50+1 and the Knockback issue

Who said anything about other rewards?

When you are +1 to foes, you do 1.11x as much damage to them. When you fight level 51 foes, you earn1.354x as much XP per foe. So unless fighting -1s means you can defeat foes around 22% faster over and above the 1.11x damage you deal it's better inf per time (or XP/time if you are leveling a lowbie) to just crank up your level one notch.

Let's think about people using a 50 to level a lowbie for a second. The lowbie(s) in the missions now get to absorb XP from foes one level higher at (nearly) the same defeat rate as before. (How similar the defeat rate depends on whether the lowbie is actually contributing by directly defeating foes. The lower their actual security level, the less they will actually contribute due to having fewer powers, fewer slots, and smaller enhancement strength. If the lowbie is sitting at the door, or only buffing the 50, the rate will be the same.)

Now let's think about drop farmers. People who were farming for drops specifically already did it at -1, meaning they were fighting 49s. Now they get to keep doing that and get level 50 drops for non-purples. Now, even the "junk" drops sell for significantly more (I sell crafted uncommons for 5M inf all the time), and earn meaningfully more inf per time while they're at it.

People who farm for the money instead of drops often do so in the AE, and usually against over-level foes. With an incarnate shift, they straight up get to earn more money and tickets per time (ticket drops scale up with foe XP) at no net change in challenge (assuming they weren't running at +4 already, but builds for which that actually yielded optimal reward/time are rare).

Edit: and yes, the above analysis assumes you get no other benefit from your Alpha than a +1 level shift, which of course isn't true. But even by itself, the level shift alone means you get more reward/time that are meaningful, either for non-50s on the map or for the supply of inf in the wider game.

Wow, you are not very knowledgeable about how CoX works at all.

And for the majority of characters (at 50), you can already achieve effects identical to those by simply lowering the difficulty by one with no adverse effect beyond a slight decrease in inf earning.

The few characters who fall outside that "vast majority" are the level 50s who have a hard time playing solo at +0 level. For them, the +1 level boost allows playing against the equivalent of level 49 enemies while still being able to earn level 50 recipes and shards. Telling them to just up the level defeats the benefit of the +1 boost.

The only other people who the +1 level boost affect at all are the people doing the content with forced level 54 enemies, and they aren't relevant to this discussion.

No, really, if we are specifically talking about a person playing this game in a situation where they can increase the level to cancel knockback, what benefit do they get from the +1 boost that isn't already available by lowering the level?

You already admitted influence rewards would be slightly better. Satisfaction/pride is a possible benefit, depending on the player. TF runs, of course, cannot be set at -1, so you get the benefit there now.

Of course, the need to increase the difficulty past 0 is non-existent since -1s are not KBd.

Anyone who gets more satisfaction from beating 50s at 50+1 than they would from beating 49s at 50 has some emotional problems given the identical mathematics of it all.

Yep, all those non-50s I brought on my +1 ITFs the week it was WST were complaining very loudly about all the XP they got.

As for speed-runners either they're speed-running to get the rewards as fast as possible, thereby dragging down the average completion times and lowering merit rewards for everyone, including themselves, or they're doing it for the challenge, and if that's the case they should be able to adapt to the new challenge of dealing with added KB.

As for regular teams with non-level-shifted 50s, if killing +1s takes significantly longer than killing +0s, you need a better team. A decent team massively overkills +0s.

Oh noes, 10 minutes!

Yeah so? Farmers choose optimal sets to farm with, all this means is that sets that do KD may no longer be optimal for farming. PL up another farm toon.

Bringing up outlier cases, most of which involve optimized characters that should be able to easily handle +1, especially when you have a whole team of them, doesn't really gain much sympathy for your position.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of fighting 51s, 52s, 53s, or 54s. I am not as happy when I see blue cons (even whites, really).

It's not that I get more satisfaction, it's that I get more shards.

I guess you don't know how the drop system in this game works. That's okay, though, do continue to be ignorant.

We've already discussed the drop issue. Someone brought up "satisfaction" as a separate reason, so I addressed that. If you want to change the topic back to drops, then feel free to do so, but don't accuse me of ignorance for using specific words to mean different things. That is how language works.

Absolutely. That was my point. A +1 that helps people get shards is good. A +1 that brings satisfaction isn't. The +1 that helps with shards but slows down getting those exact same shards by adding knockback where it didn't exist before is between those two extremes.

Can't we get more satisfaction out of knowing we get more inf/mob we're killing and the drops will be level 50 instead of 49?

You kill faster at +0. The XP/min for those non-50s were largely unaffected.

I clearly state speed runs, as I also clearly state shard runs, or xp runs or whatever. We run speed for whatever reasons we feel like. Any new "challenges" that can be skipped to save time, will be. Don't like it, don't run them. Forcing everyone to live with extra hurdles is not fair for some of us.

Just gonna combine those 2 quotes. So you think 10 extra minutes of my time, or 10 extra seconds for that matter, is of no concern. That seems awfully cavalier an attitude--my time is of paramount importance to me, what right do you have to tell me otherwise? Again, if you want to spend extra time to do whatever makes you happier, be my guest, but you have no right to devalue mine. If something adds even 1 extra minute to a run, I'm going to point it out, and explain why it's not fair.

I'm going to stop here, because all anecdotal evidence seems to show this may be a moot point. If it bears fruit, I'll be sure to point it out again.

And the developers' time is of paramount importance to them, and how they spend it is of importance to more people than just you. I'm sure they'd rather not spend it on something that's mostly a non-issue.

This is a complete non-issue atm, so I'm sure they're not going to spend any time on it. If it becomes an issue, I'm rather sure I won't be the only player who will be complaining about it. Feel free to advocate your position on the other side though when that day arrives.

Only if we want to totally abandon the ability to discuss things honestly.

You know, I did post numbers showing that you almost certainly earn more Inf and XP fighting 51s with a level shift than you do fighting 50s with a level shift. By a lot. So much more that I find it unlikely that even nonlinear effects like debuffs would make up the difference. You apply higher debuffs and mezzes to lower-level foes, but those kinds of effects would have to add up to defeating level 50s 22% faster than you could defeat level 51s, after accounting for the fact that you would do 11% more damage per attack to level 50s, and that's just to break even.