Ukase
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Posts posted by Ukase
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21 minutes ago, Stoked said:
Absolutely you would count drops that could be sold. Thank you for your effort to reveal the truth about "grinding" vs farming.
See...counting drops - the drops are where the inf is.
I conducted a similar experiment with a player I'd mentioned in one of these posts some time after the no xp/2xinf change.
Here are the notes:
//EDIT: Maryjane no longer plays, I don't think. If she does, she stays hidden and is farming in some lower populated zone. I met her through the help channel when she was asking intelligent questions about getting the most bang for her buck. So, I supplied her, as a gift, with no strings every winter-O and ATO she could need for the build, and even gave her my build, which she eventually tweaked to suit her purposes. 4 months later, she gifted me with 500M as a thank you. Like any of us, she had her issues, but to me, that was pretty classy.
//End Edit
As you can see in the notes, and I think it's at the core of the HC Dev's issue is that AFK farming is scalable. Now, the crafting, converting, selling of drops, that scales too, but only to a point, because I promise you, with 4 accounts going afk, you won't be playing the game very much at all, other than to craft/convert/sell, reset. Even when I craft/convert in the missions with burn on auto, I run out of time and need to reset with one, while another farmer is idle waiting on me to finish that. And, when I change things up to try and constantly keep the farmers busy, I end up with trays full of IOs that need to be converted, and things just get congested. I'm often tempted to just sell them for 1 inf to get rid of them - but that defeats the whole purpose of farming in the first place. The purpose is to get those drops, which is where the real influence is. 2-3M per IO for the rares, usually. When you have several hundred drops over the course of a day, it adds up quite quickly.
Still, the counterpoint is that these IOs posted sell! And they sell fast. Not because I'm listing them at 1 inf, I'm listing them at a price I know they'll sell at, but above my costs. Generally 2.6-2.8, depending. (I will burn a few converters to get something like a Mako into something that will sell for 1M more)
If I'm not doing this crafting and converting, the supply of those IOs will drop, the prices will go up. Nobody wants that, except me, and everyone else that crafts/converts and sells.
It's no skin off my teeth, but the uproar is going to be louder when that happens.-
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11 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:
Ukase, would you say that your AFK farmers average about 500-750k inf per min? Someone else gave me that number. I'm just trying to get a confirmation.
@Bionic_FleaI don't have the remotest idea. Those aforementioned characters were afk farmers, but running actively.
AFK farm characters, at least the way I run them, sit in the center of the map anywhere from 10-15 minutes to an entire day, depending on what's going on in-game and in real life. I don't know how to assess their average, because the time factor is almost certainly always varied.
Now, I can set each of them up in the same map with burn on auto and just check back in every minute or two to see when the map clears, but anecdotally, even leaving them overnight would generally show 1-4 mobs just standing in a group on the perimeter of the asteroid.
How would you like me to proceed? Do I count drops? I got a purple on one of those three runs, lol.-
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9 hours ago, Ironblade said:
Pshaw! Playing this game demonstrates less maturity than 'adult' games like golf or poker? 😛
Ha! you might have a point there!
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4 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:
Breaking down CoyoteDancer's two runs into inf per minute, she got:
~327k inf/min on the meteor and
~268k/min on Old School Wolf farm (including most drops for both).
A large part of the discrepancy between her numbers and mine I expect are because she had another player splitting the rewards.
If it's useful, I just did one meteor run of Brigg's 125.
Took my afk farmer just a smidge less than 6 minutes to clear the map ...a lot slower than I expected. I made 5,523,525 in that time, not counting drops.
So, 920,588 per minute.
My next afk farmer with a slightly different build, as I got a little smarter with the incarnate stuff (musculature over agility) and different slotting in a few powers fared a bit better.
It finished in a smidge over 5 minutes. (same meteor, same map, same influence earned)
1,104,705 per minute.
A 3rd farmer got the same inf in about 5 and a half minutes, so my average for actively farming is about 1M per minute, give or take a bit.
It may be worth noting that all three of these farmers leveled up outside of AE and have solo'd all the tfs for TFC, but probably used a summons from p2w for help with dps in some cases. So, I don't consider them actual farmers, but characters that can farm.-
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6 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
Is that an open question? I get all my rare IO's from taking the junk recipe drops, crafting them and converting them into the ones I want. The others I either spend merits or cash on. There shouldn't really be any have-not's, and it has little to do with farmers and lots to do with market players. There are many paths to fully kitting out your builds these days. And the purple recipes are not always the best set bonuses for what you're trying to build for.
Not really, it's more focused at the folks that would have the farmers of AE leave AE behind because they believe they're exploiting the game. It's simply raising the point that farmers generally list the drops on the AH. Some craft/convert, some just list recipes, and of course, I guess there are some who just delete everything but the recipes they know they want or can sell instantly for more than just a pittance.
So, if folks like UltraAlt get their way, and AE Farmers are corralled into other non-AE activity, or simply stop playing, the goods on AH will decrease. Prices will increase. But, I guess some folks don't care, or haven't considered the impact that a poor decision like this would have.
Some folks don't realize that crafting, converting and selling IS the game for them. That's what they think is fun. Personally, I don't ever want to do a Lambda again. Nor a Synapse. I likely will, for one reason or another, but it will be something I tolerate, not something I enjoy. -
1 hour ago, Stoked said:
One other consideration, building a farmer of any kind is extremely expensive and time consuming. Yes, you only have to do that once and then you can farm forever sure but how many people in the game actually go beyond basic IO's once they hit 50? Maybe we can get some metrics on the percent of people that use a full load of IO sets on their toons? For sure, the only way you're doing the kind of farming you're talking about is with a fully built toon that possibly took weeks to figure out and fine tune and about 500M - 1B or more in influence.
Building a farmer is not extremely expensive. But, I guess that depends on what you deem expensive. If you know how, it doesn't cost you anything but time. It will cost what I consider to be "house money", but it doesn't cost my characters anything.
I have this strong regret that I never opened up my own "build store". A player sends me his projected build in Mids, and says he'd pay 500M for it. I say, "Nah, I can acquire the IOs for that build for 250M." And it takes me an hour or so, done. Or, better yet, I say, "Well, let me do the shopping for you, and in an hour, I'll give you the IOs, you pay me 500M".
I'd have tons more inf than I have now, I think. Depends on how many customers I'd get, I suppose. With the exception of Hamis and d-syncs, and the Overwhelming Force, every other IO can be converted into any other IO, as long as it's the same type - pvp or pve, or purple. So, every IO except very rares and pvp costs about 1M. Very Rares cost only about 12M, and PvP IOs cost about 3M. And the only reason those prices are so high is because converter use can add up when the rng doesn't work with you. There's really no such thing as a build that costs over 200M unless the person is too impatient or just doesn't care to understand a cheaper way of getting the enhancements they want, or it could be they're blissfully ignorant.
I honestly can't tell you anyone I know that doesn't use IO sets for the set bonuses as soon as they're able. I don't think I've ever teamed with anyone at level 50 that didn't have a wall of set bonus info in their character info screen. I really think that if these players do exist, they are new, and haven't figured it out yet, or are very few and far between. Like maybe 5% of the community. I could certainly be wrong, though. -
2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:
It is still an exploit.
Farms actively and loudly defend their exploitation.
It doesn't mean that it isn't exploiting the AE.
It is not an exploit. It working exactly how it was designed to work.
Just because you think it's an exploit doesn't make it so.
And even if it were an exploit, it doesn't hurt you. It doesn't hurt anyone. It is benign; harmless.
I seriously want to challenge you to consider the idea that you're wrong. Just consider it.
I am not saying that a farmer's life is difficult. I'm not saying that once you get a farmer going it's not fairly simple to make influence.
What I am saying is that whether there's AE or not, there will be farming. It's not going away. So, if it's not going away, then what's your beef? You think it's an exploit because a farmer can earn influence faster than you can? Big deal. There are dozens of speed runners who earn influence faster than you do. There are dozens of casual players that earn rewards outside AE faster than you do. Big deal. It's not an exploit. It's by design. Why is that so hard for you to accept?Farming is what makes this community healthy.
So, let me ask this: how do you slot your characters? SOs? Because if you use IOs, I'm curious how you get them. From the AH? Odds are, a farmer put it there. Are you subsidizing the farmers, and then complaining about them in the same post?
Or are you legitimately spending 5870 merits for you final build? (roughly - 100 merits for purples, ATOs, Winters, PvP IOs, 50 for the lotgs, and most other IOs.)
I just tallied up the reward merit cost for my farmer's build, that's how many reward merits I'd have to spend to get them, going through the merit vendor.
For the sake of argument, I can imagine I'd get several drops as I played that I could use - so you're telling me you do 5000 merits of content as you level up? No? Where are you getting your IOs from? If not the AH, then your experience is perhaps similar to maybe 2-4% of the player base. Doesn't mean your wrong for doing it that way, but it does mean you're unreasonable to expect the rest of us to do content your way.
Again, farming is good for the community. It's good for the game. It is not an exploit. If you don't accept that, then I have no hope for you.
And, again, where do you get your IOs from? Who do you think put those in there for sale? Sure, some might come from a random casual player, but odds are, the very folks you're trying to belittle and degrade as "exploiters" are the ones that are subsidizing your fun with their efforts.
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14 minutes ago, srmalloy said:
I think the reference you're looking for is "I may be getting older, but I refuse to grow up".
No, seriously. That's what she told me. I had some trauma as a kid, and I haven't really emotionally progressed since then. You can ask my ex-wife, lol.
Additionally, while I may age in calendar years, I'm in better physical shape than when I was 30. So, I don't mind developing maturity, but I sure as shit refuse to grow old. I plan on being able to carry a bag of groceries up a flight of stairs, get up off the ground should I fall down - though I hope my balance and core strength will avoid that scenario. I also plan on being able to walk a mile in 20 minutes or less for the duration of my life.-
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1 minute ago, Marbing said:
Also, I asked if anyone wanted to run some data with me (so we can test it TOGETHER and make sure no one is attempting to skew the results by slow playing a farm or comparing the worst farm to the best non-AE content).
I must have missed this in any earlier post.
What would you like to test, where would you like to test it, and when would you like to test it? You can DM me. I'm busy for the next few hours, but after that, I can make some time, I think. Give me several time ranges over the week, happy to help! -
24 minutes ago, Ghost said:
Nope. Wrong (as is usual with you)
Show me a guarantee that whatever you list will immediately sell.
I can't show you a guarantee. But, I can anecdotally promise you, that if there are outstanding bids for the item, it will sell quickly, if not instantly.
But, that depends on the item being listed and how much it's listed for. If there's no demand for the item, that's what converters are for.
I'm sure most of us have read posts from certain players who list everything for sale for 1 influence, and claim they get plenty of profit, all things considered. I'm sure my method of using converters gets me more profit, but I'm putting in more time in the process than these folks are.
Nothing you don't already know, I'm sure.
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14 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:
None of the HC Team have stated they want to eliminate farming, or eliminate AE. They have made some adjustments in the past and have proposed making a change in the next update. It's not the end of the world, or the end of farming, or the end of AE. It's all going to be OK.
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?
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On 8/26/2021 at 9:49 PM, A Cat said:
All the fighting lately here makes me think everyone is lying about being an old fart and the REAL average age is 12.
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
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8 hours ago, UltraAlt said:
An exploit is
neverusing the existing game code to do what it was not meant to do.That is why it is called an exploit.
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.
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7 hours ago, UltraAlt said:
Thumbs up on this part.
How has the "design philosophy" changed to support farming?
"Player expectations" haven't changed. They are still exploiting the AE for gains greater than outside of the AE for both influence and power-leveling. That is why the did it to begin with, and that's why they are still doing it.
People won't farm if they weren't getting disproportionately greater returns. That's the whole reason they started doing and the whole reason they continue to do it.
Cut the rewards to 1/4 of what they are now, and you will see far less farmers.
The DEVs said the would ban people that exploited the AE before it came out. Then almost immediately caved when it came out because they would have lots of accounts that were exploiting the system and many of them had not bothered to read the warning in the forums.
But yes, I agree, it should have been nipped in the bud instead of allowed to fester.
But I think at the time, it turned into a cash cow for NCSoft Corporate (It was luring in F2P players that became microtransaction P2P players) so they told NCSoft Austin to let it happen. I have a feeling that NCSoft was behind some of the gold farming as well, and gold farmer definitely profited off of AE farming.
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.-
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4 hours ago, Neiska said:
And I don't mean just raw inf gained either. Take things like merits into account as well. The drops might have to be omitted because, well, they are random after all. So unless someone has a formula for that it might be better to ignore unless someone has a better idea. So a comparison such as -
The average "active" farmer can make between X and Y in an hour.
The average "afk" farmer can make between X and Y
The average "solo" player can make X and Y
The average "teamer" can make X and Y
The merit "speed runner" could make X and Y
etc...
Just asking for an honest and unbiased comparison is all. If the big brains here can manage that, it might move the needle to a place where we can all agree is a good spot and be a good compromise for everyone?
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. -
12 hours ago, lemming said:
Hmm. I might be wrong. May have been DevChoice only ones that gave the choice of XP. There's a note in the Score Doc about that.
And this may be of interest. I had read it when I first came to HC, but forgot about it
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?
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1 hour ago, Krimson said:
If you do the Dreck Map, you can get about 2 per run, more or less. But there is no way you are gonna AFK on that map. Unless it's to actually take a break.
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.-
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1 minute ago, Coyotedancer said:
That would be tough to do with Ossuni... She's a very, very specialized build.
That's why I want to try out Ironhorse and Fireproof!Kes in both AE and the Old School farms. That's a farer comparison I think than putting their times against Suni's.
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.-
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4 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:
Oh yes they most certainly are, and there is only one CoH server this is happening on. Other servers offer tools that render the need for gold farmers pointless.
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.-
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2 hours ago, Astralock said:
Again, as has been stated earlier in this thread and has been stated a few times by other people in other threads over the years... Homecoming didn't add veteran levels. The SCoRE "secret" server did, for a population a fraction of Homecoming's. I'm talking about a fraction of even the Reunion shard's population. Homecoming's population is hundreds of times larger. Homecoming took what SCoRE had and rushed it into production after the Bree server went offline.
Oh no, you have to wait ten to twenty minutes for a trial or raid to form. The horror! I think sometimes people need to be reminded that City of Heroes is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Massively multiplayer.
Also, you can't buff things to match extreme outliers. You need to reign in the extreme outlier. You can (and probably should), still buff rewards outside of Mission Architect a bit, but in the end, the rewards from AE need to be nerfed as they are an extreme outlier.
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.-
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19 hours ago, Astralock said:
Incarnate abilities were first introduced in Issue 19, back in October 2010. The only way you could obtain them was from Emyprean merits, Incarnate threads, and Incarnate salvage from... Incarnate trials and Apemage. A solo-friendly method was added in Issue 22 with the introduction of the Dark Astoria revamp back in March 2012, a year and a half later. For a year and a half, the only ways you could possibly gain Incarnate abilities were by running Incarnate trials and Apemage. Paragon Studios relented and added a solo-friendly option a year and a half later to try to appease solo or mostly solo players, but it was time gated and you could not acquire Incarnate abilities anywhere near as quickly as you could by running Incarnate trials. So, no, it's not an assumption on my part. It's how Incarnates were originally designed.
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.
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15 hours ago, MoonSheep said:
the market already has price caps in place for IOs through the various seeding in place and merit conversion. prices can be capped through further seeding if required
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.-
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The Pretty Good AE Debate
in General Discussion
Posted
So, let me elaborate. When I suggest that prices will go higher, it's basically a hunch of mine, because I imagine that with the proposed change, there will be some players who farm specifically for emp merits won't do so anymore. Heck, they may quit entirely, I've no idea. My comment was aimed primarily at people who dismiss farming as an exploit. If it were an exploit and treated as such, there'd be a lot fewer items to buy on the AH, guaranteed. That's the point I'm trying to make, to the folks who are "Farming bad! It's cheating! It's an exploit!!"
Clearly, I'm failing to make my point, because despite my best attempts to explain that our farmers are what's allowing them to get the IOs that don't drop for them at a reasonable price. Take a look at D-Syncs and Hami-Os. Look at a microfiliament. It's one of 12 Hami's available. Usually sells for 20-50 million, depending on who's selling them when they get them. And some of those D-syncs, in particular the threat/recharge/accuracy - it has sold for the inf cap!
The reason the prices of those are so outrageous is because even if my brute could hang with a Dr. Aeon, the odds of getting one of those is damn slim. I'm still better off slaving away in a farm and letting one of my primary characters run Aeon while the farmer does what he does best - sit with burn on auto.
But, I promise you, if AE could give d-syncs or hami's as a reward, the prices of those would be 10-20x cheaper.
Farming isn't going anywhere. It won't leave AE, because the changes proposed are merely going to slow things down a bit, because our afk-farmers will have to forgo certain set bonus numbers in pursuit of other set bonus numbers to mitigate the increased damage coming their way from AoE and ranged attacks. There is a noticeable difference for my farmers sitting in the middle of the map with burn on auto on Excelsior compared to Brainstorm, the test server.
So, please don't worry about "doom". That's just what I think would happen if folks like UltraAlt had their way and farming would be forbidden or discouraged to the point where a player had to choose between farming at some sub-optimal rate or teaming with some player who wants to read lore (slowly) instead of getting the job done. Or teaming with some player who hasn't bothered to slot enhancements, or even train up.