Farmer Doom says; "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"


Aipaloovik

 

Posted

LOL at this thread. I went away for a couple of years only to come back to the same garbage hate and inflated sense of value of "my story" arc stuff that we had back then. I see some of the same players as well.

COMEDY!


The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Slazenger View Post
That mission is most probably set for 8 players worth of stress though not 1, and that mission is the 3rd out of 4 and takes about 20mins top's to complete, the mission itself is not rinse and repeat over 8-10 hours day.
Anyone that takes 20 Minute to complete a farm needs to take up knitting or bowling.

I'm not a great farmer as I am new to it, but even I can clear a 4x8 ambush farm in about 3.5 - 4 minutes... at least the ambush portion of it... which gives max tickets 1500 per map board... anything after that is wasted (to me) in terms of farming.

My question is how much of this 'new lag' is caused by the new watch dog? Lag didn't seem to be as much of an issue prior to it's advent. Yes, I'm talking about (M)orially (A)justing (R)ertard (T)hrottle (y)because we like you.

I have heard the argument that it's just number crunching, but it seems thin. Take any system, add something that keeps track of ever single critter I creamate in the AE building - on top of all the other problems - and other people creamating critters - it has to add up someplace.

I am not saying that having a watch dog is a bad idea - as I am a computer idiot, I have no clue if this is an actual problem - other then common sense seems to point at it - but if it is... is the benefit worth the downside?

_____________
Phsycology is considered a soft science because most human minds are considered mush.


 

Posted

I like running AE missions for content... and regular mission for that matter. The one 'problem' I see as far as trying to team and keep up with content is that only the leader gets to see (is able to read) the story arc ... AE or otherwise. Not sure if there is a way to fix this... but for the people that enjoy the content - I think it would be a good start.


 

Posted

After all this noise, the Dev community has finally demonstrated that Farm Arcs are perfectly legitimate and most definitely not an exploit.

TopDoc (creator of the infamous CEBR) had his Claw/Elec 1-50 in 2 hours AE Farm arc unbanned today. He had to make the requisite changes to eliminate the rezzers, but since they've now unbanned his arc, its clear they don't consider AE farms "inappropriate."

Still, I'm betting haters gonna hate.


 

Posted

I'm actually pretty surprised by that. And I'm not a farm hater at all.

Good to know.


Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanatos View Post
How do you know this? Have you spoken to everyone? Or is this just baseless conjecture?

Maybe no-one is looking because they're not interested in player-written storyarcs.
I have personally heard from many people (over a dozen) that they checked out AE once or twice, everything they searched for came up farms, and gave up.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubbawheat View Post
I have personally heard from many people (over a dozen) that they checked out AE once or twice, everything they searched for came up farms, and gave up.
Actually farms are only part of the problem. There are thousands of arcs that were made when AE first came out, for the badges. There are arcs that feature custom enemies that weren't updated for the new XP rules.

I'd like to see an aging algorithm added to the AE where an arc that isn't played for [pick a number of months] gets auto-unpublished, and an email is sent to the creator notifying of the unpublish. If the creator wants to keep the arc in the game, it's a simple matter to republish. But it would help weed out old farms, arcs made for experimenting, and just old crap.

Popular arcs (yes, even current farms) would be unaffected and it would ensure that when you searched AE you'd be seeing a mix of newer content and older stuff that the creators cared enough about to spend 3 minutes keeping alive.


Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.

 

Posted

Honestly it was about time PLing took a hit.
My last AE product was a fire/time corr that took 5 hours in AE to get to 50.
These changes will set it back some hours, but is that honestly a lot considering the frequency you roll new toons at? Every once in so many months for me... I think I can spare a few more hours.
As for farming for tickets... it'll be less noticable than in PLing even.
Not bothered.


Duo MoITF - 26:06 | Duo MoKahn - 25:50 | Duo MoLGTF - 29:34 |

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by TriAngel_EU View Post
Honestly it was about time PLing took a hit.
My last AE product was a fire/time corr that took 5 hours in AE to get to 50.
These changes will set it back some hours, but is that honestly a lot considering the frequency you roll new toons at? Every once in so many months for me... I think I can spare a few more hours.
As for farming for tickets... it'll be less noticable than in PLing even.
Not bothered.
PLing & pure influence farming in AE will be 20% slower. (Each kill pre-patch valued at 80% due to rez'd enemies spawning at 60% HP.) That's not even considering zoning/reset times. I'd estimate PLing would take about an hour longer to 50. It isn't really significant and, in my opinion, not something that developer time should have been spent on. (Especially in lieu of numbers-based base bugs/pvp bugs/MA bugs that are still prevalent in this game.)

This means that more tickets are being generated. Inf-lation might take a hit (less money being generated raw in the AE & more products on the market) But I doubt it'll be a noticeable drop. So much influence is created daily after all. Rare salvage might drop again like it did for CEBR. More tickets + slower farming = QUICK BURN THE TICKETS ON SALVAGE.

So if this "nerf" to farming costs me an hour of my time per insta-50, in exchange for cheaper rare salvage...I'm all for it!


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanatos View Post
PLing & pure influence farming in AE will be 20% slower. (Each kill pre-patch valued at 80% due to rez'd enemies spawning at 60% HP.)
True... I didn't even think of the fact they don't spawn at full health second time.
Well, +20% for me IS one hour, so up to 6. Terrible...
Yeah, this change is practically meaningless.


Duo MoITF - 26:06 | Duo MoKahn - 25:50 | Duo MoLGTF - 29:34 |

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
If farms were removed, we could start trying to change public perception of AE from the current Monty Haul wonderland to a source of new content. Then, maybe, we might see more traffic.
Like you said : maybe.

In my opinion : you're dreaming.


 

Posted

Though this thread started as a doom for farmers thread it should be clear to everyone now that it’s really the end for story arcs with the exception of a very few diehards and that’s clearly fine with the development team. As things currently stand:

- An arc that can get you from 1-50 in two hours was unbanned Per Crysys “TopDoc (creator of the infamous CEBR) had his Claw/Elec 1-50 in 2 hours AE Farm arc unbanned today”

- Xanatos is spot on: “There is low demand for your stories.” Just take a look at the first few pages of player rated arcs if you don’t think he is right

- Hall of Fame is almost 50% farms and the only story arcs in it are from month one of AE (April 09). They should change it to Hall of Farms

- Ratings griefing is apparently totally acceptable to the development team. I personally had my arc get hit (though I really don’t know what I did to piss the farmers off) as did several other story authors. In all the cases I know of the response was “We can’t tell you if we did anything to the person(s) doing it and in any case, we won’t remove them”

- Marty, like all other attempts to reduce AE farming has like to no impact on it and will just generate a new wave of farms.

That is how things stand and I don’t see any of it changing anytime soon given the dev track record of addressing AE issues/problems/etc. in the past. All that considered, I wrote a farmable story arc (#517040) that is doing great. That’s what the people want, that’s what the devs are happy with, so who am I to argue?


Jail.Bird

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jail_Bird View Post
All that considered, I wrote a farmable story arc (#517040) that is doing great. That’s what the people want, that’s what the devs are happy with, so who am I to argue?
I'll actually play that one if its farmable. Thanks!


 

Posted

The devs simply don't care about QoL fixes. Now that CoH has gone F2P, anything that does not make PS $$$ is not going to be of interest to them. Customer retention is not the name of the game anymore, given that we are moving to a "pay as you go" model.

All of this will not be implemented or fixed. Despite the fact I would quite happily PAY for this instead of shiny armour/stupid emotes/gimmick powersets:

-Customizable Power Pools.
-Customizable Epic & Ancillary Power Pools.
-The myriad of bugs still in PVP.
-The myriad of numerical errors in power values in PVP.
-HD & TS existing as defaults in PVP zones.
-Base raiding.
-Base building community's requests for simple to implement things.
-Base building bugs.
-MA rating system
-MA full of old/unfinished/out of date farm missions.
-MA word filter.

Leaving piles of crap in game, while distracting people with the new shiny stuff, is the completely wrong direction for a MMORPG. Why? Because we REPLAY CONTENT OVER AND OVER.

QoL > Everything.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanatos View Post
The devs simply don't care about QoL fixes. Now that CoH has gone F2P, anything that does not make PS $$$ is not going to be of interest to them.
I don't think there's anything new there. The devs have always struggled to justify time spent on fixing QoL things when those things compete for time with new stuff. It's been like that pretty much since the game came out.

That said, the last couple of years have been thick with things that I consider QoL improvements. For me, the biggest example is probably "Real Numbers", particularly the on-screen monitor window. Is a lot of stuff still broken or sucky? Absolutely. But I don't think its fair to say the devs have done nothing - they just may not have done all the things we individually want or think are most important.

Quote:
Customer retention is not the name of the game anymore, given that we are moving to a "pay as you go" model.
I think this is unsubstantiated. The system they have put together is strongly weighted towards retaining existing subscriptions, and towards turning "pay as you go" players into subscribers. There's still room for them to turn the system into one where they nickel and dime us to death, but that hasn't materialized yet in my opinion. Despite some radical stinkers on how they have priced certain things in the Paragon Market, none of them to date are anything other than "nice to have", IMO, so if they're too expensive, I just won't have them.


Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA