ED to Ambush farms in i21

You'll have to pardon me while I laugh heartily at this.

<several minutes pass, with a great deal of laughter in the background>

Now, Before you make even *more* of a fool out of yourself with your assumptions:
1. Look at my signature.
2. Click where it tells you to to get to my guides.
3. Look at the HUGE section on MA tutorials. Ones I spent one HELL of a long time writing up, testing and rewriting when MA came out.

Note none of them are "How to farm." Note - while they are somewhat out of date - that if you follow them, you will have created a basic, multi mission *story.*


Now, chuckles, care to tell me I'm "sitting on one side" being an "arrogant farmer" again? That I *hate* anyone creating a story - when, if you look up any of my arcs, that's all they are?

Or would you like to apologize for making an assumption?

Y'see, chuckles, I *do both.* I'm not a hardcore farmer, but if I need to make lowbie IOs, I'll go in, throw down a map with a bunch of something and kill stuff for a supply of tickets. If I don't like what I see on the market, I'll go kill stuff 'til I can just pick up the salvage I need. Alternately, I've got several story arcs "in progress" at various levels.

So, which "mentality," Mr. Hilarity, am I supposedly following? Does my left side hate my right side, rendering me no longer to play because I'm beating myself up?

Oh, and yes, Chuckley Brown, I did finish reading, only to laugh at you even more. Perhaps you'd like to tell me I don't play one side or the other, or have no interest in PVP or PVE, or maybe that I don't know what it's like to have a bunch of alts?

Let me make it easy for you:
GROUPS I'M NOT IN SOME WAY A PART OF
Badgers - though I will help friends get theirs.
RMT employees
Non-North American players
Griefers
Mac client users
Min/Max multi-billion-INF build character creators
People who only play one character, period
Players who are female
Players who are under 18

... think that's about it. Of those non-me groups, the only ones I have any enmity for are RMTers and griefers.

By the way, perhaps before you claim I don't read your posts (claiming farmers and non farmers "dont' mix,") you should actually pay attention to what's being said (that, for the most part and to varying degrees - see that "big grey area" in the post? - they're THE SAME PEOPLE.) There's a small fringe on one side that won't do anything but hardcore farm, and a small fringe on the other like Venture who seem to think killing all rewards will bring back the "purity of the storytelling medium." Everyone else is in that grey area.

See my Guides and Tutorials

LOL. Sorry, EG. But to be fair we weren't having a conversation ourselves, so the contractual obligation to disagree hadn't kicked in.

Think we're going to have to reexamine that at some point....

See my Guides and Tutorials

It is human nature to look for the shortest path to a reward. However, there's a huge difference between RMT customers and farmers. RMT customers make the stupid mistake of giving someone their credit card information to get in-game inf - that's stupid because it's really really really easy to make inf hand over fist in this game. Farmers, not so much. They're looking for drops, or levels, which you can't really buy. For me, I almost never play at levels below 50, so I want the shortest way possible to get to 50 so I can play the part of the game I enjoy.

Don't tell me how I'm supposed to play the game, because my way is no more or less right than yours is.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

About time they did that!

Also, this. However, it is possible he was making a comparison... as in this change is akin to ED.

Nah, even after the change reward rate is still far higher inside MA missions than regular content.

Nice to see that MARTy's promise of not having to tweak things individually is working out, though... lulz.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

I just started reading this thread, and so don't a have a full perspective on the discussion thus far... but I noticed this and figured I would comment.

That IS what is happening. There are boatloads of folks trying to make their own farming arcs and failing miserably at it (or continue to have old un-usable farm arcs listed) that really are making it harder to find the well written stories. It is the principle reason that I don't really use the AE for anything anymore: unless I already know the name of a good arc, it is pretty difficult to find one when I feel like it.

I think this will affect the claws/elecs on lowbie farms since they have to kill most ambushes to cap tickets, so maybe now they'll get only 1000 tickets per 2-minute run instead of 1500? lol

Also, my SS/Fire who fights 54s now will have to go through two whole ambushes to cap! This will take like 30 seconds more than doing what I do now, clicking the glowie before killing the entire second ambush because if I don't pay attention I can cap tickets before I know!

Indeed. The devs usually add ambushes to increase the challenge of the mission, or to simulate some event such as the discovery of the characters in an enemy base. In real life intruders entering any installation would find every guard in the place converging on them in a heartbeat, as the monitor in the video surveillance room alerted everyone when they saw you duking it out with the guys at the front door. That doesn't work dramatically, so they reserve the ambushes for specific cases. But when ambushes become too common it gets tedious quickly, as many people have mentioned.

The whole point of ambush farms is to provide easy XP and tickets for defeating non-challenging mobs.

My guess is that the goal of the devs is to get players out of the habit of doing exactly the same thing endlessly to get XP. By evening out the XP potential across all content they probably hope to get players to say, "What the heck, it doesn't matter what I do, I get the same XP. Maybe I'll try something different today."

The devs could "do as they say" by not cutting back on rewards for ambushes that are actually challenging. For example, carnie ambushes with Master Illusionist bosses, or Malta, or custom mobs with truly dangerous powers. But they know the authors who would create six ambushes of Malta could be counted on one hand. So why waste the development resources on special cases that would never occur?

While it's true that the profusion of farm arcs does make it more difficult to find well-written arcs, there's something called "Sturgeon's Law" which is applicable here.

Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer and editor. In the 1950s the knock against science fiction was that it was unimaginative, cliche-ridden piffle, trash, crud or crap. Loosely paraphrased, Sturgeon's Law says, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crap. But 90% of everything is crap."

So it is with AE arcs. Even if you throw out all the farm arcs, that still leaves thousands of arcs that are honest attempts at creating a fun mission. And 90% of them are crap.

So finding an arc you like by searching through the descriptions provided by the authors and ratings by biased reviewers would still be hard. As always, the best way to find things that interest you is recommendations by people whose tastes mirror your own.

People came up with the solution to this problem long ago: any arc that intends to be a serious story just needs to include a keyword in the description that indicates this. As long as writers and people searching the arcs know the convention, all the farms can be immediately filtered out.

I haven't been following arc-writing conventions lately, and that practice may have fallen by the wayside -- it was in vogue before the devs added the categories for arcs. But the community can reinstitute those conventions to make the search for content more suited to their tastes easier.

It's great; you should try it some time.

Let me break it down for you.

There are people who like grilled salmon. There are people who like chocolate cake. There is some "overlap" as you say between these two groups, probably a very great deal of it. What you will not find very much of, however, is people who want grilled salmon and chocolate cake together in the same bite. This is because some things, even when they're things you really really like, just don't go together.

Whether or not there are people who like both story arcs and exploitave farming is not the point. The point is that if you put two activities with opposite and incommersurable goals into the same conceptual space then one or both activities is going to suffer. As long as farmers are allowed to perpetuate the idea that AE is nothing but a Wheel of Fortune with WIN on every space the story writers have no chance to even be heard.

As I said:

It's entirely possible that we're in the damage-done phase and there's no way back. But we will not even be allowed to try until the moneylenders are thrown out of the temple.

Yeah, PKs and other griefers have been using that line in muds/MMOs for decades. It's false. If "your way" is harmful to the game's environment then it's wrong, and there is no scenario in which the insane PLing and loot generation in AE farms isn't toxic to the game.

I'm outspoken on the boards, this one as well as many others, and I express opinions that are guaranteed to offend both story writers and farmers, at least the touchy ones. Over the years, never have I received a tell of negative feedback, never have I seen my arcs (legitimate or farms) ratings suddenly dropping.

This community is by far and large a nice bunch, and most of the angry people are either only posting on the forums and not actually playing the game, or only angry when posting.

Much like any conspiracy theory, the myth of the 1-star spam only has one use, and it is to show the person who believes in it can't be reasoned with, as he's unwilling to accept other players might genuinely dislike his arc and will go to any length denying the idea that his work might not be solid gold and universally acclaimed.

Of course, a conspiracy theorist will conclude I'm part of the griefer conspiracy and posting lies to cover up my wrongdoings. Right. Well, while you do that, I'm off ingame to work further on my evil sunday agenda, which will consist on doing some ToT, some tips, some trials and perhaps starting the Maria Jenkins arc, all of this without doubt as part of a machiavelic plan to engineer the downfall of the last defenders of humanity... Errr... I mean, people who write fantasy stories in a video game about dressing yourself in tights.

I've kinda sat out of this discussion because I honestly feel that the devs have made no effort to really make clear what their short or long term intentions are concerning MA or if they even have any and until that happens it's all just us speculating on what they feel MA should or should not be. That said, for reasons I still don't know, I personally received 6 one star ratings to all 8 of my arcs in one 24 hour period when these discussions on farming broke out about six weeks ago. That's 48 one stars. Several of my arcs had not even been played in many months having already been sitting at four stars for a long time. In the same 24 hour period many other authors also received several one star ratings to each of their arcs (FredrikSvanberg, PW, Gypsy Rose and a couple others). This was not a "myth" and it was not "players genuinely disliking our arcs", it was clearly an attempt to harass story arc authors. I'm not saying my work is all "solid gold", but I feel it's clear that the ratings given to myself and other authors, at least that time, were nothing more than griefing.


WN

Oh course, there are plenty ways to cap tickets and these sorts of many months after the fact nerfs that often end up hurting story arcs, are just a waste of time since anyone wanting to farm MA can do it anyways. I'm not a farm lover or hater, I just would like the devs to say one way or the other what exactly is acceptable and stick with it. If farms are fine by them, then just offer separate farm/story tabs. Problem solved, stop the nerfs and let everyone be happy. If there is some limit they want to impose on farming, then state that and stick to it. These changes that are supposed to curb MA farming, don't and never will. All they will do is bring forth the next batch of whatever gets exp/tickets the fastest style farms arcs and take resources away from improving MA for everyone.


WN

So very signed. It's funny, because the fact they keep dropping nerfs is a form of telling us what they do and don't find acceptable, and yet they can't seem to get themselves to actually put it into words... we need a burning bush, a list of commandments written in stone to make it all clear. It would at least be polite of them.

Yep, but like Police Woman said, she has one stared how many farms out of spite. It isnt one sided. I am not saying it is right that you folks were targeted like that. It isnt, it is wrong. I gotta say though, as a farmer, I feel like you folks target my general playstyle ALL THE TIME. I don't see how my prefered playstyle is any different than someone who RP's, or collects badges, or what not. I don't exploit anything beyond leveraging my strengths vrs the mobs weaknesses. That is not hacking the game any more than following a vidiotmap to get all the badges in a zone yet I am treated as a pariah by a signifigant part of the playerbase. **** that.

Just to be clear, I don't 1 star farms out of spite. I 1 star them because they are bad. I have given higher ratings to farms that I felt had some merit.

So, because one person who is a story arc writer said they have one starred farms that lack story, it's OK to ruin the ratings of all authors of story arcs because "You are all the same "type" and deserve it"? To top it off. I personally could care less about farms, I just think story arcs and farms should be separated with a tab/tag.

WN

Nope. I thought I very clearly said it isnt right.

Yep, third sentence.

I also said it isnt one sided. That isn't right either.

Applogies then. I do recall that said you felt no animosity to being rating bombed because you were guilty of it yourself. If that is incorrect, I applogize again, It just struck me as a very adult thing to say, and I respected it.

The only reason why I made the comment about systematic 1 starring is because it's happened. I'm one of the people who's openly commented I want people to rate my arcs how they truly feel and is happy to be 4 starred because while not the best, the player enjoyed themselves. I've even thanked people for low star ratings that gave insightful feedback since it helps me improve. But when every single one of your arcs gets 1 starred collectively and this happens to several other authors at the same time, what are you supposed to think?

It's also where the first impression and personal experience thing comes in. Someone new who's been conditioned to not even know story arcs exist in AE obviously skews the "no one plays AE" argument. Plus, there's an awful lot of bad farms out there from an aesthetic standpoint. Eyesore costumes, a few where the theme of the "story" was rather misogynistic, etc. Plus, the concept of actively promoting plagiarism is...bothersome.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

Seems to me that Posi did that, back in the day. His frustrated rant got laughed and sneered at and called "unprofessional", but you can't say he wasn't clear. He wasn't specific, because you can't be in this situation - it's too big and too fluid. You can, however, express intent. He did, and was disrespected and ignored.

Some claim they just want a simple list of things they're not allowed to do. I guarantee that if such a list was made, with 100 things on it, people would go and find #101 within minutes of it being posted. "Don't *#%$-ing do it" may be broad and non-specific, but it suffices for people not looking to poke holes in it. Alas, those people are 90% of this problem.

I would also think that the overall pattern of nerfs should be pretty clear by now, to a bunch who claim to be clever. I think it is, and they just don't want to acknowledge it, or that the devs have the right to modify or judge their behavior. (I believe that they do. It's their game.)