Crysis

I know of no way to have turned it off, so while it had that side benefit it wasn’t something you could just choose to NOT do, even if there was a mechanism to allow you to DO it.

Honestly I don’t even remember the reason for Patrol XP. I mean it’s the very example of “AFK farming” that seems to be the issue that prompted this latest nerf.

I was just about to ask if there was a table somewhere that listed “stackability” and such. I have a few builds that are heavily procc’ed out with stuff like chance to Hold, chance for Buildup and FF Chance for +Recharge. I seem to notice stuff that buffs ME sometimes stacks. Stuff that Debuffs target does not. But that’s casual and anecdotal observation and not empirical testing. I was hoping someone a lot more intelligent than I had already catalogued all the Procs to test which ones offering same benefit stack with each other, Uniques excluded of course.

You know, I’ve never cheated in this or any game. Min/max absolutely but never cheated or willfully used an exploit, even when I knew they existed. Like...Id use geometry exploits to go see what I couldn’t see otherwise (remember looking inside RWZ before it was RWZ) but never go earn anything other than curiosity points. The Devs have indicated this was an exploit many of us took advantage of without even knowing. It was just a side effect of how Patrol XP worked. But rather than just fix that, they just killed a game feature of earning double influence vs XP when exemplared. Across the entire game. So no, and they’d agree with this, they didn’t just plug an exploit. They just impacted the entire Exemplar system which goes way beyond plugging a hole.

Clicky keyboards should NEVER be nerfed. Can we at least agree on that?

Actually I’m not accusing Marketeers from hurting my enjoyment of the game. I Marketeer myself, in addition to farming, teaming, active with my SG buddies etc. But the Devs have demonstrated that nerfing influence gain per hour is an “equitable” action and they desire to see this equality across the system. I’m simply trying to get this to the point where it’s truly equitable. Marketeering throws that off balance. Are you arguing for “Inequality” as the better model?

And by pushing to eliminate Farming it’s basically the same in reverse. Everyone is fine nerfing something else until/unless it comes their way. IO’s and the Crafting system were originally designed as time and influence sinks to slow down leveling speeds, which followed a huge round of nerfs and “balancing” Regen, GDN, Enhancement Diversification, etc. And it all made a little sense because the studios were trying to make more money from dedicated players while using the F2P model to attract new ones. This no longer makes sense. Just add IO’s and Salvage to ordinary vendors at current market fixed pricing (achieved after one year of in place) and let’s eliminate the wealth accumulation (and personal enjoyment) at the expense of others model.

Why should I or you have to earn that much influence to enjoy the game? And price in this game is derived in large part from time invested. The Devs already said they wanted an equality measure in place for gaining influence, unless we are haggling over semantics here, time = wealth = influence. Just hard cap prices of marketplace items and eliminate ability for anyone to sell/buy items from there without paying fixed price less fees. No Marketeering possible. Change merit reward conversions to match same price as in marketplace....25 merit tokens equals a purple and 25MM influence equals a purple. Farming Influence, TF influence, radio influence accumulation rates can be about same (although farms with no dialogue and limited scale maps/enemies obviously can be run faster), but you earn extra rewards (Merits and Badges that lead to Accolades and such) for running “content” to encourage teaming and longevity. Maybe tweak the drop tables up to increase chance of Rare/Very Rare drops per hour logged in playing that character. Wealth wouldn’t matter, no convoluted Marketplace mechanics, hell even Mids could spit out a “price for IO bill of materials” so people could accurately see how much time/effort it would take to produce that build. And not to be combative, but you have zero right to dictate what I can and cannot “do without” as your wants don’t match my own and neither one of us should ever be in a position to deprive the other of enjoyment of this game. I’d use the word “need” but it’s a game/pastime and that’s a bit much. But if my “wants” happen to include soloing a GM or PVP or whatever that becomes an in-game “need” I really can’t do without.

Why? Why would you support any number that requires two-three TF’s (outside of Hami and MSR roads) to earn a purple? Unless in your hidden brilliance you are advocating a currency-free game where instead of earning influence to spend on stuff you earn stuff based on both time played and difficulty factors? Which is the essence of the XP model for progression. Now THAT.....true “merit-ocracy” is an interesting idea.

But there’s no reason to “make money” by eliminating the marketplace dynamics and there’s no reason to farm so much if no reason to make money to spend on marketplace and or provide alternative means of acquiring high cost IO’s via farming drops if everything was a fixed, affordable price. This continues to be “the point.” We keep nerfing things to slow down wealth accumulation but we fail to address wealth accumulation in its entirety. Which at the end of the day simply demonstrates “we prefer you play THIS way and not THAT way, so we will remove the incentive to do one in favor of the other!” And yet all this demonstrated is declines in player base in Live and likely to repeat itself here. It’s not the influence it’s the player base population that is most impacted.

You and many others keep saying that Marketeering gets influence faster and easier. This is absolutely false or it wouldn’t have been the reason the Devs nerfed AE influence awards ENTIRELY while exemp’ed. They didn’t just fix the exploit, they straight up cut out the reward structure for farming. And they have openly acknowledged that even with the nerf, farming is still the fastest way to earn influence in the game. They presumably have data to support this and aren’t just firing off the nerf missle for other “social acceptance” reasons. You don’t have to believe me...just re-read their own rationale:

Wait, are you saying that Achilles -RES proc DOES stack if triggered from multiple powers?

Does anyone else wonder why they all look the same? One of us is a player, and taking a lot of risks.

This is tiresome. Learn a game, watch it run it course and die, learn its back (actually been around all this time, just in hiding), fall in love with it again, watch the same cycle of diminishing playerbase happen all over again, live through nerfs and enhancements all trying to fix the thing.....arguments ensue, rinse, repeat. Just...tiresome. Chess anyone?

There’s a really dangerous assumption in there and that’s that the player base who prefers AE farming will actually go play TF’s to keep playing the game at ALL. I don’t go eat fish because steak is expensive. I just eat steak less often and settle on hamburger instead. This is how life works and using nerfs in MMO’s to attempt to “force resigned compliance” has to my knowledge never worked in any game in history. People who like it enough to adapt will do so. Others will just....quit playing or play far less. And this wouldn’t be a big deal if the player base were 100K or so and maybe 10% stopped playing or played less as a result. But since our max is far less than that and that’s not even figuring the multi box accounts online simultaneously (and it stands to reason MOST of those are farmers), this flawed “Nerf X to drive adoption of Y” model could backfire greatly.

This was deemed an exploit by Devs and thus fixed by basically disabling Exemplar double influence when farming.

I know Achilles Heel -RES proc doesn’t stack with itself and always thought that was true for other procs as well?

If the Market is just tangential to the game, fix price everything and eliminate Marketeering. It would also eliminate the NEED to farm heavily, meaning only people who enjoy farming would do it thereafter. There are other reasons to grind AE maps. Many of them just return us to to feeling super powered as you get surrounded by dozens of critters and burning them down by yourself, trying to max your time to clear, etc. its ironic to me that AE farming was a response to herding and AOE nerfs, regen nerfs, double pet nerfs etc. By this point the nerfing energy should have been proven to be wasted effort. Just go to affordable market fixed prices and the “problem” of farming influence goes away.

It’s definitely not a problem if they want to make the game more casual and affordable. But halving AE XP and then lowering XP-for-Influence via simple farming playstyle isn’t going to result in either making the game more affordable or casual. It will only force players who want to min/max to now become Marketeers, which is definitely not something I enjoy spending time doing. I enjoy playing the game, not the meta game. If I want to mess around with marketeering, my own investment portfolio is already in enough dire straights as is. I prefer to burn down hundreds of critters to relieve that stress rather than engage in a make believe stock market to advance my alt-itis. But it appears we are now being told “No, you shouldn’t play that way, play THIS way instead” and thus....well....Forcing a playstyle rather than tolerating multiple play styles. Semantics aside, any time logged into this game and using the features therein is a “playstyle.” I farm. I Marketeer. I power level all kinds of alts. I run TF’s. I grind certain arcs over and over again on every new toon just for badges, accolades, Emp’s/iSalvage, Merits, etc etc. But diversity of playstyle be damned I guess.

Respectfully I think the “other topic” is the one I and many others have brought up here in the thread. You replied (or one of your colleagues did) to me when I first posted it way back in first couple of pages. Specifically, if you insist on throttling Influence per Hour via farming, as a Fairness design principle, you must also address Marketeering. Otherwise pot meet kettle, 5th Column meet Coucil. TLDR; Invoke flat pricing on everything in Market. Hopefully small enough an average player can actually afford a billion influence build. Or better yet, make billion influence builds cost 250MM.

Farming being an easier path to billions than Marketeering isn’t really the point UNLESS the point is that we are expected to earn billions ONLY through Marketeering and via no other method. That means there is a mindset behind the current ongoing development and design that desires a certain type of play style over another. In this case Marketeering vs Farming. In the future, Controlling vs Scrapping. In the past, 3 of any enhancement type and no more. And I can’t help but wonder what the end-game is other than by encouraging (or outright FORCING) only certain paths to the same goal, there exists a strong desire to enforce A play style and with it...a certain type of player. This was easier to understand on Live when there existed a P&L and growth numbers that would create a sustainable business. The longer I stretched out that climb, or the more complex I made it to achieve, the closer everyone got to a normalized, predictable and forecastable revenue stream per subscribers. People wanna farm? Fine..pay for a second subscription. Even that had a revenue stream. But absent any clear revenue-driving goals here, all I can see is a desire to create a very specific kind of player base. We just keep getting pushed into the same cattle chute and the sandbox gets further normalized as they de-legitimatize certain play styles deemed “easy” or “not in keeping with design principles.”

SCORE server, which was the base of Homecoming, existed the entire time since shortly after the shutdown of Live 7 years ago. You had to “know somebody” to get in but this game ran in secret for the whole time until last year. AFAIK, SCORE is still running even now.

And I don’t think you should be able to make more influence on the marketplace in some ways versus others. I think all marketplace sales should return a flat X in influence gain as your “selling fee” and all should have fixed prices. Why should you be able to profit at a higher rate than someone else who puts in the same time playing this game? And if you detect sarcasm here....I think it’s justified. We should all be equal, the mechanics should all pay out the exact same amount per minute of playtime. The only thing that should matter is the level of pre-coded content you play, scaling from +1 to +4, modified by group size, just like influence gains work today.

I’d argue the overwhelming MAJORITY of the playerbase here are returning players looking for a retro experience. So basically, we are already starting with the same diminished playerbase we had back on Live, but without a marketing campaign to support new player recruitment, it’s totally word of mouth. Thus, you’ve got a few thousand players who basically control the outcome of this server, or any like it. And at a few thousand active players, a loss of even 10% of those is going to be noticed. Perhaps not in the marketplace immediately given the Devs seeding models. Simple math. This game can’t afford to be expelling any members unless we want Homecoming to eventually look like Thunderspy or any of the others from a “boutique membership” perspective. Then again, given the origins of Homecoming, perhaps this is exactly what they desire....a very small, very hardcore but “select” user base.

So the rationale here was to turn off double influence when exemp’ing to “make it fair” for everyone, then why not do the same with the marketplace and simply set a max ceiling on all levels of IO’s, Recipe’s and Salvage? I mean, if your goal is to be fair, then be fair. Ceiling prices can’t be exceeded, floor prices are still there for the “sell it now” players. That way we all have the same expected expenditure for every possible build (assuming you buy everything rather than crafting drops, etc). If your goal isn’t a fairness doctrine, then just say it outright: You don’t want to encourage farming as a playstyle.