How long will the exploits go on?

I tend to act more like 16 myself...but I can see where mob mentality would further reduce this.

You may also reference the Issue 14 release notes.

Most - not all, but most - versions of the exploit I ran across were level 19-25. This means that if you entered at level 1, you'd be SKed up to level 19 (assuming that you're not teamed with a higher level person). When you hit 19 and level again, the mission is still level 19, but you are now 20, then 21, 22, 23, 24 and finally 25, fighting level 19 foes (who are 6 levels below you and therefore granting no XP).

As has been said in the past. "farming" is NOT the issue here.
If someone runs the same mission over and over and over (and over and over (oh, did I mention over and over?)) again, the devs have no problem with that.

None.

Zip.

Zero.

Zilch.

The problem comes from "abuse of exploits". The game is relatively vast, with thousands upon thousands of data points that can be combined in myriad ways. It's quite beyond the ability of any one person to track ALL of the possible permutations (though I'm sure Arcana would try, given the opportunity). As such, occasional fat-fingers in values, multipliers, etc happen. Or someone finds a particular permutation that gives statistically greater rewards for less risk. Hence the old Rikti Dolls, Mitos, All Boss/EB/AV, etc, etc.

Now looking for the best "bang for the buck" of your time is NATURAL. Hence the over-use of Demon/Freak/Battle Maiden farms of old.

But abusing the exploits goes WELL beyond this. Yes, with these other farms, it was easy to make gigantic level bumps in short order. But using some of the aforementioned (as well as the current) exploit, it's possible to level between 2 and 10x PER MISSION.

THEN there's a problem. And the devs have to deal with it. Have to. If they don't, eventually even the

I am saying that this should not be the top issue on the list. It's fascinating that we have all these people on the forums eagerly decrying their fellow players as 'cheaters' and 'exploiters' and they have their knickers in a bunch over farming, but we can't get them to show in equal numbers for trying to get the game improved or upgraded. WHY? Really. Why.

Yes and no. I don't notice YOUR level 50 beating up grey-con mobs for fun and profit in Atlas Park. People in this game (hell, anywhere) have a tendency to seek the most profitable return on their time. Yeah, the exploit farm takes that a bit far but hey.

Uhm. Bovine feces.




Uhm. Way to wring the worst possible explanation there. They don't want people leveling overnight, buying all the high-end ultra-rare equipment the next night, then leaving the game the night after that complaining that it's "too easy".

The game is SUPPOSED to be a time sink. Bypassing it with an AE exploit is NOT playing the game as intended. It has jack and squat to do with jealousy or whatever other BS you're trying to shovel.

As you have nothing but your own, obviously biased opinion on this subject, we'll file it where it'll do the most good.





And, even if you were right (which would have to be completely accidental), the argument still holds. We want the new player to experience the WHOLE game. Not just exploit-farm du jour.

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That's ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult. You just don't know what you're saying.

I have posts in the Market forum showing how I'm creating about 150M inf every 10 days playing a level 50 Scrapper, solo, doing door missions on middling-high difficulty settings. The character is a DM/Regen. If it was better at AoE, the numbers would likely be higher.

And that's raw inf created. That assumes I never sell anything on the market. Selling very modest drops (5-10M inf sales apiece) has earned me about another 100M over the same time period.

At that rate, I would hit the inf cap, completely solo, in around 2 and a half months of play.

There's data in the post to back up these rates. I pulled the numbers from my own chat logs. If you turn on chat logging it logs rewards, too. Actually, I rounded my numbers up here, the pace derived in my posts is actually slightly faster.

This is a rather moderate pace of earning. If I earned merits and sold stuff, if I regularly played the market for money, or if I attended regular RWZ raids or hell, even large teams, I would earn money faster.

So please, lay off the claims that the only people hitting the inf cap could be exploiting something to do so. It's not even close to true.

Uh....they added an economy.

=P

Farming is an inherent quality of the genre, or rather an instinctive response many gamers have to challenges or goals. Give a group of gamers a goal and they will find efficient, repeatable ways to accomplish it. You can intend exactly the opposite, but oh well, there it is anyway.

As with a lot of stuff dev intent is irrelevant- to belabor my car metaphor, you can intend people to push it around the block as a grueling physical workout, but if you leave the keys in the ignition they're gonna peel out for Vegas. Posi intended for players to use MA one way, but the reward structure guaranteed it would be farmed six ways to Sunday.

So you can say they never deliberately yadda yadda yadda....so?
They made an MMO, the farming follows directly and inevitably from that.

What I'm referring to worked a bit different.

Without getting into the details, I'm not sure why you'd want to set to +4x8 at level one, unless you were sitting at the door while something else cleared the mission. If you're doing it solo, which is how I have been testing, there's no advantage to scaling to +4, and you won't be in the mission long enough for x8 to be meaningful. I'm not even sure if its ever a good idea to set for x8, because you might end up skewing the mission towards bosses and Lts which would fill up spawn allocation points.

Setting higher than even might be helpful, but I'm not sure if its helpful to go all the way up to +4. At +4, you might be forced to use two attacks when one would do, especially AoEs, which effectively slows you down by 50%. The bonus XP doesn't compensate for that.

This is how farms hurt people. Poor, poor Munki.



Random picture, because I think its funny and fits the exploit-the-AE mantra:

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See, now you know why I want Miller Lite and tequila!

This.

None of the missions I tested worked that way. They allowed me to enter at level 1, without scaling me up to 19. If there are others that force you to autoSK to 19, that would be even better than the versions I saw, although it would be all moot within a few minutes either way.

It can be tricky to detect these sorts of missions in real time, but I think I have an idea for how the devs could unequivocally detect an exploit mission in the AE which would *always* locate exploits about a certan level, and *never* accidentally trigger on a mission that did not have exploits. Its not as simple as just looking for a mission that gives a lot of XP, or even a lot of XP fast. If you fight four AVs for ten minutes, you can still get a big burst of XP within a small one minute window if you defeat them all at once. I believe I have a solution to that problem that would work in theory. But its a bit tricky, and I'll need to think about it carefully to see if there are any loopholes.

Is your idea one that sharing it publicly would help defeat it?

Because I'm really fascinated by this.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Thanks now I have this mental image of a Munkifarm where all I can see from horizon to horizon is rows and rows of your head growing out of the ground.


Then along comes a farmer in a big John Deere tractor to harvest them.

Since its an exploit detector, potentially yes.

But the fundamental principle is that all XP takes some activity to earn. That activity is highly variable. But if you could find the right set of metrics upon which to measure activity, its possible to correlate an "activity metric" with XP. When there is a huge imbalance between the two, it implies that an exploit is being used. In the case above, while there is a sudden burst of XP as four AVs are suddenly taken down, that is at the end of a huge amount of work in setting them up for eventual defeat by attacking them, debuffing them, controlling them, etc. Theoretically speaking, that could be measured.

But there are lots of ways to defeat something or otherwise earn XP, and the trick is measuring the right set of things that collectively always happen whenever XP is earned, no matter what the circumstances. Conversely, those metrics should be things that can't be faked without doing more work than it would take to simply earn XP normally. If you could do that, then even if the devs themselves make a mistake and allow AE authors to construct missions that earn dramatically huge XP, it will almost certainly break this balance metric and generate an alarm.

Sounds simple, but it actually isn't, because so many things can be faked if you knew it would help your rewards. AE authors, as we've seen, will find and exploit any loophole in the reward system that exists, so the metrics would need to work independently of the devs deliberately making them work. They have to represent something intrinsic about the nature of earning rewards normally.

Interesting. To be honest if that's how the Devs wanted the badge system to work they probably shouldn't have put in accolade powers that buff people's characters. Ah well, it is what it is I suppose. I will continue to be amused by the hate aimed at anyone farming for drops. Doing so is such a staple of the MMO genre and present in practically every other MMO I've played. I just can't understand the absolute hate so many have for it here.

Originally Posted by Edgar Allan Poe I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Sorry, but you're going to have to settle for a warm Schlitz and Lime Mad Dog.

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I drank some Mad Dog once. Once. Never again.