Risk = Reward, yes?

IF we got level shifts beyond Alpha, I'm sure the devs will do something to balance it. They're not total idiots.

You're stronger than them. How is it unfair that you can fight stronger enemies?

It's not a matter of NPC's it is a matter of other players.

Let's say you can roll at +4 with your tank. Your rolling through and plowing with no issues at all.

I go on my support corr, and only able to really excel at even con. So with your plus for you get a higher chance not just for shards, but for purples, and other drops. While I just get the normal rate.

It would not be totally for for the other PCs, which would push the idea, the game is going away from the casual player (in hindsight of other threads which are cropping up). Which would put a divide in the player base.

Also how can you gauge risk? I saw a guy that was soloing +8's. How do you gauge that? How do you gauge soloing AVs and GMs since that would have to be put into effect also.

There is to many metrics and ways it would go people would start gnashing teeth for, which would lead to massive headaches for all, and a different gameplay than what we project into the gaming world.

This game hasn't followed a more risk = more reward strategy in years. You know that. Merits demonstrated that.

True story. I was on my newly redeemed Dominator when I got a tell asking to do a Katie Hannon. I had about 45 mins. so I said SURE! Got in there, it was a group that hadn't ever done the TF before. No support, noob tank, real PUG disaster. 45 minutes later I felt bad leaving these folks to the mercy of a +3 AV that they simply didn't have the DPS to defeat.

Since we went to this Time:Reward strategy, this TF isn't done anywhere near as much as it used to be although it's objectively more difficult than TFs that give 4-5 times the reward.

How is that any different from when you're leveling up and you can handle tougher enemies than other players? Lots of players can handle enemies way higher than even con on their way to fifty, and lots can't. I don't see a divide in those players, I see them teaming up so the weaker ones get more xp and the stronger ones get backup for their fights.

The purple patch has very specific numbers that affect level modifiers. An enemy a level above you is 10% more dangerous to you. Two levels, 20%. Three, 35%. Inf and exp rewards are adjusted accordingly, so why wouldn't drop rates be as well?

To be fair, when I said risk vs. reward I was implicitly including the extra time that stronger enemies take to defeat, but I guess that's not a common assumption.

And to make things even worse, devs changed 2nd mission to require escorting Amy to the exit

Actually, farmers typically set to -1 because they get the same drops as they would at +4. Unless they're after shards, and even then, still only even-level.

No, typically they don't.

At -1 you are getting level 49 recipes that are usually much cheaper than lvl 50.

That's pretty much what I was saying. The people that stand to gain the most from being able to shift down are the same people who were steamrolling through content before. Whether it's -1 or +4 is nearly irrelevant to that group (why anyone would want to farm at anything beyond a '0' modifier anyway has always eluded me anyhow).

The upside is that the -1 setting potentially increases the farmer pool; potentially decreasing market strangleholds. As does the Ticket, Merit and Alignment Merit systems (and to an extent, the Incarnate system).

Depends on what you're farming for. Purple farming can still be done at -1.

Keep in mind that there will be more content coming and that content will very likely have stuff to keep level shifted folks challenged and give them something to do.

Secondly, being level shifted doesn't make you more likely to get shards. It makes you able to maybe go through mobs faster, and if other people on your team are level 50 and your rolling level 54, they will get shards and drops too. So it's not like the level 54 will hog all the loot, just do more work, it'd be beneficial.

Third: The level shift is available to anyone. Hell the Alpha slot doesn't really require non casual play, it just requires running TFs already in the game that casual players already do on occasion. Most of the level 50 TFs can be done in 1-2 hours. Then all you have to do is hit the strike target of the week, once and boom you have a level shift.

Lastly, the person with the +1 or +4 earned that. They did the work, they got the rewards including the +1. It's not all that unfair considering they had to do stuff to get that +1, they get to enjoy the perks of their reward.

You are getting uncommons and rares much more often than purples. Price of some rares (and even uncommons) at level 50 approaching and perhaps exceeding the price of low end purples (Numina heal, performance shifter proc anyone?).

I think you quoted incorrectly here. I was not talking about people lvl shifting their characters.
I was talking about if you were a lvl 50 fight npcs at 54, that you in what was proposed is to increase drops.

I know more content could be coming but we do not know yet on that..so it will be a wait and see.

2. Missed the point, that is was +4 against you not lvl shift +4

3. I know the level shift is for everyone I am not against it. I have a few chars already that have the lvl shift within the first few days.

4. I know I earned it like other people have earned what they got for lvl shifting. Maybe I worded it wrong so it could go off in a different perspective I am sorry for that, but that is what I was trying to show. Was the disparity of fight lvl 50s to lvl 54.

True, but a lot of money still can be made just from running the content and then dumping non-set IO recipes and SO enhancements off at a vendor. Is it as lucrative as hitting the Rare or Ultra-Rare Set IO every so often? That just depends on how the dice rolls for you. Plus you're still getting some valuable set IO recipes.

Also, not everyone that's farming are uber-marketers; some may be farming for utility; with marketing as a backup plan or side job.

I don't know farmers anything like the farmers you know.

Its a common misconception that this game *ever* followed anything remotely like a static Risk=Reward equation. It never has, to my knowledge, because reward systems aren't designed that way.

Reward systems are designed by constraint logic not proportionalities. First of all, except for certain corner cases, most reward systems are designed around reward rates not actual rewards. Influence and XP in particular are not balanced around how much XP an LT should give, but on how much XP/hour the average player should be able to earn in combat. The "reward" is not the big chunk of XP that a kill grants you, but the ability to earn a particular rate of XP and Influence over time. Its actually more correct to say that minions, LTs, and Bosses grant the opportunity to earn a certain XP/hour while killing them in terms of reward system design.

Because the currency in this game is XP/hour, not XP, time is always a factor. The devs have a target, as do all MMOs. The average in combat should be X xp/hour and Y inf/hour. Players are allowed to go higher and can go lower, but on average they should be somewhere around X and Y across the entire playerbase and across the game (normalized by combat level of course).

Risk actually matters almost not at all to how much rewards we get, or ever got. Risk is not a "factor" in rewards. What it is, is a threshold. To earn X xp/hour and Y xp/hour, you must tolerate some Risk R. If the encounter offers less than R, it cannot be allowed to grant X and Y, except by special dispensation. What happens if the encounter offers *more* than R risk? The devs can decide to offer more rewards or not. It depends on whether they feel they can do so reasonably, and if the encounter is a reasonable one to reward. Attacking Lusca solo exposes the player to a lot more risk than normal, but the devs have no requirement to reward that extra risk with sizable increases in reward rate. Soloing Lusca, even if you can, probably offers an incredibly low reward rate even if the reward itself is actually kinda large. And that rate is low because the devs don't care if you can solo Lusca.

Lower risk can, if it drops below a certain minimum in certain situations, force lower rewards. Higher risk does not automatically mandate higher rewards. And that is because higher risk only matters if it creates a new threshold of risk that the devs decide to explicitly reward. If it does not, its just extra risk.

And as Positron mentioned, relative risk is also highly variable. That's why risk only creates lower bounds on difficulty, it does not affect the upper bounds of return on activity. Because if it did, the natural variability in archetypal builds (separate from things the devs explicitly want to reward, such as investment in invention or incarnate builds) would create wide imbalances in reward earning rates. Those exist, but are tempererd by the limits placed on the ability for a player to increase their "risk" and commensurate proportional reward. In fact, an analysis of the purple patch suggests that somewhere between +2 and +3 the system has an intrinsic diminishing return on escalating risk settings. The purple patch advances difficulty faster than the reward table increases rewards at that point. That's difficult for people to understand if they believe there is some risk/reward proportional formula. Its not if you recognize that risk is just a constraint on reward rates and not a factor in directly determining actual rewards.


And by the way, the entire premise of MMO reward systems represents one way, and possibly the most important way, in which CoX AoE mechanics are broken. Because while the purple patch combines with the reward level scaler to create diminishing returns, CoH AoE creates a reward system loophole around quantity scaling separate from combat level scaling.


On the subject of risk: what is risk in CoH? In CoH, risk is very roughly quantified by the amount of offensive power that can be brought to bear on you. Put more simply, risk is damage. The ultimate risk in CoH is that you'll die or be sufficiently damaged to force you to rest. Both incur time penalties, inactivity penalties, and sometimes debt. Damage is a way for the game to slow you down and thereby reduce your reward earning rate, or kill you and slow you down even more, possibly to zero. Its also a way to potentially create a situation you cannot pass without some modification in tactics or tools (i.e. inspirations). If something in this game is going to offer you more rewards, it is almost always going to be something that can kill you faster than normal. It is almost never something that is (only) harder to kill itself. The only reason things in this game are hard to kill is to allow them to live long enough to have a chance to kill you. That's actually the implicit theory behind AVs being "big bags of health." The design presumes that staying alive forces the team to have to endure more offense, which equates to a higher risk as the game quantifies risk. Its not in and of itself to make them take forever to kill (for some teams). That's almost incidental (but not totally, because their rewards are also reward rates just like everything else).