I agree it's brilliant. It also satisfies the one concern I had about the suggestion to change auto-SK rules to simply convert everyone to one level below the mission holder, closing a long-standing balance problem in team XP division.
Hopefully that change is coming also and has simply not been announced.
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They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
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tl;dr:
With the ability to set spawn sizes as high as you want, no one is going to get free rides on farms anymore.
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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In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.
[/ QUOTE ]
You are jumping to a huge conclusion there. It is just as likely that this feature will not work in AE at all.
Heck, it's such a perfect solution that it might actually make me start farming just because I won't need anyone else to do it effectively.
I don't think it's a huge leap - the difficulty levels apply to AE now, and changing it would only have negative effects from the devs and the random person's point of view.
As I said, this would be a very intelligent, subtle, and well-aimed way to fix a lot of the problems people have with AE.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.
[/ QUOTE ]
You are jumping to a huge conclusion there. It is just as likely that this feature will not work in AE at all.
[/ QUOTE ]
Which might entice farmers away from AE and back to PI and Grandville. All done with a carrot and not a stick. I agree, this may be a work of genius.
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I hope you are right, I really do
Honestly, it's not really farming that's a problem. It's the idiots who annoy other people by spamming for farm teams or begging for PLs. I've often said that I don't care if people farm and/or PL, if they would just shut up about it.
This seems like a good plan. You don't need to support noobs or jackassery in order to farm. You can simply do your thing on your own.
As an aside, I'm not a farmer, but some of my characters would be interesting to see with higher difficulty settings. This seems to support those of us who just want to push our characters a bit.
Exactly my thought. I -am- a farmer, and I hate the spam. I hate contributing to it so much that I typically do solo (or maybe 3-4 people with my friends) rather than fill to 8-man spawns with AE spam. This would be ideal.
Also: I'm the kind of farmer you guys should love. Impatient to sell, of the opinion that I'd rather sell 50 recipes for 2m each than 2 recipes for 50m each - meaning I tend to sell low and in high volume. :P
I am not a farmer. But I am a Scrapper and Brute player, and so I heartily endorse this change, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it applies to AE as well, because then I'll be able to make your "easily soloable, squishy-friendly" mission into a "challenging" mission when my Scrapper starts nearing 40 and everything becomes stupid-easy.
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I agree with you completely. I must make the sidenote, that AE has made it nearly impossible to find a good PUG for running door mishes. Hopefully, as you suggest, the newbs will be thrust back onto the streets, and we'll see more Vets LFT with other Vets.
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Great Post OP.
Great points and I am hoping things will work out like this.
Just thinking about doing my Speeding Through Time arc specced at 8 players has me giggling. I wonder if I'd be able to get any XP in that third mission with spawns for 8 . . .
My fire/psi is going to love this. I'm a "farmer lite" in that I don't farm that heavily but do form time-to-time to raise funds for IO's that another toon needs. This will help alot. Also sometimes I just want to run a full-on-balls-out-superhard-on-fricking-insane levels. It will definitely give peole with IO'd 50's something to do.
My level 50 Dominators:
Madame Mindbender 50 Mind/Energy
Fly Agaric 50 Plant/Thorn
Nate Nitro 50 Fire/Psi
Dont forget what all those 50's running dev content spawned for 8 will do to the market!! yay for a price drop and more available loot!
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I can already set my AE missions to spawn for 8 without bothering anyone else.
So can anyone else with two or more accounts.
Since AE uses the modified TF rules, you can log in alts and invite them to your team and then log them out and they'll remain on the team.
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To the OP : very good post. And I hope you're right.
Anyway this new i16 feature is brilliant in itself and is what i've been waiting forever in this game !
QR:
I can only hope this new difficulty feature applies to AE. I've already sworn off lowbies on my teams and have basically shunned AE because of the beggars. Last time I visted, I had a lowbie offer to pay me to level him. (I turned him down)
This is the most intelligent thing the developers have ever done to address the issue of farming - what's even funnier is this solution helps farmers, but also addresses concerns about the long-term consequences of people spoiled with being leveled.
It's genius.
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Why do people complain about AE? It's not because the people who farm it are getting massive rewards - if these people didn't know where the rewards were coming from, or if they thought about what the rewards of AE brought to the rest of the game, they'd realize that AE farming is beneficial to everyone.
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Some of us are only "complaining" about the farmers/power-levelers that are "abusing" the AE.
The AE is a great idea. It is being abused. I am against the abusers. The DEVs have stated that they are as well, and they are the ones that define what abuse is.
I'm against the farmer/PL'rs because they are abusing the AE, helping to produce high-level characters for inept players, and are shortening the "longevity" of players that are, thus, PL'd by their abuse of the AE.
There may be some things that are cheaper due to the AE farming, but, by-and-large, the economy has gone crazy due to the AE.
My niche market is selling at double-xp weekend prices. That is to say between 5x and 8x what I would have been selling the items for pre-AE.
Why am I selling for so high?
Because players are paying that much.
Why? Because apparently they don't know any better and have so much inf throw around that they don't need to take time to learn any better.
The massive rewards are abuse and are obviously damaging to the game.
If you think that the market hasn't negatively been effected, then you have a very narrow view of the market.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.
[/ QUOTE ]
You are jumping to a huge conclusion there. It is just as likely that this feature will not work in AE at all.
[/ QUOTE ]
It seems extremely unlikely to me that the devs would want to maintain two separate difficulty setting systems. That would get confusing very fast, and I don't really see what the point would be.
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
This is going to be highly useful for everything. It'll help those looking for new challenges, it will eliminate the need to pad (and thus also all the broadcasts for pads), and it will mean that nobody who can solo a map is likely to invite people to fill unless they're doing it for friends and SG mates.
I am curious whether the large-team bonus will apply to up-shifted missions of this type, or if some other reward will be given, or if the convenience of large spawns will be considered sufficient reward. I hope it's the last, as there should still be good incentives to actually team, and I do think large spawns will be their own reward.
That's my only concern about this. It gives people much less incentive to team in general.
It's not going to help the fact that PUGs are hard to find for door missions. It could even make it worse.
People who don't do a ton of damage, like pre-pet controllers, and defenders with very team-oriented primaries, will almost always be looking for teams. You don't need a balanced team to go through content, and a bunch of support-oriented toons can buff each other into nigh invincibility, assuming that they actually took some form of reasonable attack.
I thought it was impossible, but I think the devs have stumbled upon a masterstroke in killing 90% of the complaints about AE.
Why do people complain about AE? It's not because the people who farm it are getting massive rewards - if these people didn't know where the rewards were coming from, or if they thought about what the rewards of AE brought to the rest of the game, they'd realize that AE farming is beneficial to everyone. (For example: How many people could afford a Steadfast: Res/Def before AE? How many people seriously planned on grabbing that Regenerative Tissue Unique? How long, before AE, did you have to wait for a reasonable bid on a +Knockback protection enhancement to go through?)
I, for one, had stopped reading the same old story text over and over long before AE - so the fact that AE has killed the 'story' of the game is also a rather pointless concern.
There are two reasons, logically, why so many people hate AE.
1) It's visible.
2) It takes the teaming masses of 'average' players off the streets.
I'll explain in a bit more detail.
The concern with #1 is that you can no longer go through the most populated zones (Cap, Atlas) without being bombarded by AE spam. Hell, a lot of people go onto the Request or Help chans spamming for it nowadays. Clueless newbies who have never leveled themselves past 30 now have multiple 50s they have no clue what to do with because you can go to one of these zones, spam the broadcast channel, and eventually get a team.
#2 comes up from the simple fact that those clueless newbs (and more average people - the ones who may not be clueless, but 'just play' instead of IOing out) are now riding along as fillers in the farms of people like me and many others who -do- have a clue and can trick out a character to take down boss spawns in the time it takes most people to team wipe against mixed minion/lt groups. Those people aren't out there on taskforces, street sweeping, doing paper missions- and they need to be. That's how you learn the game, and it's how newbies get exposed to the true team play that will get them hoked to CoH.
The devs are about to fix both of these problems with one change, one that I don't know if they fathom the consequences of:
In I16, you will be able to set your AE mission to spawn as if you had a full team of 8.
Instantly, you have eliminated most of the spamming - random average joe will no longer have a place on -my- boss farms, for instance. Why would I pad out my team with pointless non-contributors and reduce my inf/prestige drops? Why would I leech XP from the toons of my friends - people who can already play, people who know the game, people who just want to skip that 1-35 grind before the characters they want to play actually become fun? People who realize the game -starts-, rather than ends, at 50?
The answer: I won't. I won't ever again make myself feel dirty for broadcasting that I'm running an AE Team LFM. I won't ever have to worry that I've just PL'd some newb who won't know what he's doing with the toon I've just taken from 1-35 in a few hours.
Imagine a world where AE slowly transforms, organically - from a loud, noisy crowd to a few silent solo farmers moving in and out of that glowing cylinder with their close friends, silent but for their Skype or Ventrilo chats. Where the random average joe who wanders into AE does so for actual story arcs because he can't boss farm - and if he can, he can do it alone, for much greater reward than spamming the channels.
Imagine those huddled masses of lowbies and newbies and AE babies forced back onto the streets and into paper missions again. Out into the game where they'll have to learn the ropes for themselves, carry themselves from 1-50 like we did before AE, because nobody needs them to get proper-sized spawns anymore.
I think this is the best move the devs have ever made. I hope that they were smart enough to realize what they were doing, that it was on purpose, but really? Even if it's an accident, I think it's the best accident to happen to the game since AE.