New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

Hyper inflation is where so much money enters the market that it becames hugely devalued, and indeed influence went from being worth something if you had say 20 million to worthless when you only had 20 million when AE came along, the price of things at 20 million influence went up over time to a staggering half billion influence due to those levels of inflation.  I wouldn't blame pvpers specifically as pvp was already in ruins by the time AE showed up.

Many short sighted people used AE for influence, when it was really bad to use it that way.  They could only think in the short term, rather than consider the long term consequences of it.  The short term; THEY get a lot of money.  But the long term consequence: Everyone else loses a ton, including the farmer himself, due to hyper inflation.  The reason when I wanted to get rich was to solo the alignment missions on 8x was because I could get drops one couldn't get in AE, to me having high price recipes was true wealth. 

Indeed if there was a lower cap on how much influence anyone could have, I bet influence would have become 100% useless for trading and it'd be solely what recipes you had and materials you had that determined your wealth.  Just like Stones of Jordon in Diablo 2 completely replaced gold as the currency in that game for trading with other players.  It created an enormous, and very catch22-ish wealth gap that'd often form as a ladder session aged, as it was more about how to exploit the game to get Stones of Jordan rather than playing the game when it came to trading.  And THOSE exploits also caused hyper-inflation to slowly affect their value to.  :/

[MWRuger]

AE just sped the inflation up. It would have happened eventually because there simply wasn't enough things to spend influence on in the game. The market guys did studies and showed that the influence earning rate of a level 50 character was very high, even for non-farming 50's. AE opened that up to lower level characters as well. I had billions and almost never touched AE, so while AE helped with inflation it was a symptom of a larger problem.

Many Marketers believed that more inf sinks needed to be added to the game to help bleed off the excess money.

Ultimately though, the inflation was just extra zeros. Characters had no expenses so there was degradation to cost of living. Further, excluding incarnate content which had it's own restrictions, all game content was playable with SO's and did not require extraordinary funds. Indeed, hyperinflation actually helped players who went with SO's since the cost of their enhancements were fixed but the amount they got for salvage and recipes acquired in the game soared.

Besides with merits, tickets, converters and alignment merits there were many ways to get shinies that would allow you to bypass the market entirely.

The inf sinks that were added were either inefficient or not attractive. The marketing fees helped some. Tailor fees helped a little until vets got so many costume change tokens that it became pointless. The Inf to Prestige rate was very unattractive and was literally used only by people who had inf to burn.

[darkgob]

Indeed if there was a lower cap on how much influence anyone could have, I bet influence would have become 100% useless for trading and it'd be solely what recipes you had and materials you had that determined your wealth.

By the end of the game people were storing influence in excess of the cap on multiple characters.  Depending on what the new cap was you'd probably make some dent in market prices, but not much.

[Arcana]

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.

Thing is, I don't really have to guess.  What we know about what percentage of players did and did not have level 50s, had and did not have large amounts of influence, comes directly from the dev statements about the server data which to some degree I can confirm wasn't poorly collected.  Few people think their personal experience isn't representative but in this case we have unambiguous data that what people on the forums thought about what most players were doing and what they were actually doing was extremely disconnected.  75% of the player population had more in common with the forums' worst nightmares about the worst possible players than they did anything near what they thought was normal.

It is a statement of fact that basically every server had similar player populations, and that population mostly played suboptimally.  Its not something we need to guess at or derive from anecdotes.  Its something the devs could determine from running a couple of SQL queries.  We had official statements back in I5ish, around I9ish, and BaB (without permission, mind) shared data from around I13.  The devs also released official data after that around anniversary time a couple of times regarding player characters, levels, and influence.  Unless you think the devs did something trivial like count the number of level 50 characters wrong dozens of times in the same way, fact is most players were not "visible" to most other players unless they looked for them specifically.  Just consider what the limitations on global channel membership were, and consider what percentage of the approximately 100,000 players plus or minus could have ever been a member of even one of them.

[Arcana]

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.

I was looking at making adjustments to individual critters based on their power composition, and a separate global modification to the entire mission based on what spawned in it (group-based modifiers had an exploitable flaw: you could make critter members very strong that you could then engineer a mission to be difficult or impossible to spawn like a very strong boss rank in a mission with bosses off).  The second in particular would be a tricky one and would have required a code change.

[Arcana]

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

My suspicion is that someone found an exploitable glitch in the walk sequence that the animators couldn't resolve.  The animation system for CoH is remarkably complicated.  Not complex, in that the machinery is difficult to understand but complicated in that the way animations are executed involves a process that can be affected by other animations that exist in the animation sequence database.  So its possible to add an animation today that breaks one that was added yesterday.  When Elude was accidentally playing the animation for whirlwind, that was an example of such an oddity.

There were animation-based exploits that to this day I'm uncomfortable discussing publicly, because they have the potential to be game-breaking if the game ever comes back in a way that would be almost impossible to fix.

In any case, its possible that the animator(s) found such a glitch and rather than try to resolve it, they just punted it by making Walk into a special mode that locked out the ability to execute anything else, because heck its just walk.

[Arcana]

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.

There's two main reasons, a direct one and a meta one.  The direct one is that there was a belief that farming activities directly impacted other players negatively in certain technical ways.  Farming influence allowed farmers to have an advantage over other players when it came to buying things, for example, and there was the belief that farming caused price inflation (sometimes it did, sometimes it did not).  Farming also caused general power creep where players who farmed tended to be stronger than other players.  Because the game's difficulty and level progression curve were balanced around what the average or median player actually did in the game, farming in effect raised the curve on everyone else.  Things of this nature caused some players to have a negative opinion on farming.

The second, more meta reason has to do with the notion some players had that what they did should not matter to anyone else.  That isn't true psychologically.  In an MMO, there is a strong tendency for people to react negatively to what they perceive as an unfair situation.  To some players, farming is like someone who cuts in line ahead of them and then says since anyone can cut in line no one should be upset if he does it**.  It doesn't matter if the impact on them is negligible or even nonexistent.  And MMO operators can't claim to be innocent victims of this phenomenon because they all sell their games in part as social environments.  Players can claim they don't care about the other million people playing, they only care about themselves and maybe a few friends.  But the truth is that for the vast majority of MMO players, there is a sense even subconsciously that part of the attraction of playing an MMO is that its a shared experience - even if you solo.  It matters to people what's happening in other parts of the game, and what other players are experiencing.  Only sociopaths literally wouldn't care about everyone else playing.

So you can say you should be allowed to do whatever you want and no one else should have any right to voice concern, but that's simply not going to happen in an MMO played by human beings.


** Anyone queuing up to argue this is not true is wasting their time.  I'm not attempting to prove the assertion true, I'm simply asserting the truth of the statement that many people perceive this to be true and it affects their opinions on farming.  Many psychological studies related to this have been done and demonstrated the notion that what people perceive to be intrinsically fair is not based on what is quantitatively fair but on much more complicated value judgments.

[Arcana]

Hyper inflation is where so much money enters the market that it becames hugely devalued, and indeed influence went from being worth something if you had say 20 million to worthless when you only had 20 million when AE came along, the price of things at 20 million influence went up over time to a staggering half billion influence due to those levels of inflation.

I cannot think of anything you could buy in I13 for 20 million inf that sold for half a billion inf at any time beyond I14.  Could you name an example?

[Codewalker]

Only sociopaths literally wouldn't care about everyone else playing.

You heard it here first. Spiritual successor "City of Sociopaths" CONFIRMED!

[LadyVamp]

An interesting conversation here.  AE and it's merits.  I've always thought of it as an idea by someone in high level management or accounting who thought they could save money by getting the players to write the content instead of hiring writers to write new stories and graphic artists to draw up new graphical content.  I've never blamed the devs as they seemed to be frequently hamstrung by poor decisions above their level.  Blaming the players for using the system for exploitation is like blaming the guy who uses a spreadsheet as a database because it happens to do what he wants it to do.

Whether AE was a good idea or a bad idea is besides the point.  It was poorly implemented.  The players can take the blame for the pressure of getting new content.  The accountants can take the blame for forcing this kind of a solution to Coh's only real problem.  It is interesting how new story content started to flow in after AE was put to the test.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to have been at the office to listen to the "I told you this would happen" in the board room meetings.  Blizzard tried it too with Warcraft 2 and 3 as well as Starcraft as did Dune 2000 and Emperor Battle for Dune.  Building my own missions wasn't nearly as fun.  No mystery.

As for farming AE, I did some of that too.  Usually because I just wanted to beat the living hell out of some mobs.  I tended to let levels 1 - 5 ride once for free.  Join the fight.  Stay at the door.   I didn't care.   6 and above?  cough up some influence.  I do know that some people did trade real world cash for farming.  It was really hard to miss the constant broadcasts.  I even had a player once tell me I was cutting into his business and to go away.

As for building an AE story, I did that too.  No one played it except me and a few friends.  Invasion by a race of cat people named the brawlacons.

[JanessaVR]

For my part, whether I farmed or not depended on my character.  On some, I just wanted to level them up quickly and see how a certain powerset combo worked at high levels.  Those characters I farmed and power-leveled shamelessly, using any trick or AE exploit I could manage to employ.  If other people had a problem with that, I can't really say that I care all that much.

With other characters, I had created a rich and detailed background and/or were leveling up slowly with other players I knew in real life.  Those characters would go the opposite route, sometimes turning off XP at certain levels so as to not out-level content.  Some people in-game thought it was crazy to level so slowly, and again, I can't really say that I care all that much.

And in some other instances, I wanted to trick out a Level 50, but didn't have the INF, so I paid real-world cash to farmer friends I know in RL (an "unprovable buying gold transaction" in-game, if they're part of your SG).

In short, I'm on the side of "my character, my business, not yours" in the Great Farmer Debate here.

[silvers1]

Personally, I farmed tickets since that was clearly the only way I was ever going to buy IO sets for my alts.  The devs nerfed the drop rates on normal content to such an extent, that they made it impossible to outfit your characters any other way.   I'm aware some players played the market, but that's just not my thing.

   They should have made the drop rate much higher, and reduced the influence rate  - inflation problem solved immediately.  Higher supply = lower prices.

[artbunker]

For my part, whether I farmed or not depended on my character.  On some, I just wanted to level them up quickly and see how a certain powerset combo worked at high levels.  Those characters I farmed and power-leveled shamelessly, using any trick or AE exploit I could manage to employ.  If other people had a problem with that, I can't really say that I care all that much.

With other characters, I had created a rich and detailed background and/or were leveling up slowly with other players I knew in real life.  Those characters would go the opposite route, sometimes turning off XP at certain levels so as to not out-level content.  Some people in-game thought it was crazy to level so slowly, and again, I can't really say that I care all that much.

And in some other instances, I wanted to trick out a Level 50, but didn't have the INF, so I paid real-world cash to farmer friends I know in RL (an "unprovable buying gold transaction" in-game, if they're part of your SG).

In short, I'm on the side of "my character, my business, not yours" in the Great Farmer Debate here.

I agree with this. With my Widow, I played her out to 50 because I needed to learn how she worked. I enjoyed the storylines and it was just plain fun. However for my Mind-Kin controller  that i remade on Virtue, i AE'd it all the way to 50 . I knew him inside out already and didnt want to pay the transfer fee. Took 3 1/2 hours to get it to 50 with a friends help, but it saved me tons of time .

[Vee]

You heard it here first. Spiritual successor "City of Sociopaths" CONFIRMED!

Might need to check that SWTOR gen chat doesn't have that patented.

[Excidia]

Would a City of Sociopaths actually care if someone else already owned it?

[Arcana]

You heard it here first. Spiritual successor "City of Sociopaths" CONFIRMED!

In this game, your character would be permanently sitting in front of a computer screen logged into a computer message board devoted to a fictional game called City of Meta.  Through the magic of virtual reality, an Issue 1 enhancement would allow you to log directly into the City of Meta message board as if you were actually your character.

[Noyjitat]

Thing is, I don't really have to guess.  What we know about what percentage of players did and did not have level 50s, had and did not have large amounts of influence, comes directly from the dev statements about the server data which to some degree I can confirm wasn't poorly collected.  Few people think their personal experience isn't representative but in this case we have unambiguous data that what people on the forums thought about what most players were doing and what they were actually doing was extremely disconnected.  75% of the player population had more in common with the forums' worst nightmares about the worst possible players than they did anything near what they thought was normal.

It is a statement of fact that basically every server had similar player populations, and that population mostly played suboptimally.  Its not something we need to guess at or derive from anecdotes.  Its something the devs could determine from running a couple of SQL queries.  We had official statements back in I5ish, around I9ish, and BaB (without permission, mind) shared data from around I13.  The devs also released official data after that around anniversary time a couple of times regarding player characters, levels, and influence.  Unless you think the devs did something trivial like count the number of level 50 characters wrong dozens of times in the same way, fact is most players were not "visible" to most other players unless they looked for them specifically.  Just consider what the limitations on global channel membership were, and consider what percentage of the approximately 100,000 players plus or minus could have ever been a member of even one of them.

Until I see information that is verifiable I'm going to call bs and I don't mean black scorpion. How do we know that data was active players and not a ton of accounts that are either no longer subscribed, rarely log in or someones alternate account that never logs in?

This falls under the same bullshit thrown around here lately such as: "only a very few group of players participated in incarnates, min maxed or had IO's"

[ivanhedgehog]

Until I see information that is verifiable I'm going to call bs and I don't mean black scorpion. How do we know that data was active players and not a ton of accounts that are either no longer subscribed, rarely log in or someones alternate account that never logs in?

This falls under the same bullshit thrown around here lately such as: "only a very few group of players participated in incarnates, min maxed or had IO's"

if arcana said it was there, it was. I remember dev statements about 50's etc. you can believe what you want, but most people did not play to a max performance level. I had 34 50'sand I didnt. I played fun characters, not designed power characters. I used purples when I wanted to and didnt when I didnt want to. I used powers in non-optimal ways if it was fun. I tanked hami, recluse, did all sorts of things. that was part of what made coh so special. you could play in non preferred ways and still have success and fun. I farmed with my ill emp. I had to use 1 special mission to do it, but it was fun.


edit: At one time, I thought arcana was crazy......looking back, what a doofus I was...

[Brighellac]

Until I see information that is verifiable I'm going to call bs and I don't mean black scorpion. How do we know that data was active players and not a ton of accounts that are either no longer subscribed, rarely log in or someones alternate account that never logs in?

This falls under the same bullshit thrown around here lately such as: "only a very few group of players participated in incarnates, min maxed or had IO's"

+1

[Noyjitat]

Farming also caused general power creep where players who farmed tended to be stronger than other players.  Because the game's difficulty and level progression curve were balanced around what the average or median player actually did in the game, farming in effect raised the curve on everyone else.  Things of this nature caused some players to have a negative opinion on farming.[/quote

All this translates to is if you spend time farming you can afford the more expensive ios that someone who doesn't spend the time and effort. Why is this bad? If I work 40 hours and make 600 and my friend works 20 hours he shouldn't get 600$ he should get 300 unless he makes a higher wage than me. This is how it works in the game world and the real world if you spend the time you can earn the rewards. If you want to earn more wages you either wait until you get promoted or you go find a job that pays more. If you want to earn more xp you fight the more dangerous foes or pick the strategy to kill the weaker ones at a faster pace.

So you can say you should be allowed to do whatever you want and no one else should have any right to voice concern, but that's simply not going to happen in an MMO played by human beings.

Their is no problem with people voicing a concern, the problem is thinking others should be punished or nerfed because YOU don't like the way they play.
I should be able to do whatever I want as long as I'm not breaking the games rules or causing a disruption doing something illegal (all in the EULA/TOS that you sign).

Having more money than a casual player or someone who doesn't play as much as me or having a strategy for making money isn't breaking a rule. Farmers have more money because they spend the time and effort and find the right strategy to earn it. Punishing players for this just doesn't make sense

** Anyone queuing up to argue this is not true is wasting their time.

I don't have a response for this...