Coyotedancer

In all seriousness, that would probably be the one thing that would finally make me walk away. No joking or hyperbole here... It would end any possibility of me making new characters. Because I couldn't "finish" any of them that weren't suited to soloing DA. My character list would be done and *that* would end up murdering a lot of my desire to keep playing. There's a reason I'll always push back against returning to the days of "Team or Else!" Incarnates.

Timing probably also makes this one problematic, all else aside... It should have been posted at the time the second change was made rather than days later. Why? People who are unhappy with the current revision are more likely to have stuck around discussing things than people who either like the change or really don't care either way. People are generally more keen to express it when they have a negative opinion.

"Not Really Even an AE Debate Now That You Mention It"

Since when has the reality of the situation had anything to do with the pearl-clutching? 😝

You left out the well-nigh inevitable call for AE to either be removed or not to have rewards at all...

We need the kind of place a couple of Jedi would pick for a duel. You know... A high place. With narrow bridges. With no handrails. With lava or monsters or something down below. Maybe a few environmental hazards like high wind, or exploding rocks, or turrets. Maybe a few grumpy security droids or Sand People. 'That kind of thing.

Just a reminder, too, that those of us who (either by choice or time-zone) tend to run solo or in duo/trio small teams are already pretty much out-of-luck when it comes to getting PAPs via trials and hard-mode task forces. Just think about how long it'll take us to get even one of those higher-tier toys relying on random drops and the whatever weekly we can handle sans team. The number of solos and small-teamers in this game isn't trivial. (I'm also a for-fun farmer, of course, so eventually I'll be able to buy the salvage to get.... Tavaris, let's say.... a potential future Death Mage outfit. But that's not a universal solution. Neither is marketeering. Not everyone finds those activities entertaining, even in pursuit of something as flashy as Chibidom.)

That's true. *A fire ant shakes its tiny fist and squeaks something about 'being thwarted this time'-*

'Have to admit... I was wondering the same thing. I looked at the thread and pretty much instantly thought, "Wow. This is just asking to be grumped at by anti-anything-but-slow-mode crowd." 😆

Do I need to drop a fire ant down Nemu's shorts for breaking The Code?

I meant quiet as in less traffic rather than no power effects... On Ev, the King's Row AE is usually abandoned at the times I'm online, unlike the ones in Atlas and the D. I typically have it completely to myself when I go farming and I've gotten used to that. Having to share with a bunch of other people will just be weird. 😝

I suspect you're right, and even though it's likely to make my quiet, Kings Row AE a bit more of a madhouse I do think it's a good idea if they want to steer real, undirected newbies in other directions. And yeah. What happened to the one in Mercy is hilarious. I love it.

How many are in the costume creator? One of the server status pages actually shows that as a separate category. It also may not count anyone sitting on the Character Select menu.

On the other issue that we haven't really talked about yet, farmers being asshats to other players in Excelsior's Atlas Broadcast, LFG and other chat channels *is* problematic behavior. It needs to be delt with when it happens... I doubt there's much disagreement there. But I'd also say that's more of a Moderation and server culture issue than a mechanical problem. It's something I've literally never seen happen on Everlasting or Torch. If it was a "natural" or "inevitable" out-growth of having farmers on the server or of using AE as a farming platform, that kind of crap would be universal across the shards. It just isn't. If we really want to to fix that, maybe it's time to specifically address why Excelsior has been allowed to become Freedom's obnoxious dude-bro kid brother.

If we're going to go with an "equal rewards for time-spent" thing... Can I get INF, iBits or loot drops from base-building? Want to talk about CHALLENGE with a capital "Dammit. The editor just flung that tiny, nearly invisible glass bottle somewhere random in this huge room made with a thousand other objects"? There it is. In a time-sink with absolutely no bottom, with results often done for the benefit of other players as well as yourself. Sure, a skilled builder with a lot of experience may be able to do it faster than a newbie... just like speedy-running taskforces... But still. If all activities need to be equally rewarding, I'm sure we could find an Average Time it takes to build a base of a particular size and complexity and then adjust the numbers from there. (Yes. I'm being silly here. But the idea does poke a bit at the concept of effort and time investment not necessarily needing to be equally rewarded to be fun.)

Yeah... I planted those pennies after the first frost. I've watered them. I've weeded. Still nada. Not even a sprout. I'm starting to think that the northwest just doesn't have the right climate for it. 😞

I've mentioned before that one of my time-travelling Ordus Chronos magi.... My Force Mage, Tessamun... is a footie fan. She'll go on endlessly about the Nerva Novas given half a chance. But that seriously confounds people in the current era, Because the Novas and their league won't even be established until a few decades after the end of the Battalion Wars. 😝

You do realize that just getting rid of AE wouldn't get rid of farmers or pawer-levelers, don't you? Those activities were a City feature long, long before AE was even a twinkle in some Live dev's eye. Me,,, I just finished rebuilding my Old School "fireproof scrapper" just for fun, That particular build, which was my farming go-to back in the day, can tear a hole through Harvey's demon mission just as easily as my zen-mode brute can take apart a fire farm. Testing her out? It's about equal to a run through the highway tunnel map. A bit slower since she doesn't have Burn, but not by much. Sorry to burst that daydream, Moon. But we farmers are an adaptable lot. And stubborn. It comes with being the Root of All Evil. 😆

I'm too old to have any patience left for high school mean-kid shenanigans.... If someone has a beef with the way I play the game, better they just say it outright, I think. At least they should be honest about wanting to drive out the believers in BadWrongFun, right?

If these threads are to be believed, to a certain portion of the forum population we already are. I'm sure Moon and UA and others like them would just be *HEARTBROKEN* if all of us pulled up proverbial stakes and moved elsewhere. 😝

It's a little debatable if adding EBs to a map is really "best practice" for farm designs. Sure, they're valuable... But they also take longer to kill than regular bosses. It's a bit of a trade-off. That's why you'll see them included in some farms but not others.

That depends on the farmer and why they're doing what they're doing. Running a zen-mode fire brute is a whole different world than farming with, say, a Blaster. (FCM does that. I think he's nuts but... yeah. What he does with that rabbit is anything BUT zen-mode easy.)

The real advantage that AE farms have over "regular" content maps run at x8 (Including our Old School farming favorites like Harvey's demons and Council Earth-) is mob density. Each individual target is typically worth less than its "outside world" counterparts, because non-Dev Choice XP in Ae missions was halved early on... But by adding patrols and ambushes and hostage groups, farm designers manage to stuff more of them on the map. (You can see that for yourself if you run, say, a round of Briggs' cave farm and then that Warriors mission using Atta's cave map in the 'Wheel of Destruction' arc-) Call it quantity over quality, Or making up for slim margins with volume. Honestly, the "OMG but there's no RISK!!" issue doesn't even come into it as far as I can see, on either side of the debate. I mean, let's be realistic for a second here. Are you honestly going to try to tell me that something like Council Earth or Wolf World or a smash-it-all ITF *really* poses one iota more real "risk" to a well-built character than those angry cosplayers do to a farmer's brute? We all know the situation in the game. With even a half-way descent build there's very. very little in the normal game that's dangerous. Saying AE fire farms are uniquely cakewalks ignores what a lot of us to darn near everything else in the CIty on a regular basis.

It would be a pain in the bum for those of us who like to dual-box our active farmers with our own leveling lowbies or incarnates-in-progress.

Someone has gone rifting in Aion.... 😝 (The rifts stayed for more than five minutes, though. 'Big zones. Sometimes it was hard to find anyone to stab.)