Are we allowed to talk about farming?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Similarly, neglect/lack of immediate response != approval.

Which is why I choose not to be silent, even though I doubt it will change anything or convince anyone.

My brother, who applied similar logic to the real world, was never convinced by any sort of moral argument that his behavior was wrong. The only thing that finally got him to modify it was losing his freedom and other privileges (i.e., jail time) - something which directly affected him, the only entity about which he cared.

To answer the question: pretty much, yes.

There may or may not be some invisible line at which things begin to disappear (there is) as to what constitutes something that goes over, there is absolutely no way of knowing as it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.


Now allow me to cry "Waah waah I like farming, you don't, I'm taking my ball and going home":

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Originally Posted by Seldom Secondly, the devs made the architect to be a place to supply supplemental content, that is stories for players to play along to when they did not feel like doing a dev arc again. A similar/alternate path of progression. The straight up streamlined reward systems present in many cases faster progressions, whether it's to leveling or to become wealthy. The devs have often mentioned their discomfort with accelerated progressions, particularly ones that bypass their desired progression speed and bypass content. Third, the above mentality to find the most streamlined rewards has often found means to create heightened rewards through bugs/loopholes or just in ways the devs did not intend, which gave far more rewards for far less danger. These were termed 'exploits,' and are seen as a threat to the devs. I don't think you'll get a flat "Farming is fine!" from the devs.

I can understand their intentions to create MA to be supplemental content - but initially, it was completely and utterly doomed to fail in this regard.

Enemies do not scale down at all. This means that to make a supplemental arc that lower-level players could contribute, you'd have to cap THE ENTIRE THING at a lower level, or risk overwhelming underdeveloped toons. This also meant that anybody above that line would cease to get XP from it. Unless you had a higher level friend, and ran arcs that they were capable of doing.. in which case, you would also have been fine to go and farm some dev-provided missions, which are still the best way to farm. Add this to the fact that most "non-farm" arcs that I've ever played (since I farm a lot in AE, I had to try some. You're welcome, people who hate farms.) are incredibly and ridiculously difficult, they become one of the worst ways to get XP that I am aware of. There's your alternate progression! The solution, I think, would be to add an enemy group modifier - when people design an arc that includes EVERY FRIGGIN DAMAGE TYPE IN A SINGLE GROUP it should not be worth a simple 100% fire-farm-everything-does-fire-lol. Hell, a lot of the enemies I see with psionic and even friggin HOLDS aren't even worth 100%. /rant

I will grant you, on your third statement, that things like the hamidon farm were wrong. Would you consider utilizing game knowledge and setting up an environment that is beneficial to your chosen build - i.e. "Exploitation" of knowledge and/or ability, to be an exploit worthy of nerfing in some fashion? But, I must say, I have yet to hear it stated definitively that any type of fire farm, S/L farm, etc - are wrong, or bad, or frowned upon by anybody of any importance. Sure, they've received nerfs, some aimed at them, but nothing specifically was ever stated along the way along the lines of "Hey, we're nerfing this guys, don't let us see you doing this again." in fact I pretty much get the message "Well it looks good enough to me, proceed with what we've done to it." I'm not 7 like last year, I'm pretty sure I'm old enough to handle it if the devs say "NO, bad guy, no farming!" so you know all around a pretty cool kid.

And this is the problem- we're not getting anything from the devs, other than "Well, MARTy isn't aimed at any particular playstyle" so unless that's a blanket statement that just means "Except we're trying to curb anybody who farms through any gameplay means" and separating farmers in AE, farmers in regular missions, people who kill very quickly in TFs into their own categories, I don't see how that's a true statement, when people refer to MARTy as attempting to kill farming.

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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike Farming isn't a frowned upon activity. Farming EXPLOITS is a frowned upon activity.

Where is this miniscule line?

I can not design an AE arc which is "the equivalent of one-shotting the entire zone of Perez Park" (Unless you're talking terms of relative XP, in which case, how much XP is the Kraken worth?) but I was still able to trip MARTy last I checked.

MARTy was not aimed at any one specific playstyle, and yet we've basically seen the removal of revive powers in AE. Does utilizing knowledge of your build and high AoE damage constitute "Exploiting" and then, how? Are you exploiting your knowledge, or exploiting broken game mechanics? How long have these mechanics been broken?

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Originally Posted by Jagged Talking is a good thing, even talk about farming I'd like to see the Devs talking about farming as well. In fact I would like to see the Devs give a Dev's Choice to a farm. If a Dev came out and said, "This here mission here, is absolutely the best fire farm ever. Don't bother creating your own, just use this one." then we might see a lot less of the useless things cluttering up the AE.

Jagged for Paragon City President.

Well said.

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Originally Posted by Xanatos If farms did not exist, people would still use the forums to find decent peer-reviewed storyarcs. .... In fact I am sure there are some farmers who, having grown bored of farming, decided to check out some storyarcs in the AE. I remember a thread recently where a couple members said that were it not for farming drawing them to the AE...that they wouldn't have bothered with the storyarcs there. Farming is driving traffic to the place your stories are located. It's a good thing. If you want people to play your arcs then promote them heavily. Just like in the real world, you can't expect the system to do the work for you.

Here we will have to disagree. The forums would be used just as much as they are currently for non-farm arcs, undoubtedly even LESS so.

I don't think anybody appreciates the VOLUME of players farms bring into AE. They are people you hate, and yet, I can tell you personally of at least 30 players who now play the ARCS in AE, after farms brought them there. That's like orders of magnitude over the amount of people who actually post on the forums about them. And yet "serious AE authors" hate these people. I myself belong in that category, though I rarely play the arcs because most of them are less creative than farms. Like, seriously - one of the ones that was near the top was like "sum counsul got ure hat" for the mission intro dialogue. At least some of the farms are very in-depth about stopping "Crey's new line of flame-tech battle suits.."

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Originally Posted by Megajoule Your question has still not been answered by someone in a position to do so officially. Assuming for the moment that it was sincere, and not rhetorical or disingenuous, I advise you to wait for an official ruling before you proceed.

.. and it will be a very long time before he gets one that meet YOUR Criteria. Thanks for trying to get the OP to conform to your standards. Did you even read his post?

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Originally Posted by Liz Bathory Basically using the exploits or oversights in the game to go faster in xp or gain more inf then ever meant to be! And that includes a fire farm where you make enemies doing the damage you are good against.

Hold on now. Using the system as it was intended is now exploiting? It seems like you're creating the dividing line here - it's okay to use the enemy creation tool if you purposefully make the enemy groups more difficult than regular enemies, possibly even directly opposed to your armor set - but it's not when you make them something you can handle? That's realistically the only exploit here, and it's really just an exploit of your armor set.. don't really think that counts, or else stone tankers should be really worried right about now.

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Originally Posted by Megajoule Which is why I choose not to be silent, even though I doubt it will change anything or convince anyone. My brother, who applied similar logic to the real world, was never convinced by any sort of moral argument that his behavior was wrong. The only thing that finally got him to modify it was losing his freedom and other privileges (i.e., jail time) - something which directly affected him, the only entity about which he cared.

Well aren't we jaded?

Your brother sounds like he's basically a psychopath, so thank you for considering nearly everybody who actively uses AE to be mentally disturbed via your comparison.

Also - choosing to remain silent might have actually been the right answer here, as you're not contributing anything to the topic at hand or seemingly attempting to actually debate any point. I understand the underlying irony in that you wish us to not debate, because it's pointless to do so as nobody in an official position has yet come forth to reinforce either one side, but acknowledge that this was not the original intent of the thread.

I think at this point it's obvious that people just don't play story arcs unless explicitly solicited, or if the arc is very visible (dev's choice, HOF, first few pages of search). This was not always the case -- yeah, we don't have "official" numbers, but back in early-mid 2009 story arcs did get played quite often*. NB: there were quite a few farm arcs in the system back there, too. So what changed? Here are the scenarios I could think of (from all viewpoints):

1. "MA is so 2009"
MA was 'the new shiny thing' back then, and everyone wanted to try it out. A lot of people created arcs as well, at a higher throughput than nowadays (my august '09 arc had an ID of almost 300000, newest arcs in oct '11 have IDs in the 500000s). As with all shiny things, this petered out, people got bored of the entire thing and trickled away from MA. Nowadays only farmers (minority) and hardcore 'MA story enthusiasts' (smaller minority) care about MA.
My take: This is certainly plausible, and I think at least part of the overall issue. It's also not something that can be helped, unless the devs promote playing MA missions in some way (see STO: reward for playing 3 different player-created missions a day).

2. "Sturgeon's Law corollary"
90% of everything is crap. This includes MA story arcs AND farms, and is easily verifiable by playing 10-20 random arcs -- preferably ones that have zero plays. Players don't want to risk wasting a lot of time on bad content, so they stick to playing things on the front pages, which happen to be DCs, HOF arcs, and mostly highly-rated farms. Using search to find story arcs around a certain theme is likely to point you at old / broken / never-updated / just-plain-mediocre story arcs.
My take: The interface is really one of the core problems of MA (more on this later). Relying on a forum post (as much as I think PW's forum thread is an awesome resource) is unfortunately NOT a solution. Most players don't read forums at all, or only read announcements.

3. "Your storyarc sucks"
MA story arcs on average are just bad compared to official dev content, and authors have an inflated sense of their worth. Players would rather play 5 newspaper missions or i1 contact missions than a player-created arc. MA story-focused arcs also have too much text, enemies can be too difficult compared to the reward, etc..
My take: This is just plain not true IMO. Even 'just good' (4-star) mission arcs are FAR better than most of the early COH content and generic newspaper missions even if I'm only looking at the XP payout and annoyance levels (again, play Maylor's Carnie arc for comparison). A lot of the story arcs I've played are better than most tip missions and newer content as well.

4. "Path of least resistance"
Some players like to farm/PL through the game for reasons of their own (which I'm not disputing -- everyone can play the game as they want, it's their $). Right now MA is the best option, since you can tailor missions to farm/PL with almost zero downtime and a handy inspiration vendor. For some it may even be fun to create the best / most optimized map / enemy setup combination capable of producing the most tickets and inf/xp per minute. This results in a lot more farms being created, especially since each issue brings nerfs/buffs with it and farms being easy to create (remember that the farmer community is currently much larger than those who play MA story arcs).
My take: This is why banning farms is NOT a solution. If it's not MA farms, people will farm freakshow missions or the Television mission with a gazillion enemies in it. There'll always be several optimized builds and mission setups for getting 1-50 in a day or less. The payout will be lower and downtime will be higher, but there will always be farm/PL content.

... and as with all similar discussions in the last 2 years, the outcome is the same: the only acceptable 'fix' is overhauling the entire rating system/search interface. I won't repeat all the various suggestions here in detail, or the redundancy in the forum database will make the MA forum collapse into a black hole... but things like seeing what arcs friends played, favorites lists, 'if you liked this, you might like x/y/z' suggestions, changing to a like/dislike (or just like) system, etc etc.


-- Z.

* This is based on data from my own arcs (a mid-2009 arc, an early 2010 challenge arc, two late 2010 'normal' arcs, a late 2010 challenge arc BEFORE and AFTER it won and got Dev's Choice). However, if you search for 3-star arcs (aka mediocre/average and low-profile), order by # of plays, and note the creation date of each arc, you'll see the same thing.

You left out Step Six: "Push buttons on your keyboard in response to flashing lights on your screen, in the manner of a NASA-trained chimp."

Games (and missions) with story, on the other hand, require thinking, higher reasoning, and reading comprehension.
(In many cases, the capacity to feel emotions enhances the play experience, but is not required to complete the game.)

I can't see the point of farming. what good would it do me if I get run up to lvl 50 in three hours by someone else and knew nothing about my build or how to play it?

All AE farms do is produce lvl 50 nubtards who don't have the slightest clue about anything their character can do outside of what they have read in a guide or had a friend tell them. (unless they are making an exact carbon copy of a skill set they have on another character... and what is the point of that? ... they already have one.)

I would much rather take a month or two to level my character up the hard way by doing missions and end up having a build that suits my play style and the knowledge of what all my skills do and when to use them.

I've put a suggestion in the suggestion forum here about this subject. Feel free to add your two cents

Eco.

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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."