Andreah

The idea the random number generator in CoH is biased or unfair in some way was put to bed long ago. Enemy accuracy will come into play, and this may increase the chance to hit, but 5% is the floor. Lts and bosses get rank accuracy up to 1.3, and enemies at +3 to you (a 50+1 doing +4 content) another 0.3. If they're using accurate powers, I suppose it could double to 10%. It never forces enemies to miss you. It only forces hits if they've missed too many times in a row. And the lower their chance to hit is after all the calculations, the more hits in a row it allows -- in this case, up to 100 or so. At a minimum, no matter how good your defense is, if 40 mobs are shooting at you, most of the time you will get hit, and even in the best case for the player, those 40 mobs will score two hits per collective cycle of their powers. Whereas before the aggro change, only 17 at most would have been trying, with less than half as many hits per cycle. My conclusion is that using powers like Judgment in target dense areas is going to attract a lot of enemy fire, and the amount that lands even on defense capped characters will be substantially higher than we've seen in the past. Tester feedback here in this thread seems to confirm that as well.

Whip Melee pool?! Circus Control set? Praetorian Epic Archtypes? Cimerora Barbarian Invasion Zone Event? Oh No!

The way I suggested it, their character names would always fail the check against matching the player's global name, and thus the name "Coyotedancer" would come up available if they allowed the character to become release flagged. Then, if you managed to then get that local name, your new Coyotedancer character's name would match your global name, @Coyotedancer, and thus you would never again worry about it becoming flagged for release, even if you left the character at level 1 forever. There's no system to alert us that any particular name has become available, so you'd have to routinely check to see if the name became released from inactivity of whoever currently holds it.

That's a fair opinion. But I wanted to discuss it anyway, because I enjoy this sort of discussion. Maybe some other do too. People who don't shouldn't feel compelled to be riled by that. It's okay. The devs rarely ever leap on any proposals we make here.

At a 5% capped minimum chance to hit, 40 attacks will on average result in 2 hits. There's only a ~36% chance none would hit.

I suggested back on Page 2 of this thread that if a character name matched the player's global name, it be exempt from being flagged for release. However, as I read things the devs have said, that may not be possible to do.

I don't want this to be done by account. If a person is sitting on many low-level characters and wants to be assured of keeping their names, they should have to put some effort into doing so. If a name isn't important enough for a player to log in once a month on that specific character, and then just immediately log back off, I'm not feeling much sympathy.

It sounds crazy to me too, but there are all kinds of people. Some of them would probably look at how I spend my time in game and shake their heads in disbelief the same way I look at them when they spend 20 Merits on a Catalyst. The best explanation I've given to myself for why people enjoy repetitive, and even AFK content, is that it has an ASMR-like effect on them. When you get down to the basics, all computer gaming is about watching pixels flicker, listening to sound waves modulate, tapping the same hundred of so keyboard keys over and over, moving the mouse around, and clicking its clicker.

I'm not offering a personal judgment on whether boosting reward (or earnings, or whatever word we decide defines it) from specific content is needed or not, just proposing an outline of a means by which it might be done and not encourage repeating the same identical missions over and over. that's why I tied the rewards (or awards, or payments or earnings) to mission completion of a specific and identifiable class of missions. And for a mission to give out rewards like this, in my proposal, at least someone can't ever do it again. Doing missions via oro wouldn't give the bonus. Maybe you would accumulate a bonus differently during the mission to account for stealthing (maybe a time-completion bonus that drops down so you complete mission quickly to get it instead of mob defeat bonuses -- it would award whichever was greater when you finished) Or want to emphasize salvage and recipe drops instead of XP, or whatever. I don't think those particulars matter much to the concept. But you can't get it until the mission completes, and only missions that can't be done again by the team leader qualify. It's not like the demon or freaks map where you jump out just before it would have completed and then reset to rinse and repeat. Ideally, the completion bonus would encourage people to complete their missions, and instead of running the same ones over and over, play a variety.

You're right, it absolutely would backfire. I might believe I'd prefer it today in some ways, but I probably would regret it too after a while.

I imagine the devs are busily crafting a long explanatory post/diary entry!

I doubt we'll spend any time on this, but I enjoy speculating on how things might be done. :)

If they're not farming for convenience or efficiency, then they won't mind farming at -1 level, x1 group size, and at reduced rewards, right? It's convenient for the mobs to be higher levels and still be easy to defeat; it's convenient for them to come in large groups. It's so convenient to get more rewards per hour than any other game activity. It's convenient to even be doing that while away from the keyboard. They want to farm for the disproportionately high rewards it grants per unit time. Yes, many of them will move to other, activities, and I suspect, that is partly why this is being done.

I would if I had evidence it was more than three. But even then, it's not going to be easy case to make if they say it wasn't; we've been down this road before, it's basically an honor system.

Convenience means efficiency, and that's entirely the point of farming. It's not only significant, it's critical.

I would say that in Page 4, chasing them at least a little could significantly improve your build. I'm no build expert, but after applying those -tohits on those near and in range of your character, you have surplus in S/L defense over the softcap. Some of that could be switched to those exotics that are giving you issues now. If you can get F/C/N up to 21, that will be at/near the softcap for those who're debuffed near you. Those that are still attacking you from out of range would miss a little more, too. It might make all the difference.

I disagree. You can pick your adversary group in, say, PI Radios, but you can't design them. I would also like to see someone run PI Radios over and over AFK with seven door sitters.

You are the soul of patience. And I really mean that.

I'm fully aware of that. I have about 1200 vet levels on my fifties in total. No, the one I am most familiar with deletes at about vet level 48, where you've been granted 280 of the 410 Emps from vet levels, because the rate of return is lower after that. Keep in mind, in this process a player is vet-farming several characters in parallel using multiboxing. When they get to vet 50, you move everything off, liquidate/email/store, and make a fresh one to continue vet-farming. Even the threads you gain as bonuses in the early vet levels are worth a lot. All I can say is I disagree.

I get that we all love easy access to Incarnate powers, but it bothers me in a Game Integrity sense that we've made it so trivially easy to get shards, threads, components, astrals, and even emps. These were supposed to the key rewards from the most dififcult content anywhere in the game, that could not be gained without the greatest effort, perseverance, or group coordination. And now we award them like anything else. Honest, we ought to remove emps and threads from vet levels, and no longer drop shards and threads from content under level 45. But I know that's not happening. But we should at least not make it worse.

Yes, some do, on purpose.

To be honest, I'd love to see XP globally reduced by about 5x. And maybe life made a little easier for soloers. Team steamrolling is hugely rewarded comparatively. So long as the story completionists can continue to lock their xp at need, ofc.

And a couple of large resists, because 40 targets shooting at you, a couple are going to 5% leak through.

I think of the affected mob to have a list of possible targets in the area around them. Normally, they go down the list and pick one (e.g., we base this on aggro). I'd assign an aggro based chance to pick one based on relative aggro scores instead of always taking the very top one off the list. When confused, and confused to some degree, I would expect them to reduce the chance of picking a hostile, and instead pick a friendly. If there were no other friendly mobs around, they would of course pick a player to attack, and vice versa. But in a both-kinds-of-targets rich environment, being unable to establish who is a friend and who is a foe ought to produce mixed results. And a means to do this in proportion to the degree of confusion instead of as an all or nothing "I only ever attack my enemies" vs. "I always attack my friends". I mentioned this in the Advanced ITF thread, and I'll repeat it here. All other things being equal, I think the chance of attacking a friend instead of an enemy ought to be something like: chance = Clamp(0%, (Magnitude of Confusion - Confusion Protection)/ (Confusion Protection + 100%), 100%) In a case where all we did was redirect off the normal target that would have been selected against aggro, then just roll against this and pick the nearest alternative if it fails.

I don't count them because they are the repeatable versions of the arcs not run from their in-game acquired contacts. They would be slower to level up than others, but they would get end-of-mission bonus defeat credit for any mobs killed by their own team. Also, stealth character do more missions per hour, and any benefits they get at end of mission would stack up more quickly. Still, this is a good point and it would need some work. This is true, but it also means merits aren't worth very much. A merit is worth 200-250K Inf. What I really like about Merits is they are a pure supply-side hedge against auction price inflation from injecting more influence into the system. Maybe there would be random recipe roll or small random pile of salvage instead. I would still want you to get a bonus recipe/salvage at the end of the mission.