What's the big deal? Powerleveling and the AE "nerf"

OK, I'll state few things first so you know where I'm coming from:

1) I've never power-leveled or been power-leveled in the nearly 4 years I've been playing. I don't get it. The game (for me) ends at 50 (I don't badge hunt) so if I'm enjoying a character, the last thing I want to do is accelerate it's lifespan. I played none of my favorites this weekend for that reason. I did get several new ones to 20, which is when I tend to really start to enjoying a toon.

2) I love AE. It's the best enhancement to the game, ever. It's infinite free content, even if alot of it was dreck.

3) I LOVE CoH, so my motivation with this topic comes from a desire to help it, not kick a hole in it.

So...in an environment where there are new challenges to CoH's prosperity (Champions, other games current and planned) - what is the logic behind the decision to 'nerf' AE in i16 so severely that the place is literally empty in all zones on all servers most of the time now?

If a player is paying their $15 a month, who exactly cares if they are level-grinding their pointless little hearts out? For those of us that don't care about "getting bigger numbers in order to get bigger numbers" (power-leveling) it made for ready teams and active servers. For those that love that sort of thing for whatever unfathomable reason - why curtail their fun?

Was the decision to murder AE worth it? If, I don't know....say 10000 players quit because of that, that's $1.8M in lost revenue that probably ain't coming back. Seems expensive to preserve...what? Design philosophy? I'd think happy, paying customers would be more important that some abstract disparity between a game element's actual, and intended, use.

Just curious.

I'm not sure how many people actually quit because of the changes to AE. I think a lot more people just quit using it (arena anyone?).

Is beating a zombie horse the same as beating a dead one, morally speaking?

Hmm...

You can argue the OPs points but you can't argue that AE isn't pretty dead now. I'm sure there are people out there playing it, just like there are people out there playing the arena, or there are people doing Eden trials. AE should have never given out XP/Inf to begin with, and the fact now that they have to come up with all kinds of convoluted and annoying ways to prevent whatever they consider abuse of the system only works to confirm that.

They basically released an entire new system to the game, released alongside a new retail box (architect edition) and then, months after it's release, completly overhauled a huge part of it. In my opinion it was released too soon and all of the aftermath (the extreme farming and subsequent nerfing and alterations) was a result of poor decision making and maybe some wishful thinking on the devs part.

If I were to make myself more useful by suggesting something other than complaining I'd suggest adding purples to the list of things you can get with tickets if you wanna bring players back to AE.

I have a choice between *rolleyes* *facepalm* and *headdesk*. Which one would you advise me to choose?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think teaming now is as good as its ever been. You can find great teams and TFs in every zone on both red and blue side. You could not say that when all the AE Babies were spamming the zones with AE requests, along with level 50s asking how to get to Steel Canyon.

I think everyone who uses AE as it was intended is using it now. Who cares if that room isn't jam packed with ridiculous toons who got to 50 in a day?

Things could not be better!

OP, your argument is based off of a false premise, one that has been iterated several times since the launch of Issue 16.

Farming is not an issue, so long as there is risk for the reward. Within the MA, one of the biggest problems was reward without risk - the exploitation of the custom mob system specifically. For example, bosses with no attacks which, once defeated, granted the same XP and Inf reward as a boss that could hit back.

The current solution, although not the most desirable, is the best solution at the current juncture in time. Developers want to create a better solution in the near future that will allow more flexibility in custom mob creation without penalizing players who want to mix and match powers (with a break in the middle depending on chosen powers).

Click!

Je-Saist:

1) I'm not presuming that the developer's vision doesn't matter. It's extremely important. It is not, however, *more* important than customer satisfaction.

2) Your argument about who was having fun and who was not, while well-made (and I do hear you) does not hang together. There are a lot fewer people on now, and AE is a ghost town. The fun is not boss farming, the fun (for them) was leveling quickly. People not knowing how to play their toons is a self-limiting problem - they are quickly identified and dropped from teams. They affect ONLY PUGs.

3) Uh...I have the 45 month badge to prove I've been here as long as I say I have? Alternatively, you could look up the date of my first post? Wait! I know, *it's right under my name in a little field called "Join date"*!

4) I'll take your word for it that more people were happy with it than not, and that the membership rate was unaffected. I certainly hoped that was the case.

Captain_Photon: I guess then you missed AE building full to bursting with players. Because, now, they are *EMPTY*. That is what I meant by murdering it. Sure, it's still a GREAT system. It works fine. There's great stuff on it amongst the crud...but it's empty. You are bringing a team in there with you, or you are soloing now. There's no more just poking your head into the building and getting 5 invites in 3 minutes. I liked that.

SlimPickens,

1) Thank you. You understood.

2) Some of us don't live on the forums, so I have not seen the deceased equine flogging you and other bemoan.

All,

No one twisted anyone's arm to read or respond to this post. And if you can read, you know where I was coming from and that I'm not some troll looking to start stuff.

"Everyone pays a subscription to play this game. However, when those who exploit certain systems stand to gain the greatest rewards, how is that fair to the majority of the playerbase? Although the markets are optional systems within the game, how could they not be affected if a swell of Influence causes prices on items to skyrocket, or if a once rare items suddenly becomes so commonplace that game balance becomes questioned? In the end, exploiters (but not all farmers, mind you) can hurt the entire playerbase through their actions."

That's a good argument. When I wrote my post I was thinking mostly in terms of fast leveling alone - which really doesn't hurt anyone else.

Thanks.

I have no idea what happened to the AE but when I went in to make an arc the other day... no one was there. At all. I mean... I could hear a pin drop.

edit: I mean I havent read the actual patch notes for the issue 16... so i like really dont know what happened... but all the spam is gone from Atlas.

Just because you pay for club membership doesn't mean you can take a dump in the pool.

Honestly I don't think it was the AE changes that pulled everyone out - I think it was the changes to the rest of the game. Specifically the difficulty level changes and super side kicking.

Preveiously the AE was the only place where it was easy to form groups out of characters that had a wide variation in levels as you could set the level range on an AE arc and everyone would be SK'ed up to the minimum level of the arc. With the new auto side kick mechanics this ability was extended outside of the AE and was actually made better, as folks can even earn XP while exemplaring. So now that grouping is FAR easier outside AE people are more willing to try other things.

Also prior to i16 the most efficient farming method was to put together a full group of 8 in order to maximize the amount of mobs in a mission. This was a lot easier in the AE as everyone was in the same place, there was no travelling between missions and all the amenities where nearby. With the new difficulty levels the serious farmers don't NEED extra players to pad their missions - so they are off soloing TV missions or battle maiden missions set to 8 players and don't need pads, thus pulling those players and all the door sitters that used to pad thier missions out of the AE.

Really, the only change that impacting any kind of farming was the nerfing of boss only farms. However I suspect that had a lot less overall effect than most people think, since boss only farms where ONLY efficient for certain builds - the classic farm builds (fire/kin, fire/psy, etc) probably get more benefit from minion/LT farms -which they can get now by setting thier diffuclty to +4/x8 and no bosses. I think if you actually polled folks who did boss farms you will find most of them did them for the challenge OR because they bought into the "boss farms are l33t" meme and mistakenly thought they where the best way to farm.

The last change to the AE, nerfing custom mobs probably did absolutely nothing to impact farming in AE as you can still fill maps with custom groups of standard mobs and get full xp as long as you include 1 of each type (minion, LT, Boss) in the custom group. This still allows you to pick a mob type that is easy for you to farm (say, fire weilding CoT demons for /fire armor characters ) and be fairly safe - and since the new difficulty settings work in the AE those who are farming there are probably doing it solo so you wouldn't even notice them. The REAL impact of this change was to butcher story focused arcs that relied on custom mobs - with the reduced XP I bet those arcs are getting NO play anymore, thus killing the one thing that the AE was intended to do.

In conclusion it seems to me that the real change here was that the devs took the lessons learned from the AE and applied them to the rest of the game, allowing folks to group easily and farm dev designed story arcs and paper/scanner missions with the same ease that the AE previously allowed. If they had stopped there or JUST made the changes to kill the boss only missions things would have been fine - but the real AE killer was making custom mobs which tend to be a lot more challenging than normal mobs worth less XP, killing any story based arc that relied on custom mobs.