Bored of AE? I am..

Some of us have been running normal content most of the time because the AE became such a huge farming/PL-circus. And this hasn't been happening on a server but most of the servers. I admit that I have given up on Virtue and Farmdumb for quite a while now.
With i16 dropping, I hope that there will be more people running normal content missions again.

I can understand why you are sick of the AE farms. They weren't supposed to be there in the first place and they are a boring grind.
Too bad so many new players were pulled into them and have burnt out on them like you are. They don't know about the "normal" game experience because they were lured into the AE farms and so they what they will be experiencing - the actual game - will not reward them as quickly. I'm assuming many of them have already quit or will quit once i16 drops.


I am.
Originally, it was quite clear that there was to be no farming in the AE. Exploit farms in the AE are still reportable for locks, banning, etc.

I'm glad that you have at least seen some of the light as you apparently have been part of the problem.

if it was "clear" that there was to be no farming, then it would have been fixed a LONG time ago.

farming is a part of this game as any other mmo. with or without ae, farming will exist. even with ae gone or changed, there will still be a place to farm regardless, and, if ae is still on par with normal xp, evening running the normal arc missions, it will still be more beneficial then running all over the maps to get to a door.

Tickets are more efficient than merits anyways, so AE it is!

so i'm confused... are players just upset because of all the farming in AP? or farming in general? hell, i see people farming now that MA isn't being used. are you mad at that too? or are you just upset because MA allowed people to farm more efficiently and easier?

everyones general use of farming as if it's a bad word is just ridiculous. boss farms in MA were very rewarding, and was allowed to go on for a long time. a simple easy patch could have changed the xp distribution/tickets/influence. but they didn't. and now they did.

so let's stop with the melodramatics of MA. in no way was boss farms an exploit.

My two cents here, so take it or leave it.

I think the whole anti-AE mentality is a kneejerk reaction to AE being immediately appropriated by the farming industry, and having the farm frenzy overshadow Architect as a vessel of creative and new storylines for the playerbase, which was its original intent by the Dev and by a significant portion of the playerbase.

Personally, am I mad at AE farming? Not really. I've done it plenty of times, and you're right, it's ridiculously easy to farm in the environment that existed previous to Issue 16. Before AE, I had 5 lvl 50 toons, leveled normally. For a period of farming for 40 days, I have another eight 45+'s that I've always wanted to build. I'll say it now, in public: My farmed toons made me happy. I know, heresy, right?

But having the farmers take overwhelming root in two already incredibly busy zones for low-level players is what built the animosity towards them. Previously, the "farm zones" were always PI and GV, which were remote enough from most of the playerbase that they only ticked off high level whiners who bemoaned farming spam without realizing that hey, you can /ignore and go on with your life. And yeah, from the farming perspective, it made sense: You go where the money is, and with AE doors in lowbie zones, that's where you'd go to. So you have a clash of the farming crowds maximizing their efforts, and having non-farm players getting constantly drowned out. And of course, this only served to feed the pro-Champions spam from players who would kick off scripted complaints in broadcast about the death of COH, how AE has ruined the game, yadda yadda yadda. (I say scripted because from three sets of instances, I had logs of people starting the same dialogue in different zones/sides. Hooray, the marketing and the politics of fear mongering.)

If I could rewind back to April when Issue 14 hit, I'd have removed the AEs in AP and Cap, and left them in Galaxy City and Port Oakes instead. (To keep with having it accessible by lowbies; going radical, I'd have scrapped the in-zone AE entirely and just have it as an entrance to a specific "AE" zone that players could go to, similar to how the Vanguard depots are peppered through the zones.)

I have no problems with farmers getting their groove on, so long as it doesn't impact the gaming experience of other players overall. But when a new player logs into AP and hits a wall of "LFM AE 52+ boss farm NEED KIN 40+ ONLY" regularly and constantly... yeah, I think that'd make any sane person more than a little irritated, don't you think?

@TURGENEV - Freedom Server / IRON / B.A.N.E / HORDE

Turg Fiction: Ghost in the Machine Acts III & IV coming 2012!
Turg Fiction: IX is now LIVE on Architect Entertainment!

i hear where you're coming from, but what everyone has ignored is that the largest portion of new characters joining and getting PL'ed in MA were vets. i know, crazy right? i would go so far as to say 90%+ of all new chars were from vets making alts. of course this is all my opinion and i don't have any sources other than my own personal view ingame and teaming with said new characters. people blow it out of proportion and the big exaggeration was MA in AP was relative to a strip club a block away from a high school. whatever the real # is of completely new players making new characters to vets, it's not near what people have made it out to be on these forums.

Not ignoring it at all, it wasn't "who" was getting the PLs that was the problem; it was "where", and the fact that it interfered with people who were genuinely trying to get normal teams. At least in GV/PI, the farm culture's expected. Being a lowbie in a lowbie zone, and getting blitzed with "lvl 52 boss farm 45+ only" all over the place, it conflicted with normal gaming for that zone. Make sense?

@TURGENEV - Freedom Server / IRON / B.A.N.E / HORDE

Turg Fiction: Ghost in the Machine Acts III & IV coming 2012!
Turg Fiction: IX is now LIVE on Architect Entertainment!

sooo, your response falls on "lvl52 boss farm 45+ only" didn't really belong in AP? so much is wrong with this that i'm just overwhelmed with the possibilities. you win because i quit. /cookie

bottom line, if MA wasn't accessible from AP, it would of been someplace else and everyone would have followed. and there'd be a different excuse..

I agree. That's kinda proven by looking at Villain-side. Cap is where all the action is, yet that's not the Villain's introductory zone. But I've personally run into more Hero AE-babies, then I have Villain AE-babies.. so that's something to look at as well.

I'm inclined to believe it's the combination of the MA exploitation and it's location in AP that made it so bad. The natural inclination to create a Hero first and finding AE-spam in the first non-tutorial zone made people ask where it was when they created their Villain too. The system was exploited, but I never felt that MA content belonged in AP anyway.. before and regardless of the farming that went on anyway. New players should experience content that the Dev's created.. not the content the players do. Player content is supposed to be extra, not a replacement.

Word.