechanism that is based on a theoretical offensive contribution proportionality, you can make the mathematics work. But you'd be devaluing most of the *point* of actually teaming with anything other than offensive peers. The intractible problem is coming up with an XP splitting algorithm that is likely to simultaneously represent the teaming contribution values that the teaming system in CoH actually attempts to encourage, while also balancing the XP reward rate to eliminate the possibility for low-level "piggybacking." I think all solutions there will come up significantly short in one or both goals.
Or to put it more directly, any system that ultimately tries to base its equations on what each team member "deserves" is going to find that word extremely difficult to define. Which is not to say the current system can't be improved, but rather that its not obvious that there exists an obviously "correct" way to do it that isn't really a collection of arbitrary compromises, chosen to minimize the behaviors you most want to suppress at least most of the time.
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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Link please. That's not what I can find in Smurphy's post. Unless you are talking about Keep's and my posts.
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Well, I don't want to get you in trouble by actually talking to you. (Maybe you should think about how pathetic it is that people think this would actually mean something to me?)
I don't need to be quoted for the other 99% of the forums that just lurk to see the truth of a thread whose title includes the quote about fighting the "toughest in CoH".
This obviously doesn't even live up to its title.
I'm sure it won't stop the sycophants from trying to hand wave away the difference. Do carry on with your worship.
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It is pretty sad. Could you imagine the reaction in real life of someone not only putting their hands over their ears but then going around shouting don't listen don't listen
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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Link please. That's not what I can find in Smurphy's post. Unless you are talking about Keep's and my posts.
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Ok, just in case you stop quivering in fear because someone told you not to quote me, here's the evidence you were looking for that this isn't what it claimed to be.
1. The title of the thread says he will be facing the "Toughest in COH"
2. A quote from the OP:
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I want challenge. I want difficulty. I want to fight the hardest and most ridiculous mission possible.
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3. More quotes from what he actually did:
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The method I used involved fighting on a Mission Architect map spawned entirely with Fire damage bosses.
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...on my SS/Fire Brute.
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Now, if you have the guts to speak for yourself instead of doing what others tell you to do. In what world is a /Fire Brute fighting all Fire damage dealing enemies fighting the toughest most difficult challange out there?
Anyone happen to know the Fire resistance for a /Fire brute without even slotting enhancements?
All I have said is that he didn't do what he said he was going to do. Which is par for the course as far as I can tell. My guess being that he tried doing it with harder things and failed miserably.
Does someone want to argue that Fire dealing bosses were the hardest most difficult challange he could come up with? If so that shows either an amazing lack of knowledge about the game or that it was never the intention of this thread. (2 Fire Resist toggles and 1 Fire resist auto power, yeah, I can see why this was the most difficult challange one could come up with for a /Fire brute)
And the funniest part is. You have people now debating about how one might theortically fix the problem that the OP doesn't see as a problem, but rather a chance to exploit something in the game for his advantage. (In this case he wants to PL people for Inf, which is kind of an odd thing for someone who is such a market-guru to be doing. As far as I can tell anyone who is even making half an effort at marketing has Inf coming out of their ears and really doesn't need any more)
But continue to think that your hero is doing something special, when his own quotes show that not to be the case.
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I'm just wondering when this changed from "facing the Toughest in COH" to "Facing an enemy tuned for me to beat easier than other enemies I could have built"?
Not that I'm surprised...
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Link please. That's not what I can find in Smurphy's post. Unless you are talking about Keep's and my posts.
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Well, I don't want to get you in trouble by actually talking to you. (Maybe you should think about how pathetic it is that people think this would actually mean something to me?)
I don't need to be quoted for the other 99% of the forums that just lurk to see the truth of a thread whose title includes the quote about fighting the "toughest in CoH".
This obviously doesn't even live up to its title.
I'm sure it won't stop the sycophants from trying to hand wave away the difference. Do carry on with your worship.
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It is pretty sad. Could you imagine the reaction in real life of someone not only putting their hands over their ears but then going around shouting don't listen don't listen
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Internet superhero games is serious business.
Yes, this is sad, not for me, I could care less as I managed to actually mature as an adult and make my own decisions about who I talk to and who I ignore. (my ignore list has been empty since the day I registered.)
But to each their own, some people only function well while being a follower. Even if their leader is a moron. 
Well a couple points.
1. I was joking and I will assume you were also joking about me quaking in fear.
2. Jojo did mention he died several times. Your selective quoting of him ignored that as well as several other points so either you are deliberately ignorning it or you only see what you want to see.
3. There seems to be a tone in your posts that is petulant and childish coupled with an arrogance that you are somehow above that kind of behavior.
4. Your obsession with a couple posters around here you have a problem with taint every single post you make around here even on ones that at the point you post have nothing to do with them (clearly in this thread that would not be the case but I have seen it elsewhere). This would cause me to conclude you are seething in bitter rage that they receive adulation here that you want and don't get so you spew about it.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Yes, this is sad, not for me, I could care less as I managed to actually mature as an adult and make my own decisions about who I talk to and who I ignore. (my ignore list has been empty since the day I registered.)
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An ignore list isn't a sign of immaturity. It is a tool used to avoid getting into pointless arguments with people or to not waste time reading people who post the same thing over and over (like someone who has come back for 3 months and has stated his only intention is to complaing about the costume change from 6 months ago killing his kheldians).
How you use it determines maturity.
Your quote there does not show maturity to me but an immature need of self aggrandizement.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
By the way, my analysis of this is that there are three game-balance issues in play, and no exploits per se.
1) Team XP division is borked. This has been very clear to me for a long time and is the core of basically every PL scheme. There are two fixes for it that I can think of, one of which is complicated and requires a lot of careful analysis, and one of which is a giant sledgehammer.
2) Characters progress beyond the point where PvE combat is even slightly challenging. Increased reward rates have been exposed by providing opportunities for harder combat where none existed before, allowing more powerful characters to earn rewards faster instead of everyone being "flattened" to an arbitrary limit governed by existing PvE spawn rules. This is the balance issue I'm not sure should be fixed; re-flattening the game makes it less interesting IMHO.
3) Combat in CoX has many elements of "rock-paper-scissors" to it where equivalent factions may be vastly harder or easier to defeat based on player powerset choices. The MA inherently allows players to design "paper" enemies for their "scissors". I have a solution for this too, believe it or not, though it would need some careful implementation to avoid loopholes, and even then would mostly be just a "rule of thumb" kind of solution that would discourage but not eliminate this kind of setup.
I've been writing out in my head a PM to Synapse regarding all of this, including my suggestions. (Even assuming he were interested he'd clearly have to take it up with Positron, but my faith in Posi even reading a PM of mine is basically zero.)
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