Does anyone use AE anymore?

People are still using it, but not everyone and their brother are using it to the exclusion of all other content, like they used to. It's pretty helpful to bank up some tickets to buy orange-level salvage for example.

I'm crossing my fingers for the semi-rumored XP fix for custom mobs... the reawrds shouldn't be the way they are right now, I'll agree - I wouldn't go so far as to say they're "bad rewards", they're just less.

To make a metaphore: I might want a glass of water and you ask why I'd drink from a glass only 75% full when I can get one 100% full elsewhere. I like to admire the glass the water comes in as well as get a drink, that can be a reward as well.

I enjoy the MA alot and try to atleast get other people to play the developers choice missions but its tough.

For one, you can be sure that you never join a team running MA missions on their own. So i have to make my own team, no problem ill do that. Then the second problem arises, if you whisper people asking if they want to join your team, you better tell them ahead of time your doing MA missions or they will ***** and moan about it forever. Third problem, if you whisper people, asking them to join your team and telling them your doing MA missions you ALSO have to tell them your not doing farms, but real missions or they just reply with a 'no thx i dont farm' or somesuch.

So here i am, writing something like a fourliner just to get people into my team, explaining like 8 times a day that, yes MA missions DO give you XP, no i will avoid those missions that give reduced XP, yes im even willing to go for standard rewards if you absolutly detest MA tickets and so on and so forth.

In all honesty its such a logistical nightmare to run a MA team that i just stop bothering, the fact that you cant even abort a mission without disbanding and reforming the team cause its handled as a TF is really just another minor annoyance.

There are two kinds of people where the MA is concerned:

1. They have no clue about custom mob rules, tickets or even the existence of Developers Choice missions. They only see that they dont get any extra XP at the end of missions and thats that for them.

2. They who actually put some time into learning about the MA and know its nooks and crannys, yet got horribly burned by teams led by 1. people and plainly refuse to enter the AE with anyone they dont know.

So yeah, i only enter the MA with people on my global list anymore, and even then usually only if i want to play in the RWZ with hero/villain mixed teams.

Great places to get insps especially while on tfs

The nerfs to MA with regards to XP can be seen as heavy-handed, but I felt it needed to be done. Being as my primary (and really only) server is Freedom, I saw what MA in its original state had done to the general population. Some people did MA for the story arcs, but there were a lot more that just mindlessly farmed to get as much reward as possible.

When MA first came out, everybody huddled up in Atlas and Cap, and dropped anchor in the AE building. They farmed day and night, regardless of what went on. When the server was going down, people were broadcasting for farms. When the server came back up, they went right back to it. If there were zombies or Rikti invading, they still farmed. People power spammed in the building to the extent that the rest of the zone either lagged or crashed on quite a few occasions.

When Issue 16 was released, both Atlas and Cap became almost a ghost town *that very day*. The farmers went back to PI and Grandville but they were a bit quieter since they didn't need a team of people to increase the spawn sizes. It sucks that the only way to get people to use MA for what it was intended is to change rewards to custom mobs, but such a change was necessary and quite possibly the only way without completely alienating every player and throwing all that work out the window.

Personally, I didn't like the XP changes, but it beats the alternative of playing on a server where the only zone with any semblance of activity is filled with a majority of the server's players. That's just my 2 inf.

I do AE stuff every single day. I actually prefer the ticket method of gaining rewards since it gives me some control over what I want. It's also pretty handy for grouping with my friends since I can do it in Atlas Park and not make them come to Peregrine Island.

Still using AE to make custom arcs and content for my SG, sometimes with custom baddies, sometimes not. Still see plenty of people using it and plenty of new content.

Really my only beef is having to sift through all the old farm missions to find real content.

Signed, plenty of content but alot of empty farms around.

I seem to have made a return to AE. Finding good arcs doesn't seem to be quite the task it once was. Have even started to write them again. Hopeflly they won't totally suck.

Bashful Banshee

What I find funny is, many people that complained and complained and complained about farms and how they were ruining the very popular MA (at the time) were told to get over it. Now when those same types of people got what they wanted and the AE buildings are ghost towns, compared to before the nerfs anyway, and people compalin, their arguemnt is to get over it.

So crying is ok if it gets me what I want. But not ok if you are crying about something I like.

Just an observation.

Flame on.

Ok different train of thought. If the devs really want something, they should try to do the opposite.

We want to make this AE thing popular so lets try and do what we can to make everyone hate it.

We want people to enjoy PvP so lets do everything in our power to destroy it.

I only suggest this because when they try to fix things it seems to have the opposite result of their stated intentions.

/endtangent

The Dev's have a track record of nerfing too heavy, but they can't let us walk on them and choose everything they do either. After their point has been made though, they need to dumb it back and change it to more on the level with the rest of the game, then things can stabilize. Right now I can see a few things that need to change.

One, they nerfed MA to the extreme. Ok, we get it, people use it as not intended. Exploits need to be smashed like a plague. But you don't need to drop a 3 ton weight on it...

Two, PVP they say its more intended for the newer coward, beginner friendly... Right that only works if there are people actually joining in pvp that haven't been there to begin with... Mod failure. Now they said that changes are down the road, but how far? 2 years, 3 years, 6 years?

Three, Though excepted part of the game now, DR. Sure it was needed and respected after a while, they went about it all wrong... it just shows that people aren't perfect.

Now you may ask what he's getting at and it's simple. Though we dont always like things the way they turn out, we would not have this awesome game with so much to it without these changes and to be honest, I would not have it anyway other way. With greater content and major changes like GR coming, I don't see things in trouble... The only thing I see could change would be advertising, I see nothing about city of heroes on tv. Maybe it's just the mid-west, but I've seen nothing on city on the tv... Marketing tactic?

Novawulfe, TV marketting is expensive. You have to pay someone to write the commercial. Then you have to pay a director and film crew to film it. You have to pay actors/voice actors. You have to pay to have the commercial printed into a form that the networks can use. And after all that, then you have to pay the networks to show the fraggin' thing.

As a side note unrelated to anything else in this discussion, this is one of the reasons that TV networks as a whole aren't doing so well right now. Internet marketting is much cheaper, and fewer people are actually watching "live" television and are instead favoring DVRs and internet broadcasts, which more or less allow them to skip the commercials.

Now back to the discussion at hand: yes. I love the AE and still use it at least once a week.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I haven't touched it since the farming was nerfed. Then again, I never used it the way it was intended in the first place, but it made a wondrous way to get to level 22 when the actual game starts being fun for me.

All ants everywhere? Yeah, that's not going to happen.

But getting them out of this one kitchen? That's a clear, attainable and IMO desirable goal.

I've generally been playing the Guest Author, Hall of Fame and Dev's Choice arcs. (Though I did find a good one that was just a normal arc: Hearts on Fire, Arc ID 1472, great story, dark in places, good size and good for lowbies too.)

Tonight, I was playing Lady Sadako's 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' arc. Dev choice, dealt with the 5th Column and Council, which suit my character Nachtbrecher as a fun arc to play with the character in mind.

Second mission I was subject to a map full of custom lieutenants. Energy Blast/Shield Defence. Mobs outside the AE, at the same level these were (LT's, +1) 600-800 exp depending on type.

This was a mission full of 75 exp Lieutenants.

I dropped the arc. Not because I'm only in it for the exp, because those arcs that I've played I've really enjoyed the story. But I like story and leveling.

I'll keep using the MA arc for an alternative path for leveling my characters, with different stories and no need to high tail it about the city on pointless errands (Well, save for the decent zones like Faultline and so forth) but when I come across arcs where the reward is rather lacking, I'll just drop and move on.

i still use AE to help lvl my toons to the lvl 20s because i hate the low lvl game because ive run the low lvl content at least 15+ times and its boring and annoying having to run all over the place, especially heroside, i hate running ANY content heroside because the contacts send you all over the place and the zones are friggin huge.

on a whole, i never run content other than my own or friends content they ask me to test for them because if i get on a arc with ridiculously tough enemies or low rewards, ill drop the arc and 1 star it because it wasted my time, if the story is good ill give it more stars, but if the mishs arent at least fun to play through, then i wont bother giving more than 3 stars.

the concept behind AE was good in theory, but the way they implemented AE could have been better. the AE badge nerf horrendously killed my AE experience, because i lost 70 badges due to that, and it just gave me more reasons not to play AE content other than my own