Discussion: Live Patch Notes - 4/7/10

I don't see the need for helpers. If you're making an AV mission then do like the canon missions do; advise the player to bring friends. If you're gearing your arc for solo players... don't put in an AV/EB when a standard Boss would do just fine.

I could see a story driven want to include them but when dealing with story; you will almost run into the Story vs Reward wall (the original divisive when AE came about). [or the playability vs reward wall]


I can see the rez being buoyed by a regen spike but have to wonder why yall just didn't implement the same diminished XP setup that already was slapped onto rez critters; like Freaks. Also, if this was the reason for the occlusion of 'rez other' powers... please bring them back.



Personally, I'm glad to see pressure on the players to actually put in a little work to get their goodies (as well as the allowing authors to get back to the business of being authors; instead of caterers). For awhile there, I was getting fed up with hearing:

Your critters has a mez
Your critters hit too hard
Your map is too big
There's too many chapters

I was beginning to think all players were wanting was a single, one room, mission packed with bosses that had only one attack and one secondary power. People were actually whining that their uber-tanks/brutes couldn't handle mobs whose make up were mainly minions that had 3-4 powers (between both the primary and the secondary) + the mandatory ranged attack.

Well at the risk of getting flamed...

I guess there is no such thing as "harmless" exploit farming, in or out of AE. There I said it, fire away.

Is this the 2nd or 3rd time that servers were taking offline to fix an exploit farm? People can't play when servers are down, so they get hurt. Authors of AE arcs have to rewrite or unpublish, so they get hurt. Enormous amounts of infamy/influence has been generated using exploit farming causing potential inflation, maybe people are unable to buy the stuff they want in that environment, so they get hurt.

I don't care what people do, it's your $15/month, farm away....but don't ever say the exploit farming doesn't hurt the game. I just gave you three examples. I'm sure there are many more.

Farm regular content, running 0/8 is exceedingly profitable that's not-exploitable.

Just a quick FYI: I ran the infamous Jellybean arc one time on a Ninja/TA MM even level as Giant Monsters and I rolled it with common IO's. That's an exploit gang.

Bogus. I was thinking the patch was for Demon Summoning. I want it NOW!

Why does everyone keep talking about "instant level 50s," "1-50 in a few hours" and the like? In the jelly bean and weenie farms - the ones which instigated this patch - it took hours to get into the early twenties. And that's assuming you didn't have a bunch of AFKers and everyone had enough powers to string together an attack chain. It was still fast leveling, but nowhere near the exaggerated claims I've heard in this thread. All AE has done is made PLing available to the masses instead of restricting it to those with the cash and/or connections to doorsit their way to 50 in PI. Which is funny to me, because in the current AE farm paradigm team members get kicked if they're not playing. Also, let me say that given the... idiosyncratic behavior of ally AI in this game, there is plenty of risk in counting on them to follow you and keep you buffed. Trust me, there's plenty death to be had in a jelly bean farm, especially if you add minions to the GM spawns...

As someone who's been around since the dumpster + Burn combo, I have to say that this conflict doesn't seem any closer to ending now than it was when I started playing. Perhaps it would be better to assess why so many people want to PL in the first place? We can argue about it all we want on the forums, but at the end of the day the actions of the player base speak for themselves. For me personally, I'm another one of those players who levels many characters normally, and PLs others. Some builds are fun from level one, and others are late bloomers; it's just that I've been playing long enough that I don't get any enjoyment from slogging through a late bloomer, and if the means are available I'll gladly skip to the good part. For me this usually starts at level 22 (3-slotted Stamina + IOs), although I have on occasion PLed myself to the mid 30s for a particularly weak character.

I also used to PL folks for free back before they started making AE farms where lowbies could PL themselves; it was often fun just to hang out and chat with folks, something that almost never happens on a regular team. Although to be fair sometimes people would get bored and start squabbling with each other, and then I'd get a headache and have to stop playing for a day or two. But I have to hand it to the devs, it was pure genius to improve the mission difficulty system so we didn't need lowbies to pad spawn sizes anymore. Yet here we are arguing about farms again, leading me to conclude that clever quality of life upgrades are not going to end this back-and-forth. The only solution I can think of is to somehow enrich the leveling process itself, so that even someone who wishes they could PL straight to 50 would say “No, no... if I were to suddenly hit 50, I'd miss out on X, and that would SUCK so badly!” But as long as the value of X is “a whole ton of warehouse missions” then we can expect PLing to continue.

QR:

rofl at "exploit fixes" causing more damage to actual arcs than farm arcs

Looks like the reduction in exp is also applied to friendly patrols and battles in addition to allies.

I just logged on and played an arc of mine which features battles. The first mission that had no battles and compared it to the second which did. The result was a 60% reduction in exp.

I can only hope this change is reversed.


WN