Increase Merit Rewards for Arcs Impacted by Crey Buffs

[Solarverse]

10 hours ago, Bopper said:

Others have said this already, but I'll echo it. The amount of merits rewarded is typically based on the amount of time it takes to complete a TF. All TFs completion times are recorded and used for determining the merit reward amount. This will likely result in many merit rewards being reduced as a post-incarnate world has made speeding through TFs rather easy. However, in the case you presented, harder targets will help drive the average completion time upwards. I suppose the question is, will that average completion time reach a merit reward value that is greater than what it's already offering?

 

Sounds like all these people running Speedy this or Speedy that are doing the rest of us who don't speedy anything a disservice.

[macskull]

21 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Sounds like all these people running Speedy this or Speedy that are doing the rest of us who don't speedy anything a disservice.

Only cases I can think of of the "gotta go fast" crowd cratering rewards for content is KHTF and Eden (KHTF gave 7 merits when I13 launched and Eden gave only two) but those numbers were adjusted back upward around I14. There was one Kheldian-specific arc that got its merit rewards cut a bunch in the first merit rebalancing but that was more due to lack of data for assigning the initial value. Either way, the players who aren't doing "speedy anything" are ending up with more xp, inf, and drops for their time so... shrug. Just a matter of whether you want to prioritize merits over everything else.

[Solarverse]

2 minutes ago, macskull said:

Only cases I can think of of the "gotta go fast" crowd cratering rewards for content is KHTF and Eden (KHTF gave 7 merits when I13 launched and Eden gave only two) but those numbers were adjusted back upward around I14. There was one Kheldian-specific arc that got its merit rewards cut a bunch in the first merit rebalancing but that was more due to lack of data for assigning the initial value. Either way, the players who aren't doing "speedy anything" are ending up with more xp, inf, and drops for their time so... shrug. Just a matter of whether you want to prioritize merits over everything else.

 

That would just depend on what level I was running that particular TF as.

[Vanden]

1 hour ago, Earnest Victory said:

For those that can afford to outfit their characters with IOs. But if we let them (us) skew the rewards of content, we further alienate the new players who barely have a million inf to rub together.

 

Players who can't afford IOs are a shrinking minority. Homecoming has made the barrier to entry to the IO system lower than it ever was before shutdown. Median completion times are going to reflect that. The useful thing about median is that it's less susceptible to outliers than mean is, and that goes for both top-end and bottom-end outliers.

 

40 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Sounds like all these people running Speedy this or Speedy that are doing the rest of us who don't speedy anything a disservice.

 

If speeding content happens enough to merit lowering rewards, but the devs choose to ignore that data, it only encourages more speeding of the content.

Edited January 14, 2022 by Vanden

[macskull]

2 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

That would just depend on what level I was running that particular TF as.

I mean, regardless of what level you're at you're going to get more non-merit rewards during the run if you're fighting through each map than you would if you're stealthing to the objective on every mission.

[Apparition]

47 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

 

Sounds like all these people running Speedy this or Speedy that are doing the rest of us who don't speedy anything a disservice.

 

Don’t worry.  You’ll always have Synapse.

[Solarverse]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

I mean, regardless of what level you're at you're going to get more non-merit rewards during the run if you're fighting through each map than you would if you're stealthing to the objective on every mission.

 

And you don't think that it would just encourage more players to start speeding through everything, making it a tad bit more difficult to find players who enjoy just, "steady as she goes?"

To get to the point, I am concerned of two things. First, Speedy players adding to the data that shows a 2 hours long TF is commonly done in less than 45 minutes, thus getting say, Synapse TF merit rewards lowered. The other concern I have is that by the merit rewards being lowered, it may end up encouraging players who normally would not speed run, to start speed running, since the merit rewards are fewer. Lowering merit rewards based on how fast players are completing the TFs may have a very negative impact. I'm simply considering the flip side of the coin here.

[Solarverse]

Just now, Apparition said:

 

Don’t worry.  You’ll always have Synapse.

 

Shush you! (Just ran one about an hour ago, lol)

[Solarverse]

9 minutes ago, Vanden said:

If speeding content happens enough to merit lowering rewards, but the devs choose to ignore that data, it only encourages more speeding of the content.

 

That covers one of my concerns. So we know for a fact that the Devs ignore the data of the speed runners?

[Vanden]

13 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

That covers one of my concerns. So we know for a fact that the Devs ignore the data of the speed runners?

 

I can't say one way or the other. In order for a speedrun-esque time to become the median completion time for a piece of content, speedruns literally need to be more than half of all completions of that content. Anecdotally, I don't believe that to be the case for the majority of content. It's only content that is particularly onerous, like the Quaterfield TF or the Cavern of Transcendence trial, where players essentially refuse to run it without the speedrun strategies, where that's likely to happen.

Edited January 14, 2022 by Vanden

[macskull]

5 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

That covers one of my concerns. So we know for a fact that the Devs ignore the data of the speed runners?

No, but that's also why median time is used instead of mean/average time. I suppose it all depends on the time range they're using to determine what the median time is though. Apex and Tin Mage are both worth 40 merits which would imply a median completion time of around two hours each and you know as well as I do that isn't even close to how long those actually take. I'd bet all my inf those two TFs will see their rewards dramatically lowered and would be pretty surprised if the adjusted value is anything over 20.

[macskull]

2 minutes ago, Vanden said:

like the Quaterfield TF

Anecdotal here as well but none of the speedrunners I know will touch the shard TFs unless they're the WST and sometimes even that isn't worth it if you're looking at it from a reward merit standpoint. The speedrunners definitely aren't running it when it's not the WST and on the weeks when it is they're still going to be far outnumbered by the rest of the teams running it.

[Vanden]

9 minutes ago, macskull said:

Apex and Tin Mage are both worth 40 merits which would imply a median completion time of around two hours each and you know as well as I do that isn't even close to how long those actually take

 

I'm quite certain Apex and Tin Mage have intentionally inflated merit rewards, since they're pseudo-incarnate content.

[golstat2003]

41 minutes ago, macskull said:

I mean, regardless of what level you're at you're going to get more non-merit rewards during the run if you're fighting through each map than you would if you're stealthing to the objective on every mission.

 

When I'm running tfs I don't consider the non-tf rewards aren't all that important. I can get those anywhere else. If I'm doing a tf it's for the merits at end. Those who run kill-alls probably see it differently. It'd be interesting to see the data on the number of kill all tfs, regularly run tfs, or pure speed tfs as a comparison.

Edited January 14, 2022 by golstat2003

[golstat2003]

21 minutes ago, macskull said:

Anecdotal here as well but none of the speedrunners I know will touch the shard TFs unless they're the WST and sometimes even that isn't worth it if you're looking at it from a reward merit standpoint. The speedrunners definitely aren't running it when it's not the WST and on the weeks when it is they're still going to be far outnumbered by the rest of the teams running it.

 

I would run the shard tfs if I liked to have my eyes bleed out of their sockets. If there's one thing that needs a straight content re-design it's those, merit rewards being lowered be damned.

[macskull]

Just now, golstat2003 said:

When I'm running tfs I don't consider the non-tf rewards all that important. I can get those anywhere else. If I'm doing a tf it's for the merits at end.

Same here, but I know not everyone thinks that way or they'd just be speedrunning every TF. The wealth of +4x8 TF runs I see in LFG tells me plenty of people are doing them for XP and drops.

[golstat2003]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

Same here, but I know not everyone thinks that way or they'd just be speedrunning every TF. The wealth of +4x8 TF runs I see in LFG tells me plenty of people are doing them for XP and drops.

 

Fair. Also to be clear, I simply won't run content I consider annoying or terrible. If an enemy group is made more annoying I simply avoid that content. I haven't fought the new Crey in a tf yet, so we'll see. Life is too short and this isn't a decade ago.

Edited January 14, 2022 by golstat2003

[Earnest Victory]

1 hour ago, Vanden said:

Players who can't afford IOs are a shrinking minority.

Not because IOs are becoming affordable, but because new players are a shrinking minority. And since retention is not and never will be 100%... that's just a boat with a hole in it, and I don't know why we would cater to the water instead of getting a bucket. 

[arcane]

8 hours ago, Earnest Victory said:

Not because IOs are becoming affordable, but because new players are a shrinking minority. And since retention is not and never will be 100%... that's just a boat with a hole in it, and I don't know why we would cater to the water instead of getting a bucket. 

It’s an indisputable fact that IO’s have become more affordable. Orders of magnitude more affordable in some areas in fact. Some IO’s are literally 100x cheaper than they were at certain points on live. There are literally IO’s I couldn’t dream of owning 1 on live where I now have 100. Did you play on live?

Edited January 14, 2022 by arcane

[Bionic_Flea]

It's not just incarnate powers and IOs that are adding to speed.  Once you've run the content once or twice to read the story, do you really want to re-read it the tenth time?  The hundredth? 

 

And when you've spent seventeen+ years playing this game, which many of us have, you tend to learn the maps, where the blinkies and hostages are likely to be, etc. 

 

We also have access to the wonderful P2W items like Team Transport, Mission Teleport, Assemble the Team, Base TP, Base portal, and the new Long Range Teleport.  Even something like Revel can substantially reduce time to completion.

 

I'd be interested to see the data on the Aeon Strike Force.  I'm guessing that the first week had really high completion times and people quitting the TF and that those numbers fall each week since then. 

 

But the ASF brings up an interesting possibility.  Many of the rewards of the TF are not just the end reward merits and D-sync, but there are bonus rewards for running at higher difficulty and completing side tasks that could be skipped.  If they added something like that in older content, like saving the hostages in Lady Grey instead of getting them killed, then you would have more people completing skippable portions just for the extra rewards.  And that, in turn, should result in longer median completion times and therefore higher merit rewards.

[SeraphimKensai]

The overall reduction in IO prices is so true. Many of us OG players have had multiple alts on lives with IO build costs going 3-4x the actual influence cap, so we had to use multiple respecs very carefully when we changed our builds, because that was before unslotters and Respec recipes.

 

I'm definitely in the speed camp myself, and honestly as more players get more familiar with a taskforce or arc they will naturally maximize their rewards vs their time. And let's face it, a large majority of us are all adults that have other shit going on with our lives like work, family, and hell even retirement planning and attending seminars for how to maximize what we can leave to our loved ones without the government stealing more than they should as we age out and die off.

 

Time is money, and I only ever do +4/8 or relentless, etc if I'm looking to test a build out or just really try hard, and if I'm at those difficulties I'm still speeding. If I need XP, I can farm, if I need drops I can buy them or farm them.

[Apparition]

I'm perfectly capable and willing to speed run, but personally there are some TFs/SFs that I don't like to speed run, and it's not really for XP nor drops.  Off the top of my head, I dislike speed running the LGTF, ITF, Mortimer Kal SF, the ASF, and Market Crash Trial.  I usually don't speed run the lower level TFs/SFs either as I know that a lot of people join them for XP.  I will also never, ever run anything at +0, and anything above level 30 below +2.  Any difficulty setting below that, even while speed running, and I get bored quickly.

 

LGTF - I like killing arresting Rikti.  I regularly lead Rikti mothership raids.  Sue me.

 

ITF - PTSD from the first time I ever ran the ITF.  A couple of months after the ITF came out, a friend asked me to join an ITF led by a friend of hers that I didn't know yet.  I've since come to be good friends with him and he's easily one of the best players CoH has ever had.  Anyhoo, I was on a Mastermind, it was my very first ITF, and I had never done a speed run of any TF/SF/Trial before this.  Just about every mission, everyone else was at the end of the mission while I was stuck trying to solo the Cimerorans with my pets near the entrance of the mission.  I felt completely useless, and at the end of the TF I had no idea what actually happened.  I've since sped run the ITF countless times on both live and Homecoming, but that initial run has colored my perception and I still dislike speed running the ITF to this day.  It's also one of the reasons why I advise people to never make the first time they run any content a speed run.

 

Mortimer Kal SF - It's short enough as is, and I like killing arresting robots.  Sue me.

 

ASF - It has so many moving parts that it feels a shame to speed through.  Sometimes you have to take the time to smell the roses, and the ASF is one such time, IMO.

 

Market Crash Trial - The first two missions feel like a perfectly good Freakshow farm and it feels like a waste to speed them. 

[arcane]

Agree at least that ITF and Market Crash are more fun as kill most/all 🙂 

[Earnest Victory]

16 hours ago, arcane said:

It’s an indisputable fact that IO’s have become more affordable. Orders of magnitude more affordable in some areas in fact. Some IO’s are literally 100x cheaper than they were at certain points on live. There are literally IO’s I couldn’t dream of owning 1 on live where I now have 100. Did you play on live?

 

I did indeed. And as I said, it is not because of that cheapness that fewer players can't afford them. A decent build is still prohibitively expensive to any new player, or even frequent player who doesn't play in one of a few particular ways. And a less than decent build makes the game very ugly and unappealing to play at the higher levels, and that's even if you're playing a strong AT with a good pair of powersets. If not, the game can become practically unplayable.

'Cheaper than before' is not the same as 'at the price they need to be for the game to function as intended'. 

The thing that's made it so just about everyone can afford build is that just about everyone has been playing for months, if not years, because the player pool is stagnating, and they either got with the program and started playing 'correctly', or they stopped playing because optimal play bored or frustrated them. 

Which you must already understand, because as you said, the number of players who cannot afford IOs is shrinking... meaning it did not shrink all at once when all the prices dropped after live. Where then the shrinkage, if the prices are not in continuous freefall (which they are not)? 

Boat. Hole. Water. 
 

[Vanden]

6 hours ago, Earnest Victory said:

And as I said, it is not because of that cheapness that fewer players can't afford [IOs].

 

What an utterly absurd thing to say. "The lower price of IOs hasn't resulted in more players being able to afford them." Preposterous.

Edited January 15, 2022 by Vanden