MA farming: The way to kill an MMO

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You're playing the same WoW as i do? Seems not.

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Which part do you disagree with? The fact that WoW is designed with loads of endgame content or the fact that WoW developers would address a game breaking situation very fast?

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Shadowplay - Scrapper DM/DA SL 50
Doctor Storm- Brute SS/Elec SL 50
"speed boosts someone in the face" - Cognito

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In terms of money many people have wasted months of subscription, if they knew before that they could of done what people are doing now then are probably gutted and feel somewhat robbed of money and time best spent on other games.

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That is part nature of the game. I konw people spend days, weeks, months to reach a certain lvl in WoW or such, now you do in in hours. All those thus have wasted their money?

Each game does this, if you know so, why play it in the first place?

And serious, read this startpost:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....e=0&fpart=1

The approach on the US is insanely different, hmmm what am i doing here?

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My main problem with posts like that, Sinergy_X, is that they present the same argument but try to make it sound like it is a reasonable one - it always seems to boil down to 'you can't tell me what to do, I pay my subs' etc.

However, I strongly believe that the amount of powerlevelling going on is detrimental to the game. I have done it (!) and managed to get 23 levels in the space of an hour. An hour. It was boring, there was no sense of achievement and so I am deleting the characters (a domi and a Widow and a MM)

Don't tell me that it's okay to farm/PL because everyone does it, because it's not. And not everyone does it - or rather not everyone did it.

I also object to terms such as majority/minority - I don't believe I have suggested so far that anyone is either in a majority/minority, except to say that it seems as though everything (in Atlas at any rate) is PL! Farm!

The article on the US forums suggests that most people getting maximum reward etc are in the majority, probably. I'm sorry, where has this info come from?

And of course, it's never useful to listen to people, especially if they're in the minority... /sarcasm

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My concern was the quote I seen somewhere about Positron's motion towards farmers, note he said farmers not MA farmers, so I have no idea why he's all of a sudden creating a lynch mob at this time since farming has been around since Inventions, and powerlevelling since well it started... Plus, I'm not even 'delving' into his quote that much, he just said 'farmers' in general. So it could be an overhaul of experience gaining, or some sort of preventative coding...

Fury

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My concern was the quote I seen somewhere about Positron's motion towards farmers, note he said farmers not MA farmers, so I have no idea why he's all of a sudden creating a lynch mob at this time since farming has been around since Inventions, and powerlevelling since well it started... Plus, I'm not even 'delving' into his quote that much, he just said 'farmers' in general. So it could be an overhaul of experience gaining, or some sort of preventative coding...

Fury

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I think it's fair to assume, given the massive, game-breaking explosion in farming/PLing, that he was talking about the farming as it stands now.

New players are vital to the survival of CoX and being able to "finish" the game several times over in their free month is going to hit the game hard. Also, when these new players leave after their free month is up, their word of mouth is going to be pretty scathing. There will be LOLs and LMAOs.

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i see it this way, every game that is level based always have ppl who like RP and elitism.
the RP part is slow and steady, while the elitism is gathering info as quickly as possible and act better then the rest.
there is, at high level caps, one kind of player that is a bit left out here, the casual player.
they don't care about ether of them, but don't want to grind hours and hours just for a small upgrade on there character.
and with a massive grind fest, there are PL players.
it might sound cruel to devs, but grind that takes just this long without anything new trough out the game is simply a bad game design.

personally i don't care about the story's that TF or mission arc's give, just get me a level higher and i'm happy.
enjoying the game is one thing, grinding for around a year is another.

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personally i don't care about the story's that TF or mission arc's give, just get me a level higher and i'm happy.

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If this is the position of the majority of the playerbase, we might as well pack up and leave.

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@SteelRat; @SteelRat2
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Excrement happens.

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I also object to terms such as majority/minority - I don't believe I have suggested so far that anyone is either in a majority/minority, except to say that it seems as though everything (in Atlas at any rate) is PL! Farm!

The article on the US forums suggests that most people getting maximum reward etc are in the majority, probably. I'm sorry, where has this info come from?

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I agree that terms like "majority" and "minority" don't really fit; as I see it farming vs experiencing content is more a sliding scale rather than an all or nothing thing.

At one end of the scale you have people for which content is king; as long as they were experiencing new story they wouldn't be greatly concerned if they were getting zero xp, so long as they were able to progress from one arc to the next - there probably aren't that many in this camp. At the other end there are the hardcore farmers, who want lots of xp to get to 50 as quickly as possible and don't care if they have to do a pure story-free grind to get there. Probably more of these than the pure story crowd, but still not that many; now MA's available in Atlas a lot of newcomers seem to be falling into this camp by default, as they never get chance to find out there's anything different.

In between the two extremes you get everyone else - people that like to follow the stories to a greater or lesser extent, but wouldn't mind a mild bit of farming (allotment tending?) if it doesn't take them too far out of their way. For example if you're doing paper missions as set up for a safeguard/mayhem and have a choice between Council or Rikti/Freaks, a lot of people will choose the latter for the extra xp. They're after a better (albeit a long way from maximum) reward for about the same effort, but that doesn't really make them farmers.

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Ok, how about this idea draconian idea.

Limit the amount of xp/inf/salvage/tickets/merits/recipes a person can earn per hour of play.

Then after that limit has been reached you will earn less and less and less until you earn zero. Sort of the cooldown feature WoW uses/used? Of course, this limit should be such that players wont be affected who play a normal gamestyle. Including teaming and doing a tf.

Of course, farmers will jump to another toon and start again. But it will slow powerlevelling a bit.

You could go a step further with making this amount server wide or even account wide.

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i see it this way, every game that is level based always have ppl who like RP and elitism.
the RP part is slow and steady, while the elitism is gathering info as quickly as possible and act better then the rest.
there is, at high level caps, one kind of player that is a bit left out here, the casual player.
they don't care about ether of them, but don't want to grind hours and hours just for a small upgrade on there character.
and with a massive grind fest, there are PL players.
it might sound cruel to devs, but grind that takes just this long without anything new trough out the game is simply a bad game design.

personally i don't care about the story's that TF or mission arc's give, just get me a level higher and i'm happy.
enjoying the game is one thing, grinding for around a year is another.

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What is this RP? I hope you don't mean Role Playing, seeing as this is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. And pardon me if there is another Acronym floating around here that I haven't seen yet. Whatever it is, it sounds pretty bad being put up there with Elitism. Which is not included in any official game genre initialism for sure.


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Without levels, people would be grinding skills. And farming would be done under any system. But the Mission Architect has surely helped the farmers in many ways. The level system is currently made into a joke for some.

But it's the players themselves that made it so. Players create their own mess, and leave the developers to clean it up. Developers who in turn maybe put out new systems that challenge our idea of achievement, letting people go to 1-50 in a day. My first character used half a year or more to get to 40. That means I'm attached to that character. It also means that I'm a bit amazed to see how much faster people level now. If not shocked.


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i see it this way, every game that is level based always have ppl who like RP and elitism.
the RP part is slow and steady, while the elitism is gathering info as quickly as possible and act better then the rest.
there is, at high level caps, one kind of player that is a bit left out here, the casual player.
they don't care about ether of them, but don't want to grind hours and hours just for a small upgrade on there character.
and with a massive grind fest, there are PL players.
it might sound cruel to devs, but grind that takes just this long without anything new trough out the game is simply a bad game design.

personally i don't care about the story's that TF or mission arc's give, just get me a level higher and i'm happy.
enjoying the game is one thing, grinding for around a year is another.

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What is this RP? I hope you don't mean Role Playing, seeing as this is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. And pardon me if there is another Acronym floating around here that I haven't seen yet. Whatever it is, it sounds pretty bad being put up there with Elitism. Which is not included in any official game genre initialism for sure.


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just what i would've expected from elitism, act like they know everything and shout when they can't be right.
thanks for clarifying how they act

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@Sorudo

This comes from a proud casual player, I either don't get your point, or you are some kind of [censored]. You can get to level 50 in a couple of months of casual play, how is it that you feel threatened from people wanting to stop players from grinding to level 50 in a couple of days of casual play?

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Shadowplay - Scrapper DM/DA SL 50
Doctor Storm- Brute SS/Elec SL 50
"speed boosts someone in the face" - Cognito

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i see it this way, every game that is level based always have ppl who like RP and elitism.
the RP part is slow and steady, while the elitism is gathering info as quickly as possible and act better then the rest.
there is, at high level caps, one kind of player that is a bit left out here, the casual player.
they don't care about ether of them, but don't want to grind hours and hours just for a small upgrade on there character.
and with a massive grind fest, there are PL players.
it might sound cruel to devs, but grind that takes just this long without anything new trough out the game is simply a bad game design.

personally i don't care about the story's that TF or mission arc's give, just get me a level higher and i'm happy.
enjoying the game is one thing, grinding for around a year is another.

[/ QUOTE ]

What is this RP? I hope you don't mean Role Playing, seeing as this is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. And pardon me if there is another Acronym floating around here that I haven't seen yet. Whatever it is, it sounds pretty bad being put up there with Elitism. Which is not included in any official game genre initialism for sure.


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just what i would've expected from elitism, act like they know everything and shout when they can't be right.
thanks for clarifying how they act

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If there is one thing Gravito aint, its an elitist.

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The argument against Farming is really rather simple; even when it's pure XP farming, it almost always increases the income generated over normal time too. And when you've a game where players bid against each other to achieve goods, the goods will tend to go to the highest bidder, and thus to the ones who are setting the currency-gaining curve. Whilst no one HAS to pay a higher price, people will almost always charge what the market can bear, so eventually everyone will adapt to paying more.

Thus farming directly impacts everyone, because either their play style is forced ever closer towards a farming style, as they simply can't afford to possess certain items without the same income growth rate... or they learn to do without. The same does not hold true in the other direction; choosing to play through all of the available content has absolutely no bearing on anyone except those who experience it; nor following it make unavailable the same content to other people.

Now it's true that not all farming is equally bad; Badge farming for instance often takes money out of the system, rather than putting it in; Think invention recipe badges. And Prestige farming spends it on the Superbase, which again links it back to individual experience and takes the gains made back out of the public realm. In other games, I can think of farming which is done for purely role-playing reasons (Taming specific creatures in Ultima Online, grinding pointlessly low mobs for boxed critter drops in WoW) that carry no weight at all unless you already share the assumptions behind the act...

But in general, in my experience, the dedicated XP/Influence farmers are usually outright embracing a selfish approach to the game; and as long as THEIR character gets up there quickly, they don't bother or even care to think what it does to anyone else's ability to enjoy the game. In CoH (and WoW and UO in my experience) often you'll find the worst examples join your teams without even reading what you've advertised it as, demand you change the planned tasks to maximize personal growth for them, and then eventually leave when you won't. You can see it even in RTS games for that matter; you've just recruited 7 of 8 players into a game which says "2v2v2v2 Random Teams" with normal settings, and someone comes in, spends 10 minutes refusing to tick in, and repeating "Quickstart, fixed teams, no rush kk?" because that'll maximize his chances of getting the super-weapons, of "pwning" someone, and not getting beaten by someone who can play better... whilst everyone gets annoyed at the delay, or even leaves if the host gives in to the badgering because that's not what they signed up for.

Now in CoH in the early days, when we didn't have transferable loot, I didn't really care too much about farming; I'd quickly kick the idiots who joined my teams, but beyond that you can enjoy the game as you wish. Now however prices for salvage have gone through the roof... I can avoid that, as I know how to use the Architect tickets to get them instead... but so too have risen prices on everything; and I'm finding that, running missions for badges, or testing my own arcs mean that I simply can't afford to buy most recipes now either, as I'm not earning enough money doing the time spent on either of those. And that's ruining my ability to progress; certainly having any more than the one purple that dropped to me on my character is probably going to be impossible now as prices for them escalate way beyond my tolerance of farming will let me go; I'm bored witless even trying to get the second Hall of Fame badge... 25 plays through Footsteps Initiative will kill me, let alone 250. But it's either that or, because of the distorted market, grind one of the farming missions on MA; there's no other practical route to get any progress any more.

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just what i would've expected from elitism, act like they know everything and shout when they can't be right.
thanks for clarifying how they act

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That was bolded out, to make it easier for you to see the relevant text. I thought shouting was the use of uppercase letters. If that was over the top, my apologies. But people seem to miss the point often, if you don't make it clear.

Do you complain about people that shoot too much in a FPS too? You join a game and tell people they're bad when they do what's in the game description. That strikes me as kinda odd. Especially in the context of this debate. Just for the fun of it, I found my old CoV special edition Box, and it says this is a Diabolical MMORPG on the backside. That strikes me as kinda official. It's on the box. Heh.

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I'm bored witless even trying to get the second Hall of Fame badge... 25 plays through Footsteps Initiative will kill me, let alone 250.

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Or you just wait for more arcs to make HoF and for them to stay there (sure that the intention was for them to stay once they'd been made HoF).

The thing about badges is that they'll still be there in a week, or 2 weeks, or 20...

So there's no need to grind/race to get the badges in the first 5 minutes.

Enjoy the game and the badges will come.

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By my mohawk shall ye know me!
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Sorudo, have you actually ever teamed with an RPer?

And how is banding RP with people who like stories the same thing?

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In other news, report farms. It's not griefing as far as I am aware. It's bringing to light the missions which are exploiting the game's levelling system.

Of course, there are currently (or at least last time i checked' 42 pages if you type the word 'farm' in. The obvious ones are easy to spot: generally defeat alls with high levels or 42-42, Custom Group, Ally (i.e. Rikti Comms Officers) which even with reduced xp will still net the player a hefty amount of inf and xp. Especially if they're level 1.

And if powerlevelling is so acceptable then why does everyone make a separate map with Comms Officers/Easy Bosses etc? Why not just keep the one map? Or is it because people understand that it is fundamentally wrong in terms of exploitation that they'd rather create their own which will lead to a mass influx of these missions, making them more difficult to weed out/report?

My tendency would be to go for the latter explanation.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy levelling up. And I have powerlevelled in the past. So I am certainly not 'without sin'.

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I am pretty sure when the new patch goes live, and the ritki comm officers get nerfed, all of a sudden 90% of the MA missions will disapear, which should prove that Ma is used for farming by the majority of the players, and not in the way it was intended.

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I'm sorry, but do you guys really think the Rikti Communication officers or what the hardcore farmers are farming? If that's all they changed on test then the farming will continue.

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CoH PvP SG = SuperUnion - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
CoV PvP VG = Disruption - Co-Leader - Union/Freedom
Global = @Rent & @Rent.

Playgroup are all **** - Global Handle

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I am pretty sure when the new patch goes live, and the ritki comm officers get nerfed, all of a sudden 90% of the MA missions will disapear, which should prove that Ma is used for farming by the majority of the players, and not in the way it was intended.

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Im pretty sure they will just change their custom mob to something else.

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I'm sorry, but do you guys really think the Rikti Communication officers or what the hardcore farmers are farming? If that's all they changed on test then the farming will continue.

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lv 42 Rikti are what the unimaginative folks are doing en masse it seems (a lot of the 42 pages were 42-42 maps). It won't stop powerlevelling - I doubt anything would short of threatening people with bans. And seeing as JD pulled out an interesting bit from the EULA in i14, advertising in the MA, over in-game chat, on the forums and somewhere else (or was that it?) are violations of the EULA.

The number of hilarious descriptions (including: this isn't a farm or PL, it's got some story to it - complete with single mission, lv 42-42, Defeat All, Custom Group, Ally) including the word farm saddens me (it makes me giggle too but moreso with the sadness).

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I'm bored witless even trying to get the second Hall of Fame badge... 25 plays through Footsteps Initiative will kill me, let alone 250.

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Or you just wait for more arcs to make HoF and for them to stay there (sure that the intention was for them to stay once they'd been made HoF).

The thing about badges is that they'll still be there in a week, or 2 weeks, or 20...

So there's no need to grind/race to get the badges in the first 5 minutes.

Enjoy the game and the badges will come.

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Wait - there's an HoF arc up now?

There have been packs of restless, snarling badge hunters cicrling the MA terminals for days now, waiting for one to come up

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

Wow, you don't read the forums for two days and theres like 2000 new posts, just like the old days....

Any ways,
lower level limit on MA - Yes
lower xp/inf on MA - Yes
Remove AE building from starting zones - Yes

All good ideas, if only some one was reading and taking not.

If only the US side had the same ideas something may get done.

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I'm sorry, but do you guys really think the Rikti Communication officers or what the hardcore farmers are farming? If that's all they changed on test then the farming will continue.

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Fury

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Wow, you don't read the forums for two days and theres like 2000 new posts, just like the old days....

Any ways,
lower level limit on MA - Yes
lower xp/inf on MA - Yes
Remove AE building from starting zones - Yes

All good ideas, if only some one was reading and taking not.

If only the US side had the same ideas something may get done.

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It'll be interesting to see what the devs do.

Simply removing certain mobs won't be enough. A suitable replacement will simply be used. To heavily nerf the rewards, will certainly stop the MA farmers, but it also affects those who are using MA as it was intended to be used.

Past experience suggests that a heavy nerf is likely, but with MA being a supposed new showpiece part of the game the devs will be wary of going too far with the nerf.

Personally I can see the auto sk facility being removed at the very least. After that, it's all a question of balancing it up I suppose.

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