Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

Hi all,

I wanted to provide an update on the Mission Architect solution that Dr. Aeon mentioned last month.

After reading a lot of your feedback (and I mean a *lot* of feedback), and reviewing and testing our planned solution internally, we feel that the solution requires a lot more testing before it can be released to the Live Servers.

Due to our estimates of the time it will take to release and polish this Mission Architect change, and in light of our current Going Rogue development and Closed Beta test schedules, we have decided to put the Mission Architect solution into the Going Rogue release, and allow Beta testers to check out the changes.

To ensure that these changes are thoroughly tested, Dr. Aeon will be inviting active members of the Mission Architect Community into the Going Rogue Closed Beta.

Our goal is to ensure that Going Rogue development continues, and that we deliver you a solution that is not rushed out. The entire development team here at Paragon Studios is committed to properly addressing this issue, and we want to be as transparent as possible about the reasons behind implementing the solution post-Issue 17 in conjunction with Going Rogue.

Best,

Ghost Falcon

I don't suppose we can get a hint about what this solution will be and why it doesn't work, so we can start thinking about what to do about it?

what you need in gr closed beta is the smart ones who know how to get past theses "issues" to see if they can.

the normal players you have arent the ones that come up with ways to get past it all to use to their advanatage.send in the farmers to fix the farming or else you ll get nothing accomplished..im just telling you now so i can tell you i said it later.your current roster of beta players arent gonna get it done.

as a farmer/pler myself i can tell you i dont even use that ae .so id be happy to exploit it till im blue in the face.

I have to agree with Severe here. Don't invite the peeps trying to make stories, invite the people making the exploits to see how hard they can break the new system.

Anyway, Rodian also made a valid point also. We need to identify the problem(s) that brought the hotfix into effect, and work from there. That said:

The ROOT problem is the fact that a rewards system exists in the first place, and that people will strive to attain those rewards as efficiently as possible. AE is a very tempting target no matter what, because even doing radios in PI nets less XP/hour due to travel time and fighting in maps with limited spawn numbers. In AE, you can link 5 large outdoor missions with mobs that pose no threat to your character and finish all of them in the time it takes to do maybe 3 radio missions (assuming you're defeating all foes for drops/inf).

I'm not saying get rid of rewards all together, however, I think AE XP (and related drops) needs to be recalculated to compensate for the fact that there's almost no travel time between missions as opposed to the rest of the regular content.

*shrug*

Aw, I got neg-repped by a farmer who doesn't want to lose their easy xp-machine.. How cute!

[edit 2]Woo, more neg-rep with one-word replies! Yay for logic and discourse!

Rewards exist in AE. Deal.

Rewards will continue to exist, or they wouldn't bother trying to fix the ally problems. Your horse, she is dead, the vultures have stripped the flesh from her bones.

And trusting farmers and exploiters to find possible exploits and actually report them is, well, totally counterproductive. Most of them don't know how to find exploits anyway, they just copy something someone else has made. Go look at the Resources and Discussion forums for some good examples of clueless wannabe exploiters.

Overall I find this announcement very disappointing. Considering how few new things to play with i17 gave us, I had hoped against past evidence to the contrary that we'd at least get a fix for an old toy so it would be more fun to play with again.

Did you not read my whole post? Especially the second to last sentence? I didn't say get rid of rewards, just reduce them.

And trusting exploiters to find exploits isn't counter productive. Governments and private companies around the world rely on hackers, crackers, thieves and other magnificent bastards to make sure their systems and security are safe and impenetrable. So, you know, finding people with a mind for finding loopholes and things that our benevolently-minded devs miss isn't an inherently bad idea.

Oh, and you can have just as much fun with AE as before, the patch didn't change that. You'll just level slower, no big deal.

well,I would say the only way to fix it is to remove it completely,yes you can put in some very strict restrictions to the usage of it, but a lot of people will just stop using it,and it will sit about 90% empty, I will admit that i only use it once or twice a month, and i take in one of my 50 lvls to farm enough tickets to purchase salvage.

yes you could remove the xp, you could remove the inf.even remove the tickets,so at that point what is left? why do any of the missons? i can do a itf and get most of the above,and get drops and progress for badges.So why do a MA misson? or even do a radio misson and get more.

But if the MA is "fixed" to the point of 80% of the players don't use it ,why have it? Look at all the other things that were turned off or "fixed" into non-use.

Base raids? IOP? COP? PVP?,and yes I know a lot of people PVP,but how many of those are just doing it to get the expensive drops.

Or the way merits are awarded? i can do a itf for 26 merits,or do a 5-10 misson arc and get maybe 5-15 merits,which is the better use of my time?

instead of spending so much effort on something that may not be fixable, delete it and forget it.

I've been trying to think of a good way to fix this, and so far all the ideas I come up with have more problems than they fix.

I'll be very interested in hearing what the Devs have in mind to fix this.

Placing the AE fix in GR release is, in my opinion, a bad idea.

I base my reasoning on the fact that GR will be big: content-wise, new features-wise, balance-wise.

There will be more issues to fix, as there always are in releases. And for periods of time afterwards.

On the point of letting farmers and powerlevellers be the pioneers of change, rooting out the exploits: Please... stop... spleen ready to explode.

I tested quite a bit of the mechanics of AE, plus highlighted a big exploit concerning Ninjitsu (which has now been fixed). I hope others did the same level of testing, but have no way of measuring that.

Strangely enough, spending hours creating stories on Test was not my major priority.

So I would propose one of three things (there are doubtless many other ways to do it, but these are my suggestions):

1. Revert AE to day one in terms of available mobs, and update the xp tables accordingly.
2. Spend time working on the fix to release before GR - specifically explaining why 'NPC allies' also means 'non-combat escort' and 'defendable object' to the community.
3. Suspend AE activity (development) and keep the system as it is indefinitely.

It makes me sad to hear that this issue will not be fixed before July at the earliest. Frankly, I continue to be unconvinced of the need for the patch, and think it did way too much collateral damage. No imaginable exploit justifies keeping it live. Attempting to combat exploits by a patch that made repetitive combat the only worthwhile AE content, and penalized the use of other characters, seems to be a huge misfire. Continue to work on the issue, but revert AE to the state it was in before in the interim. If the fix is delayed so long, this really isn't justified as a stopgap measure any more.

It would also appear that the original advice not to revise arcs to address the penalties that are now attached to hostage rescues, non-combat escorts, and defendable objects may need to be revised in light of these developments.

Still, I'd like to thank all the devs for creating AE. This recent patch made me realize how important AE had been over the past year in sustaining my interest in the game. AE meant always having something new and worthwhile to do. I miss it.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

I still say, and have for some time now, the MA is an entertainment system/holosuite business and should charge for its services.

XP and tickets should be the rewards but it should cost you to get them at an excelerated rate. Price of missions should be based on XP rate. If a missions xp rate falls at or below the normal in game mission xp rate the fee would be nominal (100 inf for example) the higher the xp rate the fee goes up exponetially.

Dev choices, guest authors or anything the good Doc likes from an AE contest would be granted free to play status.

You can make farming have a cost to benefit ratio and create a badly needed influence/infamy sink in the game all at the same time. People could search arcs by cost. High dollar arcs would be obvious farms. If you want to pay 10 mil (random number) play away, high rate rewards = high dollar cost. Want a good story? Plunk down a hundo and have fun.

MA should have been presented this way from the start. Its a business. Pay to use it.

Not everyone cares about XP. Inf is a reward also, and to some it is a more meaningful reward than XP.

Any meaningful pay-for-use system would require players to participate in one mini-game (farming and/or the market) to use a completely unrelated one (a storytelling tool). Aside from PvP, CoX has done a fairly good job at keeping its mini-games independent of each other. So no.

It looks as if Eva, Artic Princess and heraclea have summed up my thoughts on this as well as if I tried to state them. So... well... I guess that's all I got to say about that.



For the moment.