City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

Aliana Blue

By Aliana Blue,
Posted on: 2010-04-08 18:12 in Mission Architect

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by EmperorSteele View Post
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.
Except most of them are only working for the government as an alternative to going to prison. Otherwise they'd still be living a life of crime.

Quote:
Originally Posted by EmperorSteele View Post
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.
Oh we can if we want to be the only ones playing our own arcs, but the point of writing them is to get OTHER people to enjoy them and that is very difficult now with the current nerf.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by PapaSlade View Post
Perhaps I missed the infamy farming in MA but I thought most folks farmed it for XP and turned in tickets for high dollar rolls or recipes. Even if you farm regular content for infamy you are really farmimg to sell the drops, in this case tickets are the drops. Yes you will make infamy off the kills but selling reg IO recipes and good drops is where the real money is at.
MA is certainly used for inf farming.

Regular content farming does generate quite a bit of inf from kills. Threads on the subject have quoted amounts in the range of 20-30 mil, just from kills and vendoring.

Purples and other good drops are where the real money is but there is quite a bit generated from kills. Inf badges don't lie.

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If all you want to do is use the story part of MA then the cost to play those type of arcs would not require other types of mini game play.
So....what exactly are you saying? That story and rewards are mutually exclusive (the flies are really buzzing around that one)? Or are you saying that you should be able to use MA to create farms that give more XP than standard missions?

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Posted

Inviting exploiters into beta will allow them to identify new exploits... which will not be dutifully reported so they can be fixed, but secretly disseminated so that they can be taken advantage of once the issue goes live. So that's a non-starter. You'd just be giving them a head start.

Like other authors, I'm sorry (but not really surprised) to hear that we're going to have to wait even longer to get an MA system that actually works.

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Posted

Quote:
I love how everyone keeps beating the "remove rewards" dead horse even after an announcement has been made to the effect that they feel the current reward structure is unfairly low.
And we're probably going to keep advocating it, so if it bothers you I suggest you stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud.

Nothing is "settled". Everything is on the table. If Ultima Online could get elective PvP after its lead dev practically screamed at me on Usenet for a year that it was utterly impossible for the game to work with elective PvP, then there is still time for City's devs to come to their senses and realize this fire-fighting strategy they've been using has failed and will continue to fail. Constantly repatching AE to fight the latest exploit has not and will not stop the exploiters. It has and will continue to torque off the legitimate authors.

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Posted

Eh, I'm just glad they're getting some of the MA community involved. We're the ones consistently tooling and fooling with the system to its maximum potential. Building an exploit, while ingenious in some cases, is not really utilizing the system to its utmost.

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
MA is certainly used for inf farming.

Regular content farming does generate quite a bit of inf from kills. Threads on the subject have quoted amounts in the range of 20-30 mil, just from kills and vendoring.

Purples and other good drops are where the real money is but there is quite a bit generated from kills. Inf badges don't lie.
I think we may agree on this but I tend to lean towards more of that money coming from vendoring/marketing than from kills. For me, the tickets just replace the drops.



Quote:
So....what exactly are you saying? That story and rewards are mutually exclusive (the flies are really buzzing around that one)? Or are you saying that you should be able to use MA to create farms that give more XP than standard missions?
I am saying it doesn't appear that the system is capable of giving the story writing crowd all the tools, mobs, whatever, needed to both make compelling arcs that offer enough incentive for the general public to play without leaving the loopholes that turn into some form of xp/infamy/ticket farm.

If that is the case, then make the system so all the tools are there for making great arcs but charge infamy to play. Stories that fall within the designed xp/whatever that dev content provides charge a minimal fee. Arcs that provide accelerated rewards pay an accelerated fee and I mean way accelerated fee. If you want to PL a toon from 1-50 have at it. Running high reward content is going to cost you 10 mil a run (again, random number could be 50 mil for all I care).

Look, I really want MA to work. I have lots of stories I would like to try out, both writing and playing, but the constant exploit/nerf cycle makes it seems like any attempt is a waste of time. If the cost of having a functional story telling tool is people can still farm then perhaps we all have to live with that side effect. All we can do is cushion the blow and I think charging infamy/influence to run low risk - high reward content is an idea worth thinking about.

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Posted

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Originally Posted by PapaSlade View Post
If that is the case, then make the system so all the tools are there for making great arcs but charge infamy to play. Stories that fall within the designed xp/whatever that dev content provides charge a minimal fee. Arcs that provide accelerated rewards pay an accelerated fee and I mean way accelerated fee. If you want to PL a toon from 1-50 have at it. Running high reward content is going to cost you 10 mil a run (again, random number could be 50 mil for all I care).

Look, I really want MA to work. I have lots of stories I would like to try out, both writing and playing, but the constant exploit/nerf cycle makes it seems like any attempt is a waste of time. If the cost of having a functional story telling tool is people can still farm then perhaps we all have to live with that side effect. All we can do is cushion the blow and I think charging infamy/influence to run low risk - high reward content is an idea worth thinking about.
All this depends on how you define "high rewards." High by what standard? High rewards proportionate to time invested, or proportionate to risk?

If you're looking at high rewards proportionate to time spent, that's already been addressed. The all-boss and all-lieutenant groups that did away with all those time-wasting minions have had their rewards reduced. Enemies that give bonus XP outside of AE do not do so in AE. The only advantage AE has in this case is that it allows you to choose a map with little downtime and fill it with an enemy that is weak to your damage type.

As far as high rewards proportionate to the risk, well, isn't that what the ally patch was supposed to take care of? So you are suggesting charging influence to play an arc such as "Teen Phalanx Forever," which has multiple allies in every mission? Charging people to even try out your arc would be even more detrimental than reducing the XP.

So how would you quantify "risk vs reward?"

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Heraclea View Post
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.
Heraclea stated my thoughts!
Namely, this exploit fix that ruined rewards for all of these innocent story telling options created way too much collateral damage to be acceptable.
I am disappointed that this view is not shared by the development team, but I do appreciate and believe it is not a matter of not trying or caring.
The damage done was too extreme to leave in place as is.
What irks me is how the team now says that they don't want to throw a quick fix in... Well, yeah... Maybe you should take the previous quick fix out!

I'm not looking to beat up on the Team, nor am I interested in any debates among us players about how AE should work... I just feel the same way as Heraclea (And a great many other players)... We love AE. We love having it for original gaming content as an alternative system of advancement.
And... We miss that.

Best of luck!

@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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Originally Posted by Lazarus View Post
Except most of them are only working for the government as an alternative to going to prison. Otherwise they'd still be living a life of crime.
I dunno about this. Take a look at the people who write many of the antivirus programs everyone uses religiously. Many of them....are former hackers. Can't really teach the mindset that comes with being a malicious (or just curious) tinkerer.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Megajoule View Post
Inviting exploiters into beta will allow them to identify new exploits... which will not be dutifully reported so they can be fixed, but secretly disseminated so that they can be taken advantage of once the issue goes live. So that's a non-starter. You'd just be giving them a head start.
It's not going to matter. If there is an open beta stage for GR, there will be a multitude of exploits that will be found by those folks and many (if not most) of them won't be found or reported by the "good guys".

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Originally Posted by Venture View Post
If Ultima Online could get elective PvP after its lead dev practically screamed at me on Usenet for a year that it was utterly impossible for the game to work with elective PvP
While true on the face of it, the effects of Trammell on UO shouldn't be ignored. For many old UO players, 'Trammell' evokes the same reaction as 'CU/NGE' does for players of another game. It's also not a good idea to ignore what occurred afterward (with a new competing title basically relegating the venerable title largely an afterthought). While admittedly not likely to occur, there is a new shiny (with a good deal of financial backing and name recognition) on the horizon that could create a similar phenomenon. Removing rewards from AE, while seemingly the easiest, simplest alternative to the constant changing and patching that currently goes on, would make the feature largely an afterthought in the minds of the vast majority of the playerbase (which is a guess on my part but probably not far from true). If they didn't wipe the system, you'd still be left with the problem of obsolete farms clogging up the system so 'stories' don't get seen anyway.

I'm disappointed the fix is being put off until July but not really all that surprised.

@Remianen / @Remianen Too

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
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.

Wah wah wah wahbulance.... There is other things to do than AE... Here's an example, Task Forces. They reward Merits, which you can get random rolls(20) or save them up for a *Item* you want. Wow! I forgot! You also get xp, drops, inf/prestige.


P.S, can I haz PL on the Meow farm?

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Posted

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Originally Posted by RemianenI View Post
I dunno about this. Take a look at the people who write many of the antivirus programs everyone uses religiously. Many of them....are former hackers. Can't really teach the mindset that comes with being a malicious (or just curious) tinkerer.
There is nothing inherently malicious about being a hacker, one can be one without ever doing anything criminal.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Its_Me_Matt View Post
Wah wah wah wahbulance.... There is other things to do than AE... Here's an example, Task Forces. They reward Merits, which you can get random rolls(20) or save them up for a *Item* you want. Wow! I forgot! You also get xp, drops, inf/prestige.
Really? Thank you, I had heard rumors of these "Task Force" things but had never believed them before. Some guy I know also heard from his cousin's boyfriend's roommate that they award badges! Is that true, is it?

Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Severe View Post
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.
THIS THIS THIS!
you win sir.
I suggest a challenge...offer up a reward of something cool and shiny or just braging rights to whoever can find these exploits and how they did it.

With this, however, you have to determine who these players are...who wants to out themselves? what good would it do? whats the benifit?

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
All this depends on how you define "high rewards." High by what standard? High rewards proportionate to time invested, or proportionate to risk?

If you're looking at high rewards proportionate to time spent, that's already been addressed. The all-boss and all-lieutenant groups that did away with all those time-wasting minions have had their rewards reduced. Enemies that give bonus XP outside of AE do not do so in AE. The only advantage AE has in this case is that it allows you to choose a map with little downtime and fill it with an enemy that is weak to your damage type.

As far as high rewards proportionate to the risk, well, isn't that what the ally patch was supposed to take care of? So you are suggesting charging influence to play an arc such as "Teen Phalanx Forever," which has multiple allies in every mission? Charging people to even try out your arc would be even more detrimental than reducing the XP.

So how would you quantify "risk vs reward?"
I quantify risk vs reward by what the devs have set forth in the content they create. If "Teen Phalanx Forever" allows a player to level faster than double XP weekend because of multiple allies then the cost to play that mish would be high. If "Teen Phalanx Forever" let's you level the same as doing and arc from an NPC contact then no problem it's a cheap 100 influence to play mish.

Personally I would love to walk into MA and look at a menu divided by cost:

Dev choice, guest author and whetever else the Doc decides = free to play

Arcs with rewards equal to dev content: 100 inf flat rate

Arc with rewards equal to dbl XP weekend: 5 mil per player on the team

Arcs that surpass dbl xp by 10%: 10-50 mil per player on the team

Then I know anything on the menu over 100 inf is a farm and I can concetrate on the stuff that isn't. People that want to fight easy maps for easy xp pay a premium.

It's no different then hunting. If you are in it for the experience of being in the woods and absorbing the sights and sounds, you buy a $15 dollar hunting license and park yourself in the woods early in the morning and absorb the ambience. You are happier with a successful hunt but happy either way. You are in it for the story. If you want a garunteed trophy kill with no challenge you pay $5,000-$10,000 to go to some private animal preserve and shoot something that was no challenge at all. You are in it for the reward to hang on the wall so you pay to get it.

From what I can tell the ally patch ruined a lot of what were once very well done arcs that were in no way farms. If the collateral damage from all this farm control is to kill quality work then it is counter productive. I would rather charge the big game hunters for their easy kills then to continue down this exploit/nerf path that has rendered the MA a shell of what it should be.

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Tanker Tuesdays & Brutal Thursdays. If you like fun, look'em up!

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While true on the face of it, the effects of Trammell on UO shouldn't be ignored.
Yeah, it probably kept the game from going under.

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For many old UO players, 'Trammell' evokes the same reaction as 'CU/NGE' does for players of another game.
But they were the ones everyone wanted to leave, so nothing of value was lost.

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It's also not a good idea to ignore what occurred afterward (with a new competing title basically relegating the venerable title largely an afterthought).
EQ came out way before Trammell. UO's PvP changes were yet another case of closing the barn door after the cows have left, graduated college, moved to other cities, got jobs, etc.

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Removing rewards from AE, while seemingly the easiest, simplest alternative to the constant changing and patching that currently goes on, would make the feature largely an afterthought in the minds of the vast majority of the playerbase (which is a guess on my part but probably not far from true).
It already is. The idea of the bulk of the player base flocking to player-developed content has fallen flat on its backside. Too many people found the system to be full of vapid farms and/or poorly-written stories. They're not coming back for another try. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and AE's first impression was not a good one.

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If they didn't wipe the system, you'd still be left with the problem of obsolete farms clogging up the system so 'stories' don't get seen anyway.
I think arcs that haven't been played or accessed by their creators for 90 days straight should be deleted.

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If "Teen Phalanx Forever" allows a player to level faster than double XP weekend because of multiple allies then the cost to play that mish would be high.
This determination could not be made by any automated system, at least not a priori, and would have to be the product of a human actually vetting the arc. Leaving aside the fact that they don't have the staff for that, at that point you'd be better off just kicking the farms out anyway.

Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by PapaSlade View Post
Personally I would love to walk into MA and look at a menu divided by cost:

Dev choice, guest author and whetever else the Doc decides = free to play

Arcs with rewards equal to dev content: 100 inf flat rate

Arc with rewards equal to dbl XP weekend: 5 mil per player on the team

Arcs that surpass dbl xp by 10%: 10-50 mil per player on the team

Then I know anything on the menu over 100 inf is a farm and I can concetrate on the stuff that isn't. People that want to fight easy maps for easy xp pay a premium.
Ah I see. So you believe that higher rewards than dev-created content should be possible in AE?

You also run into another problem: the system would need to quantify difficulty on the fly.

Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Venture View Post
And we're probably going to keep advocating it, so if it bothers you I suggest you stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud.

Nothing is "settled". Everything is on the table. If Ultima Online could get elective PvP after its lead dev practically screamed at me on Usenet for a year that it was utterly impossible for the game to work with elective PvP, then there is still time for City's devs to come to their senses and realize this fire-fighting strategy they've been using has failed and will continue to fail. Constantly repatching AE to fight the latest exploit has not and will not stop the exploiters. It has and will continue to torque off the legitimate authors.
I was one of those people who strongly advocated that the AE launch without rewards myself. Having said that, I would rather try to fix the existing system than tossing it aside. While I'm not a fan of the reactive patching, I believe its possible to make the AE, if not completely unexploitable, then no more exploitable than the standard PvE content. It wouldn't be easy, but I've put enough thought into it to not be speaking purely hypothetically.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
And we're probably going to keep advocating it, so if it bothers you I suggest you stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud.

Nothing is "settled". Everything is on the table. If Ultima Online could get elective PvP after its lead dev practically screamed at me on Usenet for a year that it was utterly impossible for the game to work with elective PvP, then there is still time for City's devs to come to their senses and realize this fire-fighting strategy they've been using has failed and will continue to fail. Constantly repatching AE to fight the latest exploit has not and will not stop the exploiters. It has and will continue to torque off the legitimate authors.
youve been here a long time. Once the devs make up thier mind, they set about asking for advice...which they will blithely ignore.

Seriously....this one like alot of everything else, Ed, pvp, markets....its already been done.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
Ah I see. So you believe that higher rewards than dev-created content should be possible in AE?
If it means the system is not gutted for use by authors of quality material then yes. We just need to come up with a "cost" of some kind for being able to run that high reward content. If the tech is not available to judge the xp rate on a mish based on the tools/mobs being used then its back to the drawing board for my idea. I run giant tonka toys for a living so I am some what lacking in my tech knowledge.

Perhaps they just cap XP rate per mission like they capped tickets. If there is an acceptable rate for xp/hour in dev content then make it within a certain percentage of that for AE. Then make dbl xp weekend count in AE as well.

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Posted

Quote:
If the tech is not available to judge the xp rate on a mish based on the tools/mobs being used then its back to the drawing board for my idea.
It's computationally impossible. It would be tantamount to solving something called the halting problem, which is proven (in the mathematical sense) to be unsolvable.

You could come up with a heuristic (as opposed to an algorithm) that could guess whether or not an arc would be abusive, with varying degrees of accuracy, but that has its own problems, left as an exercise for the reader. You could implement some (it would pretty much have to be) real-time data mining that tracks arc plays and rewards earned, adjusting the "cost" of the arc according to how productive it is in use, but I'm guessing the devs don't have those kinds of resources available or they'd be in use now to catch abusive arcs on the fly. Even if they do, exploiters don't leave their arcs up anyway (they publish, play and delete) which thwarts any kind of evaluation over time strategy. You could implement a digital signature for every arc so the system could see if the same arc was being republished, but that's countered by changing non-essential text on every republish. You could try signing only the essential details (mobs, maps, a few others maybe) but that's countered by throwing in some "noise" (changing mobs that won't affect the exploitive value of the arc). Whatever you do here you'll always be at least a step behind the exploiters.

Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Venture View Post
Even if they do, smart exploiters don't leave their arcs up anyway (they publish, play and delete) which thwarts any kind of evaluation over time strategy.
Fixed. All the wanna-be, "I can't just use someone else's farm, I have to make my own, identical farm" exploiters leave their missions up to clog up the search long after they've become unusuable.

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Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

 

Posted

It's disappointing that many things with AE's development seemed to have been poorly planned. While hindsight is 20/20 and all that, it's disappointing not only to see how things have gone but to get the impression of the thought process behind the changes. Using nukes to kill flies wouldn't be all that bad if it weren't for the fact that it sort of kills everything else in the surrounding area.

Perhaps the biggest irony about the Mission Architect system is that for something designed for storytelling, writing stories is one of the hardest things to do with the system. Farms and challenge arcs are easy but there's a surprisingly limited number of tools for storytelling. Teammates have difficulty following along with the overall story (though that affects all CoH content), the lack of proper conversational objectives forces workarounds like using allies, and the mere mention of direct spawn control seems to be met with sheer developer terror.

The one million inf question is, "Where do we go from here?" Is it too late for an upswing? Many players have a bad taste in their mouth from the AE. How do we reassure them? How do we improve the ability for all arcs of quality to obtain players as opposed to only the Developer Choice pics? I think the situation could stand to be handled more delicately in the future since AE is too good of a resource to have as bad of a reputation as it does.

 

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Originally Posted by Zamuel View Post
...but there's a surprisingly limited number of tools for storytelling. Teammates have difficulty following along with the overall story (though that affects all CoH content), the lack of proper conversational objectives forces workarounds like using allies...
Good point there. I was sort of hoping the newer updates such as GR might make changes to to the first problem you mention, but nothing so far....

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zamuel View Post
Many players have a bad taste in their mouth from the AE. How do we reassure them?... I think the situation could stand to be handled more delicately in the future since AE is too good of a resource to have as bad of a reputation as it does.
Some players still have bad tastes in their mouths about stalkers, there's just no way to regain 100% of player's respect sadly, which is more about their ignorance than the dev's doing a 'bad job' (recall how farmers began to badmouth the AE and leave it in droves when the exploit fixes began rolling out way back when). Not to suggest the devs have been prefect angels when it comes to how they treat the AE - I agree that they should be handling it more carefully.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Zamuel View Post
Farms and challenge arcs are easy but there's a surprisingly limited number of tools for storytelling. Teammates have difficulty following along with the overall story (though that affects all CoH content), the lack of proper conversational objectives forces workarounds like using allies, ...
This is why the continuing existence of the patch on live is particularly galling to me.

My personal style has always been to maximize team friendliness by using NPCs to say stuff, and using mission entry and exit popups: I avoid putting plot points in clues and briefings because they have to be looked up at the right time, and in a fast paced game that may not be possible. This way everybody gets a chance to read the key texts.


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Originally Posted by Venture View Post
It's computationally impossible. It would be tantamount to solving something called the halting problem, which is proven (in the mathematical sense) to be unsolvable.
Its not quite that bad, because you only need to consider the case of a reasonably straight-forward solution to the mission, and then search for all possible ways to complete it quicker. All ways slower don't count.

Still, it would not be easy.


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You could come up with a heuristic (as opposed to an algorithm) that could guess whether or not an arc would be abusive, with varying degrees of accuracy, but that has its own problems, left as an exercise for the reader. You could implement some (it would pretty much have to be) real-time data mining that tracks arc plays and rewards earned, adjusting the "cost" of the arc according to how productive it is in use, but I'm guessing the devs don't have those kinds of resources available or they'd be in use now to catch abusive arcs on the fly. Even if they do, exploiters don't leave their arcs up anyway (they publish, play and delete) which thwarts any kind of evaluation over time strategy. You could implement a digital signature for every arc so the system could see if the same arc was being republished, but that's countered by changing non-essential text on every republish. You could try signing only the essential details (mobs, maps, a few others maybe) but that's countered by throwing in some "noise" (changing mobs that won't affect the exploitive value of the arc). Whatever you do here you'll always be at least a step behind the exploiters.
There's an orthogonal problem to allowing higher than standard rewards in AE missions, and that is the simple fact that there is no proportionality between "difficulty" and reward rates. There is only an implicit threshold of difficulty for a given reward rate which the situations must meet. In other words, even if it was possible to compute "difficulty" as a number, the appropriate reward rate for that mission isn't necessarily a function of that number.

The actual boundaries on reward rates for individual situations have as much to do with conditions outside of but related to those situations as within them. For example, the value of the reward that Hamidon generates has as much to do with how repeatable the trial is and how stackable the reward could be as it does how difficult the Hamidon trial actually is. Those types of variables are much more difficult to control for in the AE because people can easily publish many copies of the same missions with minor non-material (to rewards) changes.

Almost regardless of the difficulty of the arc, if the arc is indefinitely repeatable that already places a limit on the rewards that arc should generate. And that makes it difficult to allow more than trivial increases in reward rate above the standard one.

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