Ukase

Doooooooom!!!! In all seriousness, I do understand that neither are going anywhere. Most of my replies are to folks who, for reasons of their own, would like to see different things: 1. AE rewards reduced to be more consistent with non-AE content. 2. Elimination of fire farming altogether because they don't like it and consider it an exploit. I've got no beef with the Dev team as things stand now. I do however get irritated by people who present these statements about the game's "economy" or the health of the game itself, as if they were some sort of subject matter expert on the topic when there's no evidence that they know what they're talking about. The HC Dev team is going to do what they're going to do, and they seem willing to listen, which is one part of what I require. The other part is the rationale behind certain decisions which impact some of my game play. It was like pulling teeth, but I finally got the second part. But some of these folks come up with their arguments in favor of their own preferred way to play, but take the position that my play is somehow unsavory and damaging to the health of the game - yet they can't present any evidence of this, nor refute logic when it's presented to them. They seem to think a player having a stack of influence is "inflationary", when there's no evidence to support this. Items on the AH are cheaper now than they have been since the game re-opened. Clearly, all the farming and marketing that's going on has been nothing but good for the game, if the price of IOs are any indication. (although they could be artificially suppressed due to lower demand) Add to that, it's kind of fun to challenge folks with contrary opinions. I do my best to remain open-minded. Maybe I'll learn something. Stranger things have happened. But I will never take assertions by a poster in this forum as fact, unless I already believe it, or know it to be true. If it's not something I currently believe, then I'll challenge it. Isn't that what these forums are for? To share information, opinions, etc?

My therapist called it "Arrested Development". Apparently, I keep repeating my adolescence trying to get it right. In real life, I'm only good at maybe three things. One of them is losing my temper and shaking my fist at idiots whose identities are unknown to me simply because they refuse to see things my way. Go figure.

"Including Florida" lol

So, I fixed that for you. The way you had it was completely wrong. And even my corrected form is wrong. Using game code is simply playing the game. Just because some folks think outside of the box, that's not an exploit. That's value-added unintended bonus. A better example of an exploit would be if I discovered that killing a -3 lieutenant sniper on a roof of a building in PI gave me a very rare recipe every 2nd time I defeated him and proceeded to let him respawn hundreds of times to do just that. That would be exploiting a flaw in the rng recipe drop code. The AE system, when you create the npcs to defeat, there are sliders to make them super tough for more xp, or not so tough for less xp. There's no flaw at all. No exploit. It's by design.

So, the part in bold is a really interesting theory! I know nothing about "design philosophy". I'm not real sure I could define it. It's semantics, but AE is not an exploit. Is it being used the way Paragon Studios imagined it would be used? Yes, it is being used in the exact way they imagined it would be. That said, it's also being used to "farm". What a term, "farm". Farming in real life is traditionally meant to invest resource in the hopes of getting far more return. Plant seeds, harvest. Feed pigs, breed pigs, slaughter the fattest ones. With the way we refer to farming, many of you are unaware of the time it takes for a new player to make a character that can do this. It's almost idiot proof now, granted. Copy one of the many builds, market a bit, or play for merits as you need to, or simply work you way into the build you're looking for. Either way, you're investing your time and energy to make a character that can withstand what most non-farmers cannot. It really doesn't matter what Paragon Studio developers said, or were aiming for. They are not here. They no longer have skin in the game. We are a fraction of the size of the old CoH player base. It makes sense to me to not even consider the original plans that NCSoft and Paragon Studios had in mind. It's an apples and oranges player base. It's not a pay to win model. It's not a subscription model. It's a rogue server that is emulating a darn good, if slow (because of the volunteer status) developer studio. AE and farming are an integral part of CoH. The influence that a farmer earns really shouldn't matter to anyone. Why? Because all that influence does is help drive down the costs of IOs. All that influence they have is spent on alts, I suspect, or stashed in unobtainable bids or email. Or maybe they're having a costume contest every now and then. All of these habits farmers have - stashing inf, or spending it, they don't hurt the casual player in any way. They have no impact on their game play. And I cannot fathom how anyone sane can consider AE farming an exploit. An exploit is doing something that generates an advantage. It's not an advantage if anyone can do the same thing. I do understand that some of you would retort that if they did the same thing, we'd have "City of Farmers". Newsflash - we have had City of Farmers since the Fire tank was born. The only difference now is that because HC is free to play, anyone can make multiple accounts without paying an extra $15 per month. That's the only real reason why there are so many folks with extra accounts that have farmers. Because we can. It's even encouraged, because Jimmy himself has stated that farmers are good for the gaming community. What he did question was the AFK-farmer. Again, it's not an exploit to use AE to farm. It's perfectly reasonable, and hurts nobody. If it weren't for the folks to lazy or to ignorant to make their own second account and farm themselves, 90% of you against farming would be blissfully unaware of them. I do not see how farming harms anyone. I do understand that someone getting PL'd and knowing nothing about the game...yeah, what that player ends up in a team I'm on, it's a sad situation. But that's not really on the farmer, that's on the player that has so little knowledge of what they're doing, they are genuinely unaware that they don't know what they're doing. But, again, farming is not exploitative. Anyone can do it. Just because you don't want to...that's sounds like a personal problem. I understand that some folks have this ideal way that they think the game should be played. Folks join together, team up for a common goal, and everyone shares the proceeds automatically. Some folks crack jokes, folks get to know each other and laugh and have a fun experience. But not everyone is going to find that pursuit so ideal. Some folks want to speed through. Some folks want to kill 'em all. Some folks want to farm. If you're not on the team, it has nothing to do with you, doesn't impact you at all. When someone runs 6 hami raids, back to back and alts out and scores 480 merits in about 90 minutes, nobody's fussing about that. Sure, they coordinated and got the job done, so there was a slightly higher degree of risk. But not by much, really. 50 folks buffing up with incarnate buffs and zerging hami in 60 seconds isn't hardly a risk these days. But it goes on routinely. And it should! Let these folks make their loot if that's how they want to! Some player named Blapperella was running an Ouro Positron AGAIN today. I swear I see them forming up for that once a week, at least. It's merits, and they're probably pretty quick at it. Good for them. Is there risk? Maybe. But not much, once you get your team composition squared away. All these players make influence and merits their own way. And, if I'm not on their team, it's none of my business. Let 'em do them. So, with regards to farming, I just wish all of you who are against it would realize what I do: It hurts nobody. If anything, it helps the community by having more items in the AH for folks to buy. I'm sure I'm coming off as obtuse, and I suppose that's fair. But I don't see the harm. In what specific way does a farmer hurt the community? The game? I keep reading, "If farming didn't give a ridiculous amount more rewards, nobody would do it." That may be true. And to that comment, I reply, "Then it's a good thing it offers more rewards. We need to incentivize farming! Without farmers, the cost of IOs is going to go up! And that's fine by me. I'll be quite alright. But you do realize, I hope, that there are players that think 20 million influence is unobtainable! They are level 20 or so, have maybe 100K influence and know nothing about the market, know nothing about how to make influence - but they've heard about the LotG 7.5%. They know these are a favorable enhancement to have. If you guys have your way, these poor folks are going to be blowing their merits on recipes instead of simply buying one for 6M (going price now). If farming is reduced, that price point goes up, guaranteed. I say this to be helpful. You do not want to reduce farming. I can see the case for reducing or eliminating AFK farming, although I think the case is weak. But active farming? It's not an exploit at all. It's no more risky than folks in a radio mission in PI, folks in an MSR, or folks in a hami raid, or folks running an itf. And the rewards for active farming might give more influence due to the density of the mobs, but farmers don't get reward merits, so it's pretty much a wash.

First, I think this is a great question (well, set of questions) for us to ponder. My gut tells me that we would need a lot of participation to get a more precise picture to account for outliers. About 3 years ago, I think. Maybe 2.5, I counseled a new player on the basics of farming, gave her the IOs needed and my build. (and much to my surprise, 4 months later emailed me 500M inf as a repayment, even though it was a gift) Since then, she tweaked the build a bit to suit her own playstyle, and would run 3 farmers on the same map routinely. She tracked her earnings, and was puzzled to learn that despite her actively farming, (the two other accounts would also be brutes with burn on auto, set to follow her primary), my afk farming gave me more influence because I actually crafted/converted/sold the uncommon and rare recipes. The reason was scale. I could conceivably have 3 farmers on each shard. She could only control one farmer at a time. And, even if the rng is stingy, because of converters, the hills and valleys of the rng were smoothed out. Simply because the afk farmer can scale the running of maps, I don't know how we can reach a true apples to apples comparison. Add to that, the speed runner can certainly acquire merits very quickly. On Excelsior, someone like Stitch or Confusion? (aka Bright Phoenix), or Marsh - those guys seem to run TFs or iTrials in succession on a routine basis, and do so in a speedy fashion. But, it's not so much the merits they earn - but what they'd do with them. Converters? Boosters? Or just buy ATOs, purples, or Winters? Or some other recipe? For something like this, I would call on a more scientific mind like @Bopper. Never met the man, but in my mind he's to CoH like Brad Schoenfeld is to the science of resistance training. But, with the latest call for testing hard mode ITF, he's probably too busy right now. Not to do the testing, mind you, but lay out the framework for the tests. Metrics to measure and what content should be run to measure them, etc.

Sorry, @lemming. My ability to quote portions of a post and such is limited. In this post I'm quoting, you have a quote, some comment that you cut and pasted from somewhere, and I'd like to see it in context, but have no idea where it came from. Could you point me in the right direction?

Well...you can't truly afk, but what I have done is I'll take two-three accounts, depending on what I'm after. One farmer goes to one mob, the other two go to two other different mobs. I tab out, watch Netflix, or play on the other server with the 4th account. (remember, you can play with 3 accounts on one shard, but there's no rule against playing a 4th account on a different shard) It's all about timing. Sometimes, the bosses rez, and the timing's off. So, I'll wait an extra couple of minutes. Every 5 minutes, I tab in, move to the next mob, and so on. Takes about 45 minutes for the Dreck map, and sometimes, if I'm paying closer attention, takes 35. It can vary, though, as sometimes, the freaks fly off, and return, which can slow things down. It's technically afk, but to have any efficiency, you're tabbing in more often than not.

So, someone absolutely gave me proof that there is someone using a domain registrar based out of Toronto that seems to be hiding the domain owner's name - for all the good that would do me, I don't know any player's real life name, lol. The only thing I could think of would be to entice them to come out of hiding by selling them some of my influence, but 1) I'm sure they'd want me to give them my influence first, and 2) not sure they'd follow through with paying me cash and honestly, wouldn't feel comfy telling anyone where I live or give my banking info in order to get the funds. I'm sure there's some app or something that would make it easy and anonymous, but I wouldn't want anonymous. I'd want the name, address and in-game global, but anyone can just start over with a new account easily enough. It'd be like playing whack-a-mole. And to be clear, the only reason I would consider such a thing would be to get them shut down, whomever they are. But the prices I saw being charged, I just ...I can't even...It's hard to take it seriously. It's not like it was 5 bucks for a billion. It's like a LOT of money, given how easy it is to make it in this flavor of CoH. So, I would ask any of you to ask me how I make the influence I make, legitimately, rather than line the pockets of some nefarious evil person. I would sooner teach you all to figuratively fish than have you buy a rotten over-priced fish from this rascal. I honestly think I'm gonna vomit.

I think it was about 18 months ago, when I was helping a lowbie alt clobber freak tanks for Tankbuster badge, en route to the FPR accolade, when it finally sunk in that AE XP is lower than it is in the wild. Granted, there aren't a dozen patrols running right into a burn patch, but you can out-earn AE pretty easily once you determine how often you have to tab in, to move to the next mob. The only reason I stopped doing it was I would get a call and forget all about it, and "waste" time for the afk-er. But if I were an active farmer, I'd never touch AE unless I needed tickets, and I don't often have that need.

Really? What's the exchange rate? I could liquidate 500 billion today, if the price is right! As far as I know, there's no cash money trading hands for something as easy to get as influence. There's no evidence of it. There was evidence of it in 2019 https://massivelyop.com/2019/09/19/city-of-heroes-homecoming-is-now-banning-accounts-for-real-money-trading/ But, I've not seen any since then. Granted, that doesn't mean it isn't happening, but if it is, HC will detect it and act accordingly. It's not a prevalent issue in the least.

Is English not your first language? It doesn't matter about Score. They are irrelevant to this discussion. The HC devs brought Vet levels to HC:CoH. Doesn't matter who came up with it - they implemented it. And it was a great move. And YES! Why the blue fuck would anyone want to wait 20 minutes of doing absolutely nothing to form an iTrial? That's insane. And that's the single biggest reason why I only do iTrials by appointment. It minimizes the waiting around. Log in at 7:55, and queued in by 8:00. You may have nothing better to do, but I do. I ain't waiting that long, period. And there's no reason why we can't buff things to match "extreme outliers", although nobody can prove that AE is an extreme outlier. Compared to what? A TF/SF train? An iTrial train? It's apples and oranges. For each farmer that out-earns a task force team, there's likely another task force team that will out-earn a different farmer. All farmers are not the same, nor are all TF teams the same. Only the devs have the data, if anyone, to verify there are any outliers. And, even if they have that data, there's no way to really know how each person spends their merits to determine who's really earning more, because it's not the merits you earn, it's what you do with them that matters more. You keep saying "you can't" when there's no evidence to suggest we "can't" do this or that. Where is it written that you "can't buff things to match extreme outliers"? We do not need to reign in extreme outliers. Clearly, the game is being played just fine with things the way they are now. There's no evidence to suggest anything needs to be reigned in, except perhaps to quiet this vocal minority that is upset about something that they could do themselves every bit as easily as the rest of us do.

On the other hand, ask yourself why HC installed veteran level rewards in the first place. Because of the small player population. Look around! Incarnate trial leaders will tell you that they burn 10-20 minutes, if not more, when forming for an iTrial, except maybe during peak hours on the weekend. I never had to wait more than 5-10 minutes at most on Liberty back in the day. The HC devs understand that solo play is the primary method of play. More soloers than folks who team. Team play is in the minority. This is largely due to the wider age gap, I think. Most of us are grown adults that can't often commit to the iTrial train of BAF, Lambda, Keyes. We can't just assume the way the original Paragon Studio devs installed things was the right way for the player base. They did get shut down, remember. Despite having a profit, it was minimal profit. NCSoft knew this; they would make more money just putting the investment in the stock market than in CoH. So, clearly, Paragon Studios, despite our love for them because of the wonderful world they created, they did a lot of things less than optimally. I'm sure there's a number of players that would like to go back to SO only days, before enhancement diversification. Then they bring in the invention system...so which did they get right? Pre-ED SOs vs invention system...they installed the IOs well after SOs, which are still available. Did they get SOs wrong? Or did they "relent" and allow for more variation with the invention system where almost no two builds are alike? It doesn't matter how incarnates were originally designed. We're here now, at this point in time, with a much smaller player base that doesn't want to rely on incarnate trials for incarnate loot. It's that simple. The question is, "Will the HC devs insist players mostly rely on Incarnate trials and hardmode tfs like Aeon and the upcoming ITF?" Clearly, a lot of time and effort was spent on these two new Hard Mode tfs. Of course they want the players to spend time playing them! But to make changes in the game where a player feels pushed towards "main stream content", when they were perfectly happy doing AE...what's the point of that?! It's silly. Further, it doesn't make sense to me. (and it doesn't have to, but I really want it to) All this talk about folks wanting reward/risk to not favor the farmer - just buff the rewards for non-AE stuff. It's that simple. That way, folks that are complaining about farmers getting rich doing nothing can go make more than the farmers by doing content. And the farmers have nothing to complain about because nothing they were doing was impacted. It's just a common sense solution, really. I fail to see why so many of you can't see it.

If you think folks are going to be happy about paying those "capped" prices through the merit vendor, you keep dreaming. If you thought farmers were vocal about this proposed change, when the price of an ATO essentially goes from 5-7M to 21 million, it's going to piss folks off. The 21M figure comes from 100 merits = 300 converters = 300*70k = 21M There are no proposed changes (yet) to account for the likely effect. It won't bother me. I have thousands of ATOs and Winters and Purples. But it will bother a lot of folks when it's time to kit out their build.

Point by point - I'm not paranoid. They really are out to get me. They have stated it. They do not want folks to convert emp merits to converters, which is what I've been doing as soon as I discovered it was an option about 18 months ago. They don't want this to occur, presumably because folks are dumping converters on the AH. While I see no problem with this, they do. I personally do not think there are enough converters in the market. When I was farming, I would go through about 3k a day, which is easily 10% of the converters on the market's best days, generally when a high merit tf is the weekly. And that's just me. I am but one farmer amongst hundreds. Now, when I say they don't want me, certainly that's not literally true. They probably would prefer I run task forces for those merits and get converters that way. Less stress on the servers, another potential teammate, everyone wins - except me. It is NOT a fact that the market gets flooded with influence. Ever. Yes, the more npcs that are defeated, the more influence is in the economy. But is it? Can you really count my 500 billion as part of the economy? My stack grows, but for all practical purposes, I only have 300M inf on the character I'm playing right now. That 500Billion will likely never get spent, because influence is meaningless in this game. Emp merits are really the only currency I'm after. Why should I run content for emp merits when I can farm and simply craft and convert what I want? I'm all for running content when the mood suits me. But I'm also for afk-farming when the mood suits me - and when that mood does suit me, I don't want to be penalized because someone like yourself has an opposing opinion, and quite possibly assumes certain premises are factual when they are not. You mention competent play, and I certain respect that. But competent play requires a number of things; at minimum, enough visual acuity to see the team chat and what's going on during a mission, a fair knowledge of in-game mechanics, decent eye/hand coordination, a computer that's fairly up to date, at least, enough to load into a map without disconnecting, and the ability to kit out a character. And, this proposed change would negatively impact a fair number of players with their ability to do just that. Sure, all of us can run content for 100 merits and work the system and directly buy whatever we want. But not everyone has the time to commit when various teams are being formed. Some of us only have small blocks of time. And, candidly, some of us don't want to team that often. Farming is an excellent solo activity. And AFK-farming, even more so. Many players are under the impression that this game economy would mirror fundamentals of economics. And it can, to a point, but because salvage is seeded, the merit vendor exists, the economics of this game do not mirror reality. Someone like myself, or Yomo, Hedgefund, Dahle - our influence goes largely unspent. If we spent it, what would be the point? It's not how much influence you earn, it's how much you save. Every 50M I save is an hour I don't have to farm. (roughly) In reality, we are our own influence sink since the Devs don't seem to want to give us one. We just sink it into bids on unavailable items in the AH and in email.

I'm gonna quote myself, because it bears repeating. I should know better than to host a team event in Goldside content, as several of those missions are "borked". I say "borked" because, apparently that's the highly technical term at least one GM uses in reference to the mission we had to get help with last night. Two Friday nights in a row, I used the Menu-Support to ask for assistance because we couldn't complete the mission, despite no glowies or NPCs left to clobber. Each time, a GM was there within 2 minutes, maybe even less than a minute.

"Best bet"? No, not even close. No status protection, low Hitpoints? That's a character that can solo, but a brute or a scrapper would have a far easier time of it.

You're entitled to disagree. That's fair. But I'm in agreement with Coyotedancer. It certainly seems as if a vocal minority would have me, and others like me removed from the game completely. I can only assume these folks aren't really sure of what cause and effect is when you remove farmers from a game with a small player population. Take a look at Rebirth some time. They're still spending 25 to 50M for a Luck of the Gambler 7.5%. (mind you, they do award everyone vip tokens that contain options for packs or converters and various costume trash options. I must have thousands of merits, ATOs and purples there, just from logging in weekly during maintenance. And they allow as many accounts as you wish.) There is no wrong way to play. While it's come to my attention the HC Devs would rather I not farm for emp merits, so now I won't. All they had to do was say something. It seemed to me they wanted us to do this to keep converters available cheaply. But I guess that's not the case. So, I will farm my 50's to avoid iTrial burnout and get emps for incarnate materials - at least until they start selling emps. Seems like a Merit Vendor would sell emp merits, but I guess that's too much to hope for.

Need? We don't need to play this game. We don't need to DFB. There's so many things we don't need. This particular flavor of CoH server got popular due to it's many options. I sometimes call it "City of Options". This notion that a soloist doesn't need incarnate abilities is true, but it also misses the mark. It's not about need. It's about the elusive subjective "fun", or amusement, or interest, or whatever a player chooses to pursue. I NEED Judgement. I NEED Barrier. I NEED Hybrid. I NEED all the incarnate abilities. Or, at least, I want them. And they're available to me now. To make them no longer available, or tell me I have to team up to get them takes away my options. So, no. I loudly disagree with your opinion.

In all honesty, and I place myself in this group, any adult that plays this game for more than an hour a day probably lacks the maturity to be dispassionate about reviewing and analyzing upcoming content that might negatively impact their future game play. I continually remind myself that I'm playing a game for free, which beats paying 15 bucks a month that I used to pay. And, really, these guys, in particular the GMs, are every bit as good as the ones that were around during live. Game play for me is better than live, but that's because I think I understand the game better now than I did then. There's always something to complain about, and I'm seriously not happy unless I have something to complain about. But they really don't give me a whole lot to complain about.

Seems strange...saw this monkey, thought it was one of the pvp monkeys that got loose...but it's a Rikti monkey that dished out my first defeat when I went for the badge in Pocket D. Now I have to delete and start over. Not sure how this rascal got in here, just wished DJ Zero would back up his policies for no violence.

If you're one of those folks who PL to 50, move on, nothing really to see here. If you are accustomed to leveling up, I'm curious if any of you notice this, and perhaps can shed some light on why it occurs. My ice/fire brute recently dinged level 12. I took Healing Flames. Now, I'm going solo, and am not pushing the envelope yet, as I don't have Plasma Shield yet, still feeling a bit squishy. Running at +1, and the only difference between level 11 and 12 is Healing Flames. I haven't even used it yet. And yet, as I go through (just fighting skulls, doing Eagle Eye's arc), my end is running out, where at level 11, it wasn't. Sprint and Super Speed are off. It's all the same, but it's like - wham, you're level 12, so your endurance will now require attention. I know there's beginner's luck for ToHit, but is there another mechanic for endurance? I do have the same End Mod SO slotted in stamina, just like I did before, and even remembered to upgrade it to +3. From a story perspective, I can see it making sense - the more slots you have, and the more damage you're dishing out, makes sense it would cost more endurance, but I'm just curious if there's some game mechanic I've somehow missed. I don't recall Skulls having any -end debuff, but maybe they do.

You're right in that it's a lie. I really don't pay much attention to any of that. But if I notice a thumbs down, I am more inclined to return the favor.

My favorite will vary with my mood. But, right now, my favorite is rescuing Yin's father. The spacing of the mobs, at that level, is just about perfect, as it's then that I boost the difficulty to +1 or +2, depending on the AT. And, the old man follows well, so if I get an ambush or missed some mobs, he doesn't try to fight them, and they don't seem to target him at all, so I can ignore them if I want to and just proceed to the exit. I used to like Atta for nostalgia's sake, but the map is too large. I say that because if you fight through, you end up out-leveling the mobs in it, even if you raise the difficulty. It's just too large, too many mobs. Frostfire is interesting, and it's not because of the ice on the floor. It's interesting because if you're level 10, you'll have a different experience with Frostfire than you will if you're level 12 or 14. Sometimes, he spawns imps, and sometimes he doesn't, and it seems to me that it's level dependent. So, always interesting to me in that regard. I really enjoy preventing the 30 fir bolg from escaping. I would never want to do that on a team, though. Too many folks are content to let 29 escape, or even let them all escape and auto-fail because they don't like it. But to me, it can be fun to clear the area around the portal, then pursue the npcs that are close by, double back to the portal to be sure none are making their way to get out. It can take awhile, but that's part of why I like it. Ordinarily, if I'm in pursuit of merits and such, I may not like that part, but still, it's something I like - probably because most everyone else hates it. For TFs, I like Apex just because of the dodge ball; I get to practice jousting, stick and move, stick and move. It's a fun mechanic for me to deal with. Market Crash has a lot to offer, too, but that's mainly because it's still "new". For iTrials, nothing beats Master of Underground, where you zerg the bombs, as opposed to snipe. I used to like the sniping, but when you don't have one, it's a bit of a snooze fest. And explaining to fledgling snipers how to properly approach the bomb without getting within 150 feet of it can be problematic, as I sometimes lack the ability to articulate how to do this properly in a clear, concise manner. Discord is a help, and also a distraction. Some folks aren't happy unless they're chatting. (I believe if it's not a master attempt, it ain't worth doing, as far as iTrials go. Every badge you get, you get one free random uncommon incarnate drop. If you get the master, you get a random rare. Why anyone runs a non-master (except for MoM or Lambda as they require multiple runs) is beyond me. Magisterium isn't bad, but it's tiresome when you see folks who just don't pay attention to the advisory "don't use longer animation attacks until after the crackle". A fair number of folks get stuck in animation because they're just blindly button-mashing, instead of being more thoughtful about what they do. They die, their lore pets die, and often that can ruin the attempt for RHW.

There may be a couple of things you're forgetting; maybe you're aware and it's not an objective. The Kheldian arcs - PB and WS both have a unique contact that other ATs dont' have access to, even in Ouro.