The Pretty Good AE Debate

[Ukase]

ToS violations are probably what's gotten the devs attention on this whole farming thing. So, certainly any discussion of how such things are done are best left in the shadows. 

Seed22 just quoted that you, AA, and there's a rad/fire build you shared. It's commonly known that rad/fire, due to irradiated ground has a tiny edge over spines/fire. My data was presented with spines/fire, and I believe CoyoteDancer and others were not even using brutes. While your numbers are useful, and valid, they cannot be presumed to be the only numbers to consider, but as I stated earlier, just one set to consider in the data. 

 

[Ukase]

2 minutes ago, Neiska said:

I intend to post my numbers for my 3 box farm when I get home, but a few quick thoughts -

They can scroll up and read your quick thoughts. I agree with everything you stated could happen. It might take a little longer, but it would likely happen to some degree. Just my opinion, and they'll vary. But you did a good job expressing it. 

[Top Gear]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

Yes, the anti-farmer should go to Rebirth. You will like the grind, the different ATs and powersets. The only thing you won't like is at peak times, you might get 100 players. I doubt it, but you might. And because of that, most of you won't go where other like-minded players are. You'll stay here and try to drag the rest of us, kicking and screaming out of the farm and into your bloody mainstream content, with your "You'll play it my way and like it" attitude. 

Good luck with that. 

I couldn't agree more.

[Coyotedancer]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

ToS violations are probably what's gotten the devs attention on this whole farming thing. So, certainly any discussion of how such things are done are best left in the shadows. 

Seed22 just quoted that you, AA, and there's a rad/fire build you shared. It's commonly known that rad/fire, due to irradiated ground has a tiny edge over spines/fire. My data was presented with spines/fire, and I believe CoyoteDancer and others were not even using brutes. While your numbers are useful, and valid, they cannot be presumed to be the only numbers to consider, but as I stated earlier, just one set to consider in the data. 

 

 

 

When I post numbers for a character, I tend to include their AT and powersets for exactly that reason. Likewise which creator/map I'm on, since not all of them are created equal.

 

My main AE fire farmers (Haroeris and Ossuni) are both Claws/Fire Brutes. They were built specifically for that. Suni is a somewhat slower/safer "zen mode" farmer. Harry is built for speed. He gives up some security in the name of more damage and so faster clearing times.  I chose to use Suni for the tests because she's the one that I spend the lion's share of my farming time with. She's my base-line "average".

 

The other two I've posted numbers for aren't optimized for AE farming, but are capable of it... One (Grey Kestrel) is a "Fireproof" Dual Blade/WP Scrapper updated from the Live game days, who was originally designed for plowing through Harvey's Praetorian demons. The other (Ironhorse) is a Dual Blade/Rad Brute with a general-purpose S/L build.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Coyotedancer

[America's Angel]

6 minutes ago, Ukase said:

Somehow I missed that, thanks for pointing it out. 
So essentially 20 minutes for both Apex and TinMage, with 80 reward merits, 240 converters, when used properly...that's on average about 20 IOs converted for sale. (a lot of variation, due to rng - RNG is a fickle mistress sometimes. Anecdotally, I burn about 10 converters per IO to get something worth selling for 3M. Please bear in mind, that I've converted 10's of 1000's of IOs. I craft and convert if necessary, every uncommon or rare. I submit that 10 converters per IO IS an average that be trusted if you're converting 1000's of IOs over time, not just a couple dozen. Over time, those are my anecdotal results. I also submit the point that not every player will recognize the best time to convert in category or out of category.) Yomo and others say it's 15. But many of them also convert in the level 30 and under category, which skews the number higher due to more undesirable sets being an option to convert into. Since you use a level 50 tf, presumably level 50 recipes would be used for the most part. 

That's roughly 60M, so 6M per minute, give or take a smidge. Seems about the same to me.

I probably am missing something, but can't see it right now. Gotta jet!

 

Assuming it takes about 3 minutes to convert a row of IOs into something sellable with converters. You're looking at 20 mins for the TFs and 6 mins for the two rows. So assuming that 60million figure is right, you're looking at 60/26 = 2.3m per minute.

 

Add in two other accounts AFK farming, and the total becomes 4.06m per minute.

 

Which is about on par with the 4.35m/minute (3x active farmers) and 4.18m/minute (1xactive+2xAFK farmers).

 

Interesting numbers. Of course they don't factor in the inf cost and time cost of getting the IOs to convert. But still...interesting.

[Top Gear]

1 hour ago, Astralock said:

 

Unfortunately, Rebirth is still 32-bit and does not have all of the background, technical changes Faultline, Number Six, Telephone, et al. made to City of Heroes over the years to make it more compatible with modern computers and modern operating systems.  I was told that Rebirth does not have anyone on their staff that understands the C language.  Also, I still have a couple of friends left on Homecoming that insist I play here.  So here we are.

Though I take your word for these things, I find it very sketch that there are always so many reasons "grinders" don't want to go to Rebirth. This is beginning to look a lot like people just generally being miserable unless they're controlling the narrative and in this case, everyone's game play. I'll not be forced to play "regular" content with the sociopaths that are generally leading the teams and running what should be an hour or two TF in 20 minutes and then coming here to complain about others preferring to farm as if there's a difference. You people, (and I don't include Astralock, I'm only using their post as a basis) are complete hypocrites.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Top Gear

[Coyotedancer]

6 minutes ago, Top Gear said:

 you stole code to make a server and now you're playing the righteous judges of everyone else. I sincerely hope that NC Soft catches wind of all this.

 

 

"I don't agree with some of you, so I hope everyone's playhouse burns down!" isn't a great look, Top... 

[Top Gear]

2 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

 

 

"I don't agree with some of you, so I hope everyone's playhouse burns down!" isn't a great look, Top... 

At least copy the entire sentence so the context isn't manipulated. I've since edited that out for general forum consumption anyway. It's not about burning the house down, it's about getting support to insure EVERYONE can enjoy playing how they want to play.

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Top Gear

[Coyotedancer]

7 minutes ago, Top Gear said:

At least copy the entire sentence so the context isn't manipulated. I've since edited that out for general forum consumption anyway. It's not about burning the house down, it's about getting support to insure EVERYONE can enjoy playing how they want to play.

 

 

In what way was that "out of context" or manipulated? The first half of the statement didn't, in any way, change the meaning of your statement. o_O

 

 

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Coyotedancer
I spel gud

[scottocamp]

50 minutes ago, Neiska said:

Not everyone farms the same way - some have spines/fire brutes built for afk farming, other people take their level 50s and go farm on like, +2 or +3/8 or whatever they can handle. Not everyone farms with Elite Bosses on. Some do it with full teams, others do it strictly solo. And others still sit and do the math to figure out what is the best active farming, and then do that.

 

 

I am at work so not entirely sure of my numbers - but it seems like a solo toon playing the Brigg's 125 first mission at 4x8 received roughly 7 million for clearing the map.  Just using random toons my clear times were in the 10 minute range.  To get a 2.5 million per minute return you would have to clear that map in less than 3 minutes solo.  Which seems rather amazing.  But the build AA posted would be about as good as it gets in achieving that I suppose.

 

That all said - what matters I think for the purposes of this discussion is looking at the spread between AE and regular content.   Presenting an AE number in isolation is somewhat meaningless.  What could an amazing build in AE accomplish compared to an amazing build in regular content?  The spread didn't seem so impactful to me personally.  But I'm clearly not playing with optimized toons.

Edited August 11, 2022 by scottocamp

[Blue_Archaura]

1 hour ago, arcane said:

Literally anything AA claims should be taken with a grain of salt because he clearly farms out of some data center with an unspoken number of accounts. Not to mention we’ve already been told directly AA breaks the ToS to do this.

Just here to say that I, legitimately, laughed out loud when I read this :D

 

Edit: Also, guys, this is a game supported by folks who aren't getting paid and are doing this in their free time (from my understanding). The phrase "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Blue_Archaura

[Seed22]

6 minutes ago, Blue_Archaura said:

Just here to say that I, legitimately, laughed out loud when I read this 😄

They are the single best source of entertainment on these forums bar none. Arcane you need to be charging us for this comedy

Edited August 11, 2022 by Seed22

[Ruin Mage]

It's always amusingly annoying when the "Play our way" stuff comes up.

By playing an MMO you are agreeing to playing the way the game is designed.
By playing a not-official (AKA anything considered private/rogue) server, you are agreeing to playing the way the team of said server sets out.
Hell, by playing any games in general you are playing in a way that developers intended.
In that vein, the AE was not intentionally designed to be a Farming Machine. It happened to become one.

Now changes often go through iterations or testing (various candidates) or in some cases get sent back to the drawing board/scrapped. The AE change that nuked AE farming got walked back (besides a "wait what" bug moment with XP booster) to a Merit Conversion change. This means that the only thing going forward is a slightly slower leveling process for using boosters. I don't have the data to say how much slower, but its not some monumental decrease.

Any changes, at their core, are "Play our way" because there is limits to how you can play the game. Some limits are baked into the game's design. Others are added for the vision of the CoH that HC wants to deliver. This can be repeated on and on as needed for the other servers - where you agree to play their way inherently by going on their server. There is a ton of freedom, yes, but there is no promise or guarantee that the freedom will remain untouched.

Taking an axe to AE's rewards by a smidge is not "go fuck yourself, play our way." - its trying to address what they can with the manpower and the hours they have. 

Now, could they have done something else instead of trying to tackle the Beast With A Thousand Backs that is AE farming? Sure. It's no secret that everything else is lacking reward-wise. The amount of EXP / influence you can get from AE farming versus doing actual content in the game is absurd, and its very easy compared to the various enemy groups out there. Imagine trying to farm against Arachnos or Circle of Thorns instead. Fire Armor and its various attack set combinations + how easy it is to build against a custom tailored fire mob makes AE lucratively more worth doing than anything else.

However, it's on their choices and not ours (thank god) on what they spend their time & effort on.

The gist is that something had to change or give with rewards, AE, and how things work between the two.

Part of the problem stems from Veteran Levels - which were made for the massively smaller server that kicked off all the "COH IS BACK!?" stuff years ago.

[AboveTheChemist]

For the folks that are familiar with the popular and/or 'best' non-AE missions to farm, what non-AE missions would be recommended for a spines/fire brute that isn't optimized, but can handle Briggs' 125 fire farm with minimal risk? I've got some older (but still applicable) testing data for that farm, but no non-AE farming data. If I get the time and motivation, I might try to compile some non-AE data for comparison purposes.

[Coyotedancer]

Harvey Maylor's demon mission from the Bands arc is an Old School favorite. My /Fire brutes can both handle it... Although, as mentioned upthread, grab the KB Reducer from your base forge if you don't already have some KB protection. Those demons will swat you around if you don't have that. 

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

For the folks that are familiar with the popular and/or 'best' non-AE missions to farm, what non-AE missions would be recommended for a spines/fire brute that isn't optimized, but can handle Briggs' 125 fire farm with minimal risk? I've got some older (but still applicable) testing data for that farm, but no non-AE farming data. If I get the time and motivation, I might try to compile some non-AE data for comparison purposes.

 

As mentioned earlier, I farmed DA repeatables to get my main to 666 vet lvls for the screenshot. Getting +4 rewards while effectively fighting +1s made it worthwhile and the SL farms in AE that would have sped things up some, I found annoying to play. At best (with experienced charges also in play,) I was getting 3 vet lvls/hour. One might be able to convert that to inf/min from other posts in this thread.

[Neiska]

12 minutes ago, Shadeknight said:

It's always amusingly annoying when the "Play our way" stuff comes up.

 

(Cut/snip by me)

Taking an axe to AE's rewards by a smidge is not "go fuck yourself, play our way." - its trying to address what they can with the manpower and the hours they have. 

Now, could they have done something else instead of trying to tackle the Beast With A Thousand Backs that is AE farming? Sure. It's no secret that everything else is lacking reward-wise. The amount of EXP / influence you can get from AE farming versus doing actual content in the game is absurd, and its very easy compared to the various enemy groups out there. 

 

I agree. It is annoying. For two years now its been posts precisely about "play our way."

 

To the anti AE crowd - "it's one little change. Its not THAT bad! Stop whining, its making things more equal!"

 

To the AE crowd - "Yet one more bit of dry land lost on an already shrinking island."

 

I am fine with "tweaks" or "tuning." But going back to the start, what has been suggested here and elsewhere has run from the "remove AE rewards entirely" all the way up to and including "reset the economy" which to my mind is a very far cry from balancing and tuning. And I think its pretty funny how that rebalancing has always gone a certain way, and never in the reverse in an effort to make things equal. And they always seem to take the most extreme example of what one group is capable of, not the "typical." The majority of farmers don't farm for 8+ hours a day, heck I don't even think AFK farmers are the majority now, not going by what I've seen hanging out in the AE nowdays. Theres still spines/fire sure, but mostly I see things like Earth Sets, or Scrappers, or even Tankers. The typical spines/fire brute is actually becoming rarer and rarer to see, at least when I am in the AE.

 

So yes, to some of us in the farm crowd, it most certainly has been 100% "play our way and you'll like it" this entire time. Past changes. Present changes. And I expect future changes as well.

[MoonSheep]

11 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

As mentioned earlier, I farmed DA repeatables to get my main to 666 vet lvls for the screenshot. Getting +4 rewards while effectively fighting +1s made it worthwhile and the SL farms in AE that would have sped things up some, I found annoying to play. At best (with experienced charges also in play,) I was getting 3 vet lvls/hour. One might be able to convert that to inf/min from other posts in this thread.

 

that sounds fun - a good reason to run incarnate content too

[TheZag]

I havent read any of this.  Any chance someone could sum up the last 43 pages in a sentence or 2?  🤪

 

[Neiska]

2 minutes ago, TheZag said:

I havent read any of this.  Any chance someone could sum up the last 43 pages in a sentence or 2?  🤪

 

Sure.

 

Side A) AE needs to be nerfed more.

Side B) AE needs to be nerfed less. Or increase non AE stuff to make them more balanced.

[Coyotedancer]

The Paragon Grange Association: "Farming in AE is fun!"

 

The Anti-Farming League: "Farming in AE sucks and is ruining our game!"

 

Both Sides: "Buzz off, buster! You're not the boss of me!"

 

.... So, pretty much like every other thread about AE ever. 😆

[Ruin Mage]

It's a circular debate of sides that will never fully agree with one another. Which is fine.

I'm more in the middle camp of what Neiska says. I don't want total nuclear destruction of the AE, but I also don't want it to be the 100% go-to that it was. I like AE Farm nerfs, but I don't want AE farming gone if that makes sense. Having non-AE stuff buffed is good too, but that takes time and probably more wrangling than AE changes do. Maybe. Who knows.

[TheZag]

Appreciate it.  I feel caught up.  Who knew so much could fit in so few words.

 

[Black Zot]

35 minutes ago, Shadeknight said:

 The amount of EXP / influence you can get from AE farming versus doing actual content in the game is absurd, 

 

The hard numbers people are putting up in this very thread say you're full of it.  The difference in inf gain per minute has been shown to be marginal, and that's at the bleeding edge.

 

Now granted, there was a time, back on Live, when AE could actually give you an outlandish amount of goodies compared to regular stuff.  But that time was several rounds of nerfs ago, both on live and HC.  Now you have to optimize the everloving shit out of what you're doing to outpace regular content by what, 10-15%?  And as people keep pointing out, that's still a distant second to what you can earn by fooling around at Wentworth's.

[Ukase]

1 hour ago, America's Angel said:

Interesting numbers. Of course they don't factor in the inf cost and time cost of getting the IOs to convert. But still...interesting.

On that, I think we can all agree, it's interesting. 

So, to sum up, I think this is where we're at: 

The proposed changes will likely go through. 
The scalability of afk-farming gives it an edge over pretty much anything - but, since there's only an initial barrier to entry, which every player has gone through, there's really not a true advantage for anyone. But, if the idea of it simply irks, or disgusts, or annoys , or whichever description one chooses, it puts them in a place where they feel like in order to keep up, they have to do something they don't really want to. 

It seems to me that the HC devs are listening to that, and would rather the farmers instead do things they would prefer not to do. At least, that's how it seems to me, based on reading the anti-farmer part of the debate in this thread. 

I believe afk-farmers and farmers alike will adapt, most likely within AE. If I/we/they make a little less per minute, it won't be the end of the world. And the addition of reward merits to the various iTrials will certainly boost the speed runner beyond what most afk farmers who only run 1-2 farmers will take in. At least, that's what I think. Only time will really tell. 

I have learned a bit about some of you in this thread. I have learned that some of you are decent folk, even if I disagree with your position. I have also learned that some of you are ...well, stubborn and don't seem to want to look at other perspectives except through your own doom-colored lenses. 

I honestly don't even know why I'm still typing, lol. I have a level 22 ice/fire brute that I'm leveling up, without any 2xp buffs, and building off of drops, and using converters to fund the way through. (although I did have an alt help me with invader, cuz I'm not about to run 5 radios and a bank mission 8 different times. I want merits to keep funding my way through, while my billions sit idle and basically removed from the economy - until such time the HC devs slap in a tasty inf sink for me. Or allow us to give away temp powers like work benches and such.