The Pretty Good AE Debate

[Andreah]

If there was a shard where AE just gave no rewards at all, I'd probably join it. I wouldn't join one that had no AE at all.  AE is a very commonly used and effective tool for carrying out RP stories in-game.

 

Or maybe AE only gave out tickets, and tickets were changed so they could only be used to pay the tailor. 

 

Or maybe tickets could be used in a special store to buy character bound / unsellable enhancements.

 

But this is just a thought experiment; there's no way they're going to make shards with special rulesets. That's a huge new overhead to manage for very limited benefits, if any.

[ShardWarrior]

4 hours ago, Troo said:

Oh I was just pointing you to a discussion that proposed saving some of the PL time.

 

People can already create however many fully decked out level 50s as they want on Brainstorm and hardly anyone uses it.  Just my own personal perspective, I think most have found the happy medium they are after with creating characters and leveling them through AE.  They are enjoying what they are doing and feeling like they accomplished something versus using a token to instantly level up.

[lemming]

9 hours ago, Parabola said:

Anything beyond 'big steel box with random kit scattered around one corner' is witchcraft as far as I am concerned.

That's my Jam!  (The steel box)

[ShardWarrior]

58 minutes ago, Krimson said:

The idea isn't to actually permanently divide the player base, since that might require new accounts and the like. I'd just like to see how many players who are against farming and AE would actually embrace a Shard without it, because I don't think the anti-farm crowd is the Legion they want you to think they are. 

 

All you need to do is look to the literal ghost towns that the other servers are to see that.  There is no AE leveling to speak of, no P2W vendors, no seeded markets.  It is the traditional, slow levelers paradise and yet there is hardly anyone there.  New Dawn lets you create one level 50 with all the bells and whistles and 2 billion inf for free per account and the server is still a ghost town.  I think that telling. 

[Ghost]

6 hours ago, Krimson said:

The idea isn't to actually permanently divide the player base, since that might require new accounts and the like. I'd just like to see how many players who are against farming and AE would actually embrace a Shard without it, because I don't think the anti-farm crowd is the Legion they want you to think they are. 

It would be a flawed experiment.

You would need an intense hatred of farming/AE to change servers.  
People hate it, but not that much.

 

The test is like to see would be locking in a choice for 1 week of game time.  You can either AE/Farm or run TFs/missions only - no rewards, regardless of choice.   Just to be curious what everyone would choose if there was no incentive either way.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Ghost

[Excraft]

10 hours ago, Krimson said:

The idea isn't to actually permanently divide the player base, since that might require new accounts and the like. I'd just like to see how many players who are against farming and AE would actually embrace a Shard without it, because I don't think the anti-farm crowd is the Legion they want you to think they are. 

 

They aren't that many.  It's a handful of people in the inner circle using alt accounts. 

[Black Zot]

27 minutes ago, Excraft said:

 

They aren't that many.  It's a handful of people in the inner circle using alt accounts. 

 

It's a subset of Team City of Dark Souls, which is itself a lot smaller than its members want you to believe.

[Puma]

Interesting experiment, if possible?

 

Make one shard the "farming" shard where AE is in no way nerfed.  

 

Let the feet do the talking, and see just how "popular" or "unpopular" farming really is. 

 

[Bionic_Flea]

Are there any insta-50s or super farming servers out there?  How popular are they?  I know most or all are smaller than HC, but I really don't follow the others.

[Puma]

13 hours ago, Nurvus said:

 

I think that's a good idea, it would have to be locked from transfers though. My main worry is it might cause a split in the RP community. I could see a push for the new server to be the new Everlasting with mixed reception. 

Im not sure it WOULD need to be locked from transfers. 

  

Because if we find that that server suddenly has a lot of transfers to/from over and over, that alone tells you people WANT to use AE the way we've been using it...even those who join a non-AE server initially.  

[Puma]

23 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Are there any insta-50s or super farming servers out there?  How popular are they?  I know most or all are smaller than HC, but I really don't follow the others.

Cake New Dawn will grant you any level you want, instantly, and also has a robust level of farming.  It's a much smaller population, though.  Mainly it's people who've left homecoming over time due to the "balancing" done here.  New Dawn's version of P2W has a token that lets you autolevel to whatever level you want.  

 

Thunderspy has a lot of farming but I don't think it has any sort of insta-50 ability.  

I'm not sure you can go with "population size" as a pure measure though, since Homecoming got a huge head start and a ton more publicity, and still is the first real server that comes up on a Google search for City of Heroes currently (I just checked).  
 
It's basically a "McDonalds vs Five Guys" at that point.  Even if Five Guys offers a much better burger that its customers all rate better, it just can't compete with McDonald's exposure at this point, even if McDonalds's own customers rate their burgers lower.  

Edited July 29, 2022 by Puma

[arcane]

16 minutes ago, Puma said:

Cake New Dawn will grant you any level you want, instantly, and also has a robust level of farming.  It's a much smaller population, though.  Mainly it's people who've left homecoming over time due to the "balancing" done here.  New Dawn's version of P2W has a token that lets you autolevel to whatever level you want.  

 

Thunderspy has a lot of farming but I don't think it has any sort of insta-50 ability.  

I'm not sure you can go with "population size" as a pure measure though, since Homecoming got a huge head start and a ton more publicity, and still is the first real server that comes up on a Google search for City of Heroes currently (I just checked).  
 
It's basically a "McDonalds vs Five Guys" at that point.  Even if Five Guys offers a much better burger that its customers all rate better, it just can't compete with McDonald's exposure at this point, even if McDonalds's own customers rate their burgers lower.  

So you’re saying you knowingly consume what you consider to be McDonald’s every day. Gross. I suggest you go play with your better burger because I saw something like this on Supersize Me.

[golstat2003]

1 hour ago, Puma said:

Cake New Dawn will grant you any level you want, instantly, and also has a robust level of farming.  It's a much smaller population, though.  Mainly it's people who've left homecoming over time due to the "balancing" done here.  New Dawn's version of P2W has a token that lets you autolevel to whatever level you want.  

 

Thunderspy has a lot of farming but I don't think it has any sort of insta-50 ability.  

I'm not sure you can go with "population size" as a pure measure though, since Homecoming got a huge head start and a ton more publicity, and still is the first real server that comes up on a Google search for City of Heroes currently (I just checked).  
 
It's basically a "McDonalds vs Five Guys" at that point.  Even if Five Guys offers a much better burger that its customers all rate better, it just can't compete with McDonald's exposure at this point, even if McDonalds's own customers rate their burgers lower.  

 

Eh I don't fully buy the headstart idea. All the servers have been pretty popular for a while now. I do buy the idea though that folks stay on HC because they PREFER NOT to instant level to 50 and prefer to play some where WHERE there is an actual population, and the way HC does updates. (I've experienced updates on the other servers that screwed up my characters data and often the solution is "just recreate them". Which instantly turned me off of those other servers.).

 

If the features of Cake were that popular there would be more folks there. I'm looking at this from folks who KNOW that COH is back on private servers, not new players.

[golstat2003]

12 hours ago, Astralock said:

 

Remove Empyrean merits from veteran levels and the 50% and double XP boosters as well, and I would move over to that shard yesterday.

 

Never going to happen of course.  It would further split the community, and add work and expenditures to the Homecoming staff for little gain.  But it would be nice.

 

It would add a ridiculous amount of work in terms of maintaining the AH db also. You'd have to have two based on what folks are suggesting. Agreed that this does not seem realistic at all.

[Bionic_Flea]

1 hour ago, Puma said:

Interesting experiment, if possible?

Make one shard the "farming" shard where AE is in no way nerfed.  

Let the feet do the talking, and see just how "popular" or "unpopular" farming really is.

 

39 minutes ago, Puma said:

I'm not sure you can go with "population size" as a pure measure though, since Homecoming got a huge head start and a ton more publicity, and still is the first real server that comes up on a Google search for City of Heroes currently (I just checked). 

 

I'm all for experiments, but if population size is not a good measure of popularity, what are we experimenting for?

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

 

I'm all for experiments, but if population size is not a good measure of popularity, what are we experimenting for?

If I'm understanding this correctly, the thought experiment is to get an idea of to what extent the "nerf AE farming" contingent actually reflects the interests of the Homecoming playerbase. The size of the other servers isn't a good indication of how popular different changes would be on Homecoming because:

 

1. There are historically contingent reasons for those servers to be smaller that don't have anything to do with the contnet of those teams.

2. A primary motivation for joining a server seems to be population size. So players will naturally flock to servers that are more populated, and move to more populated shards within those servers, as we saw on Freedom and now on Excelsior.

[Troo]

 

soo.. debate over?

[golstat2003]

If they want to have one shard designated with no AE limits to see how many folks actually flock there, then sure. But that should be the ONLY change. Having our volunteer team do anything more than just that for just an experiment cause some folks just don't like AE or farming, is just a complete waste of their limited time IMO.

 

Also not even sure if such a suggestion is even possible. EDIT: Aka does the server code even allow for one AE on one server to have a different ruleset? Also doesn't answer the question of WHICH shard this would on. Excelsoir (large shard) or Torchearer (smaller shard) ? 😉 

Edited July 29, 2022 by golstat2003

[Bionic_Flea]

I think it's more of a thought experiment than an actual experiment that our devs would do.

[ivanhedgehog]

1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

 

I'm all for experiments, but if population size is not a good measure of popularity, what are we experimenting for?

Science!!!!!!(says in booming voice)

[Grouchybeast]

3 hours ago, Puma said:

Im not sure it WOULD need to be locked from transfers. 

  

Because if we find that that server suddenly has a lot of transfers to/from over and over, that alone tells you people WANT to use AE the way we've been using it...even those who join a non-AE server initially.  

 

A lot of people happily farmed the heck out of the extremely broken AE on live, until it destroyed the economy and put high-end IO builds entirely out of the reach of many players unless they were willing to play in very specific ways.  I don't think 'some people love doing it' is necessarily the sole metric by which to judge whether or not something should be in the game.

 

And it really doesn't matter, because the devs have said more than once that they don't have anything against farming in general, and they have no intention of trying to stop people farming.  They're just trying to keep a balance between different play styles, and between different play styles and the economy.  They question they usually seem to be asking is 'does this potentially have undesirable consequences for the playerbase as a whole?'

[ShardWarrior]

5 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Are there any insta-50s or super farming servers out there?  How popular are they?  I know most or all are smaller than HC, but I really don't follow the others.

 

Yes.  New Dawn (Cake) lets you build one free 50 with everything unlocked (badges, incarnates etc) plus 2 billion inf per account, basically just like Brainstorm but it is an NPC contact in Atlas.  Hardly anyone there taking advantage of it, which again disproves the whole "people want everything for no effort" excuse.  Other servers also have vastly superior costume editors and have added signature power sets for players.  They each have some very cool stuff in their own right. 

 

Hate to say it but the more Homecoming does to drive off players, the more attractive those other servers become.

[Puma]

3 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

 

I'm all for experiments, but if population size is not a good measure of popularity, what are we experimenting for?

I meant population size between servers.  

 

Homecoming had a HUGE head start.  It was the "secret server" that got the buzz once the game became public again, and so it instantly got thousands of people.

 

 

what I was talking about were "shards" on HC.  Make one of them a "farming shard" or a "no-farming" shard and see, in our own population, how that plays out.  

[Bionic_Flea]

I think that maybe we need more missions/TFs that are like farms, ITF, Yin, Apex, Tin Mage, Market Crash, which means densely packed maps of critters that give great XP and also make you feel super.  Add limited travel to that.

 

If all missions were farms, would anybody farm?  Dun, Dun DUN!

[Darmian]

We also need more farms that involve animal husbandry and three field crop rotation and plows.  Maybe an orchard or two.