Discussion: Live Patch Notes - 4/7/10

Yup. That pretty much sums it up. At this point they should just shut the whole thing down and consider it an utter failure. They clearly spend way too much time datamining and policing it, time that would be better spent improving the game instead of finding ways to break it.

I have to agree with Fred on this, the story-telling portion of the MA is not harmed by this, in so much as there is nothing preventing users from using the system for that purpose. The presence of XP or rewards is superfluous if the purpose of using the AE system is to tell and enjoy a story provided by another player.

However.

The problem with this nerf is the fact that rewards and xp are a significant portion of a player's appeal to the AE system in general. At present, it is difficult enough for an individual MA Author to get plays on their arcs once it falls below the 5-star threshold (and there are a host of reasons for this, and other threads address them). To place in a new disincentive for players to enjoy the arcs that authors are making creatively impoverishes those attempting to use this tool to expand the boundaries of what the players can experience.

I believe that people who care about their arcs and how they perform in the community are going to find their popularity and critical-reception suffering because there are "too many allies" or "doesn't give sufficient reward for risk". I want to make my story-based arcs as friendly to a casual player as possible, and sometimes that means pandering to the need for a demonstrable reward for the gracious expendature of time that the player is making. This nerf makes that job even harder than it was before.

And suggesting that an author refrain from using any function of the interface is as fallacious as suggesting that an author of prose fiction refrain from using the common mechanisms and conceits of literature to tell their stories ("Hey Mr. Bradbury, I know you like to use flashbacks, but we're gonna have to levy a 2% cut to your royalties for each instance in the novel 'cause we had bad experiences/responses in other works you didn't write").

Functionally, no, it doesn't stop us from writing stories using the MA. What it will do is negatively effect how we write them, and complicate the (non-narrative) considerations that authors have to take into mind in order to make that story "marketable".

Once again Eva comes in and says it all a lot better than I did.

At this point I am definitely throwing down my pen and walking toward the side of the fence where the "Kill XP for MA" Camp is setting up. At this point, XP rewards are pulling down the whole system to the basest, common denominator.

Yeah, that'd be the markets even more Fu-bar than they already are, a bunch of level 50s not knowing how to play, and people put off from even touching the game because 'all people do there is farm'.

What they are fixing here is exploits. Farming, as a whole is kind of hard to stamp out, and I would say its not something that should really be wiped out. Some people do validly enjoy it, and I, and the Devs too it seems, dont mind that so much. Its when something is exploitable, such as 1-50 in a few hours, that they have to take action, and have been doing so.

The sooner that people understand that, the better.
Still, this thread doesnt dissapoint, it seems.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

And once again it's a fix that will hurt non-farm arcs far, far more than the actual farms.

who does this help? maybe your allies were better than mine but this isn't going to change the speed of my farms THAT much. This won't stop people from farming. it won't stop people from getting to 50 from only farming. there are always going to be people who do that so this changes nothing. it was really a pointless nerf because they are still grumpy that people are using their toy as a farm tool when they said that isn't what they wanted.

If what Venture says here is correct, that does not sound good to me.

Including battles and patrols in this change hurts potential story telling as an alternative way to gain rewards a good deal.

It guts our options more than I'd like to see.

I have to ask, is this working as intended? Battles and Patrols count in this ally change?

I suppose it could be a preemptive move. After multiple buffbot allies were taken away, those mission creators might turn to custom friendly patrols and/or battles? (That seems to clunky to me for a good farming exploit, but I don't know)


Hrm

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

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But I thought lawn care came with your peep'in tom service......

another heavy handed nerf to something that wasn't really a problem anyway. they were in too big of a hurry to slap people on the wrist that they didn't think that they may be damaging real arcs worse than farms. i'm not surprised and you shouldn't be either. they hate farmers more than they like regular players.

Wait... even ONE ally causes a nerf? The patch notes say it's when you go past one that you get the nerf.

Hey Devs, is this a bug?

Nothing could make the markets any worse than what they are so I dont think thats the issue. Lvl 50s not knowing how to play is going to happen anyways. That could happen even if a person teamed all the way to level 50. So unless that person learns from the other person its not going to matter. While I do agree the insta lvl 50s was sick there is so much more they should have done in this game than the AE. Its pointless to keep nerfing it at this point. Its never going to be as popular as it was when it first came out and all the servers had at least 2 dots.

Laz, can you go in and replace that ally with an ally-aligned patrol and see if it still happens? I'm curious if the nerf is affecting those too and whether its on a per-critter basis (3-ally patrol < 8-ally patrol) for calculating the XP crash.

Pretty much bang on. I spent a fair amount of time on my first arc, which admittedly wasn't great, only to have a bunch of Dudley Do Right Critics rain down invective and so on. Fair enough, I unpublished then wrote another arc which people have liked.

Through it all, I wonder if I should even write another arc. If I do, it likely won't get more than a handful of plays and be overshadowed by the AE "Elite" that have the Dev's ears, or those that have become the self-appointed "Hoity Toity Kontent Kops" that will downrate the arc to the point of oblivion.

A big part of the early AE was all the badges and they took those away.
A friend of mine wrote an arc about his characters. Sure, it's Mary Sueism but he had a lot of background notes and clues and dialogue in there.

After three weeks he said:

"No one played my arc, I don't understand."

"Did you advertise it on the forums or in channels?"

"No, I didn't know you had to do that."

So then he went and build a boss farm that got 20 five star ratings.

What did he learn? He learned that he was rewarded for manufacturing grossly exploitive content that gave players quick levelling and fast tickets.
I hardly even look at AE anymore. Honestly. I sometimes log in, try a nice arc and give feedback but what's the point? The author might never get the feedback, might pull down the mission or might not care. These days I just use AE to PL my lowbies to 20 and beyond. I dip into Dev's Choice missions but they've been very uneven. The only ones I have truly enjoyed were the Discount Task Force and Hickman's arc. The latter had custom mobs but they weren't INSANE. The former had a funny story and normal mobs which made it great. A lot of the "Critic's picks" had long arcs with tedious objectives and were just boring, really.

Here's my TL/DR advice to the Devs:

-Add an XP Rating flag to the missions
-Allow farms and add a "Farm" tag to the AE
-Honestly try to get more Dev's Choice or good arcs looked at. There is some GREAT stuff in there but...WE NEVER SEE IT. PLEASE remove Dev's Choice from the front page. When I go into AE and all I see are Dev's Choice I am missing out on a LOT of good missions. "What? Dev's Choice ARE good missions? What are you talking about?" No. Dev's Choice are missions the DEVS LIKED for some reason. A lot of them aren't challenging, the rewards aren't great and the story is so-so. Just as an example, someone wrote a GREAT arc about the Trojan War but it likely never got looked at.
-Make the best stuff Canon. Heck, make zone of the zany, crazy challenging missions canon too. How cool would that be?
-Add a "New Arc!" tag that shows you new arcs in AE.

But please...Devs...AE was a great idea but the split it created between RP-focused writers and farmers was inevitable. You can't stop the farms and you can lead players to AE but you can't make them drink from your mission well.

Just add an XP flag to the missions so we know what to expect.

Thank you.

This change effects patrols and battles too?

WN

Imagine every spawn spot filled with a battle. Enemy side is anything that gives good EXP. Ally side is all custom critters, each with only two powers. The AoE hold from Illusion, and Disruption Arrow from Trick Arrow.

You've got the allies locking down the targets, and making them easier to kill, all whithout doing any damage. Instant no-risk farm, just add player.

I thought of this a while ago (and no, I never used it). I'm glad to know the Devs saw it coming.

I still don't like this fix, but I can't think of a better one so I'll just live with it.

Nobody using allies that only attack was exploiting.

Pets who attack and deal damage already steal experience from you via killsteal code. Now they steal additional experience just by existing. Nobody was exploiting by running farms full of guys who are killing enemies for you, thus taking all of the experience and inf for themselves. The exploit was for having tons of allied buffers. The fix should only cover allied buffers.

Now simple things like having along an ally who only attacks will steal all of your experience. Having a battle between two groups where one is set to ally (Longbow, PPD, etc) will steal your experience. In fact, setting anything anywhere in the entire system to "ally" will steal all of your experience.

It's not just fixing the exploit of having along 6 pets who have you RES/DEF capped with FF and Sonic Dispersion, this change impacts every single arc who has an allied unit of any kind anywhere in any mission whatsoever. Which, having played through a ton of AE arcs, is damn near all of them.

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

Stop calling it an exploit. It's not. And exploit is when you take advantage of broken mechanic or bug. This is not the case here. The system was designed to allow allies to help you. This is not by mistake.

This is a nerf to curb what the devs deem to be undesirable behavior. It's more of them telling us that we can't play the game we pay for the way we want to, only the way they want us to.

They set up a situation that requires certain behavior to attain goals they have purposely made difficult to get, but then constantly nerf and nerf and nerf whenever we get creative in finding ways to quickly achieve those goals.

It's like hanging a carrot in front of a horse and chiding him for knocking the stick down and eating the carrot instead of blindly following it till he drops dead of starvation. If you don't want people to farm stop putting **** in the game that requires farming to get. 6 years of this never-ending cycle you'd think they'd be done with it by now. Well you'd be wrong. Some boneheaded dev mentality I guess you just can't break no matter how many years pass by.

Why bother with CoH 2 when you clearly haven't learned any lessons from 6 years of CoH 1?

Let's see...

Exploit farms: dead in the gutters.

Story arcs: still perfectly playable for the story.

Yeah, I can see how story arcs are far far worse off than the exploit farms.

And when I read the patch notes, it was the "worst case scenerio" that came to mind. It even seemed "logical" from a certain, skewed perspective. Who knows how the MA scripts are parsing what "Ally" means?

Later, Venture suggested that it may have included patrols and battles on one of his arcs.

Or maybe they could be in their own section, as something like "story-only assests" - you could pick them, but it'd be made quite clear that they'd give much smaller rewards.

My story is way more then just a bunch of stuff happening, and the AV's I chose where important to that story. So I've already broken your stereo type. Just wish I could nerf those AV's, it's the characters I needed for the story, not how tuff they where. Maybe boss versions of all the AV's in the future for AE?

Hehe This is true (Although, the story arcs are, of course, worse off for xp/rewards, which I'm sure is what they meant).

Still, I am very happy and thankful that we simply have the ability to create our own scenarios in this game.
Even if we didn't gain any rewards, it is a sweet thing.
I'd love for the rewards to be equal, but... oh well, it is a very very tricky balance for the Devs. This I do understand.

Hopefully a better solution may come about for Allies within Battles and the like.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music