Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

Given what you just described, the difference between running the Liberate TV mish over and over and an MA mish over and over would be what? If they could not surpass the XP of the Liberate TV mish because of the cap who cares?

Ok, if I am reading what you just said correctly, the ally problem made everyone equal to an IOed out multi-billion inf Toon. So are you saying it leveled the paying field for people with low dollar builds? and that you should only be able to do that after spending billions?

If speed is the real problem then there should be a way to figure that into the XP cap. There has to be a hard limit to how fast a toon, or a group, can mow down mobs given damage per second, recharge, maximun buffs each attribute will accept, and whatever else would go into figuring that out. If that can be figured out then there has to be a way to use that to say "If you are running at peak efficiency, speed and damage then the max XP that can be generated is "X".

Once that number is determined, the devs then decide how close they will allow an MA mish to approach that number. The average story arc is likely not constructed in a manner that will approach that number. I have no idea what that number would be. If that max XP number was set to 10% less than the total XP possible from a +4 x8 spawned Liberate TV mission (just for an example) would that be enough for people to say I can farm/PL better on regular missions? Would that be enough XP available to not punish the authors?

The "survivablity" issue granted by allies is a different problem. I am not sure that allies can push you past the peak efficiency/speed/damage number given the buff caps for character attributes. Can they make it super easy? Looks like it, but I have been on a lot of 8 person teams that make PVE content look like it has zero risk. If telling folks they can put as many allies in as they want, make it as easy as you want, but the best you can do is "X" amount of XP and "X" amount of Tickets, I think they might find something else to do. Especially if the best they can do is smidge less than what they can do in the best PVE farm.

I think once you find that peak XP number you can reduce that number to point that the Authors are happy and the farmers will just settle for it being about the same they can get doing anything else.

Same here, I've had an arc on the 3rd page since the week before i17 went live. Not a single damn play since.

Not much motivation left to update older arcs either if nobody is going to play them, not even the die hard MA players seem to care about MA right now.

I honestly have to question just how professional the developers are at times when they pull stunts like this.

I am starting to come around to this suggestion. Sure we could lose a bunch of good arcs because their authors are no longer around, but to be honest I went back and tried to play some of those arcs and found them to be so broken and bug-ridden now that unless the author fixes them no one will want to play them anyway.

And hopefully not soon (tm), no matter what Dr. Aeon tries to tell us.

There is no difference. Go run Liberate TV and keep your lame "Kill stuffz" missions out of MA.

It made everyone equal to an IOed out multi-billion inf toon, and made those IOed out multi-billion inf toons even worse. There is only so far you can go even with the best IOs.

And yeah, having to make that investment of inf, and the time spent accumulating it, is part of the equation. It's like running the RSF in an hour...after spending two hours collecting nukes and shivans.

How does that work? Since capping XP/mission won't work, do they cap XP/hour? What's to stop you from farming up to your hourly cap, then switching toons? XP/Minute? Sounds like a lot of effort to allow people to use MA for something it was never intended for.

When you're on an 8-person team you share the rewards. When those 8 people are NPC allies who buff and debuff, you don't have to share.

Fuzzy math, at best. Slap a few guestimations together, paste them together with some assumptions, and there's your post. But, for argument's sake, let's say you actually had some real numbers to back up your claims.

First off, we'd have to reduce your original number. We're not reviewing every published arc. When the author (after fully playtesting, fixing all spelling errors, and so forth) marks their arc Final, they have the option of submitting their arc to the review queue. This is not a default or automatic submission. Arcs are reviewed only when the author voluntarily submits it. Also the reviewer(s) would not necessarily have to actually play through every arc. They would have more tools than you or I and would be able to simply open the arc on the back end and inspect its contents. This not only takes less time than your estimate, but also provides a more thorough examination of the arc for potential exploits.

Now let's look at a long term example.

The MA launched last April, not quite 60 weeks ago. If they had done things properly from the start and had just one AE mod active since the beginning, by your calculations we might have between 8,000 and 12,000 playable arcs in the MA right now, each giving full, unadulterated, same-as-dev-content rewards.

In exchange for that, the laundry list of benefits goes on and on. To name a few: We would not have had to put up with the barrage of nerfs and tweaks and other changes. We would not have had to endure the Rikti Dolls/Comm Officer farms, the Hamidon Green Mito farms, the jellybean farms, and the rest. There would be no level 50 AE babies running around asking where the train is or causing your mission team to wipe. Authors would not have had to had their storytelling tools taken away because they'd been abused by others. We would not have had the "Positron's Tirade" episode. Most importantly (Pay attention, Marketing Department), the MA would be perceived more closely to how it was originally intended, as a groundbreaking storytelling tool, and not vilified as the farming and exploiting tool that it is thought to be now.

All in all, I'd have to say that's a pretty good trade-off.

Just because a task seems daunting does not mean it's not worth doing. "They don't have time" is an excuse for the lazy who do not have the patience to see things out over the long term. Instant gratification is not an option and avoidance is not an answer.

But go ahead and have your little discourse and work out your math problem. It will amount to little in the end when the powers-that-be return to their consoles. 6 years and 17 issues and they still haven't solved the human equation. Don't hold your breath on that one.

But-but-but-but...!!

Well, you said it, not me.

Patches happen that have nothing to do with exploits. Authors need to update.

Feedback happens. Authors want to update.

Every update to a published arc would mean the arc would need to be vetted again, since the system has no way of telling whether you rewrote some contact dialogue or added a potential exploit.

I addressed this. You must have missed it.

If you're still editing and testing the arc, it's not going to be marked Final, thus it won't be submitted for review in the first place. Get all your edits done before it is locked. Authors would be made aware that no further edits are possible after review and make their choice.

Maybe that's not ideal for those authors who never seem to be happy to say something is "done" or let well enough alone, but an acceptable sacrifice given the benefits.

Reviewed arcs would of course be monitored. If an arc is found to give out more rewards than they want to give out, due to a game patch or a slip in the review process, simply remove the reward flag from that one arc. No need to apply nerfs and changes to the entire system with all its collateral damage.

Acceptable to you maybe.

Never mind that sometimes patches make updates mandatory.

First off, I have never made a "kill stuffz" mission in MA and don't play them there. There are plenty of PVE missions for me o go do that. Excuse me for trying to find some way to end the exploit/nerf cycle that some how works for everybody. I should know better.


If capping works for tickets why can't it work for XP? The problem is it doesn't appear the devs can make the system work as intended. From everything I have seen, every "fix" hurts the intended use as much or more than the unintended use. If that is the case then the devs and the community as a whole need to find a happy medium of allowable unintended use that brings the system back to where authors can make quality stories that people will want to play.

Arcanaville even said (and I am going off of memory from a post a little way up) that MA will likely never be exploit free but could possibly be made as close to PVE exploitable as possible. That is all I am trying to do. Figure out how to make the exploiters hit that PVE ceiling or even lower it a bit so there is incentive for them to go elsewhere.

I may not be smart enough to figure out why an XP cap won't work but you haven't explained it to me either.

It's called the Fermi method, and it's usually much more effective than you think. In this case I'm sure my estimate of how long it would take to clear the backlog is too low, as I deliberately lowballed everything else.

Then you catch zero exploiters, since exploiters won't submit their arcs for review. If you're not going to give any rewards or even just partial rewards for unreviewed arcs then every arc everyone writes will be marked Final on every publish so it will go into the queue. You're right back to having to review everything.

Automated tools won't help. Tune in to the rest of the thread. Automated tools won't catch any exploits you don't already know about, and if you know about them you can change the system to prevent their use in the first place. The arcs have to be evaluated using the Mark I Eyeball.

Show your work -- this is not at all obvious. There is no way one person can keep up with the traffic.

Except for the fact that it wouldn't have worked, sure.

It doesn't work for tickets. It's a ham-handed attempt at a fix that does nothing to exploiters while capping gains for legitimate users.

So legitimate users will stop using MA because the best reward their story can genrerate, or the mission they are playing, will never give them more than 85% (just a rough number) of what they could get under optimal circumstances on the best PVE farm in the game??? How many legitimate story missions approach those kind of rewards???

I meant the general "you" not you specifically.

What Venture said.

Also, what you said. Thanks for proving my point. Every "fix" does indeed hurt the intended use as much or more than the unintended use. Like the ticket cap. It deprives people of rewards, especially on smaller maps with multiple objectives. You could go over the cap on many maps even before the new difficulty sliders. Meanwhile farmers use an outdoor map with a single blinky to click when you hit 750 tickets.

Farmers will go out of their way to get around limits on rewards, because that is all they're concerned about. Legitimate users are concerned with putting together a story, putting together missions in such a way as to best tell the story, and working around the mechanical limitations of the system to best tell the story they want to tell. Worrying about arbitrary reward limits only gets in the way of that.

What part of "the ticket cap doesn't work either" can't you figure out?

Your welcome. I don't think I ever argued otherwise.

So knowing your story will under perform the best PVE farms in the game by 10%-15% (because of a mission xp cap) you won't write the story?? It would not stop me from playing it because I don't expect to reach that type performance in most dev created content and I still play that.

If the exploiters new going in that they could do 10%-15% better elsewhere, would they be inclined to go eslewhere??

You have yet to demonstrate that it is possible to implement something like this that would actually deter exploiters, not affect legitimate content, and not just be a waste of development resources.

Don't insinuate that I'm advancing an idea that is good for me while bad for others. Check your facts. I'm one of those perfectionist authors. All of my arcs are marked Looking For Feedback. My idea actually hurts my arcs' chances of being played. Regardless of that, yes, I find it perfectly acceptable when weighed against the benefits.

OH! Of course. The Fermi method. The LAZY MAN'S math proof. I should have known. The "See also: Guesstimate" right on the wiki page certainly adds to your credibility.

"Catching" exploiters is not the goal, nor was it ever. Arcs that have not been approved give no rewards and arcs with exploits will not be approved. We now have a 100% success rate in preventing MA exploits.

Tune in to the post you are failing to refute. I did not say 'automated tools'. I said inspecting arcs on the back-end, ie. the Edit Arc window or something similar that summarizes all missions and details for a quicker review. Certain details like outdoor maps and custom groups could be flagged for a deeper inspection, but most generic details would only need the once-over.

5 arcs per hour x 7 hours per day x 5 days a week x 60 weeks = 10,500 arcs. 8,000 is the low end and 12,000 is the generous end, accounting for the varying lengths and complexities of individual arcs.

It would succeed in the goals set for it, which is more than can be said for any other idea both proposed and implemented.

It's not a lottery, it's a skill. It's called Writing for an Audience. You could try it.

Step 1: Look to your left and sweep that chip off your shoulder.
.....

You might find it an acceptable trade-off, others do not.

It's called writing for a specific audience, which is not necessarily representative of the larger audience, and has never made it clear what it does and does not like, or even what it does not find acceptable besides "AVs must be warned about" and a vague "your arc must not be exploitable." Then being noticed by that specific audience, among thousands of potential candidates.

I think the low end is at least a decimal order of magnitude lower than you're estimating for manual review.

I see. So you find it more acceptable to have the interface clogged with farms and the devs practically chasing players out of the MA with their constant nerfs?

Do you play this game? At all? Everything you need to know is right in the game. If you have paid any attention to the actual content of the game (other than the part where you punch, shoot, and burn stuff), then you already know all you need to know. You don't actually expect them to spoon feed you some kind of checklist, do you?

------------
Note: Reputation has been temporarily disabled so that the gutless cowards using it as their messaging service can speak up publicly if they have something to say to me or else go crawl back under the rock from whence they came.

Ah, so there are only two options then? I guess we'd better disregard everything everybody else has to say on the topic.

I play the game. Dev created content varies from "that's not bad" to "are you kidding?" Since some of the "are you kidding?" content is fairly recent, obviously someone somewhere thinks it's actually good. Hence: what are they looking for?

Oh yeah, and as for the part where I punch, shoot and burn stuff? Yeah, that also varies from walk-in-the-park easy level 50 content to level 20 content with bosses with Build Up and multiple ambushes of CoT ghosts. Again, what are they looking for?

I know how you like to use fancy math phrases like "decimal order of magnitude", but this is a hollow statement. Venture at least has enough sense to conjure up some numbers to go with his post, not to mention that he has decimal orders of magnitude more practical experience with MA matters than you.

It's not a math problem, it's an administration problem. So, yes, the "code it and they will come" fantasy is easily dismissable because it's flawed on a fundamental level.

If this is your attitude, and your approach, then, as Yoda says, "That is why you fail."

Fail at what exactly? At trolling everyone who doesn't agree with me and acknowledge my "obvious" superiority? As Yoda also might say, "Much hostility I sense in you."

...I can't watch.

Someone tell me when it's over, and the janitors have cleaned up....