How long will the exploits go on?
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2010-11-24 20:30 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Hehe, if I am right in reading the little bit of information regarding Ironic's playstyle and usage of the word "grinding", I'd say it is mostly an aspect of pace in one's playstyle (And a matter of over-all playstyle, taste and enjoyment).
I can understand calling what Uberguy is posting about there as grinding.
Grinding is keeping your nose to the grindstone, pressing the pedal to the metal... Getting (close to) as much out of your time as you can.
Nothing wrong with grinding if you enjoy it, but there's also nothing wrong with not enjoying that and not doing it.
I'm a pretty casual player (by my own standards, at least), so I can relate.
However, I've never found myself in trouble in this game, financially.
I may have just been lucky...
Most importantly... I've never slotted a single IO set. So, I guess that could be it.
Although, I do equip my characters with Standard IOs, often times throughout their careers to 50 (I prefer to craft and slot than to keep buying and replacing SOs).
I will say this, Ironik... Slot some Standard IOs or just SOs in that 50!!!
What're ya doing? 
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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See, if someone says 'grinding' to me, I think more about all that stuff I do to drag a character up to 50. Once they're there (or, at least, over ~45), I can stop thinking about how efficiently I'm making progress in terms of XP, and start playing them in whatever content takes my fancy at the time. It's really all just personal taste.
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Originally Posted by Ironik
My Influence issues almost certainly stem from my playstyle: multiple alts which I play in round-robin fashion and casual "a few hours per week" play. I also tend to "retire" my toons once they hit 50, rarely bringing them out since there's no advancement beyond getting badges, and I have the badges I want on my first couple 50s. Do you play a single character for more than 15 hours a week? Is he level 50? Are you grinding content over and over again? If so, you are the opposite of me
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Defiant @Grouchybeast
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Let me tell you how I play Ironik. I've over 100 characters and I usually play a different character each time. When I start a new one out, I play AE story arcs (not farms or exploits) until L7. I've done the regular low-level content so many times I don't want to run it anymore anyway. |
Originally Posted by Ironik
Yeah, see that style of play would bore me until I shot myself. I just like to take alts through different paths to 50, then start over once they get there.
So I maintain the only way to get a bunch of Influence is to farm or grind. Grinding is what Uberguy is doing there, plain and simple. Whether you call that exploiting or just plain old deadly dull is a personal call. |
At L7, I buy bronze rolls with my tickets. I've only once ever not gotten at least a couple recipes I can craft and sell for a few million. Right now none of my characters between 7 and 10th level have less than 5 million, and I start IOing out at 7th level, so that's after buying everything I need and crafting it.
I generally pick up another 5 to 10 million with one or two random merit rewards and/or more bronze rolls before level 20. After that, I get my first hero merit, roll 5 random recipes, pull between 20 and 100 million out of it by crafting and selling the good recipes. (I haven't really noted an average, but 20 million is the least I've ever made).
So, by running missions (and I never farm a mission, unless you consider running tip missions every 5 or 10 levels to be farming) without doing any marketing other than buying what I need for myself and selling crafted drops and random rolls, I IO out my characters every 10 levels and have over 100 million cash on hand on everyone over level 25. I've even been dumping influence into my alts only SGs.
Further, the only thing I can't afford on the market are procs, and the fact is, if I want one bad enough then I can "farm" a couple hero merits. Usually I just don't bother with procs unless I get one I actually want on a drop. (Of course, you do need to not have the "buy it now" attitude and be willing to wait a bit, which is pretty easy for me since I may not get around to playing that character again for weeks).
Now, I'll never buy purples or PvP recipes with this strategy, but, so far, whether I'm outfitting a level 20 or a level 46, the only obstacle to getting every IO I want (other than procs) has been availability. No grinding, no farming, no marketeering (unless you consider buying your needs and selling your drops marketeering).
@Doctor Gemini
Arc #271637 - Welcome to M.A.G.I. - An alternative first story arc for magic origin heroes. At Hero Registration you heard the jokes about Azuria always losing things. When she loses the entire M.A.G.I. vault, you are chosen to find it.
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This is what I do. I get everything at buy it nao prices.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Or to put it simply: impatient people with lots of cash will pay ridiculous prices for stuff if they can have it now.
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In order to equip four level 50 toons with the 2 purple IO sets each... 19.2 billion. Roughly. (Assuming an average of 400 million per recipe.)
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Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
How much ya need?
 |
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
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Whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis? I did. |
Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
I will say this, Ironik... Slot some Standard IOs or just SOs in that 50!!!
What're ya doing? |
I respecced her about a month ago, slotting in SOs and crafting generic IOs as they come along. She just got her Alpha slot tonight and got a single SO drop the entire arc. Science. Bleh. Got a couple IOs she couldn't use and no one was buying at WW. So I bought a whole bunch of IOs (you can always tell when I've been through the market because everything I buy ends in "117") and then sold them. Earned about 50k or so. Did the doppelganger arc with a friend, logged her out.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
Been away for the holiday, so apologies for coming a bit late to the thread.
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You say this, Tex, and I agree. But it seems that a distressingly (to me, anyway) large portion of the playerbase defines success and victory not as triumphing over in-game enemies, but by defeating and outsmarting the Devs ... in the sense that grinding away at an arc made by someone else, based on an exploit found by someone else, counts as either.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
To hear some people tell it, they deserve a medal for pulling one over on the devs. How ridiculous.
Our relationship with the game developers is not adversarial. They are not our enemies. Nor are they some kind of angry, cheapskate god that leaves us starving for experience, forced to scrounge for every illicit scrap of it we can spirit away from them. |
(Congratulations, AE d00dz. You can follow instructions, remember a number, push certain buttons in order, and happen to know someone who knows someone who knows about the latest hax. Except for that last one, that puts you at about the level of a trained chimp. A WINNER IS YOU!)
To these people, reaching level 50 or the inf cap is, on its own, not nearly as satisfying as the thought of having "beaten the Devs at their own game" by finding a way to reach the goal faster, or just in a different way than intended (but preferably both). To them, it is adversarial. They aren't fighting Council or Longbow, they're fighting Paragon Studios, with points scored in how much they can get away with and for how long. And since there are more of them than there are Devs and GMs, and Paragon is understandably reluctant to just banhammer all of them or admit that AE has largely failed in its intended role and take it out again until it can be made so (as they did with the CoP, and probably won't ever again), the balance is usually in their favor.
The game that you and I (try to) play and enjoy is just the board for the other game. Move, countermove.
My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City
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I've been proposing something similar to that for set IOs a long while now. I think the levels of individual IOs should disappear entirely, while the level ranges of sets should remain. Instead of 21 versions of Touch of Death: Acc/Dam, from level 20 up to level 40, there would just be one. One that you can start to slot at 17, enhances by the table at whatever your current combat level or 40 (whichever is lower), and contributes to set bonuses as long as your combat level is 17 or higher. Get rid of the lose/lose choice of having weaker enhancing at 50 or no set bonuses when you exemp, get rid of the situation of a level 34 IO being worth an order of magnitude less than the level 50, increase the effective supply of every IO by significant amount, and make it easier both to buy and to sell - instead of guessing which level of Miracle +Recovery is going to go on sale and putting up a bid for that, or spreading smaller bids among multiple levels, there's only one to bid on.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I have often wondered if inventions should stop, or rather start, at about level 25. Which is to say, if you get a drop when you are level 12, it will be a level 25 drop. If you craft it, you will be able to slot it, but it will function as a level 12. As you level, it will scale up with you until level 25, when it will stop at its native level. This would make it much more beneficial to craft and slot inventions below level 25: it would be a slot it and forget it until at least level 25, and level 25 inventions (single aspect) are natively about as strong as SOs and don't expire.
It would basically kill off TOs, DOs, and SOs except as filler enhancements for slots that don't have inventions yet, but I'm ok with that. It would also eliminate all those low level weirdos that no one uses, but I'm ok with that also.The fact that level 25s would never disappear under exemplar actually creates a strong incentive to slot them: they would be a weird analog to purples. In fact, this is so useful a feature that the cutoff might need to be level 20 rather than 25, so they are slightly less strong than a standard SO natively. |
I think that'd make things a lot friendlier, but such claims have so far fallen on deaf ears.
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My Arcs: #4827: Earth For Humans. #6391: Young Love.
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I'm curious: What do you do with your salvage? |
Originally Posted by Ironik
Whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis? I did.
I respecced her about a month ago, slotting in SOs and crafting generic IOs as they come along. She just got her Alpha slot tonight and got a single SO drop the entire arc. Science. Bleh. Got a couple IOs she couldn't use and no one was buying at WW. So I bought a whole bunch of IOs (you can always tell when I've been through the market because everything I buy ends in "117") and then sold them. Earned about 50k or so. Did the doppelganger arc with a friend, logged her out. |
Because for me, the inf that I get for actually killing stuff often pales in comparison to what I get selling salvage on the market (and I don't mean listing everything at 1 and praying, I mean listing it close to the current values and coming back the next day).
@Quantum Evil Rad/Rad Corruptor
Making the world safe for maleficent particles since 2004.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I give the short version answer to that question in the paragraph immediately following the one you quote, where I am very specific in saying the problem isn't the influence flow per se, but what it would be symptomatic of, which is essentially an abandonment of the red side markets of sellers. If that is the case, then the merge was practically meaningless: it just means rich red side players have more stuff to occasionally buy. But it also means villain-side market participation is effectively below a meaningful level. And that means even after the merge, the market isn't beneficially serving the villain side to the same degree as it is the hero side. In fact, its essentially not serving its original purpose at all.
I'm sure someone will come along soon to say "so what" so I'll anticipate that by saying: this would only be meaningful to game designers, and people who think on time scales longer than a month. The fact that there are potentially many ways to breathe liquidity life back into the markets that would primarily benefit hero side but may not be strong enough to have any effect on the red side is intellectually troubling to me. It means what you could have solved with a light tap in the right direction may now require a sledgehammer. And I hate sledgehammer solutions. |
I just don't understand what a "red side player" is. I can see how that used to be a useful category, but now it doesn't seem like it is. Maybe I'm not typical about this (but highly doubt it) but my money and enhancements are free flowing between all of my characters, red, blue, rogue or vigilante. If my hero acquires something it's as a good as my villain having acquired it. It's as if all of my characters are in a super group together, trading IOs among each other.
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I might be slow also but I don't get what she's getting at. To me once they merged the markets and allowed folks to switch sides, there's NO NEED for any further solutions, sledgehammer or not. I long ago stopped looking at my characters as heroes or villains.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I just don't understand what a "red side player" is. I can see how that used to be a useful category, but now it doesn't seem like it is. Maybe I'm not typical about this (but highly doubt it) but my money and enhancements are free flowing between all of my characters, red, blue, rogue or vigilante. If my hero acquires something it's as a good as my villain having acquired it. It's as if all of my characters are in a super group together, trading IOs among each other.
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The devs just caught up to my way of seeing my superpowered toons with Issue 18/GR.
EDIT: Thinking about this more, it appears that she is talking about it from pure game theory and game designer interest. That's all well and good, but I'd tell anyone going to design another game with factions that separating the factions so that they can't trade or sell to each other is a brain-dead, mind numbingly stupid idea in a new game with a similar player population size as this one.
You can get away with it in a game with the size of a certain other mmo's population [who's acronym rhymes with mom
], but not with one with a small enough size that any significant number of people logging in for one faction means the entire opposite faction just doesn't exist at any given time.The fact that the devs quickly decided that creating YET another silly faction via the Preatoria players was a stupid idea, and simply merged ALL the sides during GR beta speaks volumes.
Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
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I can't even see your original comment's goalposts from where I'm standing reading this post.|
Originally Posted by Ironik
Yeah, see that style of play would bore me until I shot myself. I just like to take alts through different paths to 50, then start over once they get there.
So I maintain the only way to get a bunch of Influence is to farm or grind. Grinding is what Uberguy is doing there, plain and simple. Whether you call that exploiting or just plain old deadly dull is a personal call. |
Your original claim was that the only way to hit the inf cap was to use exploits. That claim is wildly false. It doesn't matter one bit if the non-exploitative ways of doing so are boring to you. They remain non-exploitative.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I too am unclear on the basis of the concern about the "red" economy. Given that currency on both sides is identical and freely mobile between sides, and both share a common market. I'm not even sure what a "side" is from a market perspective any more.
The only issues I can see are those relating to whether you have access to content that produces comparable reward rates over an appropriate range of expected playstyles and/or teammates. That could certainly be a problem, especially teammates.
Edit: To be clear, the above means I'd be interested in learning more, not that I dismiss the notion.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Now I'm confused.|
Originally Posted by Ironik
In order to equip four level 50 toons with the 2 purple IO sets each... 19.2 billion. Roughly. (Assuming an average of 400 million per recipe.)
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If you don't play your 50s, why do you want to bother putting expensive IOs in them?
If you do play your 50s, then just play them in whatever content you're planning to play, and the expensive IOs will come with time. I can't think of much game content that doesn't provide a pretty decent return on play time at 50.
Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
It's not there's anything wrong with not having a red economy so much as not having a red economy is an indicator of something wrong with red side.
I think Arcana is saying that if there's no red economy, then there's something wrong with red side.
I think.
imvho
ymmv
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Except that it's all one economy now. It doesn't matter where I do my shopping. ALL my characters benefit.
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Originally Posted by all_hell
It's not there's anything wrong with not having a red economy so much as not having a red economy is an indicator of something wrong with red side.
I think Arcana is saying that if there's no red economy, then there's something wrong with red side. I think. imvho ymmv |
Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
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They all get the benefit of the economy. That's true. A lot of what people have been saying about these comments are true.|
Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
Except that it's all one economy now. It doesn't matter where I do my shopping. ALL my characters benefit.
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But I don't think it's the point that's being made.
If no one playing red side, then there's something wrong with red side. I think that's the point. The market is just an indicator, not a cause.
At least I think thats what Arcana's saying.
But adjustments to redside now also affect blue side as well. So tweaks to redside are trickier because they affect so much more.
Hey, you know what?
We better not fix this flat tire because someday the radiator might give out. Best to do nothing and sit here by the side of the road.
Sure, it makes no practical sense, but we maintain our philosophical purity and that's what really counts.
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Then riddle me this, bolded for emphasis: why do we have a "handy player tip" loading-screen which informs us "YOU CAN LEVEL FROM 1 TO 50 INSIDE THE MISSION ARCHITECT," or words to that effect?|
Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
People on both sides of this argument have some points. But this quote of yours is a bit of a misrepresentation of the side opposite your argument. It would have been more accurate to say "..for anyone who does not use AE as it was intended to be used." Paragon Studios has been clear from the start about AE's purpose as a content creation tool. It was never intended to be used as a leveling treadmill, and in fact, such use of AE is counter to the stated goal of Paragon Studios to maintain a risk/reward ratio that has taken years to achieve.
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That's pretty damned misleading. If the AE is not for leveling, they better pull that tip-screen down ASAP. If you can get your character deleted for leveling 1-50 in there, they BETTER pull it down. Because that statement, without any qualification in place, is not only misleading but outright entrapment! A more truthful statement ought to be a warning that AE foolishness can get your toon *deleted,* and it should pop up every time you zone into an AE mish.
Or just strip all the rewards, and let people savor AE missions as if they are the bouquet of an incredibly rare fine wine... as they are supposed to be, it is not about rewards but about fine storytelling!
Ha.
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| So instead of debating on whether some forumites are overreacting, maybe the REAL question here is whether you think Paragon Studios should revise its stance regarding leveling treadmills (farms). |
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| The introduction of AE and subsequent farms never impacted my playstyle. Such is my stubbornness that I continued to play my way irrespective of any changes to the game. Therefore I'm quite distanced from all of this. And being a neutral party with an unformed opinion, I'd appreciate seeing reasonable arguments rather than misrepresentations. |
This thread needs to die. The Monkey Farm is dead.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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The hatred of different playstyles espoused by many in this thread is anything BUT dead, and you can take that to the bank. It'll rear its ugly head again next time someone figures out a shortcut.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
This thread needs to die. The Monkey Farm is dead.
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A failure of "red side economy" would be a large indicator that something was wrong with villians. A continual movement to blue side would make villain only content more difficult to play. The sides must be relatively stabilized or the game must be fully opened.
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Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
Except that it's all one economy now. It doesn't matter where I do my shopping. ALL my characters benefit.
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Personally, I don't think there is any way to stabilize the two sides without completely scrapping the Rogue Isles and doing away with the whole "Arachnos stooge" concept. When you're a villain, surrounded by villains, in a land run by villains, there's not much point to being a villain.
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Originally Posted by LISAR
A failure of "red side economy" would be a large indicator that something was wrong with villians. A continual movement to blue side would make villain only content more difficult to play. The sides must be relatively stabilized or the game must be fully opened.
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@Doctor Gemini
Arc #271637 - Welcome to M.A.G.I. - An alternative first story arc for magic origin heroes. At Hero Registration you heard the jokes about Azuria always losing things. When she loses the entire M.A.G.I. vault, you are chosen to find it.
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Kinda makes you wonder what the suicide rate would be in the Isles.
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Originally Posted by Doctor_Gemini
Personally, I don't think there is any way to stabilize the two sides without completely scrapping the Rogue Isles and doing away with the whole "Arachnos stooge" concept. When you're a villain, surrounded by villains, in a land run by villains, there's not much point to being a villain.
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Come on now children, I19 has dropped, the latest farm du jour is squashed,
don't take all the steam out of the next round of complaining by dragging out this one.
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