New efforts!

[Sinistar]

BaB was, well BaB (god bless him though, he was always honest).  But part of the reason the devs were often reluctant (I'm aware of devs that were offered red names and turned them down absolutely) and sometimes constrained from posting with official red names on the forums is that they were subject to unrealistic standards of posting.  Matt's "tantrum" is a classic example.  I read that thing a hundred times trying to find the tantrum, and it simply wasn't there.  I actually often recommended tone, wording, or clarification changes to dev postings, and there were even a couple of times when I was in a position to make a proactive recommendation to change how the devs were about to describe something, and when they didn't it often blew up exactly as I predicted.  And yet I honestly could not find the specific edit point in Positron's posting I would have censored had I been in a position to do so.

Except, and this is the point, to say that in that particular case I was certain that no matter what anyone said, and no matter how it was said, the (or rather a significant vocal percentage of the) playerbase had already made up their mind to attack anything that the devs were about to post.

One of the areas I used to say the players were basically always wrong was in the area of implementation.  When a player either guessed, theorized, or extrapolated how the game worked, unless they had inside information they were basically always wrong.  This was so absolute of a rule that when someone said anything on the forums about the implementation of the game that I knew to be true I knew that player was either in direct communication with the devs or were hacking the game client in their spare time.  It was a huge red flag.  The other area was developer motivation.  Players ascribed motivations to the devs that were almost always wrong, often hilariously so.  Players would post how certain they were that a particular dev had a particular motivation for making a game change because it was just so obvious, and I would laugh because I would know that particular dev had nothing to do with the change.  In at least two cases devs that were accused of having malicious intent for making a change actually opposed the change internally.  But once you ascribe intent to a developer, your perception of everything they say and do is irrevocable tainted.  Our playerbase may have been tamer than most in this regard, but it was no less vulnerable to the same errors in judgment combined with pitchforks to back it up.

At some personal risk of being reprimanded or banned for doing so, I actually posted significant insider information about what went down with those Architect reward reversals.  Short of naming names, I stated what fundamentally happened and where errors were made that the devs themselves were trying to sort out at that time.  Few listened and fewer cared, and to prove it I'd bet today everyone who remembers Positron's "tantrum" doesn't remember the most important fact I disclosed that called that entire perspective into question, because under the circumstances it was impossible for Positron to have done what the players said he did.

What I remember from the alleged tantrum was that Posi was a tad upset to put it nicely at all the rampant AE farming and bug exploits that occurred once AE went live.

Then there were comments about some of the AE badge requirements, as I recall some were a tad high such as 50,000 kills in AE test mode or some such, and Posi finally claimed there was an extra zero that shouldn't be there in the requirements for EPIC damage, heal and money badges.

Wasn't it referred to as the "great Badge Nerf" ?

As to BaB and Lighthouse, didn't they both make an inadvertent slip of info that shouldn't have been?

[silvers1]

What I remember from the alleged tantrum was that Posi was a tad upset to put it nicely at all the rampant AE farming and bug exploits that occurred once AE went live.

What upset me about AE is all the many man-hours they put into nerf after nerf.   Needed fixes and upgrades were ignored and the system was essentially abandoned - except for more nerfs.   I so much wanted to get into creation of more content, but the system was so buggy and limited - it was an exercise in frustration.
I loved CoH, but their tendency to let old content/systems rot was its biggest failure.

[Sinistar]

What upset me about AE is all the many man-hours they put into nerf after nerf.   Needed fixes and upgrades were ignored and the system was essentially abandoned - except for more nerfs.   I so much wanted to get into creation of more content, but the system was so buggy and limited - it was an exercise in frustration.
I loved CoH, but their tendency to let old content/systems rot was its biggest failure.

Yeah the base builder system and AE are two examples of abandonment. 

remember how long it took to debug and fix the trial/raid where your league enters the shard, smash the  three pillars and then face off against a version of Rularu?  then they decided after a short time of it up and running that warburg nukes were not allowed in it"? 

[FloatingFatMan]

What I remember from the alleged tantrum was that Posi was a tad upset to put it nicely at all the rampant AE farming and bug exploits that occurred once AE went live.

TBH, to NOT realise that was going to happen takes an impressive amount of short sightedness.

That, or they were as dumb as a rock.

[MM3squints]

TBH, to NOT realise that was going to happen takes an impressive amount of short sightedness.

That, or they were as dumb as a rock.

Or they just best of human behavior... *haha*

[Arcana]

I admit to not remembering. More on the "didn't care" side because I was too busy laughing at the people who had been madly exploiting the obviously broken critters getting bitch slapped and whining about it. Shot in the dark: De-leveling characters since it's something that can't be done short of restoring from backups, which wouldn't really be feasible on the scale it was claimed.

A lot of players drew a straight line between Positron, who was supposedly extremely upset about AE exploits, and the mass reward reversions that took place afterward as an example of Positron losing his temper and overnerfing the playerbase.  The truth is that sequence of events was impossible because Positron was not the dev responsible for the scripts that performed the reversions, and because on top of that because the devs were not allowed to make operational changes to the live servers the scripts were executed by a server operator who did not honor the exemption warnings on which accounts to touch and which not to touch.  In particular, for example, I was told there was a specific note to avoid leveling pairs when reverting XP but that wasn't followed.

Matt, professional that he was, took full responsibility for what happened even though what happened was at least two steps removed from him at the time and was more of an operational error than anything malicious.

[Arcana]

Yeah the base builder system and AE are two examples of abandonment.

The devs could only work on so many things at the same time, but I should point out that although many players (including me) thought they should have put a lot more effort into certain parts of the AE (like the search and rating system) its hard to say they completely abandoned the AE when they explicitly contracted me to assist them with some of it during the I17-I19ish period.

As to the devs being surprised about the level of exploits with regard to the AE, I think it was less stupidity and more unjustified hope the players would self-regulate that area.  To be frank, the more cautious devs originally felt that the AE should have had *no* rewards attached to it; I was one of those that agreed with that notion, because the nature of how CoH combat worked made it essentially impossible to eliminate all possible ways to exploit the reward system (because for that matter, it was difficult to prevent players from exploiting inconsistencies in the *standard* content as well).

[silvers1]

The exploits in AE occurred because of the ill-advised decision to allow any combination of powers on mobs.  What they should have done is to allow players to re-skin/re-name existing mobs - none of this custom power combination stuff.  Setting a timer on ambushes would also have helped.  And also requiring the designer to designate at least one of each level of mob - minion, Lt., and Boss.  That's pretty much all that was needed.

   If you removed all xp reward from AE, it would go unused.  Most people played the game to level up and try out new powers, no one is going to waste time on a system that doesn't help with that, except for a very small core who play just for the story.

[LaughingAlex]

The exploits in AE occurred because of the ill-advised decision to allow any combination of powers on mobs.  What they should have done is to allow players to re-skin/re-name existing mobs - none of this custom power combination stuff.  Setting a timer on ambushes would also have helped.  And also requiring the designer to designate at least one of each level of mob - minion, Lt., and Boss.  That's pretty much all that was needed.

   If you removed all xp reward from AE, it would go unused.  Most people played the game to level up and try out new powers, no one is going to waste time on a system that doesn't help with that, except for a very small core who play just for the story.

Indeed, many mmorpg players are, if your familiar with various tropes or just visit tv tropes, are very similar to munchkins, they generally only care about their own power level and really don't give a crap about an story.  I think a long line of games having had bad stories way back could be a contributing factor, though some really good games even in the old games did in fact have good stories.  From the doom series to diablo often the story was there just to give the player an excuse for the environment they were in.  Even some modern games suffer this, in fact 90% modern military shooters tend to have stories like that(and often worst).  But by the time games started getting better stories mmorpgs had already locked themselves in the mold.  It's also course, all the harder to have a story at all in an environment you have to keep static, especially if it's trying to be a sandbox playground.

[Zerohour]

The exploits in AE occurred because of the ill-advised decision to allow any combination of powers on mobs.  What they should have done is to allow players to re-skin/re-name existing mobs - none of this custom power combination stuff.  Setting a timer on ambushes would also have helped.  And also requiring the designer to designate at least one of each level of mob - minion, Lt., and Boss.  That's pretty much all that was needed.

   If you removed all xp reward from AE, it would go unused.  Most people played the game to level up and try out new powers, no one is going to waste time on a system that doesn't help with that, except for a very small core who play just for the story.

That's what I loved about AE to be honest. After all the years I had played CoH, I was thankful for a way to level up faster than grinding the same old quests over and over. Dreck was nerfed, sewers too. There wasn't much left.

[Sinistar]

That's what I loved about AE to be honest. After all the years I had played CoH, I was thankful for a way to level up faster than grinding the same old quests over and over. Dreck was nerfed, sewers too. There wasn't much left.

Yeah making missions was fun and was a break from the same old nerfed quests.

an old mission I created to use was using the Troll cave map as it was so huge, input my Nemesis group that had differently Lieutenants in the group to avoid Nemesis Vengeance, set to max spawn and go to town.  Wasn't caring about AE tickets, I'd just clean out the map, load the next mission of the same map and complete it again.  5 missions, same map, tough enemies, no exploits, wash rinse and repeat. :)

One mission I was building but never quite finished was where the plot involved going on a quest to revive Marcus Cole, the Statesman.   However it was to end with the players learning that Marcus' spirit was reunited with his wife,  and all other friends and family that went before him and that he was at peace and didn't want to return.

[ivanhedgehog]

The exploits in AE occurred because of the ill-advised decision to allow any combination of powers on mobs.  What they should have done is to allow players to re-skin/re-name existing mobs - none of this custom power combination stuff.  Setting a timer on ambushes would also have helped.  And also requiring the designer to designate at least one of each level of mob - minion, Lt., and Boss.  That's pretty much all that was needed.

   If you removed all xp reward from AE, it would go unused.  Most people played the game to level up and try out new powers, no one is going to waste time on a system that doesn't help with that, except for a very small core who play just for the story.

there were a number of things that gave zero xp that stuck in some peoples craws. the rikti portals were one. a bunch of mobs that gave zero xp that were designed to go off no matter what. you couldnt even skip them. yet they did full damage to you. they upped the xp for the guy that spawned them, but when they nerfed that xp, they never fixed the xp hole they created.

[Noyjitat]

People will always play whatever gains them the most money, experience or items in as short a time as possible especially in a game that encourages alts and more characters while not playing what doesn't reward you well enough if at all for your time. Nothing will ever change that. And with people having to work more than 40 hours a week in or multiple jobs in todays terrible economy you have even less time to play.

I ran several characters through AE fire farms and then threw billions of inf and purples at them just to use them for taskforces, raids and incarnate trials simply because I wanted more choices for those events and I was curious how they would play out.

I do agree that some of the AE content was simply going too far like the hami farm where it was basically no risk to you what so ever or enemies with no ranged powers. But if you had a team or build that allowed you to kill those rikti magi efficiently then more power to you. I was annoyed when they nerfed ambush farms but I think I was pissed off the most when they removed countless AE badges just because they could.

[Arcana]

The exploits in AE occurred because of the ill-advised decision to allow any combination of powers on mobs.  What they should have done is to allow players to re-skin/re-name existing mobs - none of this custom power combination stuff.  Setting a timer on ambushes would also have helped.  And also requiring the designer to designate at least one of each level of mob - minion, Lt., and Boss.  That's pretty much all that was needed.

   If you removed all xp reward from AE, it would go unused.  Most people played the game to level up and try out new powers, no one is going to waste time on a system that doesn't help with that, except for a very small core who play just for the story.

Everyone has a "all they needed to do" idea.  This one, like all the rest, is false.  Allowing existing mobs only would only have made it more difficult for some players to figure out which combinations to exploit.  Which is to say, it would have slowed down players like me, or say Topdoc who practically lived for finding exploitable critter contexts, for about an afternoon.

(I once only rhetorically asked a question about selecting a particular kind of mob to exploit in a particular way and he already knew which one would work instantly - because he had already tested that exact combination repeatedly).

Edit: as to XP, I was in favor of allowing XP in the AE.  Just not material rewards.

[Arcana]

People will always play whatever gains them the most money, experience or items in as short a time as possible especially in a game that encourages alts and more characters while not playing what doesn't reward you well enough if at all for your time. Nothing will ever change that. And with people having to work more than 40 hours a week in or multiple jobs in todays terrible economy you have even less time to play.

I would say its a statement of undeniable fact that the vast majority of City of Heroes players did not play in a manner to optimize rewards.  Keep in mind that deep past I9 the vast majority of players didn't even have a single level 50 alt, according to the devs at the time.  Datamining showed the average CoH alt had what would be considered trivial amounts of influence relative to more resource-conscious players.

We who could and did often play optimally were always the significant minority.  From my experience dealing with average, random players the median City of Heroes player couldn't pick optimum reward gain from a police line up.  Nor, I think, did they care a lot.  If they had similar stuff to their friends and leveled about as fast as the people they played with, I think that's all that mattered.

[Pyromantic]

I would say its a statement of undeniable fact that the vast majority of City of Heroes players did not play in a manner to optimize rewards.  Keep in mind that deep past I9 the vast majority of players didn't even have a single level 50 alt, according to the devs at the time.  Datamining showed the average CoH alt had what would be considered trivial amounts of influence relative to more resource-conscious players.

We who could and did often play optimally were always the significant minority.  From my experience dealing with average, random players the median City of Heroes player couldn't pick optimum reward gain from a police line up.  Nor, I think, did they care a lot.  If they had similar stuff to their friends and leveled about as fast as the people they played with, I think that's all that mattered.

I could not in any way be described as a casual CoH player, but I also was not playing content with the most rewards for the least amount of time.  Certainly not on the whole.  This is purely a matter of perspective, but I felt that there was an "expected" pace of earning experience and other rewards.  If I deviated too far from that then I felt as though I hadn't really earned that character's level or other assets, and lost any sense of investment in the character as a result.

A case in point, that I actually posted about in another thread recently: I was interested in levelling a fire/stone tank at one point, back when mobs ran out of burn patches, to see how much I could leverage stone melee's controls.  I had a go at it over a double xp weekend and got the character into the late 30s.  I abandoned the character soon afterwards, not because I didn't like it, but because I felt it had just been too easy to level it.  From then on, I played 50s over double xp weekends rather than levelling characters. 

I have little doubt that there is a tendency towards taking greater rewards, all things being equal, but it isn't always the number one priority for people.  There is also the question of how you measure tangible rewards against intangible rewards.

Perhaps this was always true, though I certainly found that by the end of the game there was so much variance in reward-earning rates that statements such as "I have x 50s" given as a measure of expertise or veteran status were ludicrous.  I'm sure we can all think of examples of people "keeping score" by a tally of their 50s.  A 50 could represent a serious investment of time and effort, or it could represent practically none.

[Pyromantic]

Indeed, many mmorpg players are, if your familiar with various tropes or just visit tv tropes, are very similar to munchkins, they generally only care about their own power level and really don't give a crap about an story.  I think a long line of games having had bad stories way back could be a contributing factor, though some really good games even in the old games did in fact have good stories.  From the doom series to diablo often the story was there just to give the player an excuse for the environment they were in.  Even some modern games suffer this, in fact 90% modern military shooters tend to have stories like that(and often worst).  But by the time games started getting better stories mmorpgs had already locked themselves in the mold.  It's also course, all the harder to have a story at all in an environment you have to keep static, especially if it's trying to be a sandbox playground.

To interject here, I think it's important to recognize that it isn't one or the other; players aren't interested in either power levels or story.  I was sort of a power player, in that I enjoyed tweaking builds and seeing what I could get up to, but as I said above it wasn't about bypassing the effort to get there.  For example, one of those AE mishes that I enjoyed (before it was removed) was a Freak Tank farm.  The thing is, the reward rate in there was awful.  It was one of the worst things you could do if you were trying to earn in-game assets.  But I found it really fun to crank up the difficulty and dump my scrapper in a perpetually-aggro-capped-against-bosses room for a half hour and come out on top. 

But, to be honest, the story in the game didn't interest me all that much.  Sometimes I paid more attention to it, but on the whole I didn't devote much energy to following it.  When I'm looking for a good story, I simply look elsewhere.

It was the act of playing the game that hooked me.

[Pyromantic]

I agree with Star Trek Online sharing some things with City of. if you ever got to the Dysons sphere, listen to the music that plays, I swear it is almost like the Storm Palace.

I tried STO, and it lasted about an hour.  I had higher hopes that it would fill the CoH void, as I'd heard others share this sentiment before, but for me it was not to be.  Maybe if I'd given it more time.  I found the interface clunky, space combat irritatingly fiddly, and the general presentation of levelling a character very lacklustre. 

Which actually makes me wonder what my CoH experience would have been like if I hadn't had a friend to walk me through the basics when I started, or if I'd known/cared how much I had no idea what I was doing.

[Pyromantic]

Everyone has a "all they needed to do" idea.  This one, like all the rest, is false.  Allowing existing mobs only would only have made it more difficult for some players to figure out which combinations to exploit.  Which is to say, it would have slowed down players like me, or say Topdoc who practically lived for finding exploitable critter contexts, for about an afternoon.

(I once only rhetorically asked a question about selecting a particular kind of mob to exploit in a particular way and he already knew which one would work instantly - because he had already tested that exact combination repeatedly).

Edit: as to XP, I was in favor of allowing XP in the AE.  Just not material rewards.

I wrote a long forum post back in the day expressing my view on the issue.  I believe one of the biggest issues is that XP rewards for critters were calculated independent of context.  That is to say, if mob A is worth a base 1000 xp, then it's worth that whether mob B is in the enemy group or not.  That made it trivial to have all enemies in a particular group vulnerable to the same kind of character.  In the classic example, if practically all damage done by an enemy group is fire, then having high fire resistance and defense is very effective at neutralizing them.  On the other hand, if a particular enemy does almost entirely fire damage, but is placed in a group of enemies with diverse damage types, then the contextual weakness of that particular enemy to fire resistance/defense is less significant.  To that end I would have liked an algorithm for measuring diversity in an enemy group with respect to various factors: damage types dealt, damage resistance/defense, protection against different controls, etc.  The key point being that lack of diversity in any one area creates an opportunity for the "right" character to exploit.

I wouldn't claim that as the silver bullet or anything, but I do believe it would have been a step in the right direction.

[ryuplaneswalker]

The AE exploit system happened because -WE- as a player base failed.

anyone who looked at it for more than five minutes knew it would be exploitable to high heaven and we still demanded rewards from it, and then proceeded to exploit the holy hell out of it. It is a hard truth to take but the AE should never have had rewards beyond costume parts and it is our fault that it as a concept failed.

I would have loved to do more with the AE than I did, but there simply was no point in attempting to put out interesting Arcs with effort put into them, when they would be ignored for "CustomNPCfarm85".