Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[Bionic_Flea]

Sorry.  I realized that I may have misunderstood shortly after posting.  Edited above.

 

 

[Targren]

1 minute ago, Eclipse. said:

1.) I was being a sarcastic ass in the first place.

What's the downside (other than the obvious one for the marketeers) that you're being sarcastic? I like the idea. Of course, that may be informed by the fact that I had to spend hours farming morality missions when I was trying to kit out Misty, since apparently Wents couldn't keep Kinetic Combat in stock. :P

 

[Eclipse.]

2 minutes ago, Targren said:

What's the downside (other than the obvious one for the marketeers) that you're being sarcastic? I like the idea. Of course, that may be informed by the fact that I had to spend hours farming morality missions when I was trying to kit out Misty, since apparently Wents couldn't keep Kinetic Combat in stock. 😛

 

Price of cheap IOs potentially skyrocketing.

1,000,000,000 INF builds will drastically reduce in price.
100,000 INF builds will moderately-to-drastically increase in price.

It'd average the whole thing out, basically.

Marketers could still work on converting yellow -> Orange, and potentially turn profit, while making overall yellow prices more expensive.

I'm also not on the Dev team to know how those pools would work -- if they're even possible. 
It might require you to decouple the all-IOs of the same type but different levels being in a pool to allow all yellow IOs to be in a pool

Hard to say.

Edited March 31, 2020 by Eclipse.

[Targren]

2 minutes ago, Eclipse. said:

Price of cheap IOs potentially skyrocketing.

1,000,000,000 INF builds will drastically reduce in price.
100,000 INF builds will moderately-to-drastically increase in price.

It'd average the whole thing out, basically.

Marketers could still work on converting yellow -> Orange, and potentially turn profit, while making overall yellow prices more expensive.

Ah, fairy nuff... I didn't know you had a chance of converting between tiers. 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Targren

[siolfir]

3 hours ago, Number Six said:

No, the option existed, but the dynamics of using it were completely different. You couldn't earn XP beyond 50, and therefore couldn't create the weird interaction between converting XP to Influence, vet levels, and patrol XP.

Sorry, late to the party and just caught up to this part of the thread so I'm skipping the last 5+ pages as I add this, but didn't hitting level 50 essentially always "enable" this option on live since you didn't have any xp to gain? My memory isn't what it's supposed to be and there are a lot of histrionics in this thread about what went in, for how long, and so on, but I'm fairly sure I remember getting more significantly more xp at level 50 than just a slightly increased drop amount would account for.

 

Edit to add my feedback on the inf gain nerf: disabling the double inf while exemplared actually hurts my non-farming characters more and increases the likelihood of my wanting to farm since I enable the "no xp, double inf while exemplared" on my characters and like to run TFs. In reality it will probably just kill my desire to make alts because I absolutely despise playing the market and like having at least a moderately performant build. Since I'm not going to spend the time converting and flipping (see: despise playing the market) I'm simply just not going to make the new characters until I have their IOs, which will likely take much longer to get.

Edited March 31, 2020 by siolfir

[Eclipse.]

7 minutes ago, Targren said:

Ah, fairy nuff... I didn't know you had a chance of converting between tiers. 

You can with enhance converter if you do it within a set.

That's basically how Marketeering works. Buy a whole bunch of cheap IOs That are, say,  defense buff.
Convert within type until you get a LOTG.
Then convert within set until you get +7.5% global recharge.*

*this is probably a bad example for simplicity sake, and if you try it will probably not turn a profit more often than not.
 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Eclipse.

[Eclipse.]

27 minutes ago, Noyjitat said:

1,000,000 inf = 1 reward merit

 

 

This means you'll never pay more than 100 mil for any purple.

Gotcha, I was converting in the opposite direction then...
That makes a lot more sense.
Currently purples are nowhere near that price, though. I think if they got up there we'd see a lot more complaints...

Edited March 31, 2020 by Eclipse.

[Targren]

3 minutes ago, Eclipse. said:

You can with enhance converter if you do it within a set.

That's basically how Marketeering works. Buy a whole bunch of cheap IOs That are, say,  defense buff.
Convert within type until you get a LOTG.
Then convert within set until you get +7.5% global recharge.

I thought you had to start with a purple to get a purple (based on ParagonWiki page - which may not apply to HC). 

[Eclipse.]

For purples, yes.

Not For oranges, because some sets are mixed yellow and orange.

no sets are mixed orange and purple 🙂

[Targren]

Just now, Eclipse. said:

For purples, yes.

Not For oranges, because some sets are mixed yellow and orange.

no sets are mixed orange and purple 🙂

Ah, that makes sense now. 

[Veracor]

2 hours ago, Jimmy said:

I may have missed something then. What specifically hasn't been addressed?

Since you're talking about exploits, I'd like to weigh in and say that I consider AFK-farms to be one and I do not use them.  And RIP me, the only reason I'm so far ahead in vet levels is because I never turned off inf and just always played the game that way.  If there's no reason to turn off XP anymore, AFK farmers are going to shoot way past and invalidate the concept of vet levels for everyone.

 

Call me selfish for tunneling on just this point, but I think HC gives plenty of inf for a build already if people aren't just powerlevelling to 50.  It's that most do, simply because it's possible.  Reward merits are all over the place with TFs and Hami raids and I've certainly tried my best to get them all to be accessible for everyone.  I've never turned people down in my raids for being underlevelled/undergeared, as dangerous or more difficult as it makes leading a Mo run.

 

I get that you want to reduce the gap between farmers and non-farmers and make an option in the menus function as was originally intended, but you don't have to shoot down the accomplishments of the non-farmers and the gains of active farmers in the process; instead you could reduce the excessively high payout of AFK farming, or make huge experience/vet levels not a thing in AE, or similar.

 

Non-farmers accomplishing things in a game is healthy.  Active farmers making more money in a game is healthy.  But AFK farming is a strict detriment to the game in my opinion, just like botting is in other games.  Please don't address the inequality issue with the blanket solution of simply disabling the menu function (as it is currently used).

Edited March 31, 2020 by Veracor

[Crysis]

34 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

 

Except a lot of people DO end up feeling like they have to, rather they enjoy that kind of thing or not... (For an example, see the post up-thread that stated basically "New player. Looked at Wents. Decided my first character had best be a farmer.")

 

It sounds like that's one of the problems Jimmy & Company want to address. That's not a bad thing. 

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.

 

[csr]

6 hours ago, Obus Form said:

More efficient than converting/flipping? =O

Farming creates new INF that goes into the economy.  With regard to INF, converting and flipping just moves INF from one character to another (usually taking 10% of the final value out of the economy).

Edited March 31, 2020 by csr

[csr]

Somehow duplicated the post.

Edited March 31, 2020 by csr

[Chris943]

Wouldn't this change harm the economy?  especially for the lower cost IOs?  with there being less money in the economy this will increase the cost of the intro IOs, and make them more unattainable for fresh 50s.  This will also increase the cost of salvage, due to less of them being in the market, due to less farming.  All this change is doing is creating less supply, so therefore the demand will increase, causing an increase in cost.  People were already complaining about the 600,000 cost rare salvage, I foresee this increase to 900,000, doing nothing but hurting fresh 50s.

[Peerless Girl]

2 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

'Love it when people take any disagreement as emotional over-reaction...

 

Welcome to the internet, I guess. 

That was a joke, note the smiley tongue? and I doubt Jimmy is emotionally overreacting, he doesn't strike me as an overly emotional person.

[Display Name]

I'll just wait and see.  My money is still there, and my other "exploits" are still working: playing the market, farming, you know the drill.  I'll just keep doing those until they're taken away.

 

I've seen an unstable market since Feb, also (forget who mentioned it.)  I suppose that will continue for a lot longer now.  Oh well.  It allows me to really highball sales and lowball purchases, although it takes a little more patience.  Dont worry about me!  I'll be fine!  Lol!

 

Really nice updates!  Thank you for your hard work!

[Wavicle]

As someone who didn't even realize this Inf exploit existed and so has not benefited from it AT ALL, I say Thank You. This is a good change. Ignore the whiners.

[TBN8681]

8 hours ago, The Curator said:

The following change was omitted from the beta patch notes due to a related exploit:

• Influence gain can no longer be increased by disabling XP

We’ve made this change to reduce the influence income gap between players who farm and those that do not. The amount of additional influence gained by abusing level 49 missions simply wasn’t healthy for the overall economy of the game, and generally unfair towards those who play standard level 50 content instead of farming.

 

Additionally, there were various exploits that could be abused in order to further increase influence gain through this option.

 

Overall, we concluded it was best to remove the mechanic. Even with this change farming is still far more efficient than every other method of influence gain.

What this means to me (a busy adult with RL responsibilities as many CoH players are) is that it will take me even longer to gather the 25M-35M to buy a single purple enhancement. So this is drastically going to decrease my desire to grind and ultimately I will spend even less time on CoH because it will simply take too long to get even a single purple set. I might be more inclined to play if the chance of purple sets dropping was increased, but as of now, it seems like too long of a grind to build even one hero. 

 

Also, there was nothing keeping all players from farming. The influence imbalance comes from a player's desire to NOT farm. So it's pointless to balance it out when the root of influence imbalance was personal preference. Saying that double influence gain was unfair to players who CHOSE not to farm is invalid and completely incorrect. 

Edited March 31, 2020 by TBN8681

[Peerless Girl]

58 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

If I had only heard that from newbies like the poster up-thread, that would be one thing... But some of the folks I run with on Everlasting are by no means "new" to the game and still grump about that kind of thing. "I didn't sign up to play City of Wentworths" isn't an uncommon sentiment. 

 

 

Right, and I'm an RPer on Everlasting (who had RP reasons to be around Wentworth's actually) and often felt like I had to run AE arc farms back on live too. In the end it boils down to "don't let other people make you feel you have to do something" you don't HAVE to farm any more than you HAVE to play the market in CoH, the devs are just trying to equalize all the "in game" stuff. (The Market is only tangentially connected to in-game activity), as Jimmy and Six said earlier).

[Widower]

11 minutes ago, Peerless Girl said:

That was a joke, note the smiley tongue? and I doubt Jimmy is emotionally overreacting, he doesn't strike me as an overly emotional person.

Can confirm; Jimmy is a robot.

[Wavicle]

I do find it hilarious that farmers seem to believe they were solely responsible for making the game economy run when in fact the HC team have put systems in place that make farmers completely unnecessary for that purpose.

[Targren]

1 minute ago, Wavicle said:

I do find it hilarious that farmers seem to believe they were solely responsible for making the game economy run when in fact the HC team have put systems in place that make farmers completely unnecessary for that purpose.

That runs in direct conflict to what Jimmy said on the subject: they bring goods into the economy, which is a help:  Recipes and enhancements that aren't seeded like salvage. 

[Wavicle]

Just now, Targren said:

That runs in direct conflict to what Jimmy said on the subject: they bring goods into the economy, which is a help:  Recipes and enhancements that aren't seeded like salvage. 

There's no conflict at all.  I didn't say farming is useless.  Just that it isn't solely responsible for everything functioning.

More to the point, I am simply saying that those people in this thread predicting DOOM because they will make slightly less Inf when farming (though NOT fewer drops) are exaggerating in the extreme.

[Wavicle]

As has been pointed out, farming is STILL the most efficient way to get Inf, so people will keep farming. The only way farming would be disincentivized is if some OTHER activity were made MORE efficient, which is not what this change does,