How to Fix AE Rewards, in One Step

While it directly addresses the issue of exploitable levels of reward, in my opinion its the least elegant solution, for two reasons. First, its a very crude sledgehammer. It offers nothing in between "exploitable" and "not exploitable." It throws up its hands and says that some critters' XP will suck, some will be ridiculously high, but we're not going to bother to try to expand the range of the moderate middle. Its specifically, on design-elegance that I would oppose such a solution in the general case.

Second, it encourages people to make farms that fly just under the cap. So "Exploit" is bad, but "Exploit-1" is fine. And it suggests the devs implicitly approve. In this sense, it can actually make the overall problem worse, and force the implementation of a cap that isn't "definitely exploitable" but "so low it cannot be exploitable." And that level might be so low it creates the problem of AE missions that simply run out of XP long before they are over. The complaint level for that is likely to be at least as loud, if not louder, as it is now over low per-kill rewards. The psychological implications are not trivial to predict here, and if I had to roll the dice, I would say it wasn't worth the risk.

You work for NC Soft? If so why dont you have a forum red name, if so why are you posting under a non-dev account without warning the forums ahead of time, isnt this breaking the company rules you speak of?



I have my own work also, howver i also know what is going on the the office. And if castle was making a banana-grenade set then obviously Babs would know to start working on the animations, and quality would know to start testing it, and it would probably have been discussed at a staff meeting with Positron and everyone to get power input on types of attacks to include etc etc.

I have probably deleted them but i have in the past gotten mod8 responses to much less trolling responses.
And yet here is my problem, by your own accounts the devs are not supose to comment on things in the works until the offical announcments come through. However Babs response to this thread implies in some ways that the devs are ok with substandard xp earning from the MA, and that no further action is forth coming. Which is the same as would be if he said that further action is forthcoming and is talking out of turn.

And if a player was to say that the assumptions that we make about the MA are wrong then that is one thing, they are likely as playing guess work as we are. But if a Dev says that you are wrong, its implies that the offical line of the company is that the players are incorrect.


Actually we were told by the devs that the 75 percent standard thing they put in the last issue was a temp fix because they wanted time to work out a final system, but couldnt let things stand as is. Being now 3 month ago or more, i would say that it wouldnt be a big request to atleast let be known the approach that they are taking.
The devs and the box for the MA edition said that you could level to 50 off player created content. Now i understand that this doesnt promiss at the same level of speed, however i feel that it implies it based on why make the comparison if it wasnt intended to be semi-equal. That would be like me advertising a Hyundia Accent as being able to get you to Los Angeles from San Francisco just like Southwest Airlines can. Sure it can get you there but not in the hour it would take to fly.

I say its double speak like Jack because we were told a better alternative was going to be forthcoming, and the response he gave implies it could not be. If the devs pushed a crappy system onto us for rewards, saying that it would be fixed, and know now that its not going to be, then that is totally just like the things jack used to do.

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See my thing is that i dont care really about the xp, influence etc as a single thing. But IMO there should be soemthing the AE offers in exchange for slower leveling. So if they want to leave xp and influence as it is now, im fine with that, then increase the ticket cap, or remove it. Maybe allow tickets to purchase specific recipies like merits do, or better yet buy purples.

Point being, if they want players to make good use of the AE it needs to offer something, and it its going to offer slower leveling, slower influence no random drops and tickets that dont quite make up for all the random drops, and to top it off creativity costs players even more xp loss andinfluence loss, then guess what? Players wont use it. Just as they dont seem to be doingnow. It might not have been designed for rewards but the devs were atleast smart enough to know with no rewards it wouldnt be used. So how about being smart enough to pick atleast one thing that it can offer great rewards for, in exchange for slower rewards in other ways.

Well, assuming this is true and I have no reason to believe it isn't, they wasted a heck of a lot of time and resources first developing, then pushing back the deadline for the release of Mission Architect then. Basically they are wasting one of the best features introduced into an MMO by ensuring that those who use it will be a gradually shrinking niche crowd.

It takes two sides for Mission: Architect to succeed. It takes creators who are willing to work for no reward other than to see their work get played and rated. Basically, there is no other reward for them. Their work fuels the system. And if they see their work sit for weeks or months without plays because no one uses MA because the rewards are 'qualitatively different,' what will happen?

Easy enough, they will find something else to do with their time because, there is essentially NO reward for them doing it other than spending a bunch of time creating something that no one ever sees.

And if there are no creators writing stories anymore, what happens then? The niche audience shrinks even further because there's no point in bothering if there's never anything new there and if you're going to re-do content, you might as well re-do the content that gives the superior 'qualitatively different' reward.

The middle ground is where gameplay enters into the equation. Suppose there turns out to be a way to create an AE mission where, just by entering it and standing still, you could automatically earn the exact average XP/min for your level, continuously, for ever minute you remained in the mission. Your cap wouldn't affect this exploit, and you're also suggesting that the reason *why* your cap wouldn't affect this exploit is because it really doesn't matter so long as the earning rate is not above average.

Exploits aren't necessarily about a specific level of earning ability. Its a relative comparison between reward rate and activity - what is sometimes colloquially and misleadingly referred to as "risk/reward."

Put it this way: the devs would probably not care if they datamined that a particular player was earning rewards twice as fast as the average player. They *would* care if it turned out that the average of all Fire Blasters was earning 50% more than the average of all players, even though the difference was much lower. The reason is that in the first case, there is a presumption that the higher earning rate was related to a higher skill level in playing the game. That might be true, it might be false, but they are willing to presume that unless they have evidence to the contrary. But there is an equal presumption that not all players that play fire blasters could be significantly more skilled than all other players in general, so that would represent a clear imbalance in the powerset, the main difference between the two groups. And averaged across a large number of players, fifty percent is a very large gap.

Balancing rewards with the activities that produce them is a highly imperfect science, and one the devs do not have precision tools to craft. But they still have a general sense of what should earn more, and what should earn less rewards. Exploitive imbalances aren't just a question of people exceeding a singular limit. More likely, its equally a question of breaking the grey, imperfect, but still important activity/reward balances.

Making a mission that can level you twenty times faster than average is clearly over the top. But a mission that can level you twice as fast as normal while doing nothing is much more exploitive than a mission that requires a significant amount of activity that can level you *three* times as fast as normal.

In effect, saying there's only a singular maximum reward limit, and all levels of reward below that must be fine, is erasing all gameplay distinctions in earning rewards. Its essentially taking the "game" out of the game.


There's one more practical problem with caps. If exploitable content still exists and the caps are actually doing something, there's always the alt-switching workaround. If we set the maximum limit of the AE to, say, 80% of the average XP earning rate per hour, but there's a mission that can earn that 80% in 10 minutes, all we have to do is run it, switch to an alt, run it again, switch to a third alt, rotating between six alts, and we can exceed the AE cap by a factor of six, earning (plus or minus overhead) a net 4.8 times the average per hour, collectively across multiple alts.

The bigger the window, the worse this problem gets. But set the time window too short, and you run into burst XP problems. Just killing a boss or AV could get capped. And there's no sweet spot that's obvious to me, rather there's actual overlap between too short and too long, such that in between the two are windows that suffer *both* problems rather than neither.

I am not an employee of NCSoft, and therefore not specifically subject to that rule.


Big or small, its a request you will not get a red name to answer. And if you aren't interested in being informed, and choosing to question whether I'm even qualified to inform you, then that's cool. I cannot, and will not, persuade you otherwise.

I don't disagree, I just see this as a seperate problem that the Speed Limit would not be specifically designed to address by itself. One way to handle it would be to require that all critters have some minimum offensive capability before they would be worth any rewards.

True, but datamining would show that (assuing there are tools to tell when a mission was started and completed by a given character). That's where implementation comes in, and I haven't thought specific numbers through for that. In fact, setting a Speed Limit on the mission might be a good way of monitoring exactly how such things are accomplished for proper analysis so that exploits can be identified and covered.

For instance, we know that a fight against an average equal level spawn is supposed to take some amount of time...let's say 10 seconds. We can guesstimate the amount of travel time between spawn points based on how many are used in a certain amount of space, presuming Super Speed. We can know how much xp a given spawn point should generate for an even level 8 man team. This will give us a data point for how long a mission should take, assuming an utter lack of banter and delay. This info could even become part of the AE UI. "Your mission should take around 1 hour to complete, and deliver 10k xp. Mileage may vary."

We can extrapolate from this an amount of time (say 25% of the average) that is deemed acceptable, and an amount of time (say 10% of the average) that would send up a red flag, alerting GMs to check the server logs for exploits.

Of course, it might turn out that there is no exploit, and that the team running that mission is just very efficient at that particular layout and critters. That would be the actual problem scenario, and may need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. My instinct would be to say that in such a situation, I'd rather encourage alt switching than having the same players running the same characters through the same content repeatedly.

It would still be an improvement over the current situation (YMMV).

The AE does have a benefit - tickets. And tickets DO allow you to purchase recipes (standard) as well as random rolls, insps and most 'regular' enhancements. Essentially for 'free'.

Tickets can be gained quite quickly and allow a player to bypass paying a lot (i.e. 10,000+ to quote a number from the ether) for items such as Luck Charms and Scientific Theories.

As for time spent on creating = less xp, so what? Have you looked at the MA threads? Considered creating anything with a hope to get it on the 'For Our Consideration' thread (or whatever it's called)?

AE, for me, is fun. It is a good distraction just as TFs are a good distraction. It doesn't have to reward me oodles of xp or drops. The 'regular' rewards for playing are good enough to allow for a bit of R&R time in the MA.

And although the tips etc say that you can level from 1-50, they don't mention anything about comparative drop rates (on Dev Choice arcs). It's true, you can spend a whole toon's 'career' in the MA if you want to. It's an alternative levelling path. It can also address some people's issues with mobs that are just too easy. Now with the new difficulty settings I feel the balance has shifted again towards Dev Content.

Being a fan of most of the Dev content and vehemently against PLing in 2 days this is win-win for me.