Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

It is not trolling to call out Lazarus to answer for a slanderous remark.

I have played many arcs, both honored and published, and, yes, I agree that some deserving authors are still being overlooked, but that should in no way detract from those that have earned the distinction. Regardless of whether or not my arc had ever been picked, I am delighted for any author who is recognized. In most cases, the honored arcs are better than average. I get tired of the derisive comments posted by those whose petulance stinks of sour grapes. Some posters have made it seem more like a scarlet letter than an award.

Although it was not you who originated the comment, you chose to pick up the sword to defend it, and, if you choose to persist, I will continue to call you out to answer for it.

In an attempt to segue back to the topic at hand, my DC arc is one of the reasons I am against the idea of more and more patching. The second mission has both a timer and a free captive, a combination which causes the mission to fail through no fault of the player. This bug has been around for months, a side effect of one of the other previous patches way back when. When I review the feedback, players blame me for it and rate based on the assumption that it's my faulty design rather than a dev blunder. For that reason and others, I do not have much faith in the effectiveness of more patches to the MA.

Patches will happen regardless of exploits. Some patches will inadvertently break stuff, like that stupid captive bug. And I sympathize with you on that score, my arc was also affected, before I said screw it and removed the timer permanently. (People didn't seem to like the failure ending anyway, so I left it off, even though I'm pretty sure that bug has finally been fixed.)

Venture has done a bit more authoring, and far more reviewing than I have, but Venture reviews primarily for content and not exploitability or other mechanical reasons. In terms of knowledge of how the MA functions, I think its safe to say you're severely mistaken.

Venture was in I14 beta, so he knows I'm not knocking him specifically when I say that. While other people were testing the AE by trying to execute specific missions within it, I was the first one to figure out how to manipulate spawn points, the first to figure out how ambushes worked, the first to figure out how storage was calculated, the first to test the strength of critters, the first to manipulate the AI of critters in AE missions, the first to spawn many kinds of ridiculous edge-case missions. I was tinkering with every aspect of the AE from the first day of beta. Half the beta patches were probably designed to stop me from doing the goofy things I was doing in the first couple of weeks. I've actually been looking at AE mechanics and AE exploitability since *before* I14 beta, and I've never stopped looking at it. I even tracked daily usage of the AE from its release until I got frankly tired of doing it.

I'm not sure what *you* think you know about the AE, but in absolute terms its probably not very much. Certainly not enough to pass judgment on what *I* know about the AE.


On the subject of "conjuring numbers" its safe to say that your estimate of five arcs per hour has no basis in reality. Assuming the average arc has three misions, that's just four minutes per mission. There's no way you can do any meaningful checking of a mission in four minutes. What are you estimating for the time to check a custom critter, six seconds?

And if you knew anything about the AE, you'd know there's no magic about checking "the back end" like the devs have some magic perspective on the arcs that is somehow better than actually playing through the arc. "The back end" is easy to see: just look at your local mission files. That's all you'd see when you looked at the "back end." So really, you're saying that if everyone just forwarded you their mission files, you could tell, in four minutes, if any of their missions were either designed to be exploitable or had serious unintended reward imbalances.

Yeah, sure.

As long as we are taking a brief sojourn into fantasy land, lets come up with the job description for this mythological arc reviewer that NCSoft is going to hire. He or she is someone that knows how all the archetypes and powerset combinations function in CoX, knows how the custom critters work as well as the standard critters, knows how spawning works, knows what the exploitable tricks in the AE are, knows how the reward system works and what the reasonable reward rates are, and basically can spot reward problems in a mission just like that.

And this person just wants to read mission arc files all day long for NCSoft and check them for problems.


Its really easy to just throw out numbers like "five arcs an hour" when you don't have to actually figure out how to do that at that rate. And no, NCSoft is not going to pay you to figure out how, so I guess your genius will die with you.

In my own defense, IIRC I was not in Closed in i14's beta (or got in very late), so by the time I got a crack at it all the heavy lifting had been done.

I am sure you will get hints as soon as they have ideas.

You're being generous and not accounting for the fact that every arc would need to be re-checked every time someone fixes a spelling error. Even if all they are doing is verifying that only a minor text change took place it would still take time.

Sounds like something automation would be good at, if one wasn't religiously adamant that automation wouldn't be a good way to filter arcs.

I'll do you one better. I went and dug up the statistics I was collecting on the AE. I have data from more or less release (4/8/09) until 7/11/09 (when I got too bored to collect the data). During that three month period, the arcID increased to 259470, and the total number of actual arcs on the system rose to 49431.

Arc construction was more or less logarithmicly levelling off by that point, and a cursory examination of the current data suggests that pattern continued to the present day (this is to be expected: the initial burst of activity is constrained by a function of the total number of players, but as they fill arc slots the long term activity is constrained primarily by the turn over rate of new players). Nevertheless, even assuming about 10,000 arcs a year, 30 arcs per day (averaged for every day in the year, not just workdays), assuming just 20% of those arcs were submitted for review it would have taken nearly a year just to review the arcs submitted for review from April to mid July. The average wait time for review would have been about 140 days - four and a half months.

In fact, again assuming just a 20% submission rate, you would probably just be catching up with the backlog now, in mid May.

There are certain ironic complications to that simplified calculation. In particular, the wait times for review are so long on average that many arcs could have broken before being reviewed, which would make them trivial to review if they were still broken when the reviewer got to them. But I think its still highly unlikely a human being could have kept up this pace for this long of a period of time, even if we stopped caring if he was even reviewing accurately.

Paging Leandro... Leandro, there is a call for you on the white courtesy phone.

Seriously, that boy is the FIRST person I would recommend for that job, hands down.

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aka
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Your sarcasm detector is terribly dysfunctional. You should have that checked out. Banalities such as job descriptions and divisions of labor are the domain of cubemonkeys.

I'll concede to most of that math mumbojumbo you said. Venture baited me to the mathematical side of the discussion using fabricated numbers where he set me up to be laid low on the business end of your trusty protractor. No biggie. I had already admitted I'm no math major, thus a small victory on your part.

I didn't need to go there anyway. The math is irrelevant. Both you and Venture are on record as advocating the elimination of rewards from the MA. I don't see your issue with a solution that does just that while at the same time adds a steady stream of arcs that give full rewards to the existing selection of DC and HoF. The rate at which they are added is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the number of arcs is 8000 or 800 or 80, as long as it is greater than zero.

If you intend to make boasts about your due diligence during beta, then you accept that you share in the responsbility for the myriad of exploits that went live.

Your experience with the nitty-gritty of the MA is irrelevant, as is my own. The MA as an entity is evolved beyond the definition of a mere "game feature" to something more akin to Web 2.0. I may not be able to solve Pi to the fourteenth decimal place, but I do know a thing or two about mass media and interactive communication platforms. You can pick the MA apart piece by piece and solve it down to its last remainder, but you will never see the big picture.

Newspapers and publishing houses have editors to ensure reporters checks their facts and catch any potentially libelous statements. Radio and television stations have program directors for similar reasons, as well as to keep broadcast content in compliance with FCC regulations and decency laws. Internet forums have moderators to keep discussions on topic and strike inappropriate posts. Wikis have administrators to monitor submissions and remove propaganda and misinformation.

What the devs are not seeing is that the MA is no longer "theirs." It is now "ours," meaning ours and theirs together, yet they continue to treat it as if it is theirs and theirs alone to do with as they wish when they wish, and the resulting exodus of players and authors is a consequence of that callous disregard. To put this in perspective, just look to the recent media frenzy surrounding Facebook's lax privacy practices and the direct correlation to the fact that 'Delete Facebook Account' hit ninth on Google's top ten list of search strings.

While the devs have the right to impose boundaries on what is and not acceptable in the MA, they need to recognize that without the authors to supply the actual content and players to participate in it, there is no MA; their great experiment will be a failure. Only by balancing the relationship between "us" and "them" can the MA be successful, which means they need to start respecting boundaries as well. I'd hope after this, their latest guffaw, they will have learned that some actions, like deploying surprise patches that haven't been properly vetted for the full scope of their effects, are ill-advised and will not be well-received.

There's a certain highway along my daily commute. The posted speed limit is 55, and, at the times I travel it, traffic volume is light. I will usually set the cruise control to a comfortable 60. Other cars pass me, some going so fast it seems like my own car is standing still. There is a stretch where the east and westbound lanes separate with a wooded area in the middle. This spot is a well-known speed trap where troopers lurk out of sight and lie in wait. It is so well-known that, as the traffic approaches this area, there is a marked change in behavior. Speeding drivers apply their brakes and, if there is room, settle into the right lane. They do this whether or not there is actually a trooper there. After passing through this zone, drivers resume their previous speeds.

The lesson here is that, in the absence of a visible authority figure and the real threat of consequences, people are more apt to engage in deviant behavior.

That's what the MA needs, not more patches.

As a matter of fact, I do. But that's between me and the devs. All I can say is that I was not unaware of the exploit potential of the AE, and I fully believed in what I was doing at the time during closed beta, but in retrospect I made a serious miscalculation of deployment priorities. I will say that those in closed beta will know that the go-live date came as a complete surprise to all of us, because we all knew it wasn't ready to go live. Those with a really good memory will know that go-live seemed at one point imminent, and then suddenly got pushed back about two weeks.

I know why (one of the reasons why, specifically), and that's all I'm prepared to say. As to the rest of your silly tirade attempting to portray me as being unaware of the "big picture" regarding the AE, that too is a joke that only I and the devs I worked with during I14 beta (or afterwards) have the context to laugh at. Your entire point of view, encapsulated in this thread, is only a tiny, tiny part of the big picture, a part I had factored in already long ago.

Somewhere, there is a PM I sent to one of the devs on the subject of the AE. It specifically states, among other things, that one of the things they need to be aware of is players like you, using language like "its not yours, its ours." And I was telling them that players like you would be mostly right, and they would have to be prepared for that and honor that in some way. MMO game systems have a culture, and that culture cannot be trivially manipulated without destroying it, or having it rebel against you, I said. The AE was going to have one, or a fragmented set of them, depending on how they launched it and how the nurtured it, and they would have only one chance to set a course for it. They could change the AE, but they wouldn't get a mulligan on the players surrounding the AE.

Sorry to say, but your big revelation speech was trivially predictable (and you are not the first one to make it by a long shot).

Some of what you said makes sense to me, but... so, putting up patches to stop exploits isn't the devs making themselves a "visible authority figure"? And I would point out that those cars are still driving along that highway, those drivers didn't stop using it, they conformed to what was expected of them by the authority figures, even when they didn't know for a fact they were being watched.

No, they didn't. Actually they bought those arguments completely at the time. I didn't apply them to the highest priority context. I won the wrong argument.


Plus, you know the devs actually read the forums, right?


In any case, they didn't have a coherent plan to support the AE beyond simple technical improvements beyond beta, so they didn't have the allocated resources to deal with the problems that existed at the time. There's now an actual team within the development group now that is tasked with finding solutions to the problems with the AE: both Dr. Aeon and Black Scorpion have publicly self-identified with this group (its called the MAST team, actually: don't think I'm giving away any big secret there). They are actually, in fact, taking a more author-centric perspective on the AE and one of the meta-problems they are looking at is the issue of the disruptive nature of reactive patching to address exploits. Beyond that I can't comment on what specifically they are doing or when it might appear.

I find the fact that there's a development group tasked specificly for finding solutions to the AE exploit problems hilarious. What a waste of resources.

As long as AE has rewards worth exploiting, it will continue to be exploited. Farm exploiters are adaptable and smart. Smarter than the developers.

My personal opinion is that every aspect of every MMO is a work in progress not to be judged complete until after the servers shut down for a the last time.

At no time is a Dev team going to see an obvious problem, regardless of how long after launch it appears, and just go, "Well, we have to live with that, because we didn't think of it years ago."

They may decide they have to live with it for the time being because other things take priority, however. Even then, they will usually try to address the issue in indirect ways (adjusting critter AI, reward tables, the UI, etc).

I think that team is tasked to all problems with the AE, not just exploits.

In any case, I don't think the Devs continue to get paid if they give up on chasing exploiters, regardless of how thankless the task may be.

The MAST team is, as they have publicly stated, working on all aspects of the AE, not just specifically exploits.


The whole "no dev team can beat the playerbase at the exploit game" is something that one day, I would really like to put to the test. The notion that in effect the farm exploiters are using the AE authors as human shields, and the devs can't get to them without going through the authors first, is a myth I would love to obliterate.

I'd love to see that too
And I do not mean that as though I think it to be an impossibility, nor a near-impossibility.
I believe it and I'd simply like to see it done


Anyways...
I really would love for a bit more communication here from the Developers, just simply because these changes jacked the rewards pretty badly for legitimate arcs with certain game mechanics and it doesn't seem right (To an outsider) that it'd be left this way for this amount of time.

I think enough people have expressed this notion and a little bit of a follow-up to that exact point would be nice.

Don't get me wrong... I know they're not happy with it, I know they probably couldn't say much more than they have... But (Just my opinion) some regrettable changes deserve a bit more of communication and acknowledgment than others.

Captives, destructibles, etc... these things should just not be causing these xp losses. The exploiters have totally sullied our pool. The non-exploiters need some love here.

I don't say this with any bit of anger. It's a game, it's some complicated (And interesting) problems to tackle and figure out. I'd just appreciate (And think the community would benefit) from a bit more of an assurance that the specific problems we currently have are recognized and maybe even some sort of perspective as to why the collateral damage is acceptable in its current form could be offered.

I'm just looking forward to the AE being an alternative method of leveling that is once again on par with the rest of the game (When used legitimately and when using the tools that make it more than "pile up the enemies and take them out").

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First, I don't think exploiters are necessarily smarter than the devs, just like I don't think the above is a myth. It has to do with resources and priorities. If someone is focused on finding the loophole(s) in a game's systems and concentrates on finding it/them pretty much to the exclusion of all else, that's something the devs can't counter. They have neither the resources (man hours, since remember, it's not just ONE person doing this. It's often over a hundred....and several of them share info via websites devoted to this kind of thing) nor the focus to vet every single feature in the game (or even in one part of the game, like MA). Most devs can't play their own games in "hardcore" fashion (who has the time? Especially during crunch periods), which is where they fall behind those who can.

I'd like to see that change but as I said, it's not a myth. It's fact, as far as I've seen. If you have a thousand players constantly poking and prodding the game systems, looking for ****** in the proverbial armor, how is a developer supposed to combat that proactively? They can't, at least not if they expect to do anything else or eke out a profit of any kind. They're like roaches, really. For every one you see, there's a hundred you don't.

You're welcome to try. I won't bother telling you "I told you so" once the dust settles from the nerf fallout.

Unless AE rewards are handled "Much differently" (such as rewarding Arch creators instead of those running the archs) all the devs are accomplishing is further repressing the MA developer.

fixed