Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

Perhaps more importantly, the xp value of a critter is no indication of how much fun it will be to fight it.

What this info does is allow us to make missions that we can mathematically claim give the right xp in good conscience. This has no bearing on whether that's true in practice for people who play through the mission: they might bring the 'wrong' powers, play with the 'wrong' playstyle, etc and still come out feeling (justifiably) the mission gives 'low' xp. They just won't be able to point at our Bosses and put the blame on the number coming out of them.

So the next step is to make sure that this system is indeed unexploitable.

Once that is accomplished we will then need to consider whether it is even possible to create a tool that evaluates a critter in terms of danger and synergy factors.

My thought is that a true Linear Invincibility Evaluation System would not be possible without some [tech] that figures this info out dynamically (perhaps using Real Numbers), which could lead to a whole new 'conning system': you look at a creature and if it's purple, that doesn't mean that it 4 levels/ranks higher, it means that based on its stats at this moment, considering who is on its' side and who is on yours, it's going to wipe the floor with you if you engage it (it has calculated that on average you will need to attack it 20 times to defeat it over the course of 20 seconds, and in that time it only needs to attack you 10 times, which it can do).

The only other way would be to statically compare each critter to some hypothetical 'average team'. Much easier, but perhaps much less useful.

I agree completely. Its an unfortunately historical quirk of implementation. In fact, the system was originally intended to have *three* values: alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha would be the current Alpha, and Beta and Gamma would be the two values that Alpha/Beta powers have. And it was intended to be possible for a single power to have all three values set.

Why? Two words: Follow Up. Something I hope can be revisited down the road (along with some other issues).


That's not quite how I would put it, but that's essentially correct. The way I would put it is that a critter with score X is not necessarily X dangerous, the system only (attempts to) guarantees that its at least as dangerous as X. So no matter how you make an 80% XP critter, it will always be at least 80% as dangerous as the average 100% XP critter of that rank and level, that sort of thing.

And very specifically, its intended to say that for the 100% mark. The farther away you get from 100%, the more margin for error the system allows itself. Because if it turned out that a critter worth 20% XP was actually only 16% the difficulty of standard critters, the devs are ok with that because that's not exploitable.


You've hit the fundamental design principle of the system. That's exactly the mindset under which the system was created: what's the best possible value the players can be given for each power that is not exploitable.


I hope not too badly.

If you're saying the system should be better documented, I agree completely.

That would, unfortunately, only work solo. Once you try to do this based on who's on your side, you start having to figure out what team mates are likely to do with powers like taunt, force fields, heals, etc. And you'd have to make intricate tables of how things like burst damage is more dangerous to defense and regen and less so to resistance, things like that. That would be, as I tend to say, a non-trivial problem.


It depends on what your goal is. In the absolute sense, probably not in the practical sense. But it is possible to do so in still interesting ways. For example: the current system assigns XP values to critters. A synergy-aware system might attempt to assign XP values to factions. So if you make a faction composed of X, its worth something. But if you put X, Y, and Z in it, then spawn points that are allowed to pick randomly from your faction could be worth more because of synergy factors. That sort of thing is at least something that I can conceptualize how the numbers might work.

That would probably solve a myriad of problems, wouldn't it? For one thing, your melee/defense critter COULD be worth full XP, if he's the melee heavy-hitter paired with a ranged critter -- or even more so, paired with a critter that debuffs, slows your movement, or mezzes from range.

For another thing, buffing and debuffing enemies would be inherently worth more if they're paired with high-damage enemies. An /Empathy boss isn't worth much on his own, because he has nobody to heal but himself. But if he starts healing everybody else....you can't one-shot him to make him stop, so it's like adding /regen to your entire group, on top of whatever powersets they already have.

It would also get rid of the one loophole that you can't close without screwing over legitimate custom groups: enemy groups specifically designed to deal the kind of damage you have capped resistance to. Fire armor farms, I'm looking at you.

I'm trying to think of a way of conveying the information that the percentage indicator is intended to convey in a way that is more intuitive and less likely to be misread as a performance/threat value. Much though it runs counter to the prevailing sentiment concerning "real numbers", perhaps in this case a less precise indicator would be more evocative. A "reward value" bar that fills as you add powers, maybe. I'm laying out in my mind a list of the additive powers ordered from greatest to least contribution, with an accumulated contribution bar laid out next to each entry split into color-coded sections. Multiplier powers attach to the list at the point where their multiplier-limit indicates and have their own version of the accumulated bar with each additive power extended in length by the multiplier factor...

This could get hairy, and I haven't read nearly enough Tufte. I hope pohsyb has.

Another way in which the concept of reward thresholds comes into play is that critters (even standard ones, not just custom ones) aren't valued solely on the basis of how dangerous they are, nor on how difficult they are to kill, NOR on a combination of the two. Rather, offense and defense are both considered "separate but equal" requirements for critters. Critters must have some minimum offense to be considered valid, and some minimum defense to be considered valid. So Bosses automatically have more health, and are almost always designed with more attacks. Put simply, instead of saying bosses must reach 10, we say they must have at least 5 offense and 5 defense (massive oversimplification). 8 offense and 4 defense is too weak, as is 2 offense and 12 defense. But 7 offense and 7 defense is not necessarily worth more (cf: Dark Ring Mistress). That same basic principle applies to the custom critters in the AE.

So a safety valve to prevent an all fire-offense farm from becoming *too* exploitive is that its supposed to still be hard to kill them, even if they are of little danger to you. What we *can't* do is allow players to make the critters *weaker* than normal in exchange for making them stronger offensively, because that's gameable. And that's also partially why its not always easy to make full value bosses that don't have at least *some* defensive or utility powers: most (at higher levels) do have them. Its not perfect, but its in the ballpark.

I just retested my Suppression arc and there was no improvemnt at all. This arc has groups of NPCs which are allies surrounded by allies performing emotes. None are there to help you.

In the arc, killing a level 5 minion on a level 5 minion yields:

2XP, 1 influence and 7 prestige.

Outside in Atlas Park killing a level 5 minion yields:

19 XP, 9 influence and 7 prestige.

So in my case only prestige is unaffected.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

The reduction is because of a patch that was put in place in response to abusive farms that used allies unfairly.

It should be fixed with Going Rogue, but at least in my case it isn't fixed yet.

For me, only the first mission of my arc is impacted, and I did place a warning in the arc description because I have had several poor ratings due to lack of XP.

Hmm... that's kind of odd. I wasn't aware that the prestige rewards were affected separately and differently than the xp rewards.

Is that a change from what you found before?

Sorry about missing your post before I replied. My "good news" comment was based on Heraclea saying it seemed like some improvements were made to the reductions for non-combat NPCs.

Edit: Oh, and thanks. Yeah, I know about the initial change and the reasons for and all. I can see how my post, following yours, made it seem like I was asking about the initial changes in general, as opposed to the possible recent changes Heraclea was mentioning! (Hope that made sense)

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

It is a change from the way it used to be: all of them were linked, and a reduction in one yielded a reduction in all the rest. When I was testing, I was running on a level 50 and assumed that since inf and tickets had been partially normalized that XP had been also.

I wonder now if it's possible to create custom mobs that give no XP but drop tickets and inf. That would create another set of issues.

I believe that it is exactly the same as it has been since the patch. They are customs and were never meant to fight. I must admit I only looked at XP before, so I can't be sure if the effect on influence is the same.