AE farming now OK?

It is unfortunate for sure. If that is indeed the case, I am not sure how blaming farmers solves anything when it sounds like it may be the apathy of the MA community.

In my playtime, it is very rare to find someone on a global channel putting together an AE team to play arcs. I think I can remember one time. Considering I have two servers main channels in my global list, that is anemic support. I also very rarely see people advertising a farm team being put together, but thats because farmers are dirty and aren't interested in the backlash.

I don't think the devs are necessarily "ok" with it. I think it's more that they don't bother to fix exploits until they go mainstream. I'm not particularly thrilled with that approach myself since it tends to breed an attitude amongst players that exploits are ok.

Let's extend this beyond AE. Striga, Faultline, and Croatoa all have solid story arcs and doing two of them unlock TFs. Croatoa also gives significant exp rewards for completing the final mission for a contact. Now, when was the last time you saw teams being built for those zones and how often does it happen period? I think CoH in part suffers from content overload and adding more to it via AE just adds to the problem. The AE UI could be changed to help counter with this as well.

If you are on a server that goes yellow then you have a rather good chance of PL broadcasters being there.

It is human nature unfortunately. Give a guy $10 every day for a week, for no reason, and the next day don't give the guy the cash, and there is a good chance he will be pissed at you completely oblivious to the fact he was getting it for no reason and actually convinced he deserves the money.

Not fixing the exploits gives the people reporting these exploits the feeling that the devs dont care, and are indeed okay with it until they are not. They are only not okay with it when the devs feel it reaches a critical mass. For the MM exploit for instance, that was closed up relatively quickly, but bile spray? Months.

The devs have an excellent track record of making content obsolete. To be fair to them, the playerbase is just as good at it. Praetoria for example.

I think the real reason is a combination of the fact that unfortunately, a lot of people are simply cretins who don't like to read, and the prevalence of the WoW-attitude that the game begins at 50 or for some reason a toon at the level cap is the thing to get as soon as possible. And it is easy to get to 50 quickly in the AE.

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

This superiority thing isn't helping anyone mate.

I'm sure no farm arc creator or user will lose any sleep over my opinion

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

For someone who fancies themselves as an intellectual because they like to read, you sure are ignorant.

I never said I was an intellectual lol. I'm not sure what it is you think I'm ignorant of either. I think this started because you disagree with my opi ion on why some people choose to play farm arcs over and over instead of playing story-arcs.

It was probably the 'cretin' comment rather than the reading one that got your dander up, so I apologise and I'll amend my comment:

I think that a major reason why farm arcs are being played is that there are a lot of CoH players who don't like to read, and who place value not on a narrative being experienced but on numbers. Levels, inf, xp, tickets, all these things are quantitative, easy to attain, and give measureables with which they can know how much they are 'winning the game'.

That sort of playstyle's not my cup of tea, but they pay their sub, same as me, so I'm not going to demand they're stopped.

I just wish there was a good way of segregating their arcs from story-arcs in the AE interface. Everyone would win then.

Eco

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Fair enough.

I wonder if in the begining farmers wern't ostricized for creating farms, they would be more comfortable saying that their mission is a farm in the description. Old habbits die hard.

I've long thought that this would be the best and easiest fix -- a way to designate something as a farm or a story and then the ability to filter either out.

*Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Almond Joy's got nuts, Mounds don't.*

And the issue at hand is that the current wave of farms aren't using a bug to do it. The devs pretty much screwed themselves when they made the new diff setting. I'm sure something like +4 was done due to Incarnates coming down the road, but x8 is just begging to be made a farm.

I actually like Praet. I just got another character through there, and have 3 more to go.

Agreed. So many of the AE non-farms are just awful amateurish attempts. It would be nice to just be able to ignore them completely in favor of farms.


I got a random invite for a PUG the other day. Turned out it was for an AE mission arc. The leader of the team was the author. We played her whole arc, with her asking us to rate it and/or give her real-time feedback. It was actually rather annoying since it detracted from the speed of play. But I give her props for self-promotion. Pretty amateur effort as typical for AE missions, but xp is xp.

X8 has been around since launch. You just no longer need anchors.

All my AE farms are designed to make a /FA brute feel like an amazingly powerful and virtually unkillable superhero. Almost god-like in fact.

Mission accomplished I'd say!

As a writer, you want the feedback. I personally lean a little towards the quiet side when I run one of my own arcs with people since I like to see how they react. But feedback can be hard to come by so it's easy to be overeager and almost ravenous to receive it.

One thing I have a little disdain for is people don't say a word when various concerns are being brought up with AE but they suddenly pop out the woodworks when a farming discussion comes up. However, something intrigues me that's been brought up here and a few other times before. Some have stated that they don't do AE because they feel a lot of the writing simply isn't good. The question I prevent to you is, what is it that you dislike? Is it typos? While people should fix these on their own, this is where the part of being hungry for feedback comes in, plus more eyes help. Is it style choices? If most writers have a Coke style writing and you prefer Pepsi nothing can be done about individual arcs but perhaps you could be directed to arcs that better suit your tastes. Is it things like logic errors/story conflicts? This is also where feedback comes into play and is probably more useful than typo fixes since a typo is easier to fix.

My Arcs
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Mission Architect Handyman

Exactly. I love the fact that I am no longer hounded by people begging me to pad. The ability to set the difficulty a good thing overall, even though it does cause imbalance in the market, because in the past only self-centered jerks who didn't care how much they bothered other people to feather their own nests could do it. Running at x8 democratizes the process, allowing considerate people to enjoy the same economic benefits if they so choose.

And although I'm not a PLer or a farm-the-same-mission-till-my-eyes-bleed player, I turn the difficulty up to the maximum my characters can handle whether solo or on teams. By nature I'm an optimizer and min-maxer, but I still appreciate variety and challenge, and a well-designed mission. Making characters that are capable of running +4/x8 is the challenge and interesting part, but actually running the same farm over and over and PLing just to make cash is simply tedious.

I can remember my excitement at FINALLY being invited to a team in the early days of COH only to be told "don't zone, just need u 2 anchor." Farms removed these kinds of players from infecting the masses.

I'm playing a VIDEO game, not reading a book on my Kindle. The reading should be supplemental to the battles and action. Just like many of the posters here, there's waaaaay too much talk and not enough substance in the mission itself.

This is one reason I like farms. The emphasis is on action and lots of it. If I want to read a book I'll go do that. I play COH for action, not as a fancy chat client.

That WoW-attitude wasn't helped with how Incarnate Content was introduced.

For a quite some time TRIALS (aside from the two recent tfs) were the only major new content coming out.

So yeah people see where the people are (lvl 50 trials) and want to get there as soon as possible. This is surprising how?

EDIT: My assumption when Incarnate content was announced was there would be system in place to work towards as you level, just like the inventions system, and there would be small teams and solo content in place.

I was wrong obviously.

I hear you. How many folks are you sharing the zone with while running goldside?

I used to run almost exclusively in hazard zone street sweeping until the ssk change. The only time I would be sharing the zone is with badge hunters. Once the change was made, there was really no point to it anymore but I still get nostalgic about boomtown and terra volta.

Mostly hoping for best sellers, but getting 10 for $1 bin at walmart. Sure, there are some diamonds in there, but that is only after much digging.

Its the same for farms though, there are many, many bad, unorganized and plain painfull farms out there.

My turn. Since it is proposed so often to be rid of xp/ticket rewards in AE, what if they got rid of the HOF, Dev Choice and badge rewards. What if there were no rewards at all. Would the majority of arc writers still be interested in writing?