Bionic_Flea

Are there any insta-50s or super farming servers out there? How popular are they? I know most or all are smaller than HC, but I really don't follow the others.

It is. Fire/Rad is one of the top tier fire farmers. Do you dispute that?

Well done! Except the second video is a fire farmer in a fire farm. In fact, it looks like the exact same character.

Responding to @battlewraith: "Well how good do you want it to be? Is the answer to that question something that can be arrived at objectively somehow?" I don't know. I don't think we can reasonably quantify or otherwise come up with a number without data that the devs have but we don't. That's why I ask it as a relative question. I have no problem with it AE farming being the fastest method to get to 50 and the highest XP/Inf per minute. I just don't want it to be leagues better than the next best thing, which I assume is something like the ITF, Yin, or Market Crash -- all of which have densely packed critters similar to some current farms and the old school farms as well as limited travel time. Is having AE farming twice as good as the next best thing too much, not enough, or just right?

PS: All of my thumbs down are undeserved and I demand a recount! Reactions Received 918 267 671 11 16 453 31

I assure you that I don't hate farming and all my poop is perfectly and properly placed.

No.

I think we need targeted Nerfs. Devs: Please nerf ShardWarrior! Thank you.

I don't think any of those covers what I've been asking, which is: how much better should AE fire farming be then the next best thing? It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I don't think it should be soooo much faster than anything else. It can still be the number one fastest method as far as I'm concerned. And please don't pretend that fire farming isn't better XP/time than anything else. That's why many people do it and they have said so in this thread. They want to get to 50 (or full incarnate) quickly. And if you disagree that playing a farm that plays to your strength isn't less risky, I suggest you have a fire farmer run a smash/lethal farm or an S/L farmer in a fire farm. Please record it and play it here as proof. 😜

I disagree. A speed run of say ITF compared to a kill all nets the same reward merits at the end, but all of those skipped mobs is XP and inf left on the table. You can maximize merits/minute or XP/Inf per minute. A team of good players with the right sets might be able to do both, but usually you give up one to gain the other.

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