Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[Peerless Girl]

4 hours ago, DeepRootz said:

In WoW my friends would ask me to come and just do a normal raid with a pug.  "It will be quick, like 40 mins tops."  3hrs later I havent gone to bed, and the group has wiped more times than I can count.  Doing a heroic raid with my guild...similar situation depending on how many times we had done it.  Coming back to CoH it's really nice to be able to progress with the limited amount of time I have. I was actually disappointed to see that we got all the incarnate mats, without grinding incarnate content or DA.  Also even without the leveling buffs here it's still no where near what WoW is for me.  When a new xpac is released it takes me at least a week to get to level cap (usually 10 levels).  Without the xp buff here it would probably take me about the same.  Point being there is nothing even remotely grindy about this game.  I will concede that WoW has gotten quite a bit easier in recent years, but it's still a much greater time commitment imo.

 

Yeah, though if you ever run a Quarterfield or some of the earlier old version TFs like Posi, you'll have that in CoH too, but in *general* that is exactly it. 

[Gremlin]

33 minutes ago, atomicquin1 said:

I have noticed an increase in prices on rare salvage and recipes/enhancements.  I have also seen a drop in available recipes and crafted enhancements. It cost me about 20% more inf to IO out a new 50.

I've been trading pretty regularly since about February. So my comment refers to prices since then.

 

Rare salvage is currently running at 425k to 500k. That's about as low as I've seen it. Yellow salvage is at 50k which is towards the high end but I've seen periods when it's been at 60k. Purples and winter sets look like they're up a bit. ATOs, PVP recipes and PVP IOs look unchanged. Thunderstrike recipes look very cheap and available but the IOs look normal/high.

 

All in all, I'd say that there's been little or no net change in the items I'm familar with since Feb.

[Yomo Kimyata]

52 minutes ago, atomicquin1 said:

It does seem that this change is having some maybe opposite results than the Devs hoped for.  I have noticed an increase in prices on rare salvage and recipes/enhancements.  I have also seen a drop in available recipes and crafted enhancements. It cost me about 20% more inf to IO out a new 50.  I think the change has led to less farming which is resulting in less supply but same demand as before. Thats a recipe for price inflation as supply is constrained but demand is still high. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't shop often for rare salvage, but it always seems to be in the 400-600 range.  I also do all my recipe shopping in advance, so I don't often check to see what is available.  I have noticed that prices o most crafted IOs are unchanged to lower and supply of said IOs is unchanged to higher, so I'm not sure why it's costing you more.  It's actually costing me less, so far.  So I'm seeing pretty much the opposite of you right now.  Maybe it's unrelated.

[Lines]

Been playing today and yesterday. Certainly seeing lower prices across the board for crafted IOs - though I reckon that isolation is a factor here. Recipes maybe higher, but I don't know the trends outside my normal picks well enough to judge. Still very low relative to crafted IOs.

 

The big exception is uncommon salvage, but that's been misbehaving for a while now. I'm starting to surrender to the possibility that uncommon salvage just goes for 50k now.

[Parabola]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

My anecdotal observation is that the purchase price of Rare IO pieces has (on average) come down.

The luck of the gambler market is definitely down. They are trading at least 1m below where they were a couple of weeks ago. I know this with some confidence because I have stock that hasn't sold sitting there with prices that look a bit silly now. I consider lotg a decent benchmark for the whole rares market given how in demand they are.

[QuiJon]

20 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

 

But these are the kinds of choices that the server devs have to make when they're deciding what the overall playing experience on their server is going to be.  How fast is XP given out?  What's the drop rate for different types of IOs?   Should PVP IOs be gated behind PVP?  What are the rewards in AE?  How long, on average, should it take a character to unlock and fill all their Incarnate slots?  Should some costumes options be unlocks or all freely available from the start?

 

Having threads drop in normal content is a gameplay choice.  Removing minimum team sizes for TFs is a gameplay choice.  Capping ATO prices via packs is a gameplay choice.  Changing the ratio between inf drops and items drops is a gameplay choice -- and doing it by increasing item generation is not going to have the same consequences to gameplay as reducing inf generation and inflation.

 

Different servers are going to make different choices.  On We Have Cake, you can pm a GM and get your character insta-levelled and kitted out.  Everyone gets the chance to have top tier characters at will.  That's one extreme.  Some people would like to have a server that goes back to a much earlier era of CoH altogether.  There's no perfect 'how should the game play' answer that's going to please all players.  At least now, with multiple servers running on differing philosophies, CoH offers a lot more options than it did in the past.

I agree with almost everything you say here, and is the very reason why I was so critical of the way this "change" was implemented. It is all choice, and yes it can be different on different servers. However this game is not run for profit anymore. And something like ATOs which were essentially items behind a real money pay all on live need to have a means to be in the game, so they put them as a pack in the AH. I am fine with that. 

 

However my problem is that this change was done so in the dark and called an Exploit to justify changing it with little to no discussion. Once the offense of calling me an "exploiter" wears off, I am left with thinking that nothing that we did in our farms was to use anything but tools that had been in the game since the development of Day jobs and the AE itself, and used them as the original developers created them. This was not an exploit. This was a change based on a small group of people (the devs) philosophical beliefs in how the game should be played to solve a perceived problem.

 

Well like I have said, I get plugging exploits, and that excuse doesn't even really hold up. They called using the "enterbasefrompasscode" and exploit also because it was a admin command and said they would fix it, not only have they not fixed it MONTHS later, but they openly discussed it on the forums while it was in use and even had a thread on possible ways to patch it but address players desire for a better alternative that lead to its use to begin with. Yet this change "exploit we don't talk about it until it is patched".

 

These servers are not for profit. Which means options keep people player not time sinks. We support the continued operation of these servers. And as such when functionality is going to be changed I think it deserves a discussion. And if we had that discussion prior to the changes perhaps we would have seen that the majority of the players would have wanted something else. Maybe we could have hit a compromise where we get rid of patrol xp for everyone, leave the exemplar option only set to maybe 50 percent extra influence and bump up drop rates and lower merit costs and boost real world influence earning to equalize all the ways people might choose to play so one is not night and day better then another. 

 

But we don't know what might have been, because we were called exploiters and a change was stealthed into the game. Granted I don't like the change anyway, but I am honestly more upset at the lack of discussion prior to a blanket change. We have seen months of discussions on these boards when it comes to things like tanker changes, new power sets, dominator changes etc. Why suddenly was this not worthy of the same attention and community input?

[Gremlin]

9 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

But we don't know what might have been, because we were called exploiters and a change was stealthed into the game.

I am sorry that this change has upset you so much.

[Peerless Girl]

37 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

However my problem is that this change was done so in the dark and called an Exploit to justify changing it with little to no discussion. Once the offense of calling me an "exploiter" wears off, I am left with thinking that nothing that we did in our farms was to use anything but tools that had been in the game since the development of Day jobs and the AE itself, and used them as the original developers created them. This was not an exploit. This was a change based on a small group of people (the devs) philosophical beliefs in how the game should be played to solve a perceived problem.

 

But we don't know what might have been, because we were called exploiters and a change was stealthed into the game. Granted I don't like the change anyway, but I am honestly more upset at the lack of discussion prior to a blanket change. We have seen months of discussions on these boards when it comes to things like tanker changes, new power sets, dominator changes etc. Why suddenly was this not worthy of the same attention and community input?

 

 

Yeah, an exploit is an exploit, and you don't discuss it before it's fixed. It's by definition not stealthed if it's an exploit. You can decide you think it was "called" an exploit, but at that point you're effectively calling the devs liars. No one is per se calling YOU an exploiter (as Jimmy said, most were using it and not even aware of it being such). If however you knowingly ran level 49 farm maps to take advantage of it, then you ARE an exploiter. I'm sorry it has upset you so much, but sometimes changes have to be made for the good of everyone that not everyone likes. I enjoyed getting XP when EXd down myself, but I'm not going to explode over it because it was necessary. 

[Rathulfr]

46 minutes ago, QuiJon said:

Well like I have said, I get plugging exploits, and that excuse doesn't even really hold up. They called using the "enterbasefrompasscode" and exploit also because it was a admin command and said they would fix it, not only have they not fixed it MONTHS later, but they openly discussed it on the forums while it was in use and even had a thread on possible ways to patch it but address players desire for a better alternative that lead to its use to begin with. Yet this change "exploit we don't talk about it until it is patched".

 

Different things.  The "enterbasefrompasscode" exploit doesn't negatively impact everyone, while the double-Inf exploit does, by fueling inflation across the entire economy. 

 

It wasn't discussed in advance because doing so would've caused a stampede of folks trying to make double-Inf while the getting was good.   I have two fire farmer characters (one on each of my two accounts), and I didn't even know the exploit existed until it was fixed.  Had I known before then, you bet your bippy I would've been farming 24x7 to grab as much cash as I could before it was fixed.  That's just normal human nature.

 

Again, farming for Inf is not an exploit, nor is making lots of Inf in general.  The exploit was the unintended consequence of disabling XP and having rested XP generate double Inf.  And that doubled Inf was being pumped into the economy too quickly, which was one of the factors driving inflation across the board.  So it had to be addressed, before it got too far out of hand (as inflation got out of hand on retail).

 

Edited April 24, 2020 by Rathulfr

[Grouchybeast]

1 hour ago, QuiJon said:

Once the offense of calling me an "exploiter" wears off, I am left with thinking that nothing that we did in our farms was to use anything but tools that had been in the game since the development of Day jobs and the AE itself, and used them as the original developers created them. This was not an exploit. This was a change based on a small group of people (the devs) philosophical beliefs in how the game should be played to solve a perceived problem.

Gaining xp after 50 was not a live feature.

Patrol xp after 50 was not a live feature.

On live it was not possible to use disabled xp at level 50 to create infinite patrol xp to double the rewards from level 49 AE missions.  This is specifically and only what was termed an exploit by the devs, in this thread. See: here, and here.

 

You know, I would not be at all surprised if the devs looked at the exploit, considered ways of fixing it, and decided that the quickest and easiest solution would be to just remove double xp because they also saw cutting the flow of inf into the game to be an overall benefit and positive side-effect.  But they've been quite clear about the exact exploit.

[Lines]

6 minutes ago, Grouchybeast said:

You know, I would not be at all surprised if the devs looked at the exploit, considered ways of fixing it, and decided that the quickest and easiest solution would be to just remove double xp because they also saw cutting the flow of inf into the game to be an overall benefit and positive side-effect.  But they've been quite clear about the exact exploit.

Actually, Jimmy kinda did say this on page 1 (clunky phone makes quoting things hard), that it levels the playing field across everyone.

 

Characters who have 'peaked' aren't exacerbating inflation by doubling their inf, and those players won't be commanding the market as much as they might have done. 

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, QuiJon said:

done so in the dark and called an Exploit to justify changing it

 

That's the opposite of the facts of the matter.  It was an exploit, whether you were aware of it or not, it was resolved the way all exploits are, quietly and quickly and without any need for your personal approval, and your belief that it was malicious is ridiculous and petty.

 

Stop being a self-centered drama queen.

[Myrmidon]

3 hours ago, QuiJon said:

Granted I don't like the change anyway, but I am honestly more upset at the lack of discussion prior to a blanket change. We have seen months of discussions on these boards when it comes to things like tanker changes, new power sets, dominator changes etc. Why suddenly was this not worthy of the same attention and community input?

It has already been made crystal clear that this was going to be changed and no amount of discussion was going to stop that. There are ALWAYS going to be changes to this game that the Homecoming team will NOT be consulting us on and you might want to make your peace with that.

[Myrmidon]

23 hours ago, Peerless Girl said:

 

Marketeers are actually taking Inf out of the market everytime they make a transaction, WW takes it's cut of them, that Inf is destroyed entirely

In addition, every ATO that you ever see is 10,000,000 Influence  and every Winter (except for the Winter Holiday Bonanza) is 25,000,000 influence destroyed entirely.

[Panthonca7034]

@Peerless Girl and @Myrmidon

 

Here's where the disconnect and the confusion came from in my last posts: I honed in on the term "Powerleveling" and thought that they were referring to anything an everything powerleveling (fearing they would do away with XP boosts, being able to do radio missions with friends, and making it harder to reach level 50) and I didn't read the rest (I apparently missed the acronym AFK plastered right next to powerleveling). I then saw the whole matter from a "Half glass Empty" instead of "Half Full", plus it's been a semi-stressful week between this quarantine, work, in making heads or tails from the changes coming down the pipe in the game.

 

5 hours ago, Lines said:

The big exception is uncommon salvage, but that's been misbehaving for a while now. I'm starting to surrender to the possibility that uncommon salvage just goes for 50k now.

 

Part of me has a suspicion of trolls/manipulators causing chaos, and not the norm, because uncommon salvage went from as low as 1inf, shot up to 1k, 10k, 25k, then hovering at 35k for a while, and slowly but surely climbing past 50k. Just a hunch...

Edited April 24, 2020 by Panthonca7034
missing closed parenthesis

[ivanhedgehog]

21 hours ago, skoryy said:

Check the beta forums, its in the upcoming changes Jimmy mentioned.

I gotta say, I like the changes.

[ivanhedgehog]

10 hours ago, DeepRootz said:

In WoW my friends would ask me to come and just do a normal raid with a pug.  "It will be quick, like 40 mins tops."  3hrs later I havent gone to bed, and the group has wiped more times than I can count.  Doing a heroic raid with my guild...similar situation depending on how many times we had done it.  Coming back to CoH it's really nice to be able to progress with the limited amount of time I have. I was actually disappointed to see that we got all the incarnate mats, without grinding incarnate content or DA.  Also even without the leveling buffs here it's still no where near what WoW is for me.  When a new xpac is released it takes me at least a week to get to level cap (usually 10 levels).  Without the xp buff here it would probably take me about the same.  Point being there is nothing even remotely grindy about this game.  I will concede that WoW has gotten quite a bit easier in recent years, but it's still a much greater time commitment imo.

WOW currently has a 2x xp buff, FYI.

[ivanhedgehog]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

 

That's the opposite of the facts of the matter.  It was an exploit, whether you were aware of it or not, it was resolved the way all exploits are, quietly and quickly and without any need for your personal approval, and your belief that it was malicious is ridiculous and petty.

 

Stop being a self-centered drama queen.

no xp and 2x inf was not an exploit. It was changed without notice. The exemplared patrol xp thing was an exploit. I never did that, but I did like double inf with xp turned off, so that makes me kinda sad. Oh well, I'm over it.

[Myrmidon]

20 minutes ago, Panthonca7034 said:

Part of me has a suspicion of trolls/manipulators causing chaos, and not the norm, because uncommon salvage went from as low as 1inf, shot up to 1k, 10k, 25k, then hovering at 35k for a while, and slowly but surely climbing past 50k. Just a hunch...

Some people like to make nickels and dimes for their investments.

[Parabola]

7 hours ago, Panthonca7034 said:

Part of me has a suspicion of trolls/manipulators causing chaos, and not the norm, because uncommon salvage went from as low as 1inf, shot up to 1k, 10k, 25k, then hovering at 35k for a while, and slowly but surely climbing past 50k. Just a hunch...

In a way it makes perfect sense that uncommon salvage would go for around 50k. Rare salvage stabilized at around 500k not long after the hc servers came up and have been at around that mark ever since. The seeding price for rares is 1m so they are on the market at generally half that. In the same way the 50k mark for uncommons is half their seeding price of 100k.

 

I'm not sure of the exact ratio in drop rates between uncommons and rares but I wouldn't be surprised if the demand for uncommons wasn't actually much higher relative to the drop rate than it is for rares. Crafting requires quite a lot of uncommon salvage, particularly given that in general people aren't crafting rares because there is no margin in it due to converters.

 

The rise in uncommon salvage prices happened so quickly though it does feel to me like there was some human involvement in the process. I suspect someone or many someones came to the conclusions I have above and decided to see what would happen if they bought low and sold higher using 50k as a 'half of the seeding price' target. As it turns out they were right, the pressure of demand has driven the prices up and they are now where they are.

 

In fact the demand for uncommons is so high we are now seeing prices nudging up towards the seeding price at times. I bought some for 100k yesterday while doing some converting because I'm a patient seller but an utterly impatient buyer. At the end of the day 100k is still not a huge amount, it certainly doesn't hurt the bottom line in the converter business so I don't see it as a huge problem. And of course it can't get any higher.

[Gremlin]

17 minutes ago, parabola said:

The rise in uncommon salvage prices happened so quickly though it does feel to me like there was some human involvement in the process. I suspect someone or many someones came to the conclusions I have above and decided to see what would happen if they bought low and sold higher using 50k as a 'half of the seeding price' target.

A few weeks ago yellows were trading at just over 20k. For LOLs I decided to see if I could buy a lot and get the market to hover at 30k for a while. I was curious to find out how big the market for yellows was and how long it would take to return to normal when I stopped buying. I thought maybe it'd take a few hours or a day. Bearing in mind that at the time the price regularly flicked up to 50k so I didn't think it would be too difficult.

 

By bidding 30k I was buying most of the yellows that were arriving on the market. I listed what I was buying for 50k. Within 20 minutes it was clear that there was no way I could keep it up. So I dropped my bids to 25k and offers to 30k. IIRC it took about an hour to spend 1 bn inf. I'd sold virtually nothing. At this point I ended the experiment. The price immediately fell to 20k where it had started. It took several days to offload all the salvage I bought. I think I broke even in the end.

 

My conclusion was that the yellow salvage market is absolutely huge. It's hard to work out how big but I think we're talking a few hundred thousand to a few million sales per day. If anyone wants to manipulate that, they're welcome.

 

I suspect that the supply and demand for yellow salvage are very evenly matched. It really doesn't matter whether we pay 5k, 20k or 60k for a yellow because we're sticking them in IOs worth 1 million or so. Given that most players will happily pay any of these prices maybe we should think of them as being the same price.

 

Curiously we see big price swings for white salvage as well but nobody ever mentions it. I've seen that sit at over 1000 for several hours.

[Parabola]

A thought has just occurred to me. If I bid 100k for an uncommon salvage piece am I buying directly from the seeded stock or do I pick up the next in line piece listed by another player and only buy from the seeded stock if there is no supply? Buying from the seeded stock effectively destroys all the inf and creates an item so acts as a deflationary measure across the economy as a whole. If I am buying from another player only 10% of the inf is destroyed and the supply is reduced by 1. If it is the latter I could see salvage prices getting stuck at more or less the seeded prices and staying there eventually.

[Lines]

 

19 minutes ago, parabola said:

A thought has just occurred to me. If I bid 100k for an uncommon salvage piece am I buying directly from the seeded stock or do I pick up the next in line piece listed by another player and only buy from the seeded stock if there is no supply? Buying from the seeded stock effectively destroys all the inf and creates an item so acts as a deflationary measure across the economy as a whole. If I am buying from another player only 10% of the inf is destroyed and the supply is reduced by 1. If it is the latter I could see salvage prices getting stuck at more or less the seeded prices and staying there eventually.

 

You're buying (in theory) from the lowest item auctioned. As long as there's a supply below the seeded value, none of that would get touched.

 

I've seen some discrepancies that make me question if this works quite like this, but that's the concept.

[Haijinx]

14 hours ago, Peerless Girl said:

 

 

Yeah, an exploit is an exploit, and you don't discuss it before it's fixed. It's by definition not stealthed if it's an exploit. You can decide you think it was "called" an exploit, but at that point you're effectively calling the devs liars. No one is per se calling YOU an exploiter (as Jimmy said, most were using it and not even aware of it being such). If however you knowingly ran level 49 farm maps to take advantage of it, then you ARE an exploiter. I'm sorry it has upset you so much, but sometimes changes have to be made for the good of everyone that not everyone likes. I enjoyed getting XP when EXd down myself, but I'm not going to explode over it because it was necessary. 

No no no.

 

You warn them way in advamce, so they can exploit moar for a while.

 

AND lobby to keep the exploit going.  

 

That way you make the problem worse AND increase the drama. 

 

The way they did it, you only get a few diehards complaining, and everyone else just shrugs. 

 

 

[Gremlin]

2 hours ago, parabola said:

If it is the latter I could see salvage prices getting stuck at more or less the seeded prices and staying there eventually.

The seeded salvage will definitely cap prices if they ever rise high enough. Given how high the seed prices are, I suspect that the devs don't really want them to sell in any quantity. My guess is that they'd take action to bring the prices back down rather than becoming the chief supplier of yellows.

 

One of the cunning things about seeding items is that the devs can use the number of items sold to monitor the game. If they suddenly start selling reds by the bucket load then it tells them that something in the game has changed dramatically; a bug in the drop rate perhaps.