Drop rates for purple IO's down drastically?

While I agree with your reasoning here, a lot of times the devs "obvious" intentions aren't always what is accomplished. Were the devs trying to move farmers out of AE, or PLers? Were they at all concerned with the sudden tsunami of cheap recipes on the market, and took steps (via ticket cap) to reduce the recipe rewards?

Seems the devs aren't really concerned with INF rewards. They set certain IO sets to be very rare, and aside from a few halfhearted attempts to make things more accessible, they haven't changed much (tickets, merits- both with serious flaws.) Positron's ill-advised comment about merging the markets shows that they actually don't always have a clear idea of how the nuances of the in-game economy work. They've adjusted XP rewards, adjusted ticket drops, which were easy, but they haven't adjusted INF rewards at all in AE.

Watch what they say AND what they do. Either one can be misinterpreted. In the case of purples (going back to the OP) what they say and what they do has always been steady: they want them to be rare, and have so far done nothing to make them more accessible or easier to get. With that in mind, I have some doubts about the new difficulty system, and am eager to see it in practice.

This is true.
I think this is fairly idiot proof, but we'll see.

=)

I agree sometimes the changes they make seem to have no real effect on farming, and sometimes they are massive. I am still shocked they installed a no xp button has any other game ever done that?

Would be interesting that on the backend they have it so drops are based on the number of players on maps, and not the number of mobs or something to that effect.

so sure you can see if your scrapper can take on a mission set for 8, but you still only get the drops as if set for 1

I don't think they are really doing this, but wouldn't surprise me, and short of top doc I doubt anyone has the statical wherewithal to see it happen.

None of the above specifically except for the most extreme PLers. The early PLing in the AE was so off the charts that I think it got its own specific reaction, even though AE mechanics were the enabler for it.

Beyond that, I don't think the dev's motive for change was aligned against any one playstyle like that. I believe their motive was to remove anything that detracts from the AE as a place to create and play what I'll call "meaningful content". By "meaningful content" I mean arcs that are an earnest effort to create story-driven entertainment for other people.*

Farming a map chock full of the same mobs over and over, whether for inf, tickets, XP or even badges - all of that appears to be fall under an umbrella of playstyles that detract from that purity of the dev vision for the AE. The devs have taken steps to curb those kind of playstyles from the AE to an extent that they have not applied to other parts of the game. Not only that, but that there are some pretty strong indications that they don't intend to apply those curbs outside the AE, or at least not to the same extremes.

A great example is the change to the AE badges, which you can now practically get all for walking into the digitizing beam. They stated clearly that they didn't want people badge farming in the AE, so they removed any reason to. Meanwhile, other potential, non-AE badge tweaks don't appear to have anything like that scale of change in store. Another example would be the farmer-enabling I16 difficulty settings changes. The devs are clearly aware of how this will be used, going so far as to comment here on the boards how they knew that specific posters known for love of farming would love the change. That suggests they don't oppose farming directly - just farming in the AE.

I think that a lot of folks on the forums didn't recognize this intentional double standard. That's lead some of them to miss the mark in predicting just how far the devs would take some of the AE changes, because they made predictions based whether the devs would do certain things game-wide. But they aren't doing them game wide - the AE gets its own set of rules. Thus I believe the devs are willing to apply extremes to it that they actually won't apply to the rest of the game. Whether that's good or bad depends a lot on which kind of playstyles you like.

* I emphasize the notion that AE arcs are supposed to be "for other people" than just the authors. I don't buy into the frequent claim that the AE is supposed to exist primarily as a tool for authors. I find the people who claim that act as if the AE should exist for the authors, without regard for whether anyone else gets to appreciate their work. I don't accept that the devs would have invested nearly two issues of development on a tool that had such a one-way function. I believe they did intend it to be a creative tool, but primarily for content that would then be enjoyed by other players.

yeah really, that would be an uber waste of dev time if they did that.

no farmer would be stupid enough to fall for something like that.

Completely agree. Especially on the LAST part: it's especially obvious with the way folks discuss the star system. The star system was not primarily for authors, it was primarily to show what arcs are or aren't worth playing (at least that was the INTENT).

I also agree that there is an intentional double standard with farming in this game.

Actually it can, you just need to loophole the experience system to do it properly. >.>

Agreed to a point. There are some Dev's Choice missions that have nice mob/map setups that can be set to farm for purple drops. Some of them include Council and other easy to farm mobs in enclosed areas. In this case, you have a "best of both worlds' scenario in that you can farm the DC for purples then revert back to tickets as well.

hmm.... Perhaps. If the upcoming changes in Issue 16 are consistent with this analysis, I'll be quite pleased. I've played some really extraordinary AE arcs but haven't been in there lately because you have to wade through so much garbage.

On the other hand, if they ream the rest of the badges like they did with the AE ones, I'll be an unhappy camper.

On the other hand, AE has been my refuge from the really ***-tastic 'official' content my ar/dev has been painfully slogging through this week.

Steven Sheridan should have a little Biohazard warning icon floating over his head to warn people off.

/edit
howcome I can say 'crap' but not '***'?
weird filter.

So much for the idea being idiot-proof, although both said a lot more testing would be in order to see if it was a relic of the new difficulty system vs. the old. It may be a bug. It still may be WAI...

It may be related to the difficulty settings somehow, but they don't actually seem to affect it. Drop rates on a team equivalence of 1 and 6 were comparable.