How long will the exploits go on?

Quite possible. But I've never seen it, only seen references to claims that such a thing once existed.

I'm finding it surprising as well.

As long as protocol between client and server isn't changed they should be able to make changes independedly.

But I think, it is mostly their internal build/QA/publishing policy where rebuild process encompasses all components of the system, instead of only component that need to be fixed.

What I'm affraid, is that devs going to pull "we knew about exploit but weren't able to publish fix due to our HOLY internal policy" card again, rant about "moral compass" and blame players for exploiting hole left in the game for the weeks.

IMO, if they trully considered this exploit as game breaking, they could have shut down AE altogether. At least they didn't have any problems shutting down market for 4-5 days until fix was ready when they discovered one player duping LotGs 7.5%.

Abusing Mission Architect

Herein lies the rub between the differing opinions on the topic, you're implying that having perhaps many players in AE (which is usually empty on many servers), who may say something in chat (also may not, according to eyewitness feedback in this thread), will lead to driving all good intentioned fun seekers fleeing these buildings like the plague.


Even on Freedom, I believe there are AE's in more then Atlas Park, should a player be crowd-averse.


Donald Trump will tell you that "there's no such thing as bad publicity", whether players are going to reward your arc is up to you, and wishing that the hundreds of thousands of mostly bad, mostly sloppy, and many farming pcm's, would both stop and disappear, is, not even wishful thinking. It's unsoundness of mind sufficient to incapacitate one for civil transactions.




Anyway, I19 will drop tomorrow and this feud will be relived another day, yawn. See you next round.


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Also was follow up thread http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=130420

The goat digested logic and reason, along with the teachers notepad.

Honestly didn't mean to. The posts kind of blended together in my head due to the great deal of amusement the Morally Justified crowd kept bringing and the cat analogy sort of railroaded where I was aiming; your views are more than reasonable.
That and I was partially annoyed at my original point of "Guys...it's the same ****, just a different pile. Get over it (and yourselves) and let the devs deal with it when they get to it" being attacked under some accusation of trying to hold on to my apparent last bastion of 'sploiting teh xpz.

I would dispute that. Being proud of your fanfiction doesn't make it good. Fanfiction Fridays on Topless Robot can attest to that.

Then again, I find arcs like The Footsteps Initiative extremely irritating because they encompass everything I hate about above-average writers who are making a bad attempt at being funny (it's hard to describe...but if I were to try... the arc makes me feel like the author is reading over my shoulder, laughing at their own jokes). As such, my views on quality in the AE system are probably very separate from most.

It's a 6+ year old game on an engine that was outdated when the game was released. Issues abound.

I thought your post originally said it was because it 'wasn't any good'. I very well may have read that wrong(or you changed it). That was what my comment was responding to.

Sorry for the confusion. I would go back and edit the post, but that may just cause even more confusion for others reading it.

Oh man, I'd totally forgotten about BADGEPOCALYPSE.

Lawlz.

Hopefully, yes

That actually turned out quite well, because it led to the devs re-evaluating some of the older badges that had insane requirements for them too.

The world is indeed rife with hacks who're Shakespeare in their own minds.

But it's been my experience that I get a vastly better payoff from arcs in sigs and forum threads than I do from plucking them more or less randomly from the search window.

Lisar's statement here amuses me somewhat, enough to post about it, anyway.

"We got told from release not to abuse AE or bad things will happen to us why are we all in shock and awe when weeks later we are doing it and we get our hands smacked?"

Because they have only themselves to blame. This game is constructed on a philosophy of "late blooming sets" and "slowly unraveling plotlines" and "higher level hazard zones" that promise much but demand too much as well, or return nothing, as in the case of the Shadow Shard and other enormous wastes of funding and programmer time.

In my experience, farms are the only thing that has kept me playing this game, mostly because I can't stand how feeble, uninteresting, and painful low level play is. There is no other mechanic than "beat on stuff". No real crafting, no real environment to interact with...nothing. For it's era, that was fun, but any more there needs to be more to it, much more.

What's interesting is that this is the ONLY MMO I get this impression from. It's not fun at levels below 32. At all. In fact, I haven't (until this last week, ironically) played a character at those levels as a general rule. It's frustrating, not engaging, boring, and work. I play this game to entertain myself. Not to have a third job.

Back years and years ago when this game was new and the MMO industry was much younger, we were much more forgiving of a game's shortcomings. This has gotten to be true less and less as we have watched technology just steamroll right past this game and a few others that were very popular in their time.

Farming offers me a way to circumnavigate the laughably bad "plot" and ignore the grind grind grind of newspaper/radio missions, which are a poor substitute for real content. Since this game's developers and programmers refuse to offer ANYTHING in the way of real content, I don't see the issue with me finding a way to make the game enjoyable enough to keep paying for my accounts and keep generating revenue for it to continue to fail me. And the vocal few screaming about how "the marketz are being rooned!", I can say only that the tools exist for them to redress this issue in the same manner everyone else does. Get your commons with tickets, it takes ten minutes to have hundreds of them. Otherwise, welcome to the other side of the fence, where people are going to belittle and harass you for not playing the game their way. I've been dealing with it for years as I waited for real content to be added and it never was. Here and there I got an hours worth of task force every year or two, and a zone no one ever uses or two, but other than that, pretty much nil since launch. And GR, an expansion I paid for that offers really... nothing of interest or value aside from a vague promise of "more to come" that I've been choking on for years. More to come.. when? And will it be something other than the same tired rehashed and then rehashed again Freedom Phalanx characters that I've grown to hate with unmatched intensity? If the hamfisted Incarnate storyline is any indication, it's not something I'm overly eager about in any case.

What's ironic is that with DC Online marketing to a lower IQ bracket, the NCSoft folks should be taking a very, very close look at the niche of people that won't under any circumstance be looking into that diseased abortion. Right now, the base community of CoH seems to be RPers, people that love the costume creator too much to leave, and a small hard core group of PvPers that against all odds (and common sense, it seems) have found the dedication to make this game work for them. Instead of puking out ridiculously poor "content" (as with the Alpha Strike 'plotline') they would be wise to consider updating the graphcs in a meaningful fashion instead of a hopelessly overcomplex retooling utra mode that didn't really improve much. I mean really, its been seven years and I STILL DON'T HAVE FINGERS. I have fleshy meat mittens. Not that difficult to figure out.

So, instead of wasting time and effort pointing out the excesses of the playerbase and this latest farming craze , which would pass on it's own most likely, soon enough, resources need to instead be allocated to figuring out what needs to be focused on, the players that have stayed for years and years, despite this game's many, many flaws. The BASE BUILDERS. THE ROLEPLAYERS. I'm not talking about the creepy catgirl ERP nonsense,the actual roleplayers that are and have always been the backbone of this game's community, behind the vast majority of community events and interaction.

Instead of complaining about the farmers, fix the reasons it is vitally necessary for them to farm. Fix the prestige gulf. The cost of base building is absolutely, unforgivably stupid. It needs to be addressed, and would take very little real time or effort to do so, and yet for years it has remained in limbo.

This, like many other things in this game, is what drives people to farm for prestige, farm for influence (since the developers thought putting a cap on how much could be charged for an item was a no-go as was suggested when the market was born), farm for tickets for salvage since the low level game is a nightmare to play for many of us. Address these issues before chopping out the means of resolving them.

Or don't and limp along slowly dying off as more and more people get fed up and move on to better games. Oh, of course, I forgot, this game has MILLIONS of subscribers, and more joining every day, it's population is HUGE and still growing!

Closing, I suppose this had turned into one of those pissed off rants that annoy when I read them from other people, but reading this entire thread has just irritate me to no end. This game has much, much bigger problems we've continued to pretend not to notice than the players trying to make the game something interesting enough to stay logged into.

/end sarcastic overview and analysis


<---The above is written after reading this entire thread and getting tired of the CoH Forum Apologists trying to pin the imbalances and their usage on the players instead of the development team, who very likely instigated this whole thing to begin with in order generate enough interest and higher level characters to actually USE the alpha strike expansion.

Deleting this thread would take some incredibly stupid reasoning and logic.

You just blew my mind.

Would there be any benefits to the game by allowing farming to happen in a controlled manner once and a while?

No, no,

not the thread, just my posts. Evidently I am past the point of patience where I can express myself in a non inflammatory manner anymore. When I post it usually lasts about an hour. I'm tired of the forum community not drawing due attention to the issues that require it and instead turning this board into a masturbatory self aggrandizing newbhate fest that drives new players away in droves.

Absolutely. In the short term, it refreshes the market when things get a little out of hand, as well as creating a surplus of items that carry it for up to a year afterwards.

Good for you, but the issue is exploits not farms. You can farm till you're blue in the face. If the devs were against farming they'd simply make missions non-repeatable by adding timers.

Just because all exploits get farmed does not mean that all farms are exploits.

The exploit abusers tried to hide amongst the legitimate farming population last year and scare them into thinking the devs hated farming. The farmers weren't stupid enough to fall for it then and they aren't falling for it now.

That is win right there.

I wonder as well, where these streams of new players just starting the game are coming from. From the posts I have seen and listening to some of these people, this farm is the greatest recruiting tool in the history of MMO's.

If the farms don't get fixed for a couple more weeks CoX will have subscription numbers to rival WoW. That is if the fables of the mass of new players just starting and stumbling into AE farms are accurate.

May I ask what the difference is between legitimate farming and an exploit? I don't read the forums much, so I'm not exactly sure if we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about AE missions that are made to just kill enemies, make $$$, and don't offer any storyline like the "traditional" missions in the game.

The exploit being discussed is a situation were you can deliberately configure parameters on an AE mission so that a particular enemy that is normally Underling level delivers many times the XP it should. The one time I experienced it, out of curiosity, my lvl 1 character gained 4 levels on the first pull.

The difference is that a farm is much like a player created version of a scanner/paper mission. A map with a group of enemies that you beat up for rewards. The enemy type may be selected to take advantage of player character strengths and/or enemy weaknesses. Sort of how many scanner/paper teams tend to go for missions with factions like Council and Freakshow. The farm enemies gives rewards within the normal ranges for the speed and safety with which the enemies can be defeated.

Exploits use flaws in game mechanics or coding to earn rewards many times greater than normal for the time and challenge of the enemies being faced.

Edit: It's worth noting that for many skilled players time is far more relevant than risk. Most of the time the player has little chance of being defeated since they know what their limits are in regards to how many or how powerful the enemies are that they can successfully defeat at one time, so the real limiter is how much xp per minute defeating enemies within their capabilities will give.

Psychic Guardian, are you really suggesting that participating in a leveling treadmill or exploit "with a goal in mind" differentiates a player from a cheater?

Major_Control, are you suggesting that rule-breaking behavior should no longer be considered cheating once there is a wide consensus among those players who chose to participate in such behaviors?

You're both of the opinion that abusing exploits isn't and shouldn't be considered cheating. Do you think the devs would agree with your perception of the issue? And does this mean you disagree (with Paragon Studios and NCSoft) about the importance of the risk/reward ratio that has taken them years to achieve and balance? Also, what do you think SHOULD be considered cheating?

You both seem to think exploit abusers (I'll respectfully avoid the term "cheaters" as you requested) should be left alone by "Purity Police", a derogatory term that applies to some players at least. When you use that term, are you also referring to Paragon Studios? Also, do you believe using such terminology is the best, most mature way to present your arguments to Paragon Studios?

Major_Control, you suggested implementing a farming label for mission arcs in AE that are intended to be used as leveling treadmills or exploit abuses. The overall tone of both yours and Psychic Guardian's posts implies that exploit abusers actually feel VICTIMIZED by subscribers who play by the rules and avoid abusing exploits (this is where the term "Purity Police" comes in). This is interesting, because I doubt many of us would have suspected that. But let me turn that around: do you think people who play by the rules may feel similarly victimized by players who DON'T play by the rules and enjoy abusing exploits?