How to Fix AE Rewards, in One Step

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.

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.

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

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.

Omelets, eggs.

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.

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.