new posi TF review/merit whine

Ignoring Captain Freak for a moment (or forever), and talking to Emperor Steele: You're making a floating point into a binary.

TF's aren't "Efficient or inefficient" (measured in rewards per minute for our purposes). They are MORE or LESS efficient. It is very easy to get people to run an efficient TF. It is harder to get people to run a less efficient TF. You may never get, say, Nethergoat to run an Eden Trial ... but I'm still happy to do it. Smaller pool of players is not "Nobody does it." (Hami is an exceptional case because you need a 50-player team or something.) "Players" as a whole don't have a single behavior. I had a friend who paid $15 a month for a while because he really, really, loved to fly around. He was, like, buzzing Valor Bridge and stuff.

Abuse, exploit, are all words which means something in a context based on an benchmark or assumption.

When it get to TFs and Merits, one must understand that there are two reason pplayers do the TFs to begin with. Either to Level or get Merits.

I find myself bouncing between both camps:

1. If I have a new alt, I purposely do TFs to level; they are fun and yield great amounts of exp, even when done rapidly, and I get sweet merits to boot at then end too. Another benefit of doing TFs to level, I learn how to better play that particular alt as well; TFs are excellent training grounds.

2. But once I made 50, experience is irrelevant, what is relevant is getting those IO sets needed for my alt to "be all it can be". Doing missions do get influence so I can buy those recipes, is simply madness for the recipes are way too over-priced to plainly purchase, and we all know, if you need the recipe; it will not drop. So what else could you do? That's right, get merits. How can you get merits? Do TFs. So now we want to do Tfs, but only as an instrument to get merits, thus going into TF missions to kill everything that moves or could move, is simply not practical. So when I form TFs, I make very sure to declare if it is a "slow" or "fast" TF. I would push for slow, if I am helping an SG member level; but if I am doing this for myself, it will be a quick one. Now what is my definition of a quick one? In short, I only fight what I must fight to achieve the mission goal; no thrills!

Now I am not comfortable making statements saying the Devs said this or that, ot thought this or that; I much rather let the Devs do their own talking.

But when I look at a TF mission composition, I am not really sure Devs are against TFs being done quickly, as many players seem to call it exploitation. Now why am I saying this? When I look at the various TFs, the first thing we should notice is that the nature of missions are different, we have kill alls, kill the boss, click the glowy, go speak to somebody, take something to somebody, go patrol, hunt for this, etc. I would dare say, that all possibilities save "kill all" are designed to allow for "short cuts". People doing Synapse, know after the hunt there is a go talk to Positron, so one player heads to Positron while the rest massacres clockwork; people know which phones are used for a patrol; players heads to different phones at the same time, in Numina we know what the sequence of the hunts are, and so we split to do those. The examples I mentioned are short cuts, can we claim they are exploits? If all we need to is to break into a data base to get a clue, what is wrong with stealthing to console and getting the data? I would think, if we were to stealth into an enemy base and get their decryptions codes, it would be a really good idea, if the enemy did know we have copied their encryption codes!

So the question to be addressed, what is a fair measure or value in merits for a given mission?

Do we assume the reward should be comensurate for a team that brute forced it all the way?

Do we assume the reward should be commensurate for a team that shorted everything?

Is there no value in merits for players who use cunning in a mission? What about good group tactics or leadership? Should there be value for that?

These are difficult considerations, and tough to answer when we have inherent biases to one process or the other. For instance, the exp miners would give a negative look to those sneaking to the computer for much exp is not being collected.

My take or sugggestion would be, base the merit rewards for a mission based on a kill all approach. If the players speeds it up, they still get the same merits as a reward for their collective good practices.

Hugs

Stormy

What I don't get, is why not a "live" calculator?

If they think "# Merits / Min" is a good formula (maybe it is or isn't, that's not my point), why not award the Merits at the end based on how long it took?

Speed runs remain possible, but are not longer the "best" way - speed runs of 2-3 'Forces would probably be the best way to wrack up Merits in a short time, though.

Yes, you'd have problems with "parkers", who join then sit to rack up the Merits, but I bet some sort of "activity detector" or "max value" (or both) cap would help with that (...and isn't that roughly the same as speed farming anyway?).

Just a question.

Brief general reply.

All reward systems most encourage what they best reward. The developers have the means to control exactly what is rewarded, and how much; they need to decide what behavior they want to encourage, and then reward exactly that (and not some approximation or derivative thereof).

Somewhat relevant to this topic, I just ran an Eden trial the other day and it made me wonder if they've looked at the median completion time at all since they fixed the holes in the geometry. (The Crystal Titan seemed much stronger as well, but I wasn't able to find any patch notes regarding it.) I believe our completion time was just under 3 hours for 7 merits.

I wonder how often they examine that data.

There will always be outliers who run content for personal reasons. For example, I farmed DA because I really enjoyed blowing up huge spawns of zombies, not because it was the most efficient way to earn inf.

But the majority of players are reward driven to a greater or lesser degree. If you give players a list of potential TFs to run, all else being equal they're going to take the one that pays off the best.

There's a reason most of the TF invites I get include the # of merits it delivers. =P

Throughout the history of this game content that delivers the most efficient reward/time ratio is consistently the most popular with the masses.

Powergamers may find the most efficient reward paths, but once they do everyone else is happy and eager to follow their trail.

The problem with the current merit system is it seems to me too static. Posi was set to be 60+ merits and even after it was shown that it could be run under an hour over and over and over again there it sat at 60+ merits (suggesting a 3 hr+ expected time). Conversely on redside most of the SF are below the magic 20 merit limit even though many are harder to do under an hour than posi was. So does redside have superior players? Does the presence of perfect-stealthing stalkers with group TP allow for faster runs on some missions? Does a lower number of tries on some TF/SF lead to less acurate mining?

I'd like, since they have all the mining, dynamic TF/SF merit rewards -- where as the avg time went up and down it reset it automatically. The devs could have a multiplier they could apply to some like the ITF or the RSF/STF...but in general if average times decreased so would the rewards and if they increased so would the rewards. With the large samples already in place I don't think you'd see "gaming" where people would deliberately go slow doing something else to increase the rewards


Honestly I think posi was rebalanced because villians were going to have access to it soon and we all know that the devs hate villians. Anyone who whines about the new posi's rewards just hasn't done a redside 1st respec with a non-purpled team...taken 90 mins and gotten 10 merits. This is just a rebalance towards redside's reward/time IMO.

I agree with Minotaur- "most efficient gets done" is an oversimplification- but Nethergoat is not entirely wrong either. If six people don't care and one wants to do the best merits/minute, you end up doing the best merits/minute. And if you're trying to recruit for your Sister Psyche [or whatever] you don't know what motivates people, so you tend to mention the merits in case that is their goal.

Incidentally, it is still possible to do Eden very fast- I don't know if you can still do the 11 minutes or 7 or whatever it was, but I'm pretty sure you can do 20. I don't particularly enjoy it and when I'm explaining it to people, I'm like "What is there in the game, that's so much better, that you want to skim through THIS to get to THAT?"

Mmmm...

As I have said so many times, TFs and merits make an uncomfortable bed partner...

I say this for a simple reason, there are three reasons people will do a TF:

1. Get exp to level
2. Get badge for Accolade
3. Get merits for over priced recipes at WW/BM

Now let us think, what the approach towards speed or kill all would be for players of the three mind sets or goals:

1. Get Exp to level...

Well at first glance, kill all is an obvious way to go, and many inexperienced players or un-informed quickly goes for this attitude. But, it had been proven to me, amuzingly by a Stalker, that nearly half of the exp in a mission is given by the completion bonus. So one should do the math, spend 1 hour and get 100% of the exp a mission could yield, or spend 15 min and get 65% of the exp a mission could yield? Do the math, maybe your attitude towards kill alls may change a bit... But never the less, those who came to level, want to max experience and that makes good horse sense.

2. Get the badge for accolades...

Lets be honest here, if all I need is the badge so I can get the accolade, why would I want to kill everything that crawls or moves in a mission? What benefit is there for me? truth is, I just want to go in, kick bunns and get out as quickly as possible.

3. Get merits to afford recipes...

I have terrible luck getting drops and even worse rolling, unless you think getting chain drops of turtles, hunters and ghost widows lucky... Since I do not get good drops, I am therefore forced to look for what I need at the market, but when you look at those prices, I would need to adventure for weeks to maybe afford the recipe. That simply does not make sense, but then, the devs perhaps sought to kill two birds with one stone... Nobody wanted to do boring, tedious TFs, and folks could not get the recipes they wanted. Solution, merit system and TFs to get them. So myself as aplayer trying to build my perfect scraper, defender, etc. Can go do TFs for the sole purpose to earn merits to trade for the recipes I need, if I had to roll, I would just go ahead and give up on the game (I would never roll what I wanted). So here I am and many other players, we want the merits exclusively for the merits to buy recipes. Why would we want to kill everything that moves or could possibly consider moving? It plainly does not make sense.

So the problem, many folks are arguing about and complaining is what happens when players having diametrically opposing goals are kinda forced into the same path. You want to kill all so you can level, and I want my merits so I can buy my recipe. It is very arrogant of players with leveling in mind, to demand those who do the TF for merits to kill all so "they" can level faster, and then wish them ill when they do not. Same can be said for a merit focused person with regards to the exp player.

Now, maybe, just maybe, we should take a step back at the TFs themselves, and perhaps we can find a way to stop throwing stones at each other...

If we look at the composition of a TF, we have a mix of Kill Alls, Defeat Bosses, Glowies, Hunts, Patrols and Fed Exes. If we look closer, nearly half of all the mission in a TF are kill alls, about a fourth of the missions are defeat bosses which are placed in huge complex rooms where you wind up killing 40% of all the mobs anyway; and finally the balance of the TF has the others.

Now is it too much to ask the experience gaining focused players to "live and let live"?

After all there are lots of all Kill Alls, that is good for the experience mongers, and a pain for the other focused players.

The kill a boss, they are in a huge complex room, way too many mobs in that area,its almost a kill all; would it be too much to compromise a little bit in behalf of the people who the TF for the merits?

Glowies, come on, you got to give something to the I came here for the merits gang, if you came for experience, you got your kill alls, do we have to be so greedy?

So if one thinks about the TF structure naturally lends itself to a fair compromise, half of them are kill alls, and another 4th is ghostable, in a way is not as equitable to those who came for the merits. My attitude as a leader, which I often do, is we ghost what we can, and I announce this during team formation, so if you don't like it, you are free to leave and form one of your own, and no hard feelings.

Please consider we all play this game for fun, what is considered fun, varies from player to player, it is helpful if we try to be mroe accomodating of each other. The level 50 really has no good reason to assist you (unless you are in his super group), so through their participation this TF is possible, a little gratitude towards the level 50 should be accorded...

Now with regards to new Positron, indeed it gives too few merits, its much tougher, has excessive ambushes, and has enough missions between both of them to easily be worth 40 merits as Citadel awards. Unfortunately Devs are stuck with the time in jail for reward mentality and are quick to punish good tactics, teaming and practices. After all would you all not agree that a well put together team, with good leadershp, good tactics and practices would complete the mission/TF faster? And as a result why should this be punished, only because it took less time? Kinda dumb in my opinion...