Discussion: Issue 21 - MARTy

As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure that City of Heroes remains an environment where everyone enjoys a safe and fun online experience we will be introducing a new anti exploit detection measure in Issue 21. We’d like to take a few moments of your time to answer some questions about this new system, MARTy.

What is MARTy?

MARTy stands for Metric Activated Reward Throttle (Y? Because exploits are bad!)

What is the goal of MARTy?

The primary purpose of MARTy is to automatically detect and prevent exploitative behavior by constantly analyzing the rate at which players gain rewards in game. This applies to many different rewards such as INF and Experience.

A secondary goal is to throttle only the worst offenders; those who exhibit truly exploitive behavior that ruins the game for everyone. If you trigger MARTy you are going to know that you are doing something abnormal and exploitive.

Will MARTy affect my gameplay?

The system runs entirely in the background on the game server and will have no impact on your in game experience.

Is MARTy installed on my computer?

No. MARTy is a server side function.

What about things that augment how quickly I gain Experience, such as XP Boosts or Patrol XP Benefits?

MARTy is aware of and takes into account all of these systems.

How fast is too fast for MARTy?

While we won’t reveal the exact formula behind what makes MARTy tick, any one of the following circumstances would qualify as “too fast”:

- Simultaneously defeating every, single enemy in Perez Park.
- Simultaneously one-shotting the entire Freedom Phalanx, Arachnos Patrons *and* Praetors.

How will players know that they’ve triggered MARTy?

If a player’s actions have triggered MARTy they will stop receiving rewards for a variable amount of time. Additionally, a log of the player’s activity is recorded for review.

It is important to note that MARTy is not aimed at one specific playstyle or Mission type. The threshold at which MARTy is triggered is such that, through normal, or even aggressive, gameplay, a player should never be impacted by any penalties. We have been vigorously testing MARTy against live server and Beta server metrics and have ensured that even the most aggressive normal gameplay will not be impacted. We will, of course, continuously monitor this new anti exploit measure to ensure that it is effectively performing its task.

Thanks for your continued support!

Oh now this is some ********.

edit: Is this actually going to only engage from real exploits or will fire farmers mysteriously find themselves running afoul of this reward choke?

Interesting.

So for like 99% of the playerbase, nothing at all changes.

'Kay.

As long as it doesn't increase the lag I couldn't care less that it's running.

I thought something like this was going on when I was testing some popular maps in AE. At first I had thought that they had placed a cap on the total amount of influence & prestige one could earn in AE. I found out differently when I let my buffs run out one time beforehand so I could take screenshots, disturbing my normal rhythm. I received a lot more rewards on that time.

I was unable to get a group of players together to test normal content or various AE missions. However, defeating absolute hordes of enemies at +4/x8 whilst solo definitely set off Marty.

Oh no, people will have consequences for cheating and using exploits.

I'm strangely comfortable with this.

Be interesting to see if it still engages on +0/x8 or other difficulty settings. Probably could have seen this coming.

Next they will introduce the Supplemental MARTy - Paragon Activity Nomalization Technology System.

Yes. We will have a SMARTy-PANTS on our system from Paragon Studios.

See my Guides and Tutorials

The system isn't designed to punish "aggressive" playstyles, only to detect, and prevent, egregious exploitation. The examples provided are pretty explicit as to what you would have to simultaneously defeat to trigger the throttle.

I'd be really curious about whether traditional "fire farm" or CEBR type stuff will trigger this.

I have an axe/fire brute, and I made myself an AE mission which is intentionally cake for the brute. Nothing nearly as aggressive as an ambush farm, and I actually die sometimes playing it, but it's a sorta fun way to spend a few minutes Just Hitting Things. Then I have a ton of tickets which I can spend on alchemical silver.

If MARTy breaks that... Well, honestly, fine by me. I'll miss it but I don't care.

If that's fine, and it's just stuff like the underling farms we saw last year that's broken, I can't imagine this affecting me at all.

The stated aim itself is a laudable one. The problem beigns that, as a necessary byproduct of them not releasing the exact formula so people don't game the system, we can also never know exactly how far is too far. and that number can and will change, quite possibly arbitrarily according to some unknown metric. And there's no accountability for that change.