Andreah

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.

I'd have made separate damage types for these entirely. But proliferation of types would be yet another problem.

And judgment being pretty scary for squishies to use. Those high target counts on Judgment powers and the high damage they do may get the casters a lot of undesirable incoming fire from mobs over the cap, even in team settings with tanks/brutes around.

I see it putting a premium on being able to position groups of mobs, both to concentrate them so they're subject to team AoE's and not sniping lowbies/squishies with impunity, and to spread them out of ranged distance so they can't snipe.

You are probably right. It would be abused, or encourage otherwise decent players to try to fib/lie to GMs for name retention advantage.

I suggested a token claim system earlier in this thread, where we would get to claim about one released name per week, and no more than two in any week.

Maybe what's needed is a routine means to notify the GM staff that you wish to lock your account for a period of time, maybe up to 90 days,, and an easy way for them to make it happen on the back end. While "locked" your account's characters would not progress on the release timers, or at least names past their fresh dates not be claimable by other players. I wouldn't want this to be trivial for players alone to do -- it should have a human GM in the loop to exercise judgment. But make it easy to do on the back end.

I've known a number of players to make temporary characters on second accounts to use as extras in storylines. These are rarely leveled very high at all, if at all. Edit: I don't think there's a lot magic about level 2, other than walk power. I expect there would be a lot of level 1 disposable extras, and some might lock at level 2, but if you accidentally got a roleplay civilian to 3, 4, or 5, it wouldn't change the RP. Sometimes these characters are similarly named versions of a high level character, being used for some roleplay purpose that doesn't require high levels, like having purpose costumes preloaded for social events.

How about the percentage being determined by amount confusion magnitude exceeds protection. E.g., Clamp( 0%, (control-protection)/(protection+1), 100%). And I'm also feeling like we're getting off feedback to this one page 4 feature and going off onto full on systems rework suggestions. Changing confusion mechanics would hit a ton more stuff than just the Advanced ITF.

There's been a lot of concern recently voiced in the beta forums about how farming/AE rewards should not be lowered, but rather those from regular content should be increased. What I propose here is separate from discussion of those page 4 changes. Please discuss those over in the beta forums. I wanted to put an idea out for consideration on how that might be done. I consider "Regular" content to be story arcs, task forces, and street sweeping. I'm not counting radio/newspaper, repeatables, or Ouroboros arcs as regular content. That's fair to discuss, too, I'm sure. Of course, I am not an HC developer and can't speak to whether these would be easy to implement, difficult, or flat out impossible. First off, I want to define a term, what I call "Bonus Multiplier". We all know you can choose a experience increase from P2W which ranges from no increase (+0%) up to doubling XP (+100%). Our total XP Multiplier is this bonus added to 1. So, when we choose +100%, we're getting our total experience multiplier of "2XP". First off, for Street Sweeping Content, which is defeating any mob in open world content, I would award double the bonus multiplier amount of XP at the moment each mob is defeated. This would count for XP only and only for non-AVs, non-GMs killed in regular open world zones. There is no influence or drop bonus involved here. Then, I would handle Story Arcs Missions and Task Forces a little differently. While a character is in a mission, I would record the bonus multiplier's worth of experience and influence from each mob defeated on the side for the character, and then award it all in a lump bonus sum at the completion of the mission. This is in addition to whatever experience or influence was normally awarded at the time of defeat of each mob, and even if influence awarded at the moment of defeat was reduced by the base setting, this will add some back at completion. If the mission is not completed, but reset or abandoned, then both totals reset to zero. One could leave the mission and come back into it, so long as the mission internal progress was not reset, the bonuses would be there for award when the mission was actually completed. Autocompleted missions, or missions one was not inside long enough to receive a normal mission completion bonus would receive no multiplier bonus. This will encourage people to not only run missions, but to defeat most of the mobs in them as well. Finally, for each story arc or task force mission completed, provided that mission was not a no-combat "talkie" or "goto", I would award one Reward Merit, regardless of the character's xp bonus setting. This would provide better rewards for content that ought to be the premier content in the game -- story arcs and task forces, provide a boost to encourage people to not just skip over the open world mobs, or to actually sweep in the denser hazard zones, and boost both influence and merit based means of kitting out one's now faster leveling characters.

... I've been six-slotting health for ages? Who doesn't want more health? :D

That game systems has some issues too, but other than that I prefer mathematically asymptotic systems, I'm not going after it here. This issue with confusion and knockback in AdvITF isn't the first time this has been an issue, but I suppose it's the most glaring. I would expect some people to figure out how to overcome the 10 points of confusion anyway. And if/when they do, they'll use it as much as possible.

How about if the logout timer also defaulted to zero if you were within active range of a zone supergroup portal?

I'm noticing an increase in sales volume. Anyone else? Is there "panic farming" or farmer-outfitting going on?

Many, perhaps; but the roleplaying community still heavily uses AE to create story arcs to run in roleplay groups to advance their group storylines. And these AE changes have no impact on those. In my SG discord, we discussed whether our group AE missions could be run for Tickets instead of normal rewards, and would anyone care? No one did.

This discussion makes me wish there wasn't a either/or threshold based mezz system in the game. One that had a mezz chance roll, or several grades of mezz effect (e.g., slightly confused, partly confused, confused, heavily confused, totally confused) depending on magnitude level compared to protection, and we wouldn't be in this apparent all or nothing point where either a player essentially can confuse a class of enemies completely and at will, or they can't at all. But we don't have that, and I suppose the implementation here among the star levels seem reasonable, and maybe it could be tweaked a little with Flea's suggestion on slightly lower mag but with significant duration resistance.

The principle is there should be reasonable equity in rewards between different modes of play. One should not stand out head and shoulders above the others in terms of engagement AND time investment per rewards. The most rewarding modes of play should be those that engage a player and require time investment. Farming's virtue of being low engagement (due to its low effort and fast defeat rates from easy enemies and it's being able to be done from very predictable rote or even afk action) should be compensated by provided lower rewards than content that requires just as much time, but requires the player to engage with that content with meaningful thought and process. Let's be honest, if we have people leaving this game, I doubt it's the career farmers. It's the people who look at farming and see nothing but a boring time sink, and wonder why they're being pushed to do it by the comparative reward structure.