How to Fix AE Rewards, in One Step

There are lots of things the devs aren't crazy about, but not enough to take draconian measures to prevent. Just because the devs haven't implemented ways to prevent an activity that you believe would stop it, doesn't necessarily mean they are giving tacit approval. There's a lot of ground in between "devs deliberately intend" and "devs will stop at nothing to prevent." Actually, most of the game probably exists between those two extremes.

The dev statement relevant to this topic is: the devs are generally against players performing repetitive actions focused on the primary purpose of, and with the net result being, optimizing the rate of earning rewards significantly above and outside the range of most players. Such activity may be curtailed at any time at the devs' sole discretion. If your version of "farming" doesn't match this definition, you're safe. If it does, you're not.


On the general subject of fixing the AE rewards, lets just say there is no simple solution that will accomplish that, unfortunately. There are solutions that I think would work (all significantly more complex than any suggestion I've read so far), but none that could be deployed immediately.

So if it was superior then why did it have to be nerfed to be inferior rather the closer to on par. See i can get around the lessened drops, since basicly you can earn tickets that come closer to getting real desirable set peices, this helps overcome the money issue also. But i dont see why xp should have to be inferior.

Again i understand the exploits that could come with using bonuses on mission completition. However why nerf patrol xp in the missions? Why have harder custom mobs be worth so much less then mobs the game spawns which are way easier to fight? I agree that mobs with no really combat ability shouldnt gain xp, however i can make mobs at standard strenght using fire/regen or something like that, which between the two sets makes superior mobs to what the game would normally spawn, and get 25 percent less xp for them. That IMO is not fair and then further limits the desires of people to use the system and experience other players creativity.

They didn't have enough time to implement a system that was close to par, or whatever target they wanted instead of par. There is no compromise between removing exploits and making balanced rewards: they hit the system hard enough to remove all possibility of exploiting it. I'm sure if they had unlimited time and resources they would have implemented a more nuanced system, but they did not have either at that time.

Would you like me to take a picture of my original game box back when Defenders had Fold Space, Katana WAS Broadsword, and the like?
But thank you for so kindly showing me that you're not going to put effort into things; arguing bia 'I'm a veteran and you're not' always works out well, doesn't it?

I see plenty of people; farmer and regular players alike. And if I don't see many? I'm inclined to either think they're IN doing missions, or that people are taking a break. And if nothing else, I'll form my own team and populate it myself.

Because apparently, you link your fun to rewards in terms of exp. Your sole argument stands on:
"I don't have fun with AE because it doesn't offer enough exp."
You can have your own definition of 'fun', just as someone can who runs the Behemoth farm 478 times and smiles with glee, but in the heart of things, you're STILL earning exp, you're STILL engaging in ALL of the Architect's features, and nothing but personal gain was reduced.

Because you can also fight weaker enemies for that amount of exp.
Oh, and guess what? There's content OUTSIDE of AE, and with the new Super-Sidekicking and Exemplars receiving exp? Oh, man, you can essentially level 1-50 on Hellions.

Now you're just projecting yourself onto me. A big no-no. You're STILL progressing; at a slower rate, but if that slower progression automatically kills all of the 'fun' you were having, then I sincerely doubt the validity to begin with.

Can you show me numbers on these 'vast majority'? Because from the AE terminals, a LOT of arcs have a LOT of ratings as it is. There are people exploring further new content, some people working on their badging, some people are STILL using AE, and so forth. I fail to see any 'vast majority', aside from the ones that now crank spawns up to +8 and go nuts elsewhere.

And do you know WHY it was launched so early? Because they set a deadline, but had to make such drastic changes (Critter Creator) that it was pushed back into it's own entire issue. It was a correction in progress, and it was already discouraged. People were surprised when they actually had to face consequences for breaking the rules they knew existed! Oh no!

I actually have no words for this. This paragraph isn't a response but a giant wall that might as well read 'TROLL BAIT' ad nauseum.
But if you'd like to know? If you'd REALLY like to know why there's only 3 years of vet rewards?
It involves a lot of situations: my father passing away, my mother having to undergo extensive surgery, my friend needing help to deal with her unplanned pregnancy, and a whole list of different things that made me look at my subscription and say 'I haven't been playing for awhile, and I'm gonna be busy for awhile' so I cancel it for a period of time.

And you have a good idea screaming at the devs that they did a bad job on their game that you still continue to play and pay for.

Because you have the option to make enemies with 1-2 powers thanks to the new 'Custom' option under Critter Powersets.

You go on, and on, and on about how all of these things are extremely powerful, but you're clearly talking out of your ***. They're more powerful if you're looking for a challenging arc, but more often than not, they're no stronger than regular mobs, and more often than not, they're weaker.

One on one, the easiest custom character mobs with any two standard power sets are harder than many, probably most, dev-created mobs. I do think that they should give full XP.

Apart from that, I am happy with the rewards being handed out in AE currently.

I remember trying to make low-level content for AE using custom critters. I had to stick to sets like DB and AR because they have the least damage and least secondary effects. I still ended up having minions that had three minor to moderate attacks in a level range where even liutenants would only have one attack. And this is with regen secondary so they effectively have "no secondary."

When making toons at higher levels, I found that no combination of enemies I could make were easier on my Invuln toon than just fighting Council Empire. And all that's pretty much on standard, where the customs get -25% exp. Putting them on hard would mean you'd suddenly start seeing Aim, Build Up, and other similar powers. Even if you stick to strictly weak sets, the units get 2-4x as many attacks as regular units do, and tend to do more damage with them. And have much more access to ToHit buffs.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

And the devs created enemies with 1-2 attacks also, how many attacks do most hellions have? Or Council? However when i use custom setting and limit the attacks bellow standard to match dev content, i basicly lose all xp earning for the people playing my arcs. Even if i keep it standard, they will only earn 75 percent xp for enemies that are most times more difficult then dev enemies.

And i would know this about you how? Even if you canceled and reactivated an account the forum reg date would be the original reg date. Which is all i have to go off of, and your response was to my comments which were dealing with issues from prior to your reg date. So for assuming that was correct, i guess im sorry. But my points still stand, the biggest issues with this game and its fans has always been the devs talking themselves into holes with the type of double speak that BaBs was taking part in on "alternative"
On what server? Cause on Liberty it is all but dead space in the middle of each city zone. And if it is dead, and you make your one team of 8 players, that still dead in the grand scheme of player participation.

And why was personal gain reduced? For no good damn reason thats why. How many months has it been since it was reduced and back then we were told the reduction was a temp fix until they could get a new xp system on line. Someone makes a thread about how to fix it, and the dev response is basicly "its alternative not equal" not something useful like "were still working on getting a system in place that would appropriately reward players for thier hightened efforts against AE custom mobs."

Would that have been so hard to say, it infact they were still working on it?


If you make weaker then standard class custom critters they get no xp. Standard class custom critters are more often more difficult to fight then normal dev created critters. And they earn less xp then dev created critters. Even if the xp wasnt an issue, if your rolling up a blaster or something like that, and every mob in the standard setting has some type of status effect (which most dev mobs dont have until the 30ish range mostly) that becomes a pain in the ***, and in taking part im rewarded with less xp then for fighting normal mobs in standard vanilla radio missions.
Exempts should have always earned xp, and SSKing is yet another way for the devs to have limited and slowed down leveling after all their PR systems to increase it. (patrol xp, xp smoothing etc) BTW personally i also dont find it fun to kick back with a level 20 on a team of level 40 something and get xp for doing practically nothing. which i swhat SSK basicly boils down to.
I didnt say it kills the fun of playing, but if progressing through the game wasnt part of the fun, then no one would worry about reaching 50, or level 10 or 20 or 32 or 38 etc. Part of the fun is the development of yoru chracter, and ifyou have limited time to play, then yes when your playing your going to likely ignore things that further limit your progression.
Can you showme numberssaying they are recieving a fair share of use? I dont need numbers to know when i log in and go to the building to see its empty. Just like PVP zones i dont need numbers to know that the "vast majority" of players dont use them. I just have to do a player search and look at their population. Prior to these changes i used to get 3-4 invites a night like "AE team running real missions would you like to join?" i dont get those anymore at all.

They choose to split an issue because so many players felt that the AE was not what it should be without custom critters. They dont set deadlines on issues, they never have. Though im sure someone somewhere says it has to be outby such a date. And what rules were broken? When you have players that are offering up information on what is being abused exactly (like mitos missions) and the devs launch the system anyway without correcting it, how is that players breaking the rules? Take the enemy off the charts of spawnable types if its not intended to be used.


Im sorry but who isulted who first ?Its pretty much a response to troll bait.
Sorry for your losses, but ultimately dont care. You do what you have to do, i already covered this issue.

I didnt say they made a bad game, i said ihave disagreements with choices they have made within that game. I voice those differences of opinion, and get jumped on accused of being a farmer, accussed of i guess having no fun. As i said i find the game fun or i wouldnt be playing it. I find the game fun and a release between all those things that come up in everyones life like you listed above.

But the game is a role playing game, it does denote that your character will gain skills, strenght etc. If there are two paths to do that, playing through the AE andplaying standard dev content, and one path offers badges, higher xp, higher influence, faster leveling, more teaming opprotunities, purple drops etc. And the other might offer somewhat nicer choices for IO sets, but slower everything else, less people in the sytsem so fewer teammates availible, which path do you think your going to choose?

Or put it this way, your dad just died a few weeks ago, your working full time, your friend is pregnant but you want to burn off some of the little free time you have playing the game. You log in you can isntantly get on a team running radio missions, and get the 2-3 bars you need to hit 32 and get your controllerpets, or you can try and take 20 minutes of the hour you have to play to put together a AE team, and fight harder mobs for less xp and you fall short of level 32.

Which path would you choose. Cause frankly the game is the same. There might be different stories but ultimately a blinky mission or kill all is the same in AE as it is in dev created land. So basicly the FUN of playing is the same on both sides. So then why pick the slower path?

Exactly. The anti-farming rhetoric was started by the people abusing the exploits. They hoped that fearmongering would get the farming population up in arms so they could hide amongst the crowd.

Only it didn't work. Farmers turned out to be far more intelligent than the exploiters gave them credit for. In fact the farmers got offended that the exploiters assumed they were idiots and sided with the devs.

Using the custom option, in my experience, results in the creation of enemies that give basically no reward at all.

Exactly. Now, the greatest thing MA achieved is that it's once more possible to include some element of surprise in missions. At least the first time you face custom mobs, you have no idea what their powers are.

Until new ones are added, there are no standard mobs that are new to me. I know what to do when I see a Sapper or an Immunes Surgeon. Customs can surprise you, at least. The maps aren't new, but the mobs can be.

The exploiters did the game a favor by pointing out that there were standard mobs that were so weak as to be pathetic. The weakest ones were seldom used in official content, like the Malaise minions. They're now more intersting to fight, as I learned when I mixed some of them with customs in a faction I made.

I dont mind if AE gives less XP than normal dev content. In fact I think it should, since you can always choose the enemy group and mission type most convenient for your build.

And I dont mind if customized enemies give less XP.

But I DO mind when perfectly viable enemies give NO rewards at all because I removed a single power.
Even when I added more and better powers to make up for it.

People facing a very reasonable challenge when playing my arc but getting no rewards for my critters is not "fun". Not for the players when they had to use expensive stuff to defeat a boss and get nothing for him, nor for me when people dont play my arc now when it says it contains custom critters.

I dont like the idea of capping my xp or influence. IMO the devs need to look at the standard game groups of villians. And then map out a threat level based on their attacks, and use that as a guage to giving rewards on MA critters. So basiclly standard dev rewards equal a certian level of gain for a threat assesment. Use that as a baseline, then asign powers in the critter sets similar values for attacks debuffing or controling etc. If you custom critter is atleast the same as a base line dev then you get full xp, if its higher you get slightly higher, maybe 10 percent. if its lower its xp is based again on its threat.

Then give a base that every critter has to have atleast 2 attacks or something like that to prevent the non-hitter critters.

Actually, BaB is not a reward designer or an AE system designer, so BaB's comment is not an official dev response. BaB was commenting colloquially. BaB's statements about the design of the AE have no more official weight than mine do, unless BaB specifically indicates he's speaking in an official capacity. BaB has said this more than once himself. BaB is the animation-lead. He's the reward-nothing.

Also, if the devs were working on a solution to custom critter XP, it would be hard to say that they were still working on it because they would probably be barred from saying so. There are rules about speaking about future game developments that are not locked-in certainties, especially about controversial matters like AE rewards. All they could say is probably what has already been said, which is that the current state is likely not the final state. I doubt any of the red names would be allowed to say anything further.

Then who determines how long it should take. I am not saying that i think 48 hours is appropriate time, however if XP rewards were solved so that AE was similar to normal xp earning and still allowed for creative control of your creations, then the problem is solved with no need to limit how quickly i can earn xp on some arbitrary scale of how fast the devs feel i should level or how much is to much ina day or whatever.

If this is the case then BABs shouldnt be offering opinions, atleast not under his red named account.

BaBs is a developer, as such he might not directly work on every aspect of the game, but would certinally have knowledge of what is being worked on in other departments. It is not like the staff on the game is so large they dont see each other, talk, have meeting etc.

Saying its still being looked at and researched is not commiting to a fix,or putting a time table ona fix. But to basicly offer a snappy remark with no information is trolling. His post offered really nothing to the discussion of a possible fix, or related to the original topic by commenting on a proposed fix. If BaBs was one of us, a moderator could have smacked his post, i know i have gotten warning emails for less.

I dont expect the devs to make comments out of turn, i dont expect the devs to keep the players aprised of all things in development before the right time to discuss it. But I also dont expect them to take part in double speak on issues we are discussing. If they have nothing constructive to offer then perhaps they need to offer nothing at all, or at minimum have a non dev forum account and offer those opinions through that rather then a red name.

The devs are specifically barred from posting anonymously under another account. Even when his redname was malfunctioning, Castle identified himself when posting under a different account (which was also named obviously). That policy dates back to the Cryptic days, and to the best of my knowledge that policy is still in effect. And I last checked just a few months ago.


Although this is certainly true, its also true that perhaps counterintuitively because the devs have their own work to do, they are not always very aware or try to be aware of what everyone else is doing. There's no "thrill" to finding out before we do that Castle is making a banana-grenade powerset in Going Rogue, because they work there. Sometimes *I* find out what Castle is working on before BaB, and vice versa, when its not a big secret, and the one doesn't directly affect the other. BaB may know, he may not know, he may be so busy with Going Rogue and other projects he doesn't currently care to know. Its impossible to know without asking him.


On these forums, oh yes it is.


That's hyperbolic. Under no set of circumstances would someone be modded for saying what BaB said, first because its relevant, second because its true, and third because it doesn't violate any of the forum rules. Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it generally offensive.

Also, BaB *is* one of us, when it comes to forum posts. BaB has actually been modded in the past. The community managers don't answer to the designers; BaB is not higher in the food chain than Mod8, he's in a completely different part of the company.

Actually, in many ways the devs are held to a higher standard than the average poster, specifically because they represent the company when they post, even when they are not specifically representing their official position in the company. I can say things they can't get away with saying.


If BaB didn't say it, I would have eventually. Its completely relevant to the suggestion that the AE *must* provide a levelling rate comparable to the rest of the game. Even when its "fixed" there's no guarantee that will be true. If it was up to me, that almost certainly wouldn't be true on average, for a number of reasons.

And if you think its not constructive to be told that one of your assumptions about the AE might be wrong, and therefore all of your conclusions about the AE that derive from that assumption are suspect, and any argument you make to the devs that include that assumption have a significant probability of being dismissed, we have a different definition of "constructive."


And by the way, I actually don't know if BaB had first-hand knowledge, or was just guessing when he said what he said. So I'll reiterate: the AE's "alternate levelling path" makes no guarantee that it will provide an equivalently fast levelling path. And I am not guessing.** I think its fair to suggest its too low because its drastically too low. But its not fair to suggest its too low because its lower at all. That's a target you have no right to expect, in the sense that the devs have not stated or implied you'd ever get, all assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Comparing this to "Jack-speak" and saying that "alternate means equal" is ironic, because that sort of redefinition of English is exactly what Jack was often accused of. Alternate means equal in exactly the same way that Enhancements aren't powers: only from a very specific and narrow point of view.



** I've had discussions with many devs about the AE, from before I14 was in beta, up to the present day. Their collective position about rewards in the AE during those discussions has been consistent ever since Positron laid down the law on it in the open forums: the AE is intended to have rewards (it was originally conceived to be reward-less) but those rewards may not be equivalent to the rewards achievable in other parts of the game. They may be qualitatively different, and they may be lower. That's been true ever since the AE's design was changed to allow rewards at all.

Awesome. Hope scrappers get it.

When and if xp rewards are 'solved' on a per-critter basis, then sure. But the AE has already been through a few iterations of groups of powers offering different xp amounts, and efforts in that direction have been judged lacking so far.

While it would be quite possible to keep trying different combinations and then nerfing them once exploits were found into the forseeable future, I think a 'speed limit' is a more elegant solution.

It directly solves the issue of gaining rewards "too fast" while allowing full critter creation flexibility.

And there is no question of who decides how fast is too fast. That has apparently already been decided; we just haven't been given the number. If not, no changes would have been made in the first place.

Unless you think all of the changes to the AE were because of '0-risk' critters, which I don't believe to be the case. If so, they would have just put a minimum amount of attacks out there and been done.