Bionic_Flea

ROFL. Can I get more than 3 to 5 tickets for a play of one of my SFMA AEs then, considering exactly how long it takes to write one of those things that's a CHUNK of time spent! No, I knew the rewards for that when I started doing it. The rewards was me being relatively pleased I'd done a decent enough job on a story. I propose a new thing: A tip jar where people can deposit, inf, recipes, other tradable stuff in a jar to show appreciation to a player's base, AE arc, costume, etc.

I haven't really seen it on Excelsior either (which is supposed to be the worst offender), but obviously I'm not always on, and even when on I'm not paying attention to all channels (almost never pay attention to General and Broadcast). But I think removing the AE buildings from the starter zones might help with that a little bit. It's actually surprising how well that part of the changes have been received. No one seems too upset that they firebombed the AE building in Mercy!

You know, I had not noticed that before. I just looked at the numbers and accepted them without doing my own addition. Excelsior shows 411 players/accounts, 269 heroes and 51 villains, which adds up 320. What happened to the other 91? Are they Praetorians? Rogues and Vigilantes? Or some other unknown possibility?

True. This is conjecture. This is also conjecture. Both have some merit. Just for the sake of argument, say that the devs made ITF critters worth twice as much XP/Inf per kill for a standard run, 3X for 1 star, 4X for 2 star, 5x for 3 star, and 10X for 4 star. What do you think will happen? My conjecture is that AE farmers and PLers would farm and PL less in AE and more in ITF with a team.

I'm not a team member, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn . . . well before the pandemic. Anyway, history shows that there are at least a couple of builds on the test server before it goes live. So my guess is we have one, maybe two, possibly more incremental builds before this goes live. Again, from historical guidance, while they do take forum discussions and arguments into account, they prefer and are more likely to act on actual play testing with data. Not that I'm accusing you of doing that. Hell, I do some testing but a lot of forum philosophizing.

I'm sorry Ukase, you know I love you but afk-farming is pretty much not playing by definition. If there is no one at the keyboard, the game is playing itself. Yes, yes, I understand that you are at the keyboard playing another character on another account. But that's the one you're playing. Not the one or two others you parked in a fire-farm with burn on auto.

You have an Emp/Trick Arrow? HAX! Also, I'm disappointed. You said money not inf. Farming for real money is hard work and no where near as profitable!

How much are we talking about here?

I don't want to eliminate AE, or eliminate farming in general. I am not a fan of long term AFK farming, especially auto-bot AFK farming, but I have no problem if someone who is farming needs to step away. So I understand the difficulty in enforcing a rule. Even so, I wish there was a stated rule against it. What I would like is for active farming to have the best rewards per unit of time, but not many multiples better than say a +4 kill most ITF. To accomplish that, I would like to reduce AE fire farming rewards a bit and increase non-AE playing two bits. What I would need data for is to figure out how much those bits should be.

Pardon me for not reading whole thread, but I wanted to report that Ice Slick does not do containment damage on controllers, and it should. The damage is almost negligible so you'd only be adding occasional extra negligible damage. A little birdie just pointed out to me that pseudopets don't get containment. Well, then I think the damage should be doubled, at least on controllers. Dominators have a whole damage secondary they can lean on.

Although you weren't directly responding to me, I posted this set of older @Jimmy quotes in the Reward Merits thread, where he made reference to outsized AE rewards.

Oooooh! Crashing meteor! I like it. At the expiration time give it the Steel Canyon Fire explosion across the whole map. Spoiler:

I think I know one way that would reduce the ridiculousness somewhat, but lot's of people would hate it. It's a rather simple solution: Either remove the meteor map or greatly curb the number of mobs AE allows in it.

Obligatory, But Jimmy . . . From Jimmy here: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Next I’d like to talk about progression, XP boosters and the AE nerfs. To catch everyone up: In i25, Incarnate components can be acquired by earning ‘Veteran Levels’ (levels beyond 50 which do not actually increase the strength of your character, they just provide badges and Incarnate components) and Incarnate XP can be earned from any content - however, normal Incarnate content will also provide the standard Incarnate rewards On the Homecoming servers you are able to select an XP rate between 100% and 200% - however, increasing it above 100% will reduce your influence gain to the same degree (200% XP = 0% inf) On the Homecoming servers XP rewards for non-Dev Choice Architect missions is reduced by 50% (for further context: This is similar to the reduction that was present on live, but by making use of the XP boosters mentioned above you can in fact get a higher XP rate than was present on live) (Another aside before I continue: The AE nerf was originally to reduce the strain on the server as many AE farm maps used mechanics which were incredibly server-intensive, but we have decided to keep the nerf after we saw the other positive effects it produced) The concerns we’ve seen about progression seem to be focused in two key areas: Progression is too easy, nobody will run Incarnate content Stop nerfing AE, let us play the way we want to play I’ll cover both of these concerns together with a simple answer: The above changes are actually intended to allow everyone to play the content they enjoy and still progress at the rate of their choosing. Take AE farms for example: Our goal was to ensure AE farms were roughly as valuable as they were on live as well as ensuring that those who simply wanted to level quickly were not forced to rely on them. Using the boosters you can now participate in a wide variety of content and still level up quickly. We think this has actually been very successful - we still see a small subset of players engaging in AE farms, and those players still enjoy it and find it rewarding, but it is nowhere near as dominant as it was before the adjustment. The way the Incarnate system works follows the same thinking. We don’t want people to be forced to grind through only Incarnate content to unlock those specific rewards, we want players to be able to play the game in the way they choose. Overall the feedback we’ve received regarding these changes has been overwhelmingly positive, and we intend to continue making adjustments to support this philosophy as the player base and economy matures." ________________________________________________________________________________ AND

It might go something like this:

Devs hate Ukase more than they hate redside . . . .

I agree with this. Even if it is hard to enforce, merely stating it as a rule will have an effect. Some people stay far away from any possible violations, others like to dance right at the line, and a third group doesn't care what the rules are. Simply instituting and declaring the rule will get the folks in the first two groups to comply. That should also make it easier to find the ones who don't care what the rules are.

We can't talk about stuff if I can't prove it in a court of law? Come on. How can I supply evidence I don't have? Or are you just tired of reading what I type and want me to be quiet and go away?

I assume they have all kinds of datamining. I'd like to see it posted here. But that's up to them what to share.

My understanding is, yes the best AE fire farms are multiple times better than any of the old school farms. But you don't have to take my word for it; go run a test - make note of how much XP/Inf you have and run each and compare. It matters to the devs that AE fire farms are so much better than anything else, that players are increasingly only running AE fire farms. Well, "only" is hyperbole. An overwhelming majority of game hours is spent in AE farms. Some of that is AFK, some of that is active. How do you feel about AFK farming? Especially AFK-bot farming where they can use multiple accounts running 24-7 without even having to reset. I don't really care if people farm, although I can't say I support long term AFK farming, as opposed to going AFK a few minutes because I had to take a call or other personal thing. I'm just being a gadfly . . . gadflea . . . gad-something to get people thinking.

I did read it. Every word. And I appreciate that you took the time to answer directly. I'm not sure if all that stuff before this quote was directed at me. I think the market is just fine and that supply and demand works surprisingly well with the dev set upper limits by seeding salvage and giving other stuff a merit price. That sets a ceiling on everything so that we don't have 2 billion dollar Panaceas that then get sold for more off market for both sides to save the market's cut. The ceiling prices, converters, and bundling salvage by tier and bundling all levels of IOs together makes for a fairly stable, reasonably priced market. As Ukase said, I don't think there is a big scarcity of mid level stuff and even if there is, that's an opportunity for someone to supply those items. I certainly supply some low end stuff and have read many others doing a variety of things to do so as well. I am OK with farming having a better return per minute than anything else, but I don't want it to be multiple times better than the next best thing. That's why one of my many questions above was "how fast should it take to get to 50?" If the answer is: "two hours in a farm" I don't want it to be two months doing anything else.

Trying to get a handle on all of this. So if I maximize PAP rewards and run all the i-trials and 4-star Aeon and ITF every day, I'd get 60 PAPs per day. I might get some random drops from missions and I could buy some, but running all the trials and both hard modes is probably longer than most people could play daily. So at 60 per day it would take me 25 days to earn enough to buy the Chibi costume, and nothing else. But realistically, I don't run that content daily now so it would be unlikely that I will do that in the future. They also have a small chance to fall from any mission completion starting at level 1 and from the first run of the weekly. I think it's more likely that I will earn 5-10 per day on average playing the way I am today. I'll get a few from missions/WSF, a few from advanced difficulty on some days and a few from trials on some days. That makes it 150-300 days to earn a mini-chibi. And that seems too long to me. Let alone getting them all on my main. Yes, I understand that I don't have to. I also don't have to get all the badges or all the souvenirs or run all the content. But I feel that at least my main does it because I'm a bit of a completionist. That's at least 8,310 PAPS. I'm sure I undercounted because I didn't break out the mode costumes other than the existing Very Rares. At a max of 60/day (8310/60=139 days); at 10 per day it's 831 days (or 2.3 years) and double that at 5 per day. That seems too long to me. And that's all for a single character. Everyone that I know plays multiple characters. Now it's true that I could also afford to buy some in the market, but the price is currently unknown and bound to be pretty high, at least for a few months. But it's also true that the team intends to add additional ones as time goes on. I think the PAP costs need to be brought down a bit or the rewards brought up a bit, or both. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that players will get 60/day at the current rates and with the time-gates. Even 5-10 per day may be a lot. I think the sweet spot should be at most 12 months to get all of them. Let's say 365 days; at 5 per day that gives a total of 1,825 to get them all. Or looking at it the other way 8310/365 is about 23. The rewards, especially for the non-advanced difficulty should be increased such that a player can reasonably obtain and sustain an average of 23 PAPs a day through a variety of play, or the costs reduced by a factor of 4-5, or some combination of both.

Cow-EL, aka Superbull begs to differ.

Absolutely yes, I agree. I leveled both a TA/AR and an AR/TA and dual boxed them as a team because I couldn't decide which one to make . . . so I made both! The corrupter did A LOT more damage. A LOT!