worst misinformation?

I dunno about that. Mine does.

For many this is true.
This, my friend, IS true.

um, that one is true. it does, and it sucks.

Ooh, I forgot about that one. I always enjoyed that one.

That's a new one. We need shooped pictures of that, as of now.

Actually there are many ways to get rich on the market where that isn't true. Also overpaying is subjective. I don't think I am overpaying if it gets me back into the game faster even if I did pay 1 million for a common piece of salvage.

I am too busy to pay rock bottom prices for salvage. Happily, there are people who are too busy to pay rock bottom prices for my IOs.

Sorry for the delay, but I'm vacationing in Vancouver, and the wendigos are particularly thick this morning.

While I'm here, I'll remind everyone that Twilight Guardian #1 is due out next week, knock on wood. For every copy you buy, it extends your life by a year.




Well, OK, that's not true. But it'll make you WISH you had another year of life so that you could read it THAT much longer...

First post after Hickman.

Indeed, we're talking about Monopoly money here anyway; it has no intrinsic value beyond acquiring shinies for a character. If you have more on a character than you have need then bargain hunting doesn't make a lot of sense.

Frankly when I have a half billion plus inf on a character who's already fully slotted out I don't worry about paying 100 or 100,000 inf for that piece of salvage I need; it's all a tiny fraction of the inf I have available and I generate about 10 million per hour of just playing the game. I think nearly all of my 50's have a bare minimum of 300,000,000 inf and several are in the Billion club.

I'm perfectly willing to pay for the shinies I want and the people selling their shinies are perfectly willing to take my inf in exchange. Exactly who's loosing? John Q Newplayer with his level 13 character gets a piece of salvage drop that he sells on WW to me; I pay him enough for it to fully outfit himself in DO enhancements. As he gets more drops from simply leveling his character he sells them as well and by the time he's ready to think about IO's for his character he has tens of millions of inf sitting there. He's getting rich from me and others like me wanting the stuff he has to sell. Somehow it doesn't sound like he's the "victim" here.

That makes you the sucker.

But I'm the sucker too. I list everything for 11 even if it's a purple, because I don't feel like researching and waiting, or paying market fees. I purchase everything at buy-it-now prices, even if that means 500k for common salvage. Even if I'm about to go to bed immediately following, I'll spend twice as much as the last listed value just so I can craft it and slot it. I have a limit of course. When every single salvage on the market is going for hundreds of thousands, or I can't buy any recipes because they're being flipped, I give up and bid low overnight. And lately I've been doing AE ticket farms so I can get rare salvage instead of paying 5m each on the market.

But I'm the sucker -- someone out there is making money off my impatience.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

As Morbid Star said:

They did give XP at one point. And back then XP was rare and valuable, because XP hadn't been smoothed, Patrol XP didn't exist, and Debt was a lot harsher than it is now. So people would tell others that clicking the glowies would make the trial harder so that others would avoid them... And then would click them themselves for the extra XP.

The devs removed the XP from the glowies way, WAY back, but the rumor has persisted, even to this day.

I think a little clarification is in order here.

First of all, I distinctly remember a dev post a long time ago, probably four years or so now, almost certainly long since pruned, by either Positron or maybe Castle, in which he was specifically asked about farming. His response was that they do not like it when people do the same thing over and over again. The gist of it was that if you're doing something over and over because you enjoy it, that's fine; but if you're doing it over and over just to get stuff (a textbook definition of "farming"), they don't like that.

Second of all, they have repeatedly taken steps in the past to curb farming. Personally, I don't do it so I can't sit here and recite all of the actions taken from memory. But if I'm not mistaken, they have made changes to at least three missions that I know of: the Dreck mission, a Family mission, and a War Wolves mission. Farmers can probably rattle off even more. I also know they've done things like eliminated experience from spawns, such as from the Circle demon portals and the Rikti Communication Officer portals, specifically to prevent farming. They've also nerfed experience from various things (the Krakens come to mind) to prevent farming of high-value enemies. And, of course, don't forget how they removed a crapton of badges from a live build to prevent AE farming. Occasionally, they even take actions that aren't negative, actions that make obtaining farmed rewards significantly easier to effectively do away with farming, such as the substantial reduction--orders of magnitude, in fact--in requirements for healing badges and the Rikti Monkey badge (Zookepper).

Third of all, there is a fine line between "farming" and some types of "exploiting." Whenever the devs comment on AE missions or players notice some change or nerf, there's always a s***storm that brews because of the whole, "How much is too much?" argument. The fact is that the devs have in mind that a player can only earn some amount of reward for some period of time. They may not have exact numbers documented, but they most certainly do react when they think the amounts are too high or the period of time is too short.

Everyone farms at some point. There's always the drive to jump to that next level, get that last shiny, that new thingy, etc. I don't think the devs "hate" that at all, and when done occasionally, it adds excitement. There's also a fine line between farming and simply being an avid player.

But what they do hate, and what they do react to, is when people take it overboard and farm more than they play. It makes the game a boring exercise in tedium (i.e. not fun). It drives away new players who think they'll never be able to catch up. It is a nuisance when the chat channels are filled with nothing "--f lfm" and "--f lft" messages. Most of the obnoxious behavior in the game I've witnessed, such as people being kicked from teams for not going "fast enough," arguments over people's builds, arguments over how people use their powers or how they're not doing something "right," have centered around people farming.

So while I wouldn't say that "the devs hate farming" is absolute truth, I also would not put it in the "misinformation" category. At the very least, it's safe to say that they don't like many types of farming, which has consistently borne out over the years by their comments and actions.

On the other hand, what I would put squarely in the "misinformation" column is the thought process of: "Because the devs haven't nuked/nerfed [whatever], they don't mind it and/or they want us to do it." Just because a dev doesn't stop you from doing something right this second doesn't mean they don't think you're being incredibly stupid or that they won't stop you later once some higher-priority things get taken care of.

Of course you do, because you have a bug up your chimney about this subject.

I'm glad they have telepathy to interpret the players motivation.

And then they went and gave us the ability to solo a mission set for 8. That was one of the biggest boons to farmers imaginable. A reasonable conclusion might be that they have eased up on their dislike of farming. Or perhaps just accepted it as inevitable.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

You're kidding about that I hope? Outside of the lunatic fringe I hope the rest of the players are at least SLIGHTLY smarter than that.

It's hard to call something a 'lousy MM'. Even petless MMs can be useful characters.

By most quantitative measurements, a Merc/TA will be pretty low on the totem pole, but it's still a MM. Presuming a reasonably intelligent build, it's still going to slaughter hordes of enemies.

The only thing that the x8 difficulty did for farmers was remove the need to find fillers. With or without x8, farming teams are going to be running on a map spawned for 8; without the new difficulty setting they're also going to be bothering people who don't want anything to do with farming.

x8 difficulty helps farmers by making it more expedient for them, but I would say it help the non-farmers more, by cutting down on the spam they receive in the form of private tells and blind invites.

Well, it does and it doesn't. When used "correctly", it shouldn't really decrease your overall XP/hour, but it still gives you less XP per individual kill.

Ah, but that assumes the "most logical manner" for everyone to use the markets is to make influence. That's not true. Specifically because influence doesn't have the same value to characters of different levels, and not every player has characters of every level. When a level 50 buys low level common salvage from a level 15 for 100k inf, that level of inf is meaningless to the 50, but a significant amount to the 15. Also, value is highly situational. If I spend a billion inf to buy the last IO I need to soft cap my scrapper, I've benefitted greatly by that transaction but so (presumably) has the player getting the billion: that could theoretically fund a half a dozen medium-grade IO builds.

The efficient market hypotheses don't work on the CoX economy because there isn't a consistent way to value anything. It would be like if a loaf of bread was cheap food for 95% of the population, but in 5% of the population it cured cancer. Imagine if this were true for every frisbee, umbrella, and 747 on Earth.


The markets can theoretically make everyone rich, for some personal definition of rich. It cannot make everyone richer.

When the devs were thinking about making this change, I discussed the ramifications with a red name involved. I specifically stated that (some of) the players would claim this was proof the devs support farming.

This gist of the reply is that what the devs accept as inevitable is the players misreading the devs intentions when it comes to things like farming, even when there are explicit statements to the contrary.

When the setting came out, I made it a point to state that I discussed the devs intentions about this setting, and I was told it was not intended to help or hurt farmers. It was intended to allow players who wanted a wider range of challenge settings to be able to get them without having to resort to things like dual boxing or broadcast spamming for fillers. Spamming for fillers in particular was considered a bad thing, because it gave new players a very bad impression of the game. Of course, anything the devs do to make it easier for players to adjust their difficulty settings will unavoidably help farmers, but that was not the direct intent.

To this date, that public statement seems to carry exactly zero weight, given how often people believe the devs' intentions are still unknown.


You know, if the devs increased the purple drop rate, that would help farmers because they could get and sell more drops. If the devs reduced the purple drop rate, that would help farmers because they could charge more for the drops they farmed. The only way to hurt farmers is to make everything cost one inf and generate an unlimited supply of it for players to buy. In any system where there is limited supply the people with more stuff win. They always win. They cannot lose. That is intentional in the same sense that the devs intentionally made a game with only three spacial dimensions rather than four.


TonyV:

This is true, but there is some context to that statement. What Castle meant, and he elaborated at the time, was that he didn't dislike the conduct of farming, rather he believed that it suggested a potential flaw in the game design. If people are doing the same things over and over because the enjoy them, that is why you become a game designer: to make things people will enjoy playing. If people are doing the same things over and over even though they dislike doing them, just to get the rewards because they think they must have them then that suggests a potential problem.

Some of your players will just be psychotic, and there's no helping that. But in general, you want players to enjoy playing your game. If somehow the game psychologically encourages them to do things they deliberately don't want to do, the game itself is damaging its own players. Again: some of that is unavoidable, some players will torture themselves even in well designed games. But its something to be aware of, and strive to fix.

It is in that sense that I believe Castle "hated farming." To put it colorfully, Castle believed that players should farm entertainment not rewards.