Discussion: Live Patch Notes - 4/7/10

Not to argue with you--your point is completely correct--but years ago Rikti Comm Officers used to be farmed because defeating the portals they summoned gave quite a lot of XP. The developers didn't approve of the way these were being abused, so they removed the XP from the portals themselves and gave the previously minion class reward of the Comm Officer a boost to lieutenant class.

Then of course, as you mentioned, the "meow farm" fiasco last spring caused them to have to revisit that stance, so Comm Officers in AE missions only give minion class rewards again. (If memory serves, the Comm Officers still give lieutenant rewards in developer content.)

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

Still thinking about those, as I mentioned at the end of the post:

I saw it mentioned, was just curious if you had any ideas.

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

That is because we use to farm the portals; at one type there where tanks that could sit at the portal with footstomp on auto killing everything coming out the portal while they watched a movie and went to bed.

So they made it where killing the portal gave you xp this was farmed and so they took that away so now you get a big bag of nothing

Risk vs Reward was always a smoke screen, just a phrase that people assigned meaning to when there was none inherent in it. Merits demonstrate they have a Reward/Time envelope, not a Risk/Reward envelope and are perfectly willing to hammer down on anyone that gets clever with how they do things, whats more they don't particularly care about the collateral damage that occurs.

I can't help but notice that the forum's default color is reserved for insults.

Soon after that change was made, I noticed Comm Officers in AE missions giving Lieutenant-level rewards if they showed as part of the Standard Rikti group. Only Comm Officers that were used in custom groups were treated as minions. Not sure if that's still true.

Anyway, back to the Freakshow and such.... I can understand why you wouldn't want them to be attackable while they're stuck in their rez animation, but having them untargetable is just plain annoying.

Teamfarming really kills your ticket rewards and if you have deadweight on the team it knocks down the others as well.

I think we have a winner

This is true. I've tested the solo vs team drop and the disparity is vast and not at all proportional. I can run a mission solo (at x8) and get 20 recipes and salvage drops like candy. The same mission I'm lucky to see 4 recipe drops and a few salvage if I have even one teammate. I assume it is the same problem with tickets.

Risk vs Reward was always a phrase the devs used too colloquially, and the players abused into meaninglessness. But it has always had the same meaning, from the origin of this game to the present day. The game design has always reflected a design principle - even when the devs didn't describe it as such - that "rewards" are actually reward rates, because rewards measured outside of the time taken to earn them are meaningless metrics. And "risk" refers to specific thresholds of difficulty. Different reward rates have always had (sometimes subjectively) differing difficulty thresholds. Its the threshold concept that most often trips people up who think that "risk" is supposed to be *proportional* to reward, and that therefore increased difficulty *must* always be rewarded, and lowered difficulty should have only proportionately lowered rewards.

Because this isn't quantitatively enforced in both the reward systems and the critter design methodologies, there are lots of exceptions to the rule. But its not difficult to see the trend overall, if you are actually paying attention, and its always been consistent with how the devs have made balancing changes to the game.

Lots of people I don't care about have left. I don't know if you're arguing with me or some audience I don't know about, but I think I've established that I don't think losing them is hurting anything I care about.

And don't think I didn't notice you leaving out exploiters every other post. This has a major impact upon exploiters, and it needed too. exploiters exploiters exploiters. Furthermore your statements are all very dramatic. 'Falling on death ears' 'mass exodus'. This change isn't going to bring about the end of the world that you think it will. At best a few morons will get pissy, leave, and we'll be all the better for it.

More mobs = More inf. Assuming your team is competent. Given that it's AE, it's probably not, so you might have a point with soloing.

It's a pretty god damn basic concept otherwise, which I guess I'll explain since you're pretending not to get it. Once damage mitigation has been met by the horde of NPC's, all that's needed is more damage. The best characters for that are blasters and scrappers. You don't need KINS or anything either because those are also met by the NPC horde.

*EDIT* - Drops = Inf

Standard code rant.

You have *ideas* about fixes that *seem easy* to you, but without knowing the code involved, you can't say that they definitely exist. Judging from Arcanaville's posts, it's not as easy as you think it is (and she probably knows more about this game's code than anyone who isn't a dev).

And for all we know, there is an actual specific reason why this fix needed to be deployed now, not "soon". Again, you don't know, so you can't say that there isn't.

That said, I agree that this patch breaks too many things that are not exploitative and either should be rolled back ASAP, or get the full fix in ASAP. Even if we have to wait for the full fix, since Dr. Aeon is putting at i17 release or shortly thereafter, that means 3-4 weeks, which isn't too bad in the scheme of things.

********.

Work can also, and more often in the frame of this discussion, means:

My arc uses standard mobs and mechanics that are the same as most of the official game content, but the missions are worth a significantly decreased level of XP.

Your anti-exploit fervor has caused you to swing a bit far to the extremes here. You seem as passionate about this as your "have's versus have not's due to paid packs" stance. Have you even read any of the testing results posted? Would you call those mission exploits? How about the Dev Choice missions affected?

The patch as it functions does not match how the note was written. The patch breaks things that did not need changing and were not exploits. People who wrote stories with no intent of farming are seeing the rewards level they desired (which were not above "normal") decreased a significant amount. These are not rules lawyers or PLers or cheaters or anything else.

You may be comfortable with an exploit "fix" that corrects fewer exploit missions than legitimate ones, but a lot of people here are not. And rightfully so. Flat-out, the patch doesn't work as written. It misses the mark.

And really, anyone who is willing to nerf the game into oblivion or however you put it in order to address an exploit is certainly a more damaging kind of player than any exploiter IMO. You are willing to impact the game's playability and "fun level" for 95% of the players in order to correct the abberant behavior of the other 5%?

Wow.

If that were the case, the developers have done the most horrendous job imaginable of implementing it. To the point where it is more often seen in the breach, rather than the observance.

Lets take a look at the glaring examples.

1. Master of task forces do not reward more than regular tfs except for that initial badge.

2. Task force difficulty has never had a bearing on the final reward and as far as anyone knows was not factored into the calculation of rewards.

3. The Lord Recluce Strike Force, and Statesman's Task Force arguably the most difficult TFs in the game give very paltry merit rewards indeed.

4. The abandoned sewer trial once again one of the things that can be failed and frequently is, gives very small rewards.

5. Hamidon and Mother Ship raids, which outside of the holiday event raids are the most difficult things in the game to get organized, and I can point to numerous raids that failed to thrive, give a reward that is somewhat lower per minute than a decent team can achieve on one of the freedom phalanx tfs.

6. In Ouroboros as in tfs the difficulty settings on power restrictions and limits do not affect the reward.

Edit: 7. Purple drops are of course the great elephant in the room for this discussion. They fall as readily from green con foes as they do purple.


About the only place difficulty is a factor is the level difference between you and what you are killing. When you think about it, that is just about the broadest expression of difficulty you could have. In the few instances where they have tried to refine it, it seems to have been on the basis of time not difficulty. Freaks have more hp they get a bump. Comm officers can bring more minions they get a bump but nowhere near what they should on the basis of added difficulty. (In a normal grp etc). If you have a toon with no enhancements, one with SOs, and one enhanced maximally with sets the difficulty is very different for them in any particular task.

Actually that was based on Nerfs/fixes that had been implemented in the past and had seemed to be put in quite quickly. For the latest fix code actually had to be implemented to apply a decreasing reward modifier for allies . It may not have been done now, and it may have already been laying around but it still had to be done. Other fixes could be done by adjusting tables, the simplest would have just involved subtracting out problematic powers.

You are right, this may or may not be easy, but if it isn't easy to do it begs the question "Why not ?".

But most of that is not relevant to what I said. In fact, I specifically said that its invalid to specifically compare two different things of different difficulty and expect the rewards to be predictably or proportionately different. What I said was that the game was designed more around thresholds of difficulty. So task forces, for example, which have a specific set of rewards, tend to have a specific threshold of difficulty. Superimposed on that is usually that things at higher security/combat levels are intended to get more difficult. But its clear the difficulty level for task forces tends to be higher than any normal story arc. The fact that Task Force A is more difficult than Task Force B but generates the same reward is actually expected: in a threshold model everything only has to achieve a particular level of difficulty, but anything higher isn't necessarily rewarded more.

An exception to the rule would be a case where a story arc with normal story arc rewards was determined to be objectively higher in difficulty than a task force with normal task force rewards. I don't think that is true for any task forces.

Also, optional difficulty settings have no specific requirement to generate special rewards by any game design rule I'm aware of. Just because you care about reward balance, doesn't mean if the players want a way to crank up the difficulty you are required to reward such behavior. The degenerate silly case is asking for enhanced rewards for jumping off a building into a spawn. Saying if the devs aren't going to give extra rewards they need to make sure you can't jump off of buildings would be bordering on psychotic.

In a threshold system, you can't go from difficulty to reward. You can only go from reward to difficulty. If A has higher difficulty than B, that doesn't mean A must have a higher reward. But if X has a significantly higher reward rate than Y, X should have a higher difficulty threshold.


You could start by making a list of all of the "problematic powers" and then extrapolate from there how much effort it would take to figure out a way to disable those powers on the fly from buffbots only. Or at least attempt to estimate the amount of time it would take just to list them much less fix them.

My back of the envelope estimate is that there are about six or seven hundred of them, out of about twelve thousand different powers in the game. Of course, only a fraction of those powers (probably about half) can ever show up in an AE mission, but I have no real way to automatically eliminate the impossibles from contention.

You are saying if something has significantly higher reward rates/time it should have a higher difficulty threshold ??

Well lets look at that

In order of decreasing difficulty

Hamidon Raid ( involves organizing and coordinating over 30+ players in general can and does fail)

ITF/RSF/STF/Abandoned sewer trial (Involves putting together a team capable of completing the final tasks, can and does fail frequently)

Freedom Phalanx tfs, Villain side similars (Tarikos, ice mistral etc), Hess, Moonfire. (Can be run by pugs rarely if ever fail)


Now if you order it by reward/minute

Freedom Phalanx tfs, Villain side similars

ITF/RSF/STF

Hamidon

Abandoned Sewer trial

It seems your statement is still not supported by the facts.


So what you are talking about is a days work or less for someone to go through them note which can buff the players, and dissallow them. After all we are talking about the player selectable powers from the creation screen for allied groups.

Just by example how long should it take you to decide ranged shot is not a player buff power and is fine ?

15 seconds ? 30 ? a minute ?

*face-palm.* ^_^!

Your list conveniently ignores the parts of the game that the players probably spend 90% of their time playing. And yet:


Fact:

Unless the devs changed the merit formula and I didn't hear about it, this clearly demonstrates the intention is for raids to be worth the most, trials next, task forces next, and story arcs last. See: Merit Rewards.

So perhaps the devs made a computational error, which is possible, but would not change their intent**. Or maybe the error is with the person making up out of whole cloth the relative rankings of the rewards without actual hard data which is reasonably extrapolatable to the average player population, which is what the rewards are based around, and not, say, the average of the people in your household.


Yeah, reviewing twelve thousand powers should take about an afternoon. Why not help the devs out and gen up that list and PM them, it would save them at least half a day and they could get a jump on writing the suppression code Monday morning, probably be done by lunch.



** Their formula actually factors in both difficulty factors and duration factors in a way that is slightly odd but not inconsistent with the concept of acknowledging difficulty thresholds in different classes of activity.

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

Are you implying that a Hami Raid is easier to do than say, a Citadel TF?

Really? 'cause I would think that any critter that can possibly be set as an ally in an Architect mission is a potential buffbot, or at least a potential way to skew rewards without doing direct damage, and that'd mean almost every critter in the game.