The Pretty Good AE Debate

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Personally, Id like to see more focused debate. I don't want to get drawn into more of this "It should/shouldn't exist" level stuff. There are some points to be made, discussions to be had, and fundamentals to be worked out, but so long as everyone sees each other as threats to their playstyle or to the fundamentals of the game to others, we're just talking past each other.

 

Is as it ever was. Won't be changing any time soon.

[Bionic_Flea]

28 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Personally, Id like to see more focused debate. I don't want to get drawn into more of this "It should/shouldn't exist" level stuff. There are some points to be made, discussions to be had, and fundamentals to be worked out

What would you like to focus on and discuss?

[Darmian]

42 minutes ago, Krimson said:

The exception is my Forever Praetorian, whom I discovered is not welcome on First Ward and Night Ward teams because her existence prevents other players from joining unless they are in the Zone.

I had a little of that nonsense before pointing out to people, hey, we're IN Praetoria, you're the ones with the problem here, not me. LOL. Admittedly that does not always go well!

[Andreah]

5 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

What would you like to focus on and discuss?

I think I'd like to see the topic separated into its natural major divisions, whatever they are, and see those discussed at a more thoughtful pace. Without people feeling their playstyle is under assault. That last bit is a tall order.

 

For example, I think a significant part of this topic is what attributes of gameplay merit reward, and to what relative degrees? I see, generally, three camps on this: 1) Time;  2) Effort;  and 3) Risk. Each one of these is complicated though; "Time" spent at or away from the keyboard? Effort before the activity (design and planning) or cognitive effort (control action) during the activity? And what does "Risk" mean in a game? What, exactly, are we at risk of losing or even not gaining?

 

But if we start to discuss these at basic levels to arrive at mutual understanding, much less agreement, I have a suspicion where it's going to go.

[Coyotedancer]

I'm just going back to my farming... I still have a sonic defender who needs a few vet level iBits to finish his Incarnate toys. You know, a character who would just be a royal pain to run through the DA arcs a few (dozen) times on his own.

 

The pearl-clutchers can just keep on railing about how awful that is and how I'm ruining their game by being able to do that. Somehow. 😐

[Bionic_Flea]

8 hours ago, Andreah said:

I think I'd like to see the topic separated into its natural major divisions, whatever they are, and see those discussed at a more thoughtful pace. Without people feeling their playstyle is under assault. That last bit is a tall order.

 

For example, I think a significant part of this topic is what attributes of gameplay merit reward, and to what relative degrees? I see, generally, three camps on this: 1) Time;  2) Effort;  and 3) Risk. Each one of these is complicated though; "Time" spent at or away from the keyboard? Effort before the activity (design and planning) or cognitive effort (control action) during the activity? And what does "Risk" mean in a game? What, exactly, are we at risk of losing or even not gaining?

 

But if we start to discuss these at basic levels to arrive at mutual understanding, much less agreement, I have a suspicion where it's going to go.

 

Well, GM-GW split us off here, so it seems as good a place as any to discuss it. 

 

Time, effort, and risk is a good discussion to have.  While I dismissed Ivan's XP/Kill as a measurement, I cannot disagree that it is a basic measurement.  You kill X, you get Y.

 

Fire farming, especially active, wins on at least two and possibly three of those camps -- you get ultra fast rewards at minimum risk.  Effort is debatable as you do have to ramp up a farmer, kit him out, maybe get some inspiration binds and technique to be top tier.  But those puzzles have been solved.  You can copy a bargain basement build to self finance a top shelf build, and cut and paste the macros.

 

The only risk in the game is the risk of being defeated, which is only momentary and nowhere near as punishing as something like Dark Souls.  I suppose there's a secondary risk of failing the mission, trial, TF, or whatever.

 

This game also has an interesting dichotomy on time.  A perfect example is the ITF.  Some people prefer to speed run it to get a quick reward merits payout.  Others prefer to kill all or kill most to squeeze every ounce of XP/Inf in the maps out.  Neither way is the "right" way.  Both ways have merit (no pun intended) and provides different rewards.  The Devs have also started introducing Advanced Difficulty settings that provide additional rewards but have new tricks that will either slow you down or kill you.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have no problem with farming.  I like farming.  I farm myself.  But right now, and I'll be very specific, fire-farming on the asteroid map provides better XP, influence, drops, and even reward merits (due to emps from veteran DINGS!) than anything else in the game.  If it was only a little bit better I don't think it would be a problem. 

 

But fire-farming in AE is multiple times better rewards, faster than anything else, for less risk. 

 

[Without_Pause]

15 hours ago, lemming said:

PL a few chars up to whatever, strip them for parts, and delete them.  I'm not even sure Crosscut  would think that's ethical.

I feel like if you are PLing a character to 50 to just see how much you like them means you don't know you can pop a build into Mid's and export that into Test.

 

I'm glad they reverted the change. I honestly don't know how much of an impact it would have had on me. My farmer is built to do stuff outside of AE. It just seems like an odd way to go about things.

[Rahabina]

On 7/19/2022 at 8:32 AM, Sovera said:

 

It does not, don't bring your assumptions and tout them as valid facts. The devs listen, yes, but when they are firm on an idea it goes through.

 

On the other hand when something you, personally, do not want and discourse against it you will be happy the devs are not dictators and will listen, and even revert the changes, if enough public opinion is against it. Is that too going to be smeared as 'loud crying' or will it be a clear and concise presentation of fact if you're the one who is doing it?

I agreed, all of the interaction I have had with devs /GMs are great.  I can't give them enough kudos

[roleki]

4 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

But fire-farming in AE is multiple times better rewards, faster than anything else, for less risk. 

 

I still don't get that specific portion of the argument.  What is risk, in this game?  In the vast majority of circumstances, defeat is a momentary inconvenience.  In those circumstances where defeat is MORE than an inconvenience, like say a Master Of run, the folks that choose to engage in that activity (and expect to succeed) will prepare in advance to minimize the chances they will be defeated.  Step into a fire farm unprepared, and you will assuredly suffer an inconvenience.  Step into it prepared, and you most likely won't.   

Point being, the vast majority of what constitutes 'risk' in this game is mitigated in advance by those that choose to engage in the activity.  If it all goes pear-shaped and the map is littered with the corpses of you and your allies you have to... make a couple of clicks & maybe travel a tad before going back to do exactly the same thing you were doing before.  Your gear doesn't get blown off and scavenged by passersby, you don't lose piles of inf, your ranking in the leaderboards doesn't slip... defeat is really trivial in CoH. 

 

To put it another way, you either spend your time/resources making preparations in advance to stave off defeat, or you don't, and you spend time/resources recovering from the defeats that result from that choice.  I would take the pepsi challenge with anyone and wager that I spent more time and resources perfecting my Rad/Fire Brute than they have recovering from every defeat on every character they ever rolled in this game, Live or HC, combined.  Admittedly, that's not saying much, I'm a slow worker and agonize over little details. 

 

But even if I scraped the build off the forums and just ran with it, I still would have invested quite a bit of resources in that character that your typical Heroic Streetfighter might not have.  If I've invested what is necessary to survive in a 4/8 farm packed with hundreds and hundreds of angry jerks, the ROI on that is... I can survive in a 4/8 farm packed with hundreds and hundreds of angry jerks, and I get to keep whatever fell out of their pockets when I beat the dogpiss out of them, same as anyone else gets to keep what drops off THEIR victims in PI or DFB or wherever.  

[Bill Z Bubba]

14 minutes ago, roleki said:

What is risk, in this game?

 

I can spend the exact same resources/time building the perfect emp/nrg defender and it will NEVER be able to reach anything remotely related to the inf/xp per hour rate that my claws/fire brute farmer hits. But this is true with the AE and fire farming completely removed from the topic. That same emp/nrg defender against my claws/sr main running max diff DA repeatables has almost the same disparity in performance.

 

The risk vs reward structure of this game is already completely farked, (And Always Has Been) regardless of what goes on in AE, JUST in the comparisons of risk/reward for squishies and non-squishies.

 

So, yea, regardless of my Homer gif earlier, I kinda have to mock the anti-AE, anti-PL crowd, because they do nothing but miss the forest due to all the trees.

[Without_Pause]

Unless you play hardcore, there is zero risk outside of AE as well. Death is inconvenience. It is not a risk. A risk of using an awaken, having a teammate rez you,  or going to the hospital? Puh lease. Level something like a blaster without 2x XP boosters. Get it in the 40s and then have it die knowing you have to delete the character as is. That's hours of play time lost.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Without_Pause said:

Unless you play hardcore, there is zero risk outside of AE as well. Death is inconvenience. It is not a risk. A risk of using an awaken, having a teammate rez you,  or going to the hospital? Puh lease. Level something like a blaster without 2x XP boosters. Get it in the 40s and then have it die knowing you have to delete the character as is. That's hours of play time lost.

 

Yea... there's a reason I've never done that in CoH. State of Decay 2, OTOH, I'll delete a community if I lose a single person. Course, knowing that if things are going south I can just exit the game to save them means that almost never happens now.

[Bionic_Flea]

25 minutes ago, roleki said:

I still don't get that specific portion of the argument.  What is risk, in this game?  In the vast majority of circumstances, defeat is a momentary inconvenience.

I don't think we disagree on risk.  As I stated in the post you quoted "The only risk in the game is the risk of being defeated, which is only momentary and nowhere near as punishing as something like Dark Souls.  I suppose there's a secondary risk of failing the mission, trial, TF, or whatever. "

 

Let's agree that fire-farming should give the best rewards in the game.  How much better should it be?  Ten percent better?  100% better? Ten times better?  Is there a limit?

[arcane]

Risk vs reward is just one variant of input vs output. You can talk all you want about how all the risk is really trivial, but, at the end of the day, the outputs per unit of input are way inflated in AE compared to the rest of the game.

[arcane]

11 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

I can spend the exact same resources/time building the perfect emp/nrg defender and it will NEVER be able to reach anything remotely related to the inf/xp per hour rate that my claws/fire brute farmer hits. But this is true with the AE and fire farming completely removed from the topic. That same emp/nrg defender against my claws/sr main running max diff DA repeatables has almost the same disparity in performance.

 

The risk vs reward structure of this game is already completely farked, (And Always Has Been) regardless of what goes on in AE, JUST in the comparisons of risk/reward for squishies and non-squishies.

 

So, yea, regardless of my Homer gif earlier, I kinda have to mock the anti-AE, anti-PL crowd, because they do nothing but miss the forest due to all the trees.

You rejecting the widely accepted standard gaming paradigm of solo-friendly vs team-friendly archetypes is a completely separate issue.

[Doc_Scorpion]

6 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

But fire-farming in AE is multiple times better rewards, faster than anything else, for less risk. 

With all due respect to Flea, I wish people would stop dragging risk into the discussion because it isn't really relevant.  Risk in this game is, by any rational measurement, all but completely non existent.  You don't lose skills and you don't lose items - at the very worst you lose a little bit of time.

All that bringing up risk accomplishes is diverting attention from the core issue - the disparity of returns on investment (whether time or in-game currency) between farming and pretty much everything else that isn't farming.
 

[arcane]

25 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Let's agree that fire-farming should give the best rewards in the game.  How much better should it be?  Ten percent better?  100% better? Ten times better?  Is there a limit?

People evading this question hard af

[Bill Z Bubba]

21 minutes ago, arcane said:

You rejecting the widely accepted standard gaming paradigm of solo-friendly vs team-friendly archetypes is a completely separate issue.

 

Damn right I reject it. The rewards for forced teaming are never as good as the rewards for teaming when I damn well please.

[Without_Pause]

3 minutes ago, arcane said:

People evading this question hard af

Clearly it is over 9,000%!!!

[Bill Z Bubba]

14 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

Clearly it is over 9,000%!!!

 

Which, unsurprisingly, is the exact % of hyperbole regarding the damage farming does to the game!

[Akisan]

48 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

With all due respect to Flea, I wish people would stop dragging risk into the discussion because it isn't really relevant.  Risk in this game is, by any rational measurement, all but completely non existent.  You don't lose skills and you don't lose items - at the very worst you lose a little bit of time.

All that bringing up risk accomplishes is diverting attention from the core issue - the disparity of returns on investment (whether time or in-game currency) between farming and pretty much everything else that isn't farming.

 

Except that lack of risk is exactly why Fire Farms (and many of the other farms) are so lucrative - the enemies are so precisely weakened, that you don't have to invest in balanced defenses, resistances or even have much HP recovery, just damage and more damage.  I *hate* the typed AE farms, and I'd be a lot less hostile about them if the main farming builds could get anywhere near that clear speed running any other content.

 

And before the non-AE farms are brought up - one of the big reasons that a large chunk of those got 90 minute time limits back on Live was so they couldn't be farmed indefinitely.

[biostem]

I don't care if you farm or not, as long as, when teaming with others, you know how to play your character, aren't a jerk, and aren't elitist about which other ATs or powersets you're willing to team with...

[Rahabina]

5 minutes ago, Akisan said:

 

E I *hate* the typed AE farms, and I'd be a lot less hostile about them if the main farming builds could get anywhere near that clear speed running any other content.

 

And before the non-AE farms are brought up - one of the big reasons that a large chunk of those got 90 minute time limits back on Live was so they couldn't be farmed indefinitely.

I tend to make my farm builds equally playable in the COH world

[Rahabina]

16 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

The pearl-clutchers can just keep on railing about how awful that is and how I'm ruining their game by being able to do that. Somehow. 😐

Yeah farming is just one of the things i enjoy in small doses in the game and I really see no problem with it.  

[Rahabina]

17 hours ago, Krimson said:

I'm not big on the idea of stripping toons, UNLESS I am stripping it because I am remaking it. But it's still really unlikely. I have 26 toons.

I have quite a few but if I either don't enjoy something or never play it I will strip it.

 

Also if I am having problems with their build, even with Mids which is not perfect but I am glad it exists, I will strip it and maybe say several months later come up with a new build and it is nice.  I think three or four of my favorites are ones I shelved and resurected much later.