How to Fix AE Rewards, in One Step
By the way, the text editor in MA is a wee bit buggy too. |
Says the person who had to rewrite an end of mission souvenir three times last night due to managing to delete all the text in it while trying to color format it.
Well, these things are really not so different from the plethora of dev designed radio missions that have defeating 1 boss as the goal or clicking on glowie as the lone goal, running through with a Stalker and ending the mission in about 10 seconds.
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![Stick Out Tongue](images/smilies/tongue.gif)
yes, it true that some are very fast if you stealth to the end and clear the room, but the devs are fine with that. That's a change from beta (or launch? don't remember if it got to live or not) when it used to be just kill the named boss (or his spawn) or the glowie and not the whole room they/it are in.
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I pl'd an insane number of toons back in the "old" MA days. 'fore that, I had perma-bridges to do the same.
I'm not sorry to see either change (I think SSK is better for the community than the old method of sidekicking/exemping) because I see more people doing more things. Same with MA.
I still see MA teams forming in /b and in global channels, I see tons of tfs form, and just normal arc or radio mission teams.
I go test out toons on Dev's Choice stories, just I do the standards of farming the wall or whatnot.
I don't think the intent was to have MA overshadow the rest of the game and now it isn't. It's there and you can still play it, but there now is an incentive to get out and experience the rest of the game, good and bad.
Just like when they implemented mission complete bonuses...Perez is now a ghost town and I remember when it was the place for low-level toons to go.
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The pre-ED Heroes of this game could have demolished the Rikti Mothership and rebuilt the city with the scrap metal on their way to breakfast...
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The pre-ED heroes couldn't hold a candle to an IO build nowadays.....
If anything, this game needs another ED. The only thing from those days that is holding this game back in any way, shape, or form is the aggro cap and AOE limits.
And, amazingly, as easy as this game has become people still whine about those things.
What has ruined the game are the players. Too lazy, too much crying, and full of agendas, greed and stupidity. If you can't fly through it at x8 solo, then it isn't a toon worth playing. The entire industry is plagued by these "if it ain't best, don't bother" folks. If you want to blame someone, blame them.
The devs aren't without their faults (they really need to do a better job recognizing exploit potential before something is published, for example) but they sure do try hard. And they have a magnificent ability to put up with unappreciative brats. For their part, over the years, they have managed to keep an old game not only ticking but in many respects still innovative. With the right people, it is still a good game.
Funny thing, you can STILL farm AE. It's not as uber fast as it used to be granted. The Devs created this wonderful tool and players tweaked it beyond what the Devs expected. Unintended as it may be, it's not the first time either, won't be the last.
IIRC when IOs were introduced it was stated "No powers will be changed based on IOs". When we made PGT mini nukes, all of a sudden the powers broken. 6 issues of PGT being broken? How'd that slip past them?
AEuBer was tested and killed, it was brought inline w/ the risk vs reward scale. IMO mob difficulty to get full rewards is a bit high. But, the devs were trying to discourage xp farms. Mind you as I said earlier in my post, you can still farm AE. It's not as fast, but for redsiders we really only have one workable farm mission outside AE.
JE Saist, AE was advertised as an alternate leveling path from level 1-50. It just was. On the AE Edition boxes, it was specifically listed as such.
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(I think AE is fine giving XP btw - but the whole "it says it on the box" is not persuasive and to me, inaccurate.)
Just my unscientific observation, but this game seems to be more and more about penalties and limitations, and even though we were promised that in time ED would all make sence, I don't find Inventions to have been such a great boon to the game. It's definitly something else to do, but it's no more than a distraction as is AE now.
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ED forced people to think outside of '1 acc + 5 dam is how all attacks are slotted'. Now people have range, stun, hold proc's, etc.
I still associate Jack with cabbage based on PR skills and IQ, but ED was a good thing.
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Disregard for the risk and/or time to reward ratio |
If an author creates a custom critter or custom NPC group that has more powers/is more difficult than a standard NPC, where is the greater reward for the greater risk?
Shard Warrior - 50 MA/Regen/BM Scrapper
Founding Member and Leader : Shadow-Force
Co-Leader: Council of Heroes
"Whatever evils come this way... we will be there to stop them."
People keep saying this, but it does_not_ have any mention of that on my AE edition box. (I pre-ordered off Amazon - so I had it long before any of the XP changes went through.)
(I think AE is fine giving XP btw - but the whole "it says it on the box" is not persuasive and to me, inaccurate.) |
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
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"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
Interesting choice of words on Posi's part. The AE Custom Critter changes the devs implemented totally ignore this risk and/or time to reward ratio. There is no incentive to make challenging custom critters that have powers above and beyond what non-custom critters have.
If an author creates a custom critter or custom NPC group that has more powers/is more difficult than a standard NPC, where is the greater reward for the greater risk? |
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
And this may get looked at again. However, the backlash was to be a bit expected, especially when the Devs, many times, said specifically what it was not to be used for, and people still used it in an exploitative fashion. I'm betting that the rewards wouldn't have been as severely reduced if people had voluntarily not used exploits, but I guess that was asking too much.
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Fair enough. I was wrong on that. However, in many interviews and posts here on the boards, it was clear that the Devs did intend for it to be an alternative leveling path from 1-50. And like BAB said here, that doesn't mean that it was supposed to be equal, but it was supposed to function in a similar way.
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![Frown](images/smilies/frown.gif)
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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On the bases of risk verses reward, does increasing the diff yield higher chances of getting drops or better like the topic suggests?
Positron said as much as it should be equivalent, whatever BABs jokes about "alternative" not meaning equivalent. He said they were giving the same XP reward in MA as in dev content because of this. He said that the ticket rewards had been calculated to be the same as what you'd get in drops because of this. Several times and places and ways he said this.
That said, it *is* equivalent as long as you use dev developed enemy groups. You can make most of the mission use those, and have your custom group for a few ambushes or spawns for variety and story if you're careful about storytelling. Since you can recolor the standard minions and there's quite a few varieties of them, along with the ability to put in a short mission or few spawns of custom enemies, I think that the lower xp of custom enemies per their difficulty is a reasonable compromise to make the system harder to cheat.
I think that was the intent and I also hope they put in a bit more effort to make it less difficult to make enemies that are about the same difficulty as dev enemies, but with whatever costume you pick. I think a good way to go about this is to have dev selected power combos added as options to the custom enemies.
SUGGESTION FOLLOWS:
- Powers devs spend some time to come up with a bunch of thematic power sets that give minion appropriate, lieutenant appropriate, boss appropriate challenges, for the basic custom enemy power types. Like for fire, for ice, for darkness, for electricity, for broadsword and shield, for plants, for stone/earth, for radiation. Then if you make custom enemy groups use one of those thematic sets, they get full xp and are not as difficult.
With this suggestion, creators would have another level of flexibility to make fully custom costumes, have a theme, but not be able to pick and choose individual powers so there is less room for making it too easy. But it would not be as hard as a whole group of full XP custom enemies are now, which is usually too hard for the hero/villain to fight on their usual settings... unless they have their usual settings to "no challenge for me" which most tend not to do
Positron said as much as it should be equivalent, whatever BABs jokes about "alternative" not meaning equivalent. He said they were giving the same XP reward in MA as in dev content because of this. He said that the ticket rewards had been calculated to be the same as what you'd get in drops because of this. Several times and places and ways he said this.
That said, it *is* equivalent as long as you use dev developed enemy groups. You can make most of the mission use those, and have your custom group for a few ambushes or spawns for variety and story if you're careful about storytelling . . . |
However, I don't think Back Alley Brawler was joking. AE is and, I'm sure, was intended as, a supplement to other game systems. Again and again, I get the sense that it was intended as a vanity project for players. There's nothing especially wrong with that, but it's something that needs to be recognized. As I argued in i16 beta, AE is meant to satisfy the "artist and entertainer" in the mission's author, with perhaps more emphasis on the artist than the entertainer. Any benefits in terms of leveling or rewards are incidental.
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And this may get looked at again. However, the backlash was to be a bit expected, especially when the Devs, many times, said specifically what it was not to be used for, and people still used it in an exploitative fashion. I'm betting that the rewards wouldn't have been as severely reduced if people had voluntarily not used exploits, but I guess that was asking too much.
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It was asking too much. Your game has 100k players or more, and your reaching about, what, 1 or 2% of that that actively read the boards, follow developer interviews, read the box... read the manuel, read ingame proumps? If even? I'm betting the VAST majority of people who play the game barely do anything more then log on and go with the flow. THEY wouldn't nessessirly know how hell bent the dev's were about farming... they also prolly figured the devs wouldn't put something into there game that's THAT easy to exploit, and leave it in THAT long. Even I, who knew in advance how the dev's felt, begain to wonder if they were changing their minds at one point... i mean, the farming was well know in the beta, it was present when it went live, and presisted for WEEKS... without so much as a word being said, until Posi laidedit the smack down... RETROACTIVELY.
It's foolish to implement a freature YOU KNOW can be explioited and hope that telling a small fraction of the player base not to do it is going to do ANYTHING. The AE debocial, IMO, is 100% the dev's fault for there lack of forsight and planing, and common since. They dropped the ball. But, people make mistakes. I just hope they learned from that one.
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The OP's point is that while there is nothing wrong with farming or powerlevelling per se, there is a maximum rate of reward gain for which the game is designed.
Hence: put a 'speed limit' on the maximum amount of reward gain, and be done with it. Then people can play the content however they want and worry less about nerfs. Heck, rewards could even be increased as a result.
Of course, there's no such thing as a free lunch: people who are already above the 'speed limit' would have to slow down. People who don't enjoy farming, but feel they 'have to to keep up' would end up repeating easy content and then complaining that the easy content is there to be repeated. People who feel they have to thwart or beat the game in order to have fun would move on to other games (not being facetious, these are all legitimate paying customers).
I don't know about the specific numbers quoted, but the Devs can figure all of that out: the principle, IMHO, is a good one. Arcanaville and I discussed this a bit (she had reservations about the idea, particularly how it could be implemented while accounting for 'spikes' in progress), but it's similar to one I suggested.
I feel confident that a 'speed limit' could be imposed that would allow devs to increase the amount and variety of rewards in the game, while impeding less that 5% (made up number) of the playerbase.
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The AE debocial, IMO, is 100% the dev's fault for there lack of forsight and planing, and common since. They dropped the ball. But, people make mistakes. I just hope they learned from that one.
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I don't doubt the devs knew about exploits before it went live. IMO they chose to get it out the door to make the news instead of holding off another few months to close up the holes.
Shard Warrior - 50 MA/Regen/BM Scrapper
Founding Member and Leader : Shadow-Force
Co-Leader: Council of Heroes
"Whatever evils come this way... we will be there to stop them."
I get the feeling AE was rushed out to capitalize on the press hype. The AE is something brand new and innovative to the MMO market.
I don't doubt the devs knew about exploits before it went live. IMO they chose to get it out the door to make the news instead of holding off another few months to close up the holes. |
@KingSnake - Triumph Server
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My common sense is tingling... ~ Deadpool
If you can't learn to do something well... learn to enjoy doing it poorly...
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Well, just my 2 inf, but I look at it as Posi provided the warning... it was the choice of the player to ignore it. It's like buying a product that contains a warning label... if you choose to ignore the warning and use the product in a way not intended and get hurt by it, it's your fault.
Shard Warrior - 50 MA/Regen/BM Scrapper
Founding Member and Leader : Shadow-Force
Co-Leader: Council of Heroes
"Whatever evils come this way... we will be there to stop them."
The only way to fix this is going back to the dev reward metric, which rewards based upon the difficulty of the abilities. This gets real tricky, but I believe is the best way to do it. Fulcrum shift is simply more dangerous than targeting drone.
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Naturally, if I was going to be an MA user I had to find a quick way around this problem, and the solution is to click the "Browse and Play" tab, then go back to "My Creations." Just switching the display tabs from "My Creations" to "Browse" and back is enough to update the editor to point at the most recent content.
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Well, just my 2 inf, but I look at it as Posi provided the warning... it was the choice of the player to ignore it. It's like buying a product that contains a warning label... if you choose to ignore the warning and use the product in a way not intended and get hurt by it, it's your fault.
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The apparent solution here is to ban cookies. Except now the people who enjoy cookies but don't abuse them are also being punished.
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Well, just my 2 inf, but I look at it as Posi provided the warning... it was the choice of the player to ignore it. It's like buying a product that contains a warning label... if you choose to ignore the warning and use the product in a way not intended and get hurt by it, it's your fault.
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And don't even get me started on the retroactive punishment.
Now don't get me wrong, i love this game, and in general really like this dev team. But i'm not blinded by that. They screwed up, and fixed it by blaming there customers. It was screwed up IMO. And it could have been avoided if they delayed AE a bit and worked alittle harder on making it harder to exploit.
@KingSnake - Triumph Server
@PrinceSnake
My common sense is tingling... ~ Deadpool
If you can't learn to do something well... learn to enjoy doing it poorly...
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My "solution" to re-incentivising people to return to AE and helping to reduce the farming capacity has always been to simplify the process as much as possible and make it as easy and straight forward to understand as it can be. Rather than coming up with tons of new rules regarding XP and custom mobs I would just do three things:
Big increase, possibly double, ticket drop rate.
heavily cut XP gain straight across the board. No special rules based on power selection or whether or not a mob is custom. Just have everything be worth 50% XP.
Make it impossible to make a custom enemy group with just 1 class. Each group needs boss, lt, minion.* This way even the most optimised farmers are still severely limited and will probably realize that they'd be better off farming normal content for XP with a good amount of drops. People who play AE will still earn XP, but will also earn tons of tickets to spend on rolls. This has the added effect of drasitically increasing market supply of just about everything that isn't purple.
I believe these changes if implemented would provide enough reward for players to still consider playing the AE, while also preventing the massive influx of farming and allowing players to not feel like they are being limited in their creative ability to design custom mobs to behave exactly the way they want them to behave.
*Note that right now (unless they changed it since I re-subbed, been gone for a while) you can make an enemy group with just 1 class of enemy. Only problem being you earn 0XP for them. My proposed change would make it impossible to even create an arc without all classes being in your custom enemy group. You'd simply get the orange error message telling you to make more enemy classes.
Naturally, if I was going to be an MA user I had to find a quick way around this problem, and the solution is to click the "Browse and Play" tab, then go back to "My Creations." Just switching the display tabs from "My Creations" to "Browse" and back is enough to update the editor to point at the most recent content.
It's important to check to make sure you're working on the correct version of your arc at all times, and save often.
By the way, the text editor in MA is a wee bit buggy too.