New efforts!

[Pyromantic]

I find that STO has, at least for me and I think for many players, an odd interest curve.  In the beginning, like many MMOs its a pretty fun ride.  But then there's a significant tedium zone where the basics get boring and the advanced stuff is still too opaque to be interesting.  It gets better once you figure out what the heck all the various systems do and how they work and what's the best way to participate in them.  After that, like most MMOs (including CoH) it becomes whether you can find your own fun in the game.

Maybe I should give it another whirl.  There are things I've heard about it that I like, but it certainly didn't do a good job of holding my attention in the early going. 

[Pyromantic]

But for the fact that the devs didn't have the resources to implement it, the custom critter system would have addressed this weakness.  When I was working on it, I made a trivial silly mistake in the implementation that a QA person spotted: it was possible with my valuation formulas for players to make all-melee critters that were trivially exploitable for full XP.  So I recommended some fail safes to prevent that: on top of the fact that melee attacks were devalued, the lack of range forced a hard cap on the value of the critter.  It occurred to me then that a more advanced system would work to value critters and critter groups better: on top of valuation systems, there would be a few failsafe checks to make sure critters that had critical vulnerabilities were hardcapped on their valuation.  So a critter's value would be based on a combination of their offensive and defensive "strength" but offensive strength would be moderated if all the offense was too focused on one damage type; ditto defensive weaknesses.  In effect, a critter's strength would be based on the value of all of its strengths and capped by its most critical weaknesses.  That way you couldn't simply compensate for a critical weakness by piling on more strengths in other areas, leaving that weakness exploitable.

Even if I gave my time away for free (and I was perfectly willing to do that) there was no way I could have gotten that approved.  But I shelved the idea thinking maybe down the road it could have been revisited.  I thought Black Scorpion and Arbiter Hawk could have been persuaded to take a second look post I25-I26ish.

Interesting to hear it was still on the radar.

When you said it "would work to value critters and critter groups better," does that mean you were looking at xp rates for individual critters depending somewhat on other critters in the group?  I don't know if the system ever did that, except that I believe they later introduced an experience penalty on groups if they did not include at least one enemy each of minion, lt and boss ranks.

[Remaugen]

Erm, what? In AE missions, or inside the building?

Not only do I not have any recollection of anything like that, I'm not even sure restricting chat on a specific channel by location is possible.

You could not emote inside AE missions. It was something that came up often for discussion in my gaming group.

[Remaugen]

I have my suspicions on that one, but you probably wouldn't like the logic for that one.

And what are your suspicions why powers were turned off with walk?

[FloatingFatMan]

I think the issue was Roleplayers are generally less then vocal minority in the community. on a whole content to hang out in our bases or run stuff while RPing.......but i could be wrong my experience was limited to my guild on Virtue as far as that goes. I for one was happy with walk - if i'm walking then i'm RPing and its likely i'm not ripping people to pieces with claws or guning them down with assault rifles (outside of emote combat and that was rare once AE came in and we all learned how to use it to build story arcs)

There were more powers than just attacks, you know. All disabled if you wanted to walk, some quite useful during RP, but then you have to shut off walk.  There was just no need for it.

[FloatingFatMan]

Erm, what? In AE missions, or inside the building?

Not only do I not have any recollection of anything like that, I'm not even sure restricting chat on a specific channel by location is possible.

In missions. TBH though, unless you were an RPer and actually tried to use the AE for that purpose, odds are you'd never have noticed the limitation.  It didn't render it completely useless for us, but it did limit its utility rather a lot.

[FloatingFatMan]

It would have been a ghost town and not worth developing. For quite a few years, I used to take some of my characters through there at levels 1-10 just as a change from the AP/GC arcs I'd done hundreds of times. I didn't want a farm, just something that earned me XP at the normal rate.

No it wouldn't.  It would have been bereft of -farmers-, but that would have been a GOOD thing.  There were plenty of folks that used it for story telling and didn't really care about the rewards side of things.

[Noyjitat]

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.

Wasn't that way on my server. It was either the enemies are too easy or the xp isn't high enough raise the difficulty please. And if I had to guess most of the people involved with the servers main global channels at atleast one or more 50's. Usually the main or favorite character was either 50 or close to it.

On the weekends during the evenings most of the server was either running two or three full leagues for msrs/hami or multiple bafs and some tfs. I did have a few friends that simply never had much time at all to play that never made it to 50 usually trying out the new sets when they did play was the reason.

Then the AE probably wasn't made for players like you, and to be blunt, I surely do wish you had just left it alone.

That's what personally irritated me, this notion that every single part of the game had to appeal to a player, or else the game was broken.  I would have loved it if AE gave no rewards, or if it gave rewards that were only worth something inside of AE.  Would the farmers and powerlevelers have played AE then? No. GOOD! AE was never intended to be a farming or powerleveling tool, it was meant for players to create and publish their own stories.

To me, AE was one of the most exciting announcements around the game that I was genuinely stoked about, and it broke my heart to see it so mercilessly exploited.  I went from "I'm going to spend practically all of my time in here!" to "I never want to see this cesspool again" in pretty short order.

Personally, I wish that there had been a lot more very visible, very public nerfs to people's accounts. Character rollbacks, locking AE slots, etc. would have been friggin' fantastic, and based on early comments during testing and development that the devs absolutely, positively weren't going to tolerate farming arcs, I really expected it.

Oh well, I guess it's all water under the bridge now, but yeah, I agree with the poster above that basically said that it's not the devs' fault that AE was broken, it was the players.

Well if people aren't playing it then something is broken about it. *cough pvp changes* No I'm not trolling.

There are no rules about farming and I don't understand all the hate towards those that choose to farm. Wouldn't you rather let people play the way they want to play rather than shame them? That would be a customer service nightmare far worse than ED and Global defense nerf... Those that chose to farm all the time probably wouldn't team with anyone anyway and would of left and quit long ago and some of those people were big buyers on the paragon market with multiple paid accounts. I knew a few people on Liberty with 8 paid accounts and multibox farming was a routine for them. They didn't hurt my gameplay experience or anyone elses.

Exploiting a game breaking bug to get huge rewards is one thing but using the tools given to you is another... You don't ban accounts because someone discovered a method or strategy to become wealthy based off the missions and content you provided them with. Portal corp and the tv series was never meant to be farming arcs either but people used them until AE came out. Because why go all the way to grandville or peregrine when the starting zone has and every other safe zone has a friggin AE building?

And you can certainly bet that if it didn't give rewards or gave less xp than normal content people would either leave your team or complain to do something else. Sometimes the extra nice person would stay with you for one mission before leaving to find another team.

When the successors come out play the game with the people you enjoy playing with and don't delegate or punish people for the way they choose to play and you're more likely to retain a healthy active community.

[umber]

Wasn't that way on my server. It was either the enemies are too easy or the xp isn't high enough raise the difficulty please. And if I had to guess most of the people involved with the servers main global channels at atleast one or more 50's. Usually the main or favorite character was either 50 or close to it.

On the weekends during the evenings most of the server was either running two or three full leagues for msrs/hami or multiple bafs and some tfs. I did have a few friends that simply never had much time at all to play that never made it to 50 usually trying out the new sets when they did play was the reason.

You realize your data might be a little skewed when trying to define the optimal-reward-seeking scope of "most of" your server by using the players participating on the badge-hunting and TF-forming channels, right?

I wonder how many CoHers never used channels at all.  Don't recall seeing any dev datamining on it but I bet it was a clear majority.

[Triplash]

I always felt that the AE should have had two separate lists of arcs. One for storytelling, with no rewards but you could set up whatever kinds of enemies you wanted, and customize their powers as much as you like. And one for farming, that gave rewards on par with the regular game, but you were strictly limited regarding customization options.

As I recall, most of the exploits in AE came from tailoring the enemies to fit very specific loopholes. Remove the majority of that customization and the majority of the loopholes would close with it.

[Surelle]

I always felt that the AE should have had two separate lists of arcs. One for storytelling, with no rewards but you could set up whatever kinds of enemies you wanted, and customize their powers as much as you like. And one for farming, that gave rewards on par with the regular game, but you were strictly limited regarding customization options.

As I recall, most of the exploits in AE came from tailoring the enemies to fit very specific loopholes. Remove the majority of that customization and the majority of the loopholes would close with it.

That is an excellent idea!

[Noyjitat]

You realize your data might be a little skewed when trying to define the optimal-reward-seeking scope of "most of" your server by using the players participating on the badge-hunting and TF-forming channels, right?

I wonder how many CoHers never used channels at all.  Don't recall seeing any dev datamining on it but I bet it was a clear majority.

No it wasnt.skewed and first of all they were not just badge and tf channels. You can search by.archetype and level and see who's online and compare that to the channel lists and whos on a team.  We had a very social server of which nearly everyone was using one of the three global channels. it wasnt a minor amount.

[Zerohour]

There's anger here towards players who chose to farm. Would anyone care to explain what difference it makes to ANYONE but the player farming?  If that's how they want to spend their time, who cares?  Personally, when I had created a new power set combo, I would rather just level up from 1 to 20 in AE farms than grind out the same beginner missions each time I had a new toon concept.

[Ankhammon]

There's anger here towards players who chose to farm. Would anyone care to explain what difference it makes to ANYONE but the player farming?  If that's how they want to spend their time, who cares?  Personally, when I had created a new power set combo, I would rather just level up from 1 to 20 in AE farms than grind out the same beginner missions each time I had a new toon concept.

Although I wasn't above farming, I think one of the reasons for the anger is the AE farmers made things a little more difficult for those whose builds weren't farmable.
Unless you were on two particular servers, the existence of the AE farmer meant that there was fewer options to find a team. This, of course, meant that many players had to solo or duo during those early levels when they didn't have enough powers to make it enjoyable.

Then there were all the forum posts that cookie cutter farmer types used which had this air of "I'm better than you, I can take out 7000 minions at level 4". I kind of found that to be annoying simply because they could do it only with a very specialized group of baddies.

[MM3squints]

There's anger here towards players who chose to farm. Would anyone care to explain what difference it makes to ANYONE but the player farming?  If that's how they want to spend their time, who cares?  Personally, when I had created a new power set combo, I would rather just level up from 1 to 20 in AE farms than grind out the same beginner missions each time I had a new toon concept.

Personally I liked farming for some reason in CoX it didn't feel like a grind, but was actually relaxing. Originally I think the hatred of farming was people spamming messages "can you join the group so I can spawn the map." The Devs did farmers (and the community) a solid by making the level increase. Heck they even did one better for farmers by giving an option so that no bosses will spawn. After the quality of life improvement and there was no more spamming, I think the hate came in 2 forms. 1, people who didn't farm feel like farmers were artificially inflating the market for the cost of prices because there was an abundance of Inf (I don't know if that was true, but Inf was never an issue to me) and 2, people feel like farming is not really playing the game and for some reason if their are not "playing the game the right way" it is wrong.

[MWRuger]

There's anger here towards players who chose to farm. Would anyone care to explain what difference it makes to ANYONE but the player farming?  If that's how they want to spend their time, who cares?  Personally, when I had created a new power set combo, I would rather just level up from 1 to 20 in AE farms than grind out the same beginner missions each time I had a new toon concept.

Not sure it is anger, exactly. All of the farming arcs and there were tons of them made it very difficult to find arcs that weren't farming arcs. Yes, I know that this could have been fixed by the devs, but AE wasn't a priority from what Arcana says and why should it be? If it is being exploited in way that Devs didn't like why should they expend effort on it?

[Reaper]

For me, farming was a necessary evil.  I did not try to exploit AE (although I admit that when a few of the minion bugs like the spiders were found, I did use them to have a certain toon gain quite a few levels).  I truly did enjoy playing other people's storylines and seeing the creative nature of our playerbase.  Would I have still played AE had there been no rewards?  Absolutely!  I liked the stories and I wanted to see how my toons would stand up to other player's creations.  However, I did not have a problem with other people farming AE for rewards.  I don't think it was a big deal but I'm sure many others disagree.  Besides, after the huge jump in salvage prices, I needed AE tickets just to buy some of those million inf salvages.

I was perfectly happy using my freak farm @ portal corp cranked all the way up to +4 in order to gain the influence I needed to build other toons.  Had quite a few purples drop each day while running them as well.  I had expensive tastes when it came to building my characters, and unfortunately I wasn't patient enough to keep playing through missions and tfs to gain the huge amount of inf I needed to build them.  But to each their own.  I just don't believe that other farmers really affected my gameplay.  Sure it may have driven prices up, but I had my own ways to make money.  Just my two cents.   :)

[brothermutant]

The issue (I assume) is that it broke a lot of systems:

One) they had a  LOT of money now
Two) They had a LOT of the BEST gear now
Three) the above two destabilized Wentworths big time (lots of pissed off people LOST in game money in their eyes because of AE).
and Four) the advantage some players had in PvP was because of those perfectly tweeked out builds made possible by AE farming.

Having said all of that, I could have cared LESS. I hated PvP and always stayed away from it unless it was a 1 v 1 situation. Even then, I lost more often than won. Issue I had was that there were virtually unkillable people in PvP UNLESS you had a SPECIFIC toon to disrupt their advantages (-regen, - recov, -def or -res, lots of CC types of powers like stuns/holds/sleeps as you could not redo the same CC ability IIRC). I always felt that ANY toon that you put effort into it should be viable in any 1 v 1 PvP setting. Sadly, that was not the case.

[MM3squints]

The issue (I assume) is that it broke a lot of systems:

One) they had a  LOT of money now
Two) They had a LOT of the BEST gear now
Three) the above two destabilized Wentworths big time (lots of pissed off people LOST in game money in their eyes because of AE).
and Four) the advantage some players had in PvP was because of those perfectly tweeked out builds made possible by AE farming.

Having said all of that, I could have cared LESS. I hated PvP and always stayed away from it unless it was a 1 v 1 situation. Even then, I lost more often than won. Issue I had was that there were virtually unkillable people in PvP UNLESS you had a SPECIFIC toon to disrupt their advantages (-regen, - recov, -def or -res, lots of CC types of powers like stuns/holds/sleeps as you could not redo the same CC ability IIRC). I always felt that ANY toon that you put effort into it should be viable in any 1 v 1 PvP setting. Sadly, that was not the case.

Heh there a conversation about this topic somewhere in page 400-700. Pre i13 technically most toons were viable in 1 v 1 pvp (except of course buffers) You just needed to supplement the right pool powers, insp, and APP for the short comings. Technically you didn't need to have lots of CC to win a fight. The best type of CC is that the target suffers so much DPS it permanently CCed till they respawn.

[Remaugen]

I did use AE to power level now and then, though I got bored with it so it didn't happen very often. And sometimes, I would farm in Recluses Victory overnight while I slept, or until someone came along and killed off my power toons or my internet connection dropped.

I never really understood the anger and hatred that some folks directed at Farmers or Power Levelers. (For that matter I never understood PVPers! Seriously, WHY?) We all have our methods and means, why can't we all enjoy our cake when we have it?