Discussion: Issue 21: Convergence - October 19, 2011 Patch Notes for Build 2120.201110150045.1
By
Agent White,
Posted on: 2011-10-19 09:25 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
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They would have to first publicly state what "exploit" they were trying to "fix" before I could even begin to come up with a solution.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
You have a better, more targeted solution in mind? One which comprehensively fixes the exploit?
Until and unless you do, I'm gonna chalk this up as yet another nice thing that we can't have because of exploiters. |
I don't see much point in figuring out ways to "fix" something I didn't consider broken to begin with. As I said, I am perfectly fine with people farming to flood the market with low level rares. Far from being an exploit in need of fixing, it was an overall positive effect for the game.
So, tell me which of the possible non-exploits they have a problem with and I'll give you a solution, because this is their total lack of transparency at work again. I have no clue what they were trying to "fix".
First time I played the SSAs and saw how ridiculously easy it was to swim in A merits I knew it was way too good and asked about it. I understood from Positron's explanation that the extra A merits were due to 'first time reward.' After that, since they all share the same one week timer, rewards would be reigned in. I guess that was their theory, but didn't work out as they thought. Heck, if I could break it and I'm a lazy and lousy player, I'm sure other people abused it all the way to a few trillion inf.
So yes, there needs to be a way to control the rewards system. My real beef with this new way to controlling rewards that it seems to tie together systems that don't really feel they should be linked. Now the Signature arc is tied to the Morality system, and I can't find any logic to it outside of a measure to stop rewards. It's like not being able to enter Croata unless you've finished the Striga Isles arc.
It will suck even more for Preems (if anyone happens to be stupid enough to actually buy a SSA).
Seriously, can't we just kill the 'first time reward' and leave all 7 SSA tied to the same weekly timer? Or have it only give merits for 'first time' and normal merits every time after that forever. Or close Crucible/Fort Trident and level lock them till 20 or something with the excuse that you need to prove yourself?
EDIT: I should probably add that after getting 5 LOTG on week one I did SSAs #1 just a few times and only did the #2 twice, one red and one blue to see the story. No way I'm going to grind these. I get tired really fast of repetitive missions.
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Originally Posted by Freitag
Character Creation and Tailor
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This is affecting my mastermind. Can I work around it? How do I explicitly select the weapon? Do I have to change it and then change it back? Leave the weapon selected on the costume screen?
Any help is much appreciated.
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Dude I posted the exploit above. If you dont think that getting a miracle +recovery/ low level stealth IO every 30-60 minutes solo till your fingers bleed is an exploit then you need your head checked. Thats like making 100-400 mil inf per hour. Show me any other way in the game to get that sort of inf per hour solo or even teamed up.
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Originally Posted by rsclark
They would have to first publicly state what "exploit" they were trying to "fix" before I could even begin to come up with a solution.
I don't see much point in figuring out ways to "fix" something I didn't consider broken to begin with. As I said, I am perfectly fine with people farming to flood the market with low level rares. Far from being an exploit in need of fixing, it was an overall positive effect for the game. So, tell me which of the possible non-exploits they have a problem with and I'll give you a solution, because this is their total lack of transparency at work again. I have no clue what they were trying to "fix". |
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thing is, that isn't fixed, all you have to do to do that now is get a bunch of toons toons to 20, re-affirm alignment then farm the SSA's to your hearts content.
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Originally Posted by Mephe
Dude I posted the exploit above. If you dont think that getting a miracle +recovery/ low level stealth IO every 30-60 minutes solo till your fingers bleed is an exploit then you need your head checked. Thats like making 100-400 mil inf per hour. Show me any other way in the game to get that sort of inf per hour solo or even teamed up.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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No, that is not making anything. It is transferring 100-400 million inf per hour from one character to another. That does not harm the game. If there was an exploit where someone could produce that much pure inf from the aether, then I would want it corrected quickly as it would have lasting problems, but simply supplying the demand for recipes is not particularly damaging as far as I can see.|
Originally Posted by Mephe
Dude I posted the exploit above. If you dont think that getting a miracle +recovery/ low level stealth IO every 30-60 minutes solo till your fingers bleed is an exploit then you need your head checked. Thats like making 100-400 mil inf per hour. Show me any other way in the game to get that sort of inf per hour solo or even teamed up.
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The only reasonable result of that is a drop in the price so that no one has to pay 400 million for a miracle.
Plus, for it to be an exploit, I would need to know what rule it was breaking.
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http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=275713|
Originally Posted by Mephe
Dude I posted the exploit above. If you dont think that getting a miracle +recovery/ low level stealth IO every 30-60 minutes solo till your fingers bleed is an exploit then you need your head checked. Thats like making 100-400 mil inf per hour. Show me any other way in the game to get that sort of inf per hour solo or even teamed up.
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Originally Posted by St_Angelius
thing is, that isn't fixed, all you have to do to do that now is get a bunch of toons toons to 20, re-affirm alignment then farm the SSA's to your hearts content.
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I certainly hope this kind of ham-handed "fix" isn't what we can expect going forward under the "Freedom" model, but given what I've seen since open beta started for I21, I'm starting to lose faith in the team.
My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.
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Reaffirming from a brand new toon takes:|
Originally Posted by St_Angelius
thing is, that isn't fixed, all you have to do to do that now is get a bunch of toons toons to 20, re-affirm alignment then farm the SSA's to your hearts content.
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1. Getting to 20.
2. 4 days of 5 Tips per day with a Hero Morality ever other day (yes, you have to run through it twice to be eligible for A-Merits). This gets you 1 A-Merit.
3. Run the SSA twice for 2 Merits.
4. Discard toon and start again.
That's 3 A-Merits over 4 days and about 4 hours work. Not to mention having to deal with a toon with no SOs for all those missions. All that for the extra 2 Merits. It's easier to just run your 50s through the Tip missions and get an Alignment Merit once every 7 days from the SSA.
So, it's an appropriate brake.
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You can only farm the SSA 2 times, after that you need to wait a week to get one more A merit. With the exploit it had no limit because you would just delete the toon and start over fresh.|
Originally Posted by St_Angelius
thing is, that isn't fixed, all you have to do to do that now is get a bunch of toons toons to 20, re-affirm alignment then farm the SSA's to your hearts content.
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2 A merits per toon per 30 to 60 min (see exploit steps in post 119)
vs
2 A merits per toon per 100 (10 tips) +10 (1MM) + 20 (CEBR to 20) + 10 (DA run to get 3 tips at 20) + 20 (2 SSA) = 160 minutes over 2 days per toon. (I cant do it that fast so it probably takes even longer)
I agree they still didnt fix the exploit, but its 3 to 4 times the amount of work now than before.
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Market PVP is in no way related to this at all. Sure one dude made 200-400 mil in 1 hour but a bunch of other people spent 200-400 mil in that same hour. Its just moving inf around and destroying some in the process via fees.|
Originally Posted by EarthWyrm
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Exploit farming on the other hand makes new items (in this case) or inf at a rate that exceeds what the devs ever intended.
So Goldman Sachs can skim off billions of dollars from the market and thats ok, but if somebody is able to turn lead into gold on a mass scale thats probably gonna destabilize the market.
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Inf is only worth something in this game because of IOs. I would much rather be able to make any IO I wanted on demand in 1 hour than have 1 billion inf every hour.|
Originally Posted by rsclark
No, that is not making anything. It is transferring 100-400 million inf per hour from one character to another. That does not harm the game. If there was an exploit where someone could produce that much pure inf from the aether, then I would want it corrected quickly as it would have lasting problems, but simply supplying the demand for recipes is not particularly damaging as far as I can see.
The only reasonable result of that is a drop in the price so that no one has to pay 400 million for a miracle. Plus, for it to be an exploit, I would need to know what rule it was breaking. |
Remember what inf was prior to IOs? Once you had all your SO at 50 slotted it was worthless.
The devs need to worry about inf inflation (exploits that can make high inf per hour) and deflation (exploits that can make IOs at a higher rate than we currently can). If they dont keep both in check the market falls apart.
If you dont know what an exploit is check out what Marty tries to do. It checks for high rates of rewards and proactivly tries to stop it and tells the devs about it. I dont think they hooked marty up at the account level so it could not catch this exploit, but I expect they saw a large spike in char deletes at level 17.
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Why delete the toon? I have well over 100 slots available across the servers. if I was so inclined, i could spend a week or 2 rolling 100 toons, PLing to 20 on each of the toons (exploit says 1hr to 17? so hour and a half to 20?)for the first week or so, affirm the alignments 100 times over the course of the next few days. If needed anonther few days re affirming alignment, then every week after that I could get myself 100 AM's.|
Originally Posted by Mephe
You can only farm the SSA 2 times, after that you need to wait a week to get one more A merit. With the exploit it had no limit because you would just delete the toon and start over fresh.
2 A merits per toon per 30 to 60 min (see exploit steps in post 119) vs 2 A merits per toon per 100 (10 tips) +10 (1MM) + 20 (CEBR to 20) + 10 (DA run to get 3 tips at 20) + 20 (2 SSA) = 160 minutes over 2 days per toon. (I cant do it that fast so it probably takes even longer) I agree they still didnt fix the exploit, but its 3 to 4 times the amount of work now than before. |
Yes, it take a little more prep work, but the way I see it, anyonw willing to put that much work farming as per the "exploit" would have little problem getting around the "fix" to stay just as lucrative running SSA's as they were before.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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In farming its all about the prep work. Once you exceed about a 1 hour round trip on something its too much effort to keep track of. If I and 1000 other people can follow the simple steps in 1 hour to make 1 miracle IO thats 1001 miracles now in the system that would have never been there before.|
Originally Posted by St_Angelius
Why delete the toon? I have well over 100 slots available across the servers. if I was so inclined, i could spend a week or 2 rolling 100 toons, PLing to 20 on each of the toons (exploit says 1hr to 17? so hour and a half to 20?)for the first week or so, affirm the alignments 100 times over the course of the next few days. If needed anonther few days re affirming alignment, then every week after that I could get myself 100 AM's.
Yes, it take a little more prep work, but the way I see it, anyonw willing to put that much work farming as per the "exploit" would have little problem getting around the "fix" to stay just as lucrative running SSA's as they were before. |
There are plenty of ways to farm in this game at rates that would piss most people off, but its when its really simple and quick is when everybody starts doing it. When alot of people do it, thats when it messes things up big time.
What you posted looks more like a job to most people than a farm, so I would expect very few to try to do it.
Monkey farm for example, simple and effective and destabilizing to the market due to the large amount of people doing it.
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Reading comprehension FTL. That's Graystar yammering about farming AE for bronze rolls and making 200m an hour selling them. It's "market pvp" about as much as generating a Miracle: +Recovery an hour and selling it on the market is. A notable difference is that Graystar is actually introducing substantial new liquid inf into the system because what he's doing involves a level 50 at max earning rate, and ISN'T just moving wealth from one player to another by providing a low-level commodity at a higher rate than was dev-intended.|
Originally Posted by Mephe
Market PVP is in no way related to this at all. Sure one dude made 200-400 mil in 1 hour but a bunch of other people spent 200-400 mil in that same hour. Its just moving inf around and destroying some in the process via fees.
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You could rightly argue whether or not making 200m/hr is exploit-scale wealth generation, but "kill stuff, roll bronze, sell on market," is not functionally different from "kill stuff, buy Miracle, sell on market."
You asked for something in the same timeframe, you got it. If you want to pretend you didn't, that's okay. If you want to claim you didn't understand it, that's also okay. I often don't understand Graystar.
My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.
On another note: Is there a way to know who has reaffirmed their alignment and is eligible for A-merits?
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Sorry the link you gave only showed his post saying he made 200 mlll on the market, I assumed he meant he was flipping or something since the post had no details. I didnt see that his post he said it got it via bronze rolls. My bad, but come on its Graystar, he has no pants!|
Originally Posted by EarthWyrm
Reading comprehension FTL. That's Graystar yammering about farming AE for bronze rolls and making 200m an hour selling them. It's "market pvp" about as much as generating a Miracle: +Recovery an hour and selling it on the market is. A notable difference is that Graystar is actually introducing substantial new liquid inf into the system because what he's doing involves a level 50 at max earning rate, and ISN'T just moving wealth from one player to another by providing a low-level commodity at a higher rate than was dev-intended.
You could rightly argue whether or not making 200m/hr is exploit-scale wealth generation, but "kill stuff, roll bronze, sell on market," is not functionally different from "kill stuff, buy Miracle, sell on market." You asked for something in the same timeframe, you got it. If you want to pretend you didn't, that's okay. If you want to claim you didn't understand it, that's also okay. I often don't understand Graystar. |
Yes bronze rolls in the AE are probably one of the best ways to make some good coin, but it does require a bit more non playtime investment to get that level of inf. The major limiting factor is market slots, and time to craft. If you sell bronze recipies at 1 inf you are gonna make pretty crappy inf/hour. I have a toon that has 30 recipies in his inventory and all the market slots full, so I can really do much more till the clear out.
A better way to do it would be to roll gold 35-39. So I can make 3500 tickets every 10-15 minutes at my rate. That 1 random roll = 20 merits. So in 1 hour I can earn 1 Amerit. But the trick is.. its random. Even if I get 10 rolls its still not gonna be equal to 2 Amerits because I may get 10 crap of the hunters.
So even with a dedicated farm toon in the AE I can see making 1 A merit per hour. The exploit was able to make 2 an hour. Of course eventually the miracle and stealth IO prices would crash so its self repairing...
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I don't have a problem with the fact the devs want us to prove our alignment before we can receive an AM.
My issue is with the fact that I have several characters that I don't want to change alignment. Having to run 11 missions to prove that is silly.
If this has been brought up before, I missed it and sorry to re-propose it. I think they need to have a single "loyalty" mission that you could get from a trainer or even a SF/TF contact. You can run it once and it proves your loyalty/alignment.
It could be something as easy as a contact in Pocket D who gives out the mission.. the "same" mission for both heroes and villains, just a different outcome. e.g. Save people from a burning building/set said building on fire.
You wouldn't get an AM or anything special from it, it would just confirm your alignment. However, if you run a tip mission that's not of your alignment, the confirmation is lost and you have to do a full set of tips+ morality to get it back.
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Ok, if you don't want it to feel "job like", take your time getting your, however many, toons to 20 and reaffirmed. Do it over the course of a month or 2. But seeing some of the descriptions of reroll farming for up to "1008 merits a week" seems like just as much, if not more work than doing what I posted.
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Originally Posted by Mephe
In farming its all about the prep work. Once you exceed about a 1 hour round trip on something its too much effort to keep track of. If I and 1000 other people can follow the simple steps in 1 hour to make 1 miracle IO thats 1001 miracles now in the system that would have never been there before.
There are plenty of ways to farm in this game at rates that would piss most people off, but its when its really simple and quick is when everybody starts doing it. When alot of people do it, thats when it messes things up big time. What you posted looks more like a job to most people than a farm, so I would expect very few to try to do it. Monkey farm for example, simple and effective and destabilizing to the market due to the large amount of people doing it. |
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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That would work for me. |
Originally Posted by Chuckers
I don't have a problem with the fact the devs want us to prove our alignment before we can receive an AM.
My issue is with the fact that I have several characters that I don't want to change alignment. Having to run 11 missions to prove that is silly. If this has been brought up before, I missed it and sorry to re-propose it. I think they need to have a single "loyalty" mission that you could get from a trainer or even a SF/TF contact. You can run it once and it proves your loyalty/alignment. It could be something as easy as a contact in Pocket D who gives out the mission.. the "same" mission for both heroes and villains, just a different outcome. e.g. Save people from a burning building/set said building on fire. You wouldn't get an AM or anything special from it, it would just confirm your alignment. However, if you run a tip mission that's not of your alignment, the confirmation is lost and you have to do a full set of tips+ morality to get it back. |
95% (or more) of my characters are never changing alignment. They started hero (or villain) and are staying that way. A few that had Rogue/Vig fit them (I can think of... hmm... two? Three?) have done that. Two or three have done a complete change. The rest? I'd do exactly the above to "maintain" my alignment with no other reward and be perfectly happy with it.
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My point is that its all about the amount of people doing the farming exploit that makes the problem small or large.|
Originally Posted by St_Angelius
Ok, if you don't want it to feel "job like", take your time getting your, however many, toons to 20 and reaffirmed. Do it over the course of a month or 2. But seeing some of the descriptions of reroll farming for up to "1008 merits a week" seems like just as much, if not more work than doing what I posted.
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A simple and fast exploit will create a large problem because its easy for 10000 people to do it 1 time in an hour and maybe not do it again for another day or so. (10000 extra rewards in the system per day) large impact to the game rewards system. (fix in next patch with a poorly thought out and poorly tested way to fix it, and the fix must piss off people that didn't exploit it)
A more complicated exploit that takes multiple days will probably entice only 100 people to do it but they may be more likely to continue that behavior. (100 - 1000 extra rewards in the system per day) small imact to the game rewards system. (fix it some day, maybe)
Don't think of exploits being too much reward for a single person, think of it more like its too much rewards for the game to handle because many people are doing it.
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But then there are many players that already have doezens of 20+ toons, so the need of that extra time is not required by a very good proportion of the players of this game. I know I have at least 20 toons capable of just affirming their alignment, something I intend to do with them when I have the chance, then farming this arc with. Not that I would, but then, there aren't many people that were faming the arc as per "the exploit" anyway, and for those that were it is a relitively simple matter to continue to do it in future.|
Originally Posted by Mephe
My point is that its all about the amount of people doing the farming exploit that makes the problem small or large.
A simple and fast exploit will create a large problem because its easy for 10000 people to do it 1 time in an hour and maybe not do it again for another day or so. (10000 extra rewards in the system per day) large impact to the game rewards system. (fix in next patch with a poorly thought out and poorly tested way to fix it, and the fix must piss off people that didn't exploit it) A more complicated exploit that takes multiple days will probably entice only 100 people to do it but they may be more likely to continue that behavior. (100 - 1000 extra rewards in the system per day) small imact to the game rewards system. (fix it some day, maybe) Don't think of exploits being too much reward for a single person, think of it more like its too much rewards for the game to handle because many people are doing it. |
Personally, I only ran the SSA's with toon for IO's they needed for their actual builds, and I'm sure the majority of players did the same.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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Are you positive that this is how it works? My understanding from my own experience is that running the morality mission one time flags you as an affirmed hero or villain. This is why the countdown immediately begins and the reason you had to run another morality to get your first hero or villain merit was that that was previously the only way to get them, short of buying them.|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Reaffirming from a brand new toon takes:
1. Getting to 20. 2. 4 days of 5 Tips per day with a Hero Morality ever other day (yes, you have to run through it twice to be eligible for A-Merits). This gets you 1 A-Merit. 3. Run the SSA twice for 2 Merits. 4. Discard toon and start again. That's 3 A-Merits over 4 days and about 4 hours work. Not to mention having to deal with a toon with no SOs for all those missions. All that for the extra 2 Merits. It's easier to just run your 50s through the Tip missions and get an Alignment Merit once every 7 days from the SSA. So, it's an appropriate brake. |
Unless they changed it, in which case uhhh that sucks?
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Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Reaffirming from a brand new toon takes:
1. Getting to 20. 2. 4 days of 5 Tips per day with a Hero Morality ever other day (yes, you have to run through it twice to be eligible for A-Merits). This gets you 1 A-Merit. 3. Run the SSA twice for 2 Merits. 4. Discard toon and start again. That's 3 A-Merits over 4 days and about 4 hours work. Not to mention having to deal with a toon with no SOs for all those missions. All that for the extra 2 Merits. It's easier to just run your 50s through the Tip missions and get an Alignment Merit once every 7 days from the SSA. So, it's an appropriate brake. |
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Are you positive that this is how it works? My understanding from my own experience is that running the morality mission one time flags you as an affirmed hero or villain. This is why the countdown immediately begins and the reason you had to run another morality to get your first hero or villain merit was that that was previously the only way to get them, short of buying them.
Unless they changed it, in which case uhhh that sucks? |
The real stinker here is if existing characters have already confirmed this way the reset means I have to re-confirm all over again, which is costing me 1 alignment merit that I would have normally gotten (or 20 million influence, assuming I am willing to convert the 50 reward merits into an alignment merit).
The odd thing is that 50 reward merits on first confirmtion/1 alignment merit after that shows that they already HAD a way to tell if you had confirmed your alignment - so why RESET it on existing characters. New characters, old characters that had not yet confirmed and charaters that just finished an alignment switch would not have this flag set. So all resetting the flag on existing characters does is penalize those of us who have already DONE the work they wanted. It does nothing to prevent the exploit - simply coding the SSA award to check for that flag already took care of that.
EDIT: If Zombie is correct and you actually have to do 2 morality missions before you can earn alignment merits in the SSA's then it looks like I may never run them again. But it seems pretty clear to me that the first morality mission sets your 'alignment confirmed' flag, so you shouldn't have to do a second unless you where doing an alignment change, in which case the first morality mission changes your alignment, the second hero/villain morality mission will set the flag.
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Well. I came here for some clarity, but now I'm really confused.
Here is what I do know.
From my experience in game, if you have not run the SSA within a week and have confirmed your alignment status via a morality mission (in my case, a hero) you can earn 1 hero merit by completing 1 SSA arc.
After waiting 8 days, I ran part 1 got my hero merit, then ran part 2 and it's not an option. The language used "a shared" reward table is misleading to me. I thought it meant that each arc would have the same reward table - not that we're not intended to run more than 1 arc per week.
I've sent a pm to the red names and am waiting on some clear rulings. After reading some of these declarations by some of you - - who may or may not have clue what you're talking about, I'm just going to ignore all of the SSAs until I get some official ruling.
And as for this PLing and farming, then deleting, you guys do what you want, but I want to accrue the merits on my toons so I can exchange them for recipes that aren't for sale because people generally just farm for PvP ios, they don't actually PvP on a regular basis except on Freedom.
And the crazy thing is I just want the PvE set bonuses and dont' really want to PvP that much myself.
"Most people that have no idea what they are doing have no idea that they don't know what they are doing." - John Cleese
@Ukase
Until and unless you do, I'm gonna chalk this up as yet another nice thing that we can't have because of exploiters.
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