issue 27 Focused Feedback: Architect Entertainment

[Seed22]

I don't farm to help the community.

 

I farm because I want a new 50, then once that toon's 50 I take em out and get those vet levels through TFs/Accolade hunts/etc because as times have changed and I've grown older, that's what's fun to me.

 

I feel for the folks losing vet levels post-50 in AE, but I think if you look earlier in the thread I've layed out some work arounds, if you could call 'em that.

 

But on the economy? I use any proceeds from farming to outfit my next 50, and I'd imagine many farmers do the same, so I don't think there's anything to worry about there when this page drops.

[GlaziusF]

I'm all for a suggestion made earlier in the thread to allow AE to charge up patrol XP once you hit 50, either directly if the hooks are there for it or indirectly through buying charges of Experienced with tickets.

[Andreah]

15 minutes ago, GlaziusF said:

I'm all for a suggestion made earlier in the thread to allow AE to charge up patrol XP once you hit 50, either directly if the hooks are there for it or indirectly through buying charges of Experienced with tickets.

I kind of like this idea, but it would be an underwhelming substitute for farming vet levels and I expect it might be seen as insult on top of injury by some here. 

 

Maybe if you could bank up more than one level's worth of patrol experience, or if patrol experience could be as effective at vet levels as 2XP is before 50.

[Andreah]

1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:

 

or, the devs can seed them like they do for most other market content

 

farmers aren’t as important to the game than they like to think they are. they have sold themselves a myth that the game couldn‘t possibly survive without them

I think there is some truth to this. Farmers making new farming characters, or new farmer creating their first farming characters are a big part of the demand for IO, and especially the high end ones. Remember this post? 

And also this specific bit of data, from two years ago? I doubt it has become less unbalanced. 

 

Farmer characters do produce a lot of the goods in the economy, but they also consume a lot of them, and cause a lot of Inf to be generated which pushes prices up if it's not sunk out or absorbed into the trophy hordes of those Trillionaires. 

 

Also, I doubt we have a Trillionaire in-game just yet. But we certainly have quite a few people in the hundreds of billions.

 

[agentx5]

 

On 7/13/2022 at 12:28 PM, EmperorSteele said:

So...

 

People are sick of doing the same old content again and again.

 

Their solution to this issue is to mindlessly grind out the same mission over and over again.

 

O_o

 

As for actual feedback, uhm, it looks like Psi melee is still overlooked if you're adding sets?

For myself

I have an end-game-type AE Story Arc ("That Which Should Be Dead") made for teams of incarnates that I really REALLY wish could give Reward and Empyrean merits to people who actually finish it.  It takes approx 2 to 3 hours, and it would be good to reward people for that time.  With this change I kind of fear nobody will ever play it now...  I already lost the 6 Reward Merits people got for taking the time for fighting the Undead Abomination (Jack in Irons with custom description info stuff), and had to make that into an "optional" instead of "required" mission goal.  And I mean on the 5th mission the players actually fight a deity-level BBEG... I mean that has to account for something right?  It's a story arc that is a lore-hook link between my Xzianthia characters and CoH HomeComing (specifically).  I put a lot of work into custom character appearances, descriptions, and balancing of the enemy powers (to make them quite challenging, but not at all impossible with a decent team of incarnates)

 

This is the same arc (#47111) VividMuse streamed Live on Twitch the day I first published it, but it's had balancing improvements and typo corrections since then.  But I plan to have it fully complete soon, it's almost ready to be changed from Work-in-Progress to Completed.

So no @EmperorSteele, for some of us AE is the only means we have of actually adding new story mission content into the game that we can share with others.  And yes I have a couple "active farm" too, because if you don't nobody will take you seriously as an AE mission creator and they serve a functional purpose.  If I had more than 3 mission creation "slots" I could actually get more, not sure how you get more.

But why play an AE story mission when it doesn't grant Reward or Empyrean merits?   For some, it will be because they want to do something they've not done before for the novelty of it.  For some it's because they are just looking for any other challenges for their maxed out character.  And for some they'll only spend the limited time taken away from IRL stuff that they have time to play, if what they play gives them progress on rewards such as Experience, Threads, Influence, Reward Merits, Empyrean Merits, rare salvage, and/or rare recipe drops.  There's a reason Hamidon is so popular, it's good rewards versus time spent in return for some good teamwork and a bit of risk it could all fail catastrophically -- but nobody is forced to bring particular power sets or archetypes.

With regard to the conversation here in this thread:
 

On 7/13/2022 at 8:37 AM, Ukase said:

Now that I've slept on this topic of no vet levels in AE, the more I believe it's a bad idea. 
I think our HC Devs have lost their way with this move. And I don't say it lightly. 

If there's something about the idea of folks getting vet levels, emps, (shards?), threads in AE that the HC Devs find objectionable, they should simply say so. We get to play for free. I venture to guess we all abide by the 3 accounts per shard, and that's pretty much self-policed. If they don't want us to do this, then what is it they do want us to do? 

Folks, it's an old game. How many times do they want us to do the same thing over and over, after waiting for who knows how long to get a league together? On the other hand, a farmer can do the same thing over and over - without waiting who knows how long to get a league together. 

It's just a bad idea from where I sit. Maybe there's something I don't know, but if that's the case, simply state WHY. There needs to be a reason, and I would have this oh-so transparent team of HC Devs share what that reason is. 

 

Pardon? I know several people (in fact I'd say it's the far majority) who "farm" occasionally who also join weekly missions, iTrials, etc.  It's an important supplemental thing for alt-itis players.
 

And I know a few people who, believe it or not, actually enjoy just active farming to music after they get off work IRL and don't really like teamplay outside of AE.  Now that's more rare, but I promise you it's not a one-off either.

It is a dangerous precedent to say that there is only one "true" way to level up, which is the message you are hearing from people in-game that this beta patch announcement has unfortunately stirred up.  The "danger" is because there are people who play this game in all sorts of niche ways, such as people almost exclusively play this game to be in the roleplaying clubs (customized SG bases) just to have fun chatting.  Or people who make those bases, saying that their passive farming on another account while building is invalid.

I personally love the teamplay combat, and don't personally fully understand why you'd want to solo missions or only-RP or whatever; but I respect others in that they can do their own thing as long as it doesn't infringe on others enjoyment of the game.  For example, a player griefing a raid with Incandescence, or the league leader stalling an entire raid for everyone for >15 minutes on purpose just because they went on a power trip and want to "discipline" a single "leecher" on a not full zone.  But again, as long as we're being mature adults and showing respect for one another's time & effort and personal character, I don't really care what others do.  Pardon if my examples are weak, but hopefully I'm communicating effectively what I'm trying to say here.
 

On 7/13/2022 at 9:04 AM, Sovera said:

 

People throwing fire from their hands and a magical well granting divine powers is fine, but people using a Danger Room to practice their powers and train is a no no?

 

Lets not bring roleplay decisions into gameplay.

HAHA!  This is comedy gold!  The real kind, not the Fool's Gold kind.
 

On 7/13/2022 at 9:14 AM, GM Impervium said:

Shards and threads should still drop from foe defeats as normal. The only "removed threads" would be the 120 you get at a time from getting Vet Levels (thanks for the clarification, @Digirium!). But, maybe you should test it and find out?

And look everyone, I know your big take-away is the removal of post-50 XP. But there's a LOT more stuff here that needs attention. Why don't we try making some NPCs that can summon all the pets, or has one of every different blast power, or something fun? Yeah, I know, it doubly wouldn't be worth it since those custom critters won't drop XP anyway... but, if we're to revert the no-xp change, we want to make sure everything ELSE is working as intended.

 

There is certainly a lot more stuff even just in the domain of AE that needs attention!

From basic things like the contact NPC not turning into a generic hologram (that was a bug introduced with Page3 as I recall),

To medium things like actually being able to better chose the spawn locations and having more glowie & destructable object model types; or adding in missing power sets like stalker assassination attacks and hide, or water blast, or enemy actually using their healing abilities (like check out how terrible an empathy NPC is in AE).  Colorable NPC powers too.

To more advanced things like allowing SG base custom maps to be imported for use in AE missions and a GUI redesign that would allow all players to make missions just the the real TFs ones with custom trigger entities and such
(Wouldn't that be amazing!  Your favorite customized supergroup base is under attack from zombies!  Let's see if those turrets actually work!)

 

On 7/12/2022 at 11:44 PM, Number Six said:

 

We are planning to do some dev diaries to explore the reasoning behind some of the more controversial items. However, we wanted to give players a chance to give their initial reactions before being influenced by those. Keep an eye out.

 

Aww, you got put on PR Damage Control duty? 😜 (just kidding lol)

But joking aside, it should be relative common-sense that anything that gets perceived (directly or indirectly) as forcing people to play a particular way on a game -- especially one that that follows a donor-funded financial model, rather than a game funded by micro-transactions and abusing gambling addiction (i.e.: Champions Online with the lockboxes & keys) -- it should be pretty Captain Obvious that it would be "controversial", to put it mildly.  The 16+ pages of replies (at the time of me writing this) should be testament to that.  Thus,  good & transparent communication is absolutely critical, and it would not be wise (IMHO) to take a wait & see approach with an after-action debriefing-style dev diary.  This is one of those thing it's better to get out ahead of, for the good of the community as a whole, before the conversation gets poisoned with toxicity or misinformation.

I can do my part to help spread the correct information in an unbiased way, but as a team y'all gotta get a clear message to share.  Right now the best answer I have for the "why?" your team decided to go this path is this response you made later:
 

On 7/13/2022 at 12:11 PM, Number Six said:

I didn't believe it either at first. The developer who worked on the multipliers for the post-50 XP in AE ran into an issue with the calculation and fixed it, and only later realized the implications with regard to the boosters, so we went and checked and discovered that sure enough they've been awarding triple XP in AE this whole time.

 

You can verify easily by running an AE mission on live without, then with a booster and comparing the XP awarded per defeat. Then do the same on Brainstorm.

 

Strangely, despite having been that way since the boosters were rolled out, nobody reported the issue.

So a few things from this:
1.  That explains a lot, and good find actually!  I just though it was because you could pack a lot of mobs in AE, and that using all the XP buff things was just what you did when you were short on time and needed to level up.
2.  How about buffing the rewards for TFs / SFs / iTrials / zone "street-sweeping" / etc instead of nerfing AE? ( We all know Veracor will still hit 20000 Vet Levels sooner or later 😄 )
3.  The last sentence of this reply has a passive-aggressive subtext/tone to it.  I didn't pick up on it, as I usually don't b/c of my A.S.; but after a friend pointed it out to me I can see how it can come off as something like "well I knew a few of you all must have known about this and kept it to yourselves, so now we're going to teach all you farmers a lesson about not reporting exploitable loopholes" (not a quote, just how it can come off as sounding).  Probably not what you intended, and again with out transparent reasoning it leads to some speculation this was just wanting to hate on people who enjoyed causal active farming while they chat on voice comms with friends (one of many ways to play the game).

I want to be clear though, I think this change actually has it's benefits but needs to be review.
 

Edited July 17, 2022 by agentx5

[agentx5]

24 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I think there is some truth to this. Farmers making new farming characters, or new farmer creating their first farming characters are a big part of the demand for IO, and especially the high end ones. Remember this post? 

And also this specific bit of data, from two years ago? I doubt it has become less unbalanced. 

 

Farmer characters do produce a lot of the goods in the economy, but they also consume a lot of them, and cause a lot of Inf to be generated which pushes prices up if it's not sunk out or absorbed into the trophy hordes of those Trillionaires. 

 

Also, I doubt we have a Trillionaire in-game just yet. But we certainly have quite a few people in the hundreds of billions.

 

 

@GM Impervium any chance we can finally get an update on that data?  I've been asking every 6 months.  It's information we could all benefit from knowing (even if we want to know which are the least used powers, power set combinations, or archetypes; so we can try to understand why).

[KanadeVix]

35 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I think there is some truth to this. Farmers making new farming characters, or new farmer creating their first farming characters are a big part of the demand for IO, and especially the high end ones. Remember this post? 

And also this specific bit of data, from two years ago? I doubt it has become less unbalanced. 

 

Farmer characters do produce a lot of the goods in the economy, but they also consume a lot of them, and cause a lot of Inf to be generated which pushes prices up if it's not sunk out or absorbed into the trophy hordes of those Trillionaires. 

 

Also, I doubt we have a Trillionaire in-game just yet. But we certainly have quite a few people in the hundreds of billions.

 

So to get this straight. We are looking at the disproportionate amount of times someone spends on brutes, assuming they are a fire brute farming considering they are the most popular. 

 

So give or take the total time spent on all characters (2 years ago) was about 44 million hours. Now to assume that those extra brute hours are farming and to a lesser extent those tankers also were farming we would have to find the average of the other characters played to determine the average amount of hours spent on a tank and a brute, though I feel those numbers are skewed because no one plays those widows and warshade characters.

So let's just give tanks and brutes Blaster numbers right?

So now using those as NON farming playable hours (Assuming no one farms unless they are a brute or tanker) That is about 28 million hours out of the 44M hours spent not farming as a brute or tank. So 16M hours spent farming on those characters alone.  That means at any given time 36% of the characters playing are farming. Yet we aren't accounting for one piece of detail, are they just solo farming, or power leveling...I would have to assume they are power leveling alts like mad as that's all anyone ever does. So we would have to take those 16M hours assuming only 1 additional alt is being farmed and double it, because for every 16M on a farmer is 16M on one of these other random classes. So that comes out to around 72% of the players at any given time are just farming.
 

So basically the vast majority of players actually do this, and it's the tiny minority of players who speak out against it because...

Reason 1: Your fun not my fun.

Reason 2: Skipping a loading Screen is triggering you.

Reason 3: No one wants to farm you and your potato computer can't handle two accounts.

 

I mean why does getting to 1-50 have to be a chore, what is the point of doing this or preventing a player from wanting to play the game starting at 50. I think it's pretty much common knowledge to anyone who plays any mmo, the vast majority of your character, build, and fun comes once you are at lvl 50. If you want to level up the old fashioned way, them being in AE or farming doesn't prevent you from doing this and has no impact on you at all.

 

I could maybe get behind this concept if for some reason the way the game progressed was all of it had to do with leveling up, with limited content at 50, and no IOS say...Pre Issue 9? That was pretty much the only time leveling up the old way was actually enjoyable because there was no end game. You had 2 billion INF and nothing to use it on so money was useless. 

 

The difference that people cannot understand is, COH is about making ALTS which means I have hundreds of characters...you think I want to spend 12-18 hours farming each one just to see if I might like the idea of a character that I want to try out for fun? I honestly hate getting to 50 because of stupid incarnates. I honestly don't use incarnates that much but for some content it's just mandatory so I get it anyways because if I don't I'll be weaker blah blah blah. 

Make all mats account bound to all my characters and maybe I'll accept the nerfs. Then I can delete my slog of alts and reuse their mats and actually enjoy fresh 50's after my extended farms outside of AE knowing at least I won't have to grind for Incarnate garbage too.

But you know, let's turn everything into a massive waste of a grind for no reason just so people can feel happy about themselves, the tiny minority of Fun Policing.

Oh and that 72% number...that's just farming, we also have to account that those people actually play the characters they make so I would probably say the fun Police make up like 5% of the actual population who thinks this way, while the rest don't want to get involved in the drama. 

Edited July 17, 2022 by KanadeVix

[agentx5]

1 hour ago, GlaziusF said:

I'm all for a suggestion made earlier in the thread to allow AE to charge up patrol XP once you hit 50, either directly if the hooks are there for it or indirectly through buying charges of Experienced with tickets.

I'm not a fan of this, it's the lazy-coder's solution.  That's not an insult by the way, coding takes time and sometimes it's wise to use a simple solution because it's faster to implement.  But this specific solution is the same kind of lazy-coding as by trying to making things harder just by adding insta-death gimmick mechanics or giving bosses stupid extreme amounts of HP to prologue the fight into slow boredom equivalent to punching a tree until it finally breaks from fatigue stress.  Cryptic is notorious for doing that, I saw it all the time in Champions Online, please don't be like Cryptic.

Full disclosure, I hadn't played CoH until 2019 but I had played Champions Online since FFA started.  Once they were bought by Perfect World Entertainment, it all changed.  Not right away of course, but the "On Alert" patch ran off a lot of the population, for understandable reasons. Their developer staffing was severely cut in favor of Star Trek Online and then later Neverwinter Online.  And along with that, the quality of the updates and patches has suffered.  With absolutely NO ability to create custom missions like AE in that game, the content dried out and the skeleton crew of developers tried what they could do...  And things got really lazy with vehicles and coming up with new missions that always had to add some "you have to have this to win" gimmick that shut out diversity on solutions to those missions.  The worst one, IMHO was the Eidolon in the newer QWZ that was added.  After the population of the game dropped enough, we simply couldn't get enough of the right maxed-out builds and players to fight it except in rare circumstances.  Most zones remained empty, and the grind increased (or you could always spend money gambling)

HomeComing's brand of CoH has been a breath a fresh air for me.  A game funded by donors, not gambling addictions.  A game with an amazingly helpful and active community, so many wonderful people here.  The GM's and dev's here deserve high praise, especially as this is a non-profit.   So please don't misunderstand me, I'm soooo much happier here than on Champions Online.  But I do see concerning parallels with suggestions like this one on.  Maybe it's the right call, but it's... I dunno.... for me it's kind of yuck?

Edited July 17, 2022 by agentx5

[Myrmidon]

2 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Considering that many of us have been playing this game for 18 years . . .

 

Also considering that it took me several months to get my first 50, but I never want to go back to that.

 
Get off my lawn, pest.

[ExeErdna]

4 minutes ago, KanadeVix said:

So to get this straight. We are looking at the disproportionate amount of times someone spends on brutes, assuming they are a fire brute farming considering they are the most popular. 

 

So give or take the total time spent on all characters (2 years ago) was about 44 million hours. Now to assume that those extra brute hours are farming and to a lesser extent those tankers also were farming we would have to find the average of the other characters played to determine the average amount of hours spent on a tank and a brute, though I feel those numbers are skewed because no one plays those widows and warshade characters.

So let's just give tanks and brutes Blaster numbers right?

So now using those as NON farming playable hours (Assuming no one farms unless they are a brute or tanker) That is about 28 million hours out of the 44M hours spent not farming as a brute or tank. So 16M hours spent farming on those characters alone.  That means at any given time 36% of the characters playing are farming. Yet we aren't accounting for one piece of detail, are they just solo farming, or power leveling...I would have to assume they are power leveling alts like mad as that's all anyone ever days. So we would have to take those 16M hours assuming only 1 additional alt is being farmed and double it, because for every 16M on a farmer is 16M on one of these other random classes. So that comes out to around 72% of the players at any given time are just farming.
 

So basically the vast majority of players actually do this, and it's the tiny minority of players who speak out against it because...

Reason 1: Your fun not my fun.

Reason 2: Skipping a loading Screen is triggering you.

Reason 3: No one wants to farm you and your potato computer can't handle two accounts.

 

I mean why does getting to 1-50 have to be a chore, what is the point of doing this or preventing a player from wanting to play the game starting at 50. I think it's pretty much common knowledge to anyone who plays any mmo, the vast majority of your character, build, and fun comes once you are at lvl 50. If you want to level up the old fashioned way, them being in AE or farming doesn't prevent you from doing this and has no impact on you at all.

 

I could maybe get behind this concept if for some reason the way the game progressed was all of it had to do with leveling up, with limited content at 50, and no IOS say...Pre Issue 9? That was pretty much the only time leveling up the old way was actually enjoyable because there was no end game. You had 2 billion INF and nothing to use it on so money was useless. 

 

The difference that people cannot understand is, COH is about making ALTS which means I have hundreds of characters...you think I want to spend 12-18 hours farming each one just to see if I might like the idea of a character that I want to try out for fun? I honestly hate getting to 50 because of stupid incarnates. I honestly don't use incarnates that much but for some content it's just mandatory so I get it anyways because if I don't I'll be weaker blah blah blah. 

Make all mats account bound to all my characters and maybe I'll accept the nerfs. Then I can delete my slog of alts and reuse their mats and actually enjoy fresh 50's after my extended farms outside of AE knowing at least I won't have to grind for Incarnate garbage too.

But you know, let's turn everything into a massive waste of a grind for no reason just so people can feel happy about themselves, the tiny minority of Fun Policing.

Oh and that 72% number...that's just farming, we also half to account that those people actually play the characters they make so I would probably say the fun Police make up like 5% of the actual population who thinks this way, while the rest don't want to get involved in the drama. 

 

That's why I wonder if the normal player base know or even care about Beta branch if they want to try something just hop over there and spend an hour or so building a character then figuring out if you can afford it, or even like how the build plays.

Since to me the again the 3rd time saying it the REAL AE problem is solved they're out of AP and Mercy. This whole thread is pointless until we understand the removal of these AE's first really do change something. Doesn't really bother me when I normally roll a new character it's like 3am EST or some shit and I start as a villain. Yet those Blue players have to change it up.

[Andreah]

17 minutes ago, KanadeVix said:

So to get this straight. We are looking at the disproportionate amount of times someone spends on brutes, assuming they are a fire brute farming considering they are the most popular. 

 

So give or take the total time spent on all characters (2 years ago) was about 44 million hours. Now to assume that those extra brute hours are farming and to a lesser extent those tankers also were farming we would have to find the average of the other characters played to determine the average amount of hours spent on a tank and a brute, though I feel those numbers are skewed because no one plays those widows and warshade characters.

So let's just give tanks and brutes Blaster numbers right?

So now using those as NON farming playable hours (Assuming no one farms unless they are a brute or tanker) That is about 28 million hours out of the 44M hours spent not farming as a brute or tank. So 16M hours spent farming on those characters alone.  That means at any given time 36% of the characters playing are farming. Yet we aren't accounting for one piece of detail, are they just solo farming, or power leveling...I would have to assume they are power leveling alts like mad as that's all anyone ever does. So we would have to take those 16M hours assuming only 1 additional alt is being farmed and double it, because for every 16M on a farmer is 16M on one of these other random classes. So that comes out to around 72% of the players at any given time are just farming.
 

So basically the vast majority of players actually do this, and it's the tiny minority of players who speak out against it because...

Reason 1: Your fun not my fun.

Reason 2: Skipping a loading Screen is triggering you.

Reason 3: No one wants to farm you and your potato computer can't handle two accounts.

 

I mean why does getting to 1-50 have to be a chore, what is the point of doing this or preventing a player from wanting to play the game starting at 50. I think it's pretty much common knowledge to anyone who plays any mmo, the vast majority of your character, build, and fun comes once you are at lvl 50. If you want to level up the old fashioned way, them being in AE or farming doesn't prevent you from doing this and has no impact on you at all.

 

I could maybe get behind this concept if for some reason the way the game progressed was all of it had to do with leveling up, with limited content at 50, and no IOS say...Pre Issue 9? That was pretty much the only time leveling up the old way was actually enjoyable because there was no end game. You had 2 billion INF and nothing to use it on so money was useless. 

 

The difference that people cannot understand is, COH is about making ALTS which means I have hundreds of characters...you think I want to spend 12-18 hours farming each one just to see if I might like the idea of a character that I want to try out for fun? I honestly hate getting to 50 because of stupid incarnates. I honestly don't use incarnates that much but for some content it's just mandatory so I get it anyways because if I don't I'll be weaker blah blah blah. 

Make all mats account bound to all my characters and maybe I'll accept the nerfs. Then I can delete my slog of alts and reuse their mats and actually enjoy fresh 50's after my extended farms outside of AE knowing at least I won't have to grind for Incarnate garbage too.

But you know, let's turn everything into a massive waste of a grind for no reason just so people can feel happy about themselves, the tiny minority of Fun Policing.

Oh and that 72% number...that's just farming, we also have to account that those people actually play the characters they make so I would probably say the fun Police make up like 5% of the actual population who thinks this way, while the rest don't want to get involved in the drama. 

I think you're reading a lot more out of my post than I put into it. 

 

Farming contributes significantly to the economy, I think that's clear.

 

I believe farmers also spend a greater fraction of their time on-line actively gaining XP/Inf/drops that non-farming characters. Possibly much greater.

 

Farming impacts the economy in several ways, it's not just a one sided supply boost.

 

We really could use new statistics, and imo, ideally new statistics by time spent in AE vs not in AE. That might not be possible to get.

 

[agentx5]

6 minutes ago, ExeErdna said:

 

That's why I wonder if the normal player base know or even care about Beta branch if they want to try something just hop over there and spend an hour or so building a character then figuring out if you can afford it, or even like how the build plays.

Since to me the again the 3rd time saying it the REAL AE problem is solved they're out of AP and Mercy. This whole thread is pointless until we understand the removal of these AE's first really do change something. Doesn't really bother me when I normally roll a new character it's like 3am EST or some shit and I start as a villain. Yet those Blue players have to change it up.

 

Speaking of I love it that Arachnos freaking blew up and leveled the AE building in Mercy.  That is HILARIOUS!!!  (and in-character for them, after Aeon's recent shenanigans)

For those that don't know, if you got to the old coordinates of the AE building on Mercy on Pineapple/Beta you'll see a pile of burning rubble.

The fires don't do fire DoT though, they should fix that.  There.  Feedback!  😄

Edited July 17, 2022 by agentx5

[Andreah]

6 minutes ago, ExeErdna said:

Since to me the again the 3rd time saying it the REAL AE problem is solved they're out of AP and Mercy

I really doubt this would do it alone. Pocket D would just become more unbearably crowded, and likely will anyway. Fortunately, there will be new alternative locations for RP'ers to go hang out.

[EmperorSteele]

@agentx5 I meant farming!

[BurtHutt]

19 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I really doubt this would do it alone. Pocket D would just become more unbearably crowded, and likely will anyway. Fortunately, there will be new alternative locations for RP'ers to go hang out.

This. I hope people just take it to King's Row or lesser utilized zones but the Devs went and put a Pocket D truck in AP which never made any sense to me. Ah well. I really don't understand what the dev team is thinking in regards to content and direction of this game. 

[Mr. Apocalypse]

32 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I think there is some truth to this. Farmers making new farming characters, or new farmer creating their first farming characters are a big part of the demand for IO, and especially the high end ones. Remember this post? 

And also this specific bit of data, from two years ago? I doubt it has become less unbalanced. 

 

Farmer characters do produce a lot of the goods in the economy, but they also consume a lot of them, and cause a lot of Inf to be generated which pushes prices up if it's not sunk out or absorbed into the trophy hordes of those Trillionaires. 

 

Also, I doubt we have a Trillionaire in-game just yet. But we certainly have quite a few people in the hundreds of billions.

 

Here is my farming routine, I build new character on main account. I load up my 2nd account and PL that toon up to 50. Train them, then pl the incarnate slots to unlock. that gets me 3 vet levels and 20 Emp merits.  I sell everything I get except for common/uncommon salvage on both toons for 1 inf.  Whether I can get more or less at a store does not matter.  Since I started farming a few months ago, I have put up over 5000 recipes and rare salvage for sale on the market. When I decide to flesh out a build with IOs, which is not every toon I level to 50, I purchase all of the IOs already crafted from the market, or I convert Empyrean Merits in order to buy winter set enhancements when possible.   I have built 7 toons complete with all the good sets etc out of the 20 that I have PLd to 50.  Not every toon gets expensive sets, or even any crafted I/Os. Even if I purchased all of my needed IOs for the 7 toons I have finished back from the market, that would only be about 500 IOs. 

 

Bottom line, as a farmer, I can tell you I put far more back into the system than I take, and I only receive in return what the market dictates as far as pricing.  I am not alone in this, don't try to paint the picture that there is anything similar about the amount we inject into the system vs what we use, because there isn't.  I dare to say, prices across the board are lower due to the greater supply that us farmers provide. 

 

Lack of supply and increased demand, coupled with greed is what pushes up prices.  Having lots of infamy does not make me spend more for items, I spend what I need to when I need.  But I can remember people spending far more for certain items, when there were non available, and then finally one popped up.  I have seen LotG 7.5% recharge Crafted IOs sell for well over 50M+ each,  now that there are loads of them in circulation and available, the costs have balanced out to pretty cheap if you factor in the cost of purchasing the recipe with merits.

 

I would say the more trillionaires the better, because that is inf out of rotation, that is not affecting the market.

 

 

[Andreah]

Market prices of valuable IO's aren't really driven by the supply of recipes that farmers produce. 

 

For example, the price floor on LotG's is not greatly affected by the supply/price of base recipes. The dominant element is the price of the average of 39.43 or so converters it takes to make them from uncommon IOs. That's 2.76 million at the current price for 39.43 of them. Even if it were only 30, that would be 2.1 million. You could drive the cost of the original recipe down to zero and it barely moves the needle.  And converters primarily come from merits.

 

Most of the recipes farming produces are, like in most content, common ones. These can't be used in the conversion process, the need for them is pretty low in end-game builds. Most all of them vendor for more than they sell in the auction, and that's likely because farming drives their auction prices down. Which means they are not a supply in the economy at all -- they're getting immediately vendored, or listed, bought and then vendored as an inf source.

 

Salvage that farmers get is likely more of an impact, but the most efficient, least expensive means to produce useful IO's occur at lower levels where there's not a lot of call for the expensive rare salvage; instead for yellow and white salvage, which even at their seeded prices barely budge the needle on the floor for expensive IOs. 

 

My conclusion would be that farming on the whole, even by the high intensity master farmers, doesn't really drive prices down much, if at all. What it does do is create a lot of inf, which if not siphoned off in some manner, would drive prices up. 

 

The losers if farming were actually removed (not just the hair cut we're likely to see from these changes) will probably be the near-Trillionaires who siphon that excess off, because there will be a little less of it.

 

All of this is speculative, but I'm not too worried about the game economy.

[lemming]

So, is there a chance we could get another feedback topic for AE that doesn't talk about the Vet level change?

 

Clarification:  I'm not against the vet level feedback, just the other AE change feedback is getting buried, so need to be separated

Edited July 18, 2022 by lemming
Clarity

[agentx5]

52 minutes ago, Mr. Apocalypse said:

Bottom line, as a farmer, I can tell you I put far more back into the system than I take, and I only receive in return what the market dictates as far as pricing.  I am not alone in this, don't try to paint the picture that there is anything similar about the amount we inject into the system vs what we use, because there isn't.  I dare to say, prices across the board are lower due to the greater supply that us farmers provide. 

 

Related but could be off-topic, but I bet it would help if there was a Hami-O version of the D-sync Threat/Accuracy/Recharge , because due to very low supply and high demand the price on those are astronomically high!

As long as the source from non-AE game content balances it out versus time-spent, I guess it doesn't matter overmuch.  There will always be something people grind or farm.  My concern is the precedent this sets: a slippery slope of removal of alternative ways people can play the game.

PS:  While I was looking at the i27 page3 patch notes, I am reminded of some of the really GOOD game-changing things that don't get as much praise as they should, such as the Shocked mechanic that turned my Electric/Electric Sentinel from a character I gave up on playing, into one of my favorites because of the combo between **[Power Sink]** and other -END powers in those sets combined with that Shocked mechanic's damage proc's.   Praise where it's due!  😃

 

[KanadeVix]

1 hour ago, ExeErdna said:

 

That's why I wonder if the normal player base know or even care about Beta branch if they want to try something just hop over there and spend an hour or so building a character then figuring out if you can afford it, or even like how the build plays.

Since to me the again the 3rd time saying it the REAL AE problem is solved they're out of AP and Mercy. This whole thread is pointless until we understand the removal of these AE's first really do change something. Doesn't really bother me when I normally roll a new character it's like 3am EST or some shit and I start as a villain. Yet those Blue players have to change it up.

I also enjoy farming, so when I come up with an idea it gives me an incentive. I hate going to Beta because I get nothing for my time. Even if I ditch the character I made, I still earned something for it. 

So I would prefer to make one every time and see how I think about it.

Honestly time for me is the biggest factor, making money in the game is easier than farming so that has been irrelevant from the start. 

[Widower]

31 minutes ago, lemming said:

So, is there a chance we could get another feedback topic for AE that doesn't talk about the Vet level change?

Once the next build comes out I think we'll set that up, yes.

[agentx5]

1 hour ago, GM Widower said:

Once the next build comes out I think we'll set that up, yes.

I don't know if it's been discussed or not here, but I have video proof that the same map by @brigg with both characters completely cleared on salvage, influence, and recipes that there's not just a XP removal on Brainstorm (Beta) versus Indomitable (Live)

Salvage : about the same (51 Beta vs 52 Live)
Recipes : about the same (20 Beta vs 25 Live)
Influence : significantly less (a reduction of 30.14% less influence, or in this test it was a difference of exactly 3,329,611)
Risk vs Reward : increased damage incoming due to enemies above aggro cap targeting at range, build will have to be stronger

Here's a video clip:
https://clips.twitch.tv/ResilientJollyWebAMPEnergy-2xzOq5YdQjtIKiBw

To quote Mollymauk -- "fire farming is like Zen for some people, they just go an nuke all the things"

Again though for me personally, to repeat what I said earlier, it's just means I can't reward people for my challenging incarnate-grade story arc AE mission.

And in general I love my main (which is a blaster) because I love being a bit overpowered and taking on impossibly large swarms of enemies.  That's a very SUPER aspect to a SUPERHERO game...  Or SUPERVILLAIN.... 

[KanadeVix]

3 hours ago, Andreah said:

I think you're reading a lot more out of my post than I put into it. 

 

Farming contributes significantly to the economy, I think that's clear.

 

I believe farmers also spend a greater fraction of their time on-line actively gaining XP/Inf/drops that non-farming characters. Possibly much greater.

 

Farming impacts the economy in several ways, it's not just a one sided supply boost.

 

We really could use new statistics, and imo, ideally new statistics by time spent in AE vs not in AE. That might not be possible to get.

 

What economy the economy of fun, or the economy of getting incarnates leveled up? Both of those seem to only affect me. 
Getting a character to 50 only affects me. 

The markets are already seeded and honestly the only thing I've seen get expensive really had are HO's. Which cannot be farmed in AE.

 

If you think the money I make farming, or the drops I get farming is how I get rich in the game it is not. It a minor stream of INF, but there are a lot of easier and quicker methods of earning INF in the game than being in AE.

 

It honestly just comes down to one thing everytime.
People want to control how other people enjoy the game. That's it. Me mindlessly grinding in a farm upsets people who are here for the story.

I can listen to audible while farming, I have done that, and I get a way better story than anything I can find in game.

 

City of Heroes has ALWAYS had farming since the beginning, it's literally one of the core components of playstyle within the game.

The moment AE crashes and burns everyone will just be complaining about people doing repeatable solo content to get their incarnates leveled up.
They will complain about PI being full but no one doing missions because they are all farming.

Like worry about yourself. Even if the only way I could earn XP in the game was to be on a team, and ONLY be doing radios. I would just invite an alt and play by myself than with someone else. 

 

So, again, why do you care?

Do you actually want to play with ME?  Am I the answer to satiate your loneliness?  
Well, It's not you, it's me, I'd love to hang out, but that darn loading screen is keeping us from developing our friendship. 
I'll never cross that barrier. 

[America's Angel]

1 hour ago, agentx5 said:

I don't know if it's been discussed or not here, but I have video proof that the same map by @brigg with both characters completely cleared on salvage, influence, and recipes that there's not just a XP removal on Brainstorm (Beta) versus Indomitable (Live)

Salvage : about the same (51 Beta vs 52 Live)
Recipes : about the same (20 Beta vs 25 Live)
Influence : significantly less (a reduction of 30.14% less influence, or in this test it was a difference of exactly 3,329,611)
Risk vs Reward : increased damage incoming due to enemies above aggro cap targeting at range, build will have to be stronger

Here's a video clip:
https://clips.twitch.tv/ResilientJollyWebAMPEnergy-2xzOq5YdQjtIKiBw

To quote Mollymauk -- "fire farming is like Zen for some people, they just go an nuke all the things"

Again though for me personally, to repeat what I said earlier, it's just means I can't reward people for my challenging incarnate-grade story arc AE mission.

And in general I love my main (which is a blaster) because I love being a bit overpowered and taking on impossibly large swarms of enemies.  That's a very SUPER aspect to a SUPERHERO game...  Or SUPERVILLAIN.... 

 

Use map #23785.

 

[Heatstroke]

Why not just reduce the XP in AE after you level 50, by 50%. It would take longer but you arent unfairly penalizing someone for reaching a particular level.