Quick MARTy testing on Live - I haven't triggered it yet

I saw a Time Manipulation character in an incarnate trial league on Freedom on Wednesday night who said it took four hours to get to 50. I don't think "normal' aggressive play is triggering MARTy in any significant way.

I wonder if it is actually triggering a rewards block at all right now or just reporting?

Ever been to the AE? Ever seen all level <50s standing around yelling "farm plz", even on virtue? I'm sure they're all just RPing agricultural workers and are patiently awaiting slots on the "Toil for 12 hours a day in an underpaid agricultural job" farming RP arc.

Time we accept that AE is used pretty much entirely for farming. For a quantitative assessment of the claim I suggest you take a look at a farming AE map and see the 999+ 5 star votes and then take a look at any non-dev pick non-farm map and see the 0-5 votes total cast by the creator and his friends.

I think you're reading his quote in the grammatically correct way to do so i.e:

"farming is the main thing people use AE for": All people mainly use AE for farming; all things of the class 'people' mainly use the AE for farming and there are no things that are people which use AE mainly for non-farming

as opposed to what he almost certainly meant to say, but screwed up with the syntax:

"The AE is mainly used for farming by most people": Most people mainly use AE for farming; most things of the class 'people' mainly use the AE for farming, but there are things that are people which AE mainly for non-farming

I find in most things in life, but especially when it comes to grammar on the 'net, it's better to assume ignorance than malice.

So how do you explain the quantitative data? The massively higher votes on non-RP content (ignoring Dev choice etc, because that's an unfair comparative sample since it's stickied)? That's an implicit survey of farm/non-farm popularity on AE.

Name me one non-stickied (be it through Dev choice or whatever) RP AE arc which has 999+ votes at all, let alone 5 starred, because I can name you four farm arcs with that off the top of my head.

I totally agree. It'd be like if someone asked the question "So what can get me fired at this job" and the boss replied "Nuking the entire workplace with an atomic weapon"... Sure that'll get you fired, but it's such a deliberately unobtainable qualifier that it's of literally no use as an answer to the question; it's actually a sneaky and deliberate bit of equivocation, where 'what can' is taken literally to mean 'what is able to achieve' rather than the implied meaning of 'what is able to achieve, from the list of things that are probable or dubious'. The example given by the dev team seems to deliberately ignore the obvious concerns about what can realistically get us MARTyred and instead focus on unachievable hypotheticals which flat out ignore the central point of the questions. The things they've suggested could really only be done by hooking hacked files up to the upstream packets, or modifying them, but if the devs had wanted to create a system that stops hacking then that'd be quite easy (archive validating etc) and would require a simple "Hey guys, we've put in an anti-hacking system" post that wouldn't cause any confusion; no subjective, yet critical, terms would need to be used.

I appreciate they'd like to prevent reverse-engineering, but I'll be uneasy until they've defined their following much beloved, but entirely subjective, words in a clear, quantitative manner:

'Exploit'
'Aggressive'

This, although I've never actually PLd any of my own characters.

I get slightly irritated by the defensive snobbishness of some members of the community towards so called 'AE babies'. The fact that the community is more willing to declare them 'AE babies' and refuse to help them understand the game makes me think that the community actually doesn't give one jot whether the person knows nothing about the game (as the quoted person said, what's there to know? Seriously, this is a game where just reading the forums will teach you everything), but is merely annoyed that one player's fast levelling has trivialised all of their 'hard earned' (paid lots of time for) 'well learned' (learnt how to play a character over months of play when I could have just read a tutorial about in less than an hour) 'beloved' (I spent months getting this SOB, even if he sucks more than a vacuum I'm going to pretend I'm getting something out of him) characters.

This doesn't answer your question, but we did an ITF in 12 minutes and 40 seconds tonight. Rewards were fine.

Virtue and Freedom are not representative of the game as a whole, and voting is optional.

Come on now, if the unofficial RP server has low apparent AE RP then what's the chances that non-RP servers will have higher RP?

Sure, voting is optional, but that doesn't address the point either; in order for that to be a valid rebuttal you'd need to make an argument which makes it probable that RPers are unlikely to vote for AE arcs, but farmers are likely to vote for AE arcs. In the absence of any such argument your rebuttal doesn't work.

I don't know that it has low RP usage, only that the farmers are more obvious.

My point was that you can't rely on the voting to gauge usage, and I stand by that.

And yet you still haven't shown why not.

That would be the Dev intended purpose... and one that is actually enjoyable.

But I have, and you agreed: voting is optional. That makes it unreliable.

Nice.
Though this is exactly what worries me. When everyone isn't LOOKING, are they going to "flip the switch"?

Yes, voting is optional, but unless you provide some sort of plausible reason to believe that RPers are less likely than farmers to vote for an arc (be it positively or negatively) then we have no reason to conclude that the proportion of non-voting RPers exceeds the proportion of non-voting farmers and the metric becomes valid. Sure, this isn't following proper scientific method, but it's the closest we're going to get (certainly a lot closer than a forum thread poll, since it's reasonable to assume that not all gamers spend much time on the forums).

You can't simply say "this metric isn't 100% valid so I'm going to ignore it" when its the most valid metric we have and has no logical backing to believe it's closer to 0% than 100% valid.

Watch me.

Why yes, yes I have.

Every now and then sure. Far more often I'll hear about sewer teams and sewer trials and hero tips and 'try my arc ID', but then again this is Virtue and not Freedom.

When Posi shuts all of AE down, sure. Until then, ha ha ha no.

Because all the 'A+++++ WOULD FARM AGAIN' votes from every different alt that runs the farm makes up for all of our SG-or-friends-only arcs or the event-specific arcs like the one browncoats did for Patriots Day or for all the publicly available arcs advertised in sigs and broadcasts and AE arc contests.

ha ha ha oh wow

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Thats because a lot of role players are on virtue. When they say try my arc it means farm. They're just using role playing code. We all know that arc is fire farm. Virtue AE missions are probably guys in tuxedo's emoting each other, only to get farmed.

Ah so you forfeit the debate. Very well.

I'm not at all defensive (although you do seem to be rather rude, if I have done something to offend you then I apologise), this is how forums work: the posts which are closest to the start of a thread tend to get replied to most often.



Nope, I'm Virtue solely too and whenever I go to Atlas Park AE the only AE related broadcasts or locals I see are either 'LF AE Farm' or 'LF AE'. Despite nary a mention of farm arcs in that latter chat, I inevitably receive a tell along the lines of "You farming?" or "Will you PL me?" the second I walk into the building from those people who were oh so innocently looking for any old AE content.

In the past week I have seen no 'play my arc' requests whilst playing at server peak time (9PM GMT-5AM GMT). I'm not outright calling you a liar, but we appear to inhabit a very different Virtue server.


If it's possible to rate an arc more than once on different alts of a single account then you have a valid rebuttal. Unfortunately, I don't know if this is the case because I only play the one character.

Go back and read all my posts in this thread, and tell me which side I've been on.

Even if it were not, you would have to consider what kinds of players are more likely to have multiple accounts. Unfortunately, I doubt that any of us have the facts.

I have no idea what 'side' you're on in the larger debate, but the debate I was referring to was 'are votes a valid metric'.

True. Whilst I doubt that farmers have more accounts than non-farmers, I suspect that they'd probably play the same arc on more accounts than would non-farmers. However, we'd still have to see pretty staggering numbers of 'dual box' accounts to even out the numbers (with 999+ votes vs 1-5 votes).

It is as reliable as any other random sampling of a population. Depending on the sample size, it can be very reliable.

I am on the side of rationality. I oppose insupportable statements like "MART has made my character unplayable" (before it even went Live) and "the number of votes AE arcs get proves that AE is used more for farming than anything else". You agreed that counting votes isn't 100% accurate (or at least that it may not be). To me that makes it inadmissible.

If it isn't reliable, it proves nothing.

I totally agree, I made a SS/Fire Broot in Virtue thinking the AE there would be full of people talking and RPing like in the server's Pocket D, but there were only /Fire Armor toons and lowbies!

Then of course I went thru two days of self-PLing to get my Broot to 50, and when he hit 50 I started receiving tells asking for farms, cmon the guy wasn't even all Incarnatey and stuff!

Leave my farmer alone!

(The only thing worse was long ago on Freedom when my Fire/Kin hit 50 - I actually leveled him the hard way and barely farmed with him because I had a lot of ingame friends playing and calling me all the time for TFs, but I got tells asking for farms no matter the zone I was because I intelligently named him 'Yet Another Fire Kin' )