Really, devs? REALLY? AFK farming is ok?

I think this is a good idea

I'm going to do this

As soon as I find out which areas they're farming

Fixed that for you.

The fact that the set bonuses carry down to some fairly low levels? Where as non-real-money IOs (save purples) don't.

Repeat after me please. YOUR evaluation of the merit of the bonuses provided by PVP IO sets is irrelevant. No other non-real-money IOs in the game save for the purples (which also don't give multiple bonuses for going PVP)

On the market or spec-buying them with various merits?

Or should I say "off the market"?

Well, they've been fiddling with it for how long?

And the last dev who really had any real interest in "fixing" it is now gone?

Uh. Maybe because I don't play this game for the half-*** (and I'm being generous, it's much less than half, and most of it consists of brown hole) PVP and all the hostility it engenders in the PVP community?

Yup. Way to completely and utterly miss my point.

Some. But not all.

Yup. And people have been screaming about "pay to win" already.
As for the profligate Inf spenders? These people are my bread and butter. I'm a marketeer.

Oh yeah. I'm sure. See where I talked about "pay to win"?

PVP: If you catered to each of these 300 people you could make $1000 off each and make $300,000!

PVE: If you catered to each of these 70,000 you could make $100 off each and make $7,000,000.

How's that going to work again?

Maybe. I always have to admit it's a possibility.
However vanishingly small the likelihood of that is.

And thus, you've donned an even MORE narrow pair of blinkers.

One of the reasons I need to be this blunt and forthright in the first place is because anything put forth with subtlety and tact is completely missed and misinterpreted.

Mainly because said individuals don't actually want a healthy dialog. They just want to be "right" and have their way.

c'est la vie

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Because it is flat out impossible period without making the various sides of this PvP competition completely identical to one another.

It's not a question of the limitation of the dev team. It's the limitation of the playstyle. It simply cannot ever be done absent everyone being a clone.

PvP in Chess works. PvP in [Insert Basically Every Online Game Ever Made] cannot.

And please spare me any stories about how Game X or Game Y made it work. Because they didn't, I promise you.

Indeed, this is exactly why I know about this AFK farming. I wanted my fancy fusion generator for my base, and I dislike PVP.

So, I read up how to run an AFK farm. I ran it for a few days, overnight of course.

When I had my shiny fusion doohickey, I started to dismantle the farm, and checked the recipes on my killer.

I had about...5 billion worth in there? FOR DOING NOTHING.

How does this equate to a reasonable risk vs reward in any way, shape or form?

Full Disclosure:

I do not dislike farming. When I'm in the mood for some carnage, I'll slaughter thousands for funsies, PL mah shiny new toons, and roll tix like a gambler in Vegas.

I am not poor. I market in a desultory fashion, and bank a hundred million or so most days.

I have anything in-game that I want. I have hero merits out the wazoo. I have several PVP IO's on toons, have more in storage, and have the resources to buy another half dozen or more anytime I want.


What I object to is this: All games generate rewards based upon risk versus reward. Hami-o's, for example, require you to complete a significant feat to gain. This is as it should be.

AFK PVP farming entails zero risk. It requires zero time at the keyboard. After you do the set up (which is not difficult) it requires zero effort. And it is by FAR the most profitable activity in the game.

PVP IO's should drop in iTrials, (as should Hami-O's), and should be accessible via other methods. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader exactly what methods should be available. I'd suggest they be gainable as new accolade rewards. IE, run all six phalanx tf's the first time, you get the shiny badge. Each time after that, you get a PVP IO.)

The merit prices for PVP's should be adjusted to be in-line with the Unique sets, and the Unique sets should be lowered in cost.

And AFK farming should be disabled. Because the risk versus reward of that activity is WAY out of whack with everything else in the game.

My two cents. Good discussion so far!

Of course, to both your assertions.

But ganking an afk farmer costs him nothing but a nights production on one server. The next night, as he's logging off, he just sets up again. He's not even THERE, he doesn't CARE if you break up his farm for a few nights. Are you going to dedicate yourself to scourging the servers for these hacks? For how long? They'll just out-last you, as you would be exerting FAR more effort than they are.

And yes, if there was more pvp, the supply of IO's would increase. But it takes HOURS of PVP time to generate a drop. Do you grasp how much pvp play would be required to equal the IO throughput of a few hundred afk farmers?

Wow, yes Quake, Halflife, Soldier of Fortune 2, Battlefield, Counterstrike and more than I care to list did just that. I could sniper you for a headshot, grenade you, knife you, shotty you and so on - all had strengths and all had weaknesses.

I thought I'd at least give it another go despite having mostly defense based toons and seeing all my work in building them go down the drain once I zone. This way at least no one can say I didn't try. I literally felt sick after a few minutes. The last time that happened was when the Sonic bubble set first came out with it's headache inducing graphics.

I'm not sure if it was because my toons are pretty much drop bait for everyone else in zone or the terrible mechanics of PvP (talking about you defense/heal decay). Or maybe it was because in the time I was wasting my time PvPing I could have ran a Council Empire map farm 1.5 times.

I have 30 toons right now split into 3 groups of 10 across the PVP zones getting mad Purple/PVP IO's as we speak. AFK Farming, trip boxing on spunts.

I'm the bane to your existence, the knightress for your hate, the conduit of you raw q.q moar asploding emotion.

Instead of asking the Devs to do something why don't you go PvP me.

As the devs have said, it's no longer "risk vs reward". It's "time vs reward".

How much "risk" is my "capped to all" tank/brute in when I plow through +0's for hours/days/weeks/months/years on end?

Maybe about the same as your AFK farmer was? Maybe slightly less? I didn't have to worry about some random PVPer coming across and the farm and usurping it by killing the "killer" toon and hijacking the ressurection toons.


Again, no. Not anymore. It's time vs reward. Hami is a known quantity. Basically connect all the dots, ESPECIALLY on Incarnate toons, and victory is basically assured. Hell, have everyone get Warburg nukes (again, a time sink), and Hami goes away in 10 minutes.

Nowadays, a Hami raid is about the time it takes to get a group together and kill enough monsters to spawn Hami then kill him. That's it.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Those are FPS games Infernus. In those games, all the players are essentially clones of one another or clones within a VERY limited set of ATs.

The same CANNOT be said for CoH.

You have 14 ATs.

Each of which has hundreds of combinations of Primary/Secondary/Ancillary/Epic pool choices

Further increased by hundreds (or possibly thousands) of permutations of power selection.

Further increased by power slotting and augmentation choices.

FURTHER increased by Incarnate level and power choices.

Not to mention the fact that PVP mechanics are vastly different than PVE mechanics and you essentially are learning a different game with an identical skin.

Not even a nice try man.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

/Agreed

We did a 10 man Hami raid on Victory (No nukes, Heavies etc), took about an 1 hour 15 minutes, in that same amount of time PvPing I wouldn't have gotten squat worthwhile.

I'd rather run Shard TFs back to back then PvP as the extremely rare chance for a drop AND the timer all but makes PvPing a waste of time, unless you're sleeping...

Note the caveat: UNLESS you're sleeping. The whole point of AFK farms is that you do them while you're Away From Keyboard, doing whatever the hell you wanna do.

Let's take Hyperstrike's assertion at face value: Time vs Reward.

Does the Time portion of that merely equate to time logged in? Or time actually spent participating in the the content?

Because an AFK farmer with eleven accounts, (like the giggle-monkey trolling upthread) can be effectively 'playing' for upwards of a hundred hours per day, according to the 'time versus rewards' metric.

Does that make any damn sense at all?

And to make this even MORE insane, the AFK farmer is piling up that hundred hours a day of EXTREMELY profitable activity with ZERO invested effort, no use of the provided content, and while paying the Dev's only one subscription fee. (Assuming I understand how this works, I am not an AFK farmer, so I might misunderstand the exact mechanics.)

I'm sorry, but in my view this is utterly unbalanced no matter how you slice it. YMMV.

The PvP sets are most comparable to purple sets.

They have bonuses that scale down, like purples and they cost upwards of 50 to 70 emp merits per recipie at the Empyrean Store.

They can not be bought at the Astral store. The Developers have purposefully given them a rarity and a value equal to Purple sets.


On the market. Only the uniques really have any value off market.

Most of them have on market values comparable to other sets (which would go down if their supply was comparable to those sets).

A few are more expensive, because they have nice bonuses in the right places, off the top of my head:

• Panaca for the 7.5 Rech (and there is no purple healing set to compete with)

• Shield Wall for the 2.25% HP bonus (and there is no purple DEF set to compete with)

Pretty sure Posi, and I think it was Synpase in one of the more recent (think last month or so) Ustream chats speaking how they would/are considering changes to PvP - but the goal would be no more fiddling.

The goal would be to make a decent overhaul to improve the experience.

The Devs are there, and the thought is at least there.


My point was that you constantly take digs at the devs in this and many other threads, you often come off as ranting and railing against them (not honest, blunt or forthright like you seem to think).



My point was not to encourage pay to win, I'm against pay to win.

My point was that is that freedom and the paragon market has as one of its goals the generation of revenue.

One of the ways it does this is by attracting new players and luring back former players, and providing value in the store for things they want.

PvP as an area is neglected and undeveloped. There is a base of MMO fans that enjoy PvP and I think there is potential there to cultivate this customer base, hopefully they will also spend money in the store while they are here.


[QUOTE=Hyperstrike;4038600]
Oh yeah. I'm sure. See where I talked about "pay to win"?


Evidence to support your numbers?

More People interested in pvp could see more players total, adding to the 70k.

But you seem to have an adversarial position of PvP players vs. PvE players, rather than seeing them as they should be seen "Potential customers".




[QUOTE=Hyperstrike;4038600]
Maybe. I always have to admit it's a possibility.
However vanishingly small the likelihood of that is.


[QUOTE=Hyperstrike;4038600]
And thus, you've donned an even MORE narrow pair of blinkers.

One of the reasons I need to be this blunt and forthright in the first place is because anything put forth with subtlety and tact is completely missed and misinterpreted.

You don't come off as blunt and forthright.

You come off as bombastic, negative and with an unnecessary need to use caps lock.

Unless you mean you need to type this way, because you are describing your own failings at having a discussion and being able to get someone to see your points without putting them all in caps.


If you're really serious, I'd ask you to go back and take a look at how our exchange went.

You posted something, I disagree with it, and then you replied with a post full of caps, and some nonsense with Kevin Spacey.

If you really think this is me not wanting a healthy dialogue, you might want to review your way of presenting your ideas in posts.

Because if you can honestly tell me that post #41 is your idea of a healthy dialogue, and that you are simply being "blunt and forthright" than I think you are suffering from some kind of cognitive distortion.




Other MMOs have PvP that is relatively balanced. Its not impossible.

Not sure if anyone corrected the bolded, but the game's market is CROSS SERVER. It's the same market on freedom, virute, protector, etc.

Name some please. Having tried the pvp of nearly 30 mmos I'd say most of them were fairly terrible, with nerf calls and imbalance calls all over their forums.

The big daddy game of them all keeps re-balancing (nerfing and buffing) their sets nearly every patch, and they have way less sets than this game.

PVP balance is not impossible, but I'm yet to see an mmo that comes close to do it well that isn't an FPS (read everyone has nearly the same abilities). At all.

Not to mention it requires a justification for putting out the outlay to buff pvp. I don't think the current runners of NCSoft are going to provide PS with enough funds necessary to HIRE the personnel it would take to balance pvp, when there is near 0 participation.

The MOST we will ever get is them removing heal decay, and MAYBE DR as well. But that would just make pvp suck *** less. The issues that made it TERRIBAD before I13 would still be there.

Pretty much this. Stop complaining about pvp IO farming.

If people didn't you'd never see most of the most popular pvp IOs on the markets, for any price. EVER.

To be fair that happens with every game.
Also GW was sort of balanced then suddenly shadow prison.

...

Yes, those are all FPS. In FPS (most of them anyway, the old school ones you just summed up for sure) every player has the exact same tools available as everyone else. That was the point of the post you just replied too.

Balancing 100+ power sets over 10+ classes is a whole lot more difficult. There're MMO's who do it better than CoH, but there are also plenty, even PVP centric ones, who don't.

True, but only because the market caps at 2 billion. Most sales happen in off-market channels.

Also, as I suggested, have the PVP IO's available via other tracks: Increase supply.

Last, I have several PVP IO's, despite the fact that I neither PVP nor actively farm them. Alignment Merits For The Win!

It is nonsensical that the best way to amass in-game resources is to NOT play the game. How does that make ANY kind of sense? Change the code so AFK farming doesn't work any more, and increase supplies of PVP drops via other channels.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.