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While we have accomplished some of those goals with the initial launch of Mission Architect, some have found ways to abuse the system we put in place. We are not blind to this happening, nor did we not expect it.
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On the subject of Chinese Whispers, may be worth re-reading the bolded line. 
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Ack, double negative hurt brain.
Given that I read the original and still managed to misread it my point about miscommunication still stands. What chance do those hearing about it 3rd or 4th hand have?
So they expected it and still let it go forward? That's probably even worse.
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Its even worse when you consider Positrins Winter lord story that he told in to TTH
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Another moment would be the Winter Lords that went out with the first winter event that we did. We had just created new reward splitting code for Giant Monster-class entities which looked good on paperÂ… in practice however it was possible to get a character from level 1 to 20 in under an hour fighting these things. I remember making a frantic call to our Producer at the time begging him to shut off the event early, but I was just a lowly designer back then, and the long-story-short is that event ended when it was scheduled to.
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Full thing here
If he was so desperate to stop lvling 1-20 in a hour that he called Producer and begged him to shut off the event early what was he like when the discovered you could lvl 1-50 in 6 hours he must have been frantic but did bugger all about it for a month over a month if you consider that the possibility that RCO could be used to lvl quickly was raised in beta
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It's the fight of 100k+ players with many, many, many manhours of looking for exploits/freestuffz vs 50 devs + a few thousand manhours of testing by devs/beta-testers.
Sheer complexity of the system means that there will be a sweet spot somewhere which grants an unforeseen advantage that is considered an exploit, and sheer numbers of players means that someone will find it.
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And this is why it's impossible, as well as wasteful and annoying to the players, to deal with MA powerlevelling by hitting exploits one after another. The only way to do it is by estblishing a policy that abuse isn't tolerated, and then put in place punishments for it (locking slots, taking away gains from exploits).
Could it have been better handled? Maybe. There was a warning when the MA came out that abusing it would lead to sanctions. People chose to ignore that, presumably in the belief that the devs would let them get away with it. Apparently they were wrong. Clearly a lot of people didn't believe sanctions would be real, and maybe if the devs had been clearer about that from the start, it may have helped.
A little more clarity about what the devs consider abuse would be nice now, too, as at the moment some people are scared to touch the MA at all. But I can also see that it's really hard to be too specific about things like that, as it opens another avenue for exploits.
Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
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I personally definitively thing MA play should be rewarded to get people to actually use it, problem is that will always leave people looking for the next so-called exploit and from an RP stance it makes very little sense.
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It's not like the _game_ makes sense from an RP stance, assuming that that means an argument-from-realism. Consider the number of magic defeat-anything devices available in the city (which clearly _can_ be manufactured because new ones keep turning up), the number of superheroes, and the way every zone is more or less totally walled off from every other zone. How long would it take you to clear Atlas Park completely of criminals? How about Crey's Folly?
But this isn't particularly remarkable; the game is not a roleplaying game, for all that some of the players roleplay. It's a sort of tactical-combat-gaining-rewards game, and _that_ makes just as much sense in the MA as outside it.
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It's the fight of 100k+ players with many, many, many manhours of looking for exploits/freestuffz vs 50 devs + a few thousand manhours of testing by devs/beta-testers.
Sheer complexity of the system means that there will be a sweet spot somewhere which grants an unforeseen advantage that is considered an exploit, and sheer numbers of players means that someone will find it.
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And this is why it's impossible, as well as wasteful and annoying to the players, to deal with MA powerlevelling by hitting exploits one after another.
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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless. Anyone getting near the cap is warned and anyone hitting the cap gets a penalty - maybe use the debt mechanic to give them a period of vastly reduced xp/inf that they have to work off (but that increases if they continue to work it off in a way that means they'd be hitting the cap if they didn't have the penalty).
This has the benefit that the Devs don't have to stomp all over individuals mobs/factions (RCOs, Prisoners) or maps (the ones they have removed), and keep monitoring them, which creates ongoing work for them and affects non-farmers/non-PLers as well - unlike ongoing sanctions it's automated so it requires very little upkeep (less man-hours wasted) apart from doubling the cap for double xp weekends. As an added bonus the playerbase can clearly be told exactly how much xp/inf over time is too much and thus we know where we stand.
With all the datamining they do the Devs must have an idea of how fast they want players to be able to level.
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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless.
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I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it could be quite a tricky thing to do.
In normal play, xp gain is rather peaky. There's a lot of running to and fro from missions, and then a lot of fighting mobs. Then there's a lump of xp dropped at the end of a mission which can be quite large, with maybe a boss fight and an end of arc bonus close together.
With that in mind, how do you set the period of time over which gain is measured? Too short, and it will catch the peaks. Too long, and you allow people to farm their characters for a while then switch alts.
And as you say, you will have to set the cap so high that it will only affect powerlevellers and farmers. You don't want to catch, say, someone who has taken a slightly lower-level character along on a high-difficulty task force, and so is getting a big burst of xp over and hour or two and will then go back to normal rates. There needs to be a good safety margin between 'normal play' and farming xp gain. That will mean that the cap will probably have to be so high that people will very soon work out how to farm just under that cap, and still be levelling far more quickly than the devs would like.
And those were just the problems that I could see, as a non-developer, on first glance. It seems like it ought to be a nice, easy solution, and I'm definitely not saying it would be impossible, but I bet it would be hard to put in place and maybe not work all that well in the end, anyway.
Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless.
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I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it could be quite a tricky thing to do.
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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.
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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless.
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I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it could be quite a tricky thing to do.
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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.
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Yeah that could work very well too.
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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.
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Yeah that could work very well too.
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There are a couple of gotchas.
When an arc's very new, it has to start at the bottom of the reward curve. Otherwise I can publish a farm, play it once, unpublish it, make some trivial change (or copy the file locally or whatever to make it a "new" arc), republish it... To avoid totally discouraging people from trying new arcs, an arc whose reward ratio rose would have to award tickets/XP/etc retroactively to people who'd played it before.
Also, I bet there's an AFK attack to make your farm look harmless. To a degree that's self-limiting (you've got to tie up an account for a long period of time for each slow run, and each fast run erodes the effect of it) but the tracking code might reasonably ignore long periods of time with no enemy defeats in.
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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.
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Tracking would seem to be pointless, though, as at that point aren't you're simply issuing fixed amounts of xp etc per unit time spent in the mission? And that could simply be done by giving all the drops, etc, on mission exit in an amount determined by the devs (as merits are, now). No measure to measure or calibrate arcs one by one.
If you want to somehow adjust for difficulty of the mission ands the challenge faced by the players...well, then you're back into making subjective judgements about mission difficulty which will be hard to code and open to exploits.
Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.
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Tracking would seem to be pointless, though, as at that point aren't you're simply issuing fixed amounts of xp etc per unit time spent in the mission?
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Actually, that's an interesting point. It's not _quite_ that straightforward - if you do a mission faster than average that's just gravy for you (so good play is still rewarded), and the scoring system could also take into account the rate of player defeats and debt - but in principle, yes, I am working towards a fixed reward/time thing (except arguably with no _lower_ limit), and put like that the idea is not so attractive.
I observe, though, the adjustment doesn't have to be directly proportional. The mass of middle-of-the-road missions with roughly average reward/time ratios need not face any adjustments at all. Rewards would be what you normally expect - sure, some of those missions will offer a slightly higher reward rate than others, but no more so than cherry-picking canon content. That way, this scheme would not be fixed reward/time; it would just prevent excessive reward/time.
Secondly, I think a reward per defeated enemy meets player expectations better than a lump sum at the end of the mission.
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I observe, though, the adjustment doesn't have to be directly proportional. The mass of middle-of-the-road missions with roughly average reward/time ratios need not face any adjustments at all. Rewards would be what you normally expect - sure, some of those missions will offer a slightly higher reward rate than others, but no more so than cherry-picking canon content.
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Hmm...I don't think I quite understand how your scheme works in practise. Where in the process does the assessment and the adjustment take place?
Say a new arc goes up on the MA. It's never been played before, and it hasn't been tested by the writer so there's no data at all on rewards or average play time. How are the xp/inf/tickets awarded to the first team of players to run through the arc?
Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
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Say a new arc goes up on the MA. It's never been played before, and it hasn't been tested by the writer so there's no data at all on rewards or average play time. How are the xp/inf/tickets awarded to the first team of players to run through the arc?
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Well, new arcs are a problem, as detailed upthread. For the first few playthroughs (perhaps half a dozen?), there'd have to be a kludge. I've got a better one than my initial idea:
Rewards are at the normal rate, but if an arc turns out to be too rewarding after those first few playthroughs, toons who were on them retroactively get something like debt for all MA awards, reducing their ticket/XP/inf rate until they've paid off the extra gains. This is nicer in that it's invisible to players who don't go seeking farms, but there's a "publish farm, play once, unpublish" abuse where you never let a farm arc reach the point of having had those first few playthroughs. When an arc was unpublished, the pseudo-debt would have to be assessed based on the playthroughs so far, no matter how few there were.
I know that looks complicated, but it's invisible to any player who doesn't go on a just-published farming arc. Even to one who does (perhaps innocently) it's just a modest dropoff in the reward rate in subsequent missions.
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What chance do those hearing about it 3rd or 4th hand have?
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While we have accomplished some of those goals with the initial launch of Mission Architect, some have found ways to abuse the system we put in place. We are not blind to this happening, nor did we not expect it.
[/ QUOTE ]
On the subject of Chinese Whispers, may be worth re-reading the bolded line.
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Ack, double negative hurt brain.
Given that I read the original and still managed to misread it my point about miscommunication still stands.
So they expected it and still let it go forward? That's probably even worse.
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But whatever you do someone will find some way to exploit something.
It's the fight of 100k+ players with many, many, many manhours of looking for exploits/freestuffz vs 50 devs + a few thousand manhours of testing by devs/beta-testers.
Sheer complexity of the system means that there will be a sweet spot somewhere which grants an unforeseen advantage that is considered an exploit, and sheer numbers of players means that someone will find it.
It actually would have been worse IMO if the devs said "we never expected anything like this" as that would show that the devs were really naive. As it is they expected some exploitation (hence the acceptable use warnings in I14 patch notes) to be possible, but probably didn't expect the scale of exploitation and misuse that has been seen.
It's like gun crime. I expect some people to be killed by guns - but if all of a sudden half the EUs population is being killed daily I could state:
While guns no doubt accomplished some of the lawful goals intended by the manufacturers, some have found ways to abuse the weapons they created. I am not blind to this happening, nor did I not expect it.
And it'd be true. I expect that lawful use of firearms have helped in some situations, and I always expected firearms to be used by some for criminal 'exploits'... but it would be the scale of misuse that would surprise me.
OK - firearms... maybe not the best analogy, just the 1st that came to mind, although I'm not comparing the MA to firearms, nor those using exploits to murderers. All I am pointing out is that the phrase 'nor did we not expect it' can easily refer to the existence of exploits and still leave the devs able to be surprised by the scale of exploitation.
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