The Pretty Good AE Debate

[Frostbiter]

1 hour ago, Shadeknight said:

I'm getting downvoted for just informational (as in answering "wait, what are the changes?" questions) posts.

We live in a society.

 

Don't sweat it. If you aren't pissing people off then you aren't living your true self. Expecting to keep everyone happy is a fool's game.

 

Edited August 12, 2022 by Frostbiter

[Ruin Mage]

Oh I know that all too well, I'm just having fun with it (hence the "We live in a society.")

[Coyotedancer]

1 hour ago, Frostbiter said:

 

Don't sweat it. If you aren't pissing people off then you aren't living your true self. Expecting to keep everyone happy is a fool's game.

 

 

This is true.

 

Besides, the thread needed some humor. It was taking itself way too seriously. When everything is said and done, we're all just playing a game... Something that's meant to be done for good fun no matter how we may individually approach it.

 

 

 

Edited August 12, 2022 by Coyotedancer

[Frostbiter]

10 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

 

This is true.

 

Besides, the thread needed some humor. It was taking itself way too seriously. When everything is said and done, we're all just playing a game... Something that's meant to be done for good fun no matter how we may individually approach it.

 

 

 

 

Says the person who thumbed down my joke from yesterday. Now that's funny! 🤣

[Coyotedancer]

Just now, Frostbiter said:

 

Says the person who thumbed down my joke from yesterday. Now that's funny! 🤣

 

Only for the snark. 😝

[Ukase]

18 hours ago, Shadeknight said:

Bear in mind, besides PVP, there's no basis for any one of us having influence - one could argue that we only have the influence to get rid of changes that aren't quite working/need a different approach. The devs, so far, aren't as radical as forum posters wish them to be. I have my doubts of truly game changing changes like obliterating the AE will go in, but I could be proven wrong.

i just find certain farming forum posters to be funny (not you, coyote. you're cool)
 

 I earned my influence. I am supposed to be able to influence things, that's why it's called influence. Don't you realize that's why they scrapped the initial change out of AE and downgraded to the lesser no emp to reward merit exchange? I used my influence. It was a lot of influence! I had to panic farm for about 5 days to make enough! 


And, no, none of that is true, but what if it was? 

[Marbing]

5 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

Others having a different point of view does not make them a troll.

Yes but, to be fair, the fact that you don’t participate in the mass forum downvote trolls is why I respect you Shard. You actually read the content and downvote specific things. You don’t go through someone’s entire post history and downvote everything they have ever said because of a hissy fit over a difference of opinions.

 

Just saying, there is a difference. 
 

EDIT: To be clear this was just meant to distinguish between what @MoonSheep was saying and the the idea of sharing your opinion. I couldn’t care less if you downvote my opinions, you have that right. Go for it! 
 

EDIT 2: But, I and others might call you out if you’re trolling. 😂

Edited August 12, 2022 by Marbing

[Ruin Mage]

Influence is now becoming a word I dislike.

[MoonSheep]

48 minutes ago, Ukase said:

 I earned my influence. I am supposed to be able to influence things, that's why it's called influence. Don't you realize that's why they scrapped the initial change out of AE and downgraded to the lesser no emp to reward merit exchange? I used my influence. It was a lot of influence! I had to panic farm for about 5 days to make enough! 


And, no, none of that is true, but what if it was? 

 

how very inner circle of you 😉

[ZemX]

12 minutes ago, Shadeknight said:

Influence is now becoming a word I dislike.

 

Infamous, even?

[Coyotedancer]

INFormative?

[ivanhedgehog]

On 8/11/2022 at 1:39 PM, America's Angel said:

 

66% of what it used to. Negligible impact on powerleveling.

1/3rd is not negligible. its 1/3rd. if they deleted 1/3rd of your inf would you shrug and blow it off? no

[battlewraith]

2 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

1/3rd is not negligible. its 1/3rd. if they deleted 1/3rd of your inf would you shrug and blow it off? no

Yeah we want to get people out of AE, so let's nerf the boosters so that it takes longer to pl....so that people spend longer on the farm.....in AE.....

 

These changes, the merit conversion nerf in particular, will do nothing to players who have serious farming routines or regularly make billions on the market. It will fuck over casual players who basically farm when they need to outfit a new alt and who used emp merits to buy enhancements because they don't have tons of cash lying around.

 

If anything, it will probably make afk farming more mandatory, since a substantial amount of players can't commit to continuous blocks of playtime to do the content that the devs apparently want people to be doing.

[ForeverLaxx]

5 hours ago, battlewraith said:

let's nerf the boosters so that it takes longer

A fix isn't a nerf. It went unnoticed (or at least, unreported) for a very long time. Now that they're in the AE again messing with rewards, someone noticed that boosters were giving x3 instead of x2 so it's being fixed.

 

I don't get annoyed by much, but framing a bugfix as a nerf is one of the ways.

[America's Angel]

10 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

1/3rd is not negligible. its 1/3rd. if they deleted 1/3rd of your inf would you shrug and blow it off? no

It's negligible because it only takes ~20 extra minutes to powerlevel to 50.

[The_Warpact]

16 hours ago, Marbing said:

go through someone’s entire post history and downvote everything they have ever said

I only do this to @Troo its a fun game, like a treasure hunt to discover posts I haven't found.😁

 

16 hours ago, Shadeknight said:

Influence is now becoming a word I dislike.

Infamy and Information work too

[Ukase]

9 hours ago, battlewraith said:

Yeah we want to get people out of AE, so let's nerf the boosters so that it takes longer to pl....so that people spend longer on the farm.....in AE.....

 

These changes, the merit conversion nerf in particular, will do nothing to players who have serious farming routines or regularly make billions on the market. It will fuck over casual players who basically farm when they need to outfit a new alt and who used emp merits to buy enhancements because they don't have tons of cash lying around.

 

If anything, it will probably make afk farming more mandatory, since a substantial amount of players can't commit to continuous blocks of playtime to do the content that the devs apparently want people to be doing.

Don't confuse people with logic. 

[arcane]

Casual players wouldn’t have so many empyrean merits lying around that they don’t need them for incarnates. From what I can tell the people complaining about the change have been pretty wealthy on average.

[Loc]

As someone who does a lot of speedies I feel I need to address the supposed profitability of speeding as I completely disagree with what has been said about it so far. Don't get me wrong, speedies can be profitable enough to fully IO your characters assuming you don't make a new one every week, but it just doesn't compare to what farming can give you. The main reason for this is the consistency that farming provides compared to speeding. On a small scale speeding is more profitable assuming you're a decent speeder. However that completely falls apart if you either scale your farming or just farm for longer periods. This is gonna be a somewhat long post but I wanna go through all the different scenarios to give an idea of the profitability of speeding compared to farming.

 

First of all, tinpex is the best merits/min for speedies so it's not the best benchmark. Secondly, I don't see any mention of the time it takes to form a speedy which is often half the time it takes to complete the TF these days (and that's being generous in a lot of cases). Speed trains mitigate this somewhat as between TFs you'll usually only have to fill a couple of spots so we can use a speedtrain as an example. I'll pick some popular speed TFs and assume you're in a team of mostly top speeders so we have a baseline of earnings in near ideal circumstances.

 

So let's say the speedtrain is MLTF (43 merits (37+6) / 11min) - LRSF (25merits / 9min) - ASF (80 merits / 17min) - ITF (26 merits / 6min) - LGTF (37merits / 9min) - tinpex (80 merits / 12min (2*6min)) - Khan (20 merits / 8min) - 20mins for everyone to trickle in and fill the last spots and avg of 2mins in between tfs (12min)

So the result would be 311merits / 104mins or about 3merits/min

 

You might be thinking "that's even better than people said" but these are more or less ideal circumstances I used as a baseline. If I take ideal farming circumstances instead (let's say 9 (semi-)afk farmers spread across the shards doing 1mill/min each) then in that same time I could have farmed 936mill while watching a movie. (not taking drops into account on either of these but drops would obviously be better for the farmer)

 

Now let's say you have a team of regular speeders instead. You can basically add about 50% to that time to get an accurate average completion time, slashing the reward down to 1.88merits/min instead. Still good right? Yes, but these speed trains are still somewhat rare (4 times a week if you're lucky I'd guess) which is the crux of my argument. farming has no such constraints. The only constraints on farming is your PCs processing power and the initial time to level and slot the farmers. Even if I run just one AFK farmer while playing the game I could easily make 50-60mill/hour while playing the game on my other account.

 

If we look at normal LFG speeding you'll find that most of the time it's a single TF where the time to form is often 50%-100% of the time it takes to complete the whole thing. So even if we take the most profitable scenario of a tinpex, in a normal LFG pug the average time to form is probably 10min and each TF will take about 13-15 min on average in this environment giving you a total of 36-40mins on average instead. For all the other TFs the payoff is significantly worse. ASF is probably an average of 15min to form and will be 25-35min on a random LFG pug. ITF will probably be about 10min to form and take 15min to complete and so on.

 

Add onto that that the profit for most people will be far lower as they don't know how to use the market to its fullest extend. Not to mention most people will find playing the market and converting extremely tedious and want to avoid it. (most people I talk to despise having to convert stuff)

 

I should address one caveat to this: WSTs. The double bonus on some weeks will actually give you a huge boost in merits/min so if you have a lot of ioed 50ies you can join the WST trains that week and earn quite well. Most weeks are not that profitable though and I'm still pretty sure farming will eclipse the better weeks if you scale it.

[battlewraith]

4 hours ago, America's Angel said:

It's negligible because it only takes ~20 extra minutes to powerlevel to 50.

 

20 minutes of time. 

 

Ok, let's imagine that we're talking about someone's commute to work. I would imagine that 20 extra minutes on the road would be a really big deal. Now a commute obviously happens more frequently than PLing new characters, but like the commute that extra 20 minutes is going to get tacked on every time a new character is leveled.

 

I wouldn't call that negligible. But if it is truly no big deal, then why fix it? Someone's really going to tweak a variable that has been in play for (years?) and add extra time wasted on an activity just so that they have the satisfaction of correcting a mistake?

[battlewraith]

2 hours ago, arcane said:

Casual players wouldn’t have so many empyrean merits lying around that they don’t need them for incarnates. From what I can tell the people complaining about the change have been pretty wealthy on average.

 

I doubt you know that many casual players. Not everyone bothers with incarnates. After this change, emps are going to be worthless for anything other than incarnates which means losing a resource stream for merits. It also means that for characters who are already done with incarnates, emp merits will be a completely worthless reward.

[Excraft]

12 hours ago, battlewraith said:

It will fuck over casual players who basically farm when they need to outfit a new alt and who used emp merits to buy enhancements because they don't have tons of cash lying around.

 

AKA "the undesirables". 

[Excraft]

4 hours ago, America's Angel said:

It's negligible because it only takes ~20 extra minutes to powerlevel to 50.

 

Negligible to you running fully kitted toons, to the casual player not so much.

[MoonSheep]

11 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 

I doubt you know that many casual players. Not everyone bothers with incarnates. After this change, emps are going to be worthless for anything other than incarnates which means losing a resource stream for merits. It also means that for characters who are already done with incarnates, emp merits will be a completely worthless reward.

 

true, as a balancing change however, a number of trials are getting a significant boost to merit rewards - for casual players it may even result in an increase of merits received per hour of gameplay

 

a stream lost, a stream gained

[battlewraith]

1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:

true, as a balancing change however, a number of trials are getting a significant boost to merit rewards - for casual players it may even result in an increase of merits received per hour of gameplay

 

It might. But this assumes that the casual player can and will commit to doing the type of content that awards these additional merits. People that wanted to avoid teaming or have limited time to commit to trials are going to be expected to do this. Or just grind a ton more inf in order to make up for the merits that they can no longer expect to get.

 

1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:

a stream lost, a stream gained

 

Most of this discussion seems to assume a generic player that is only concerned with grinding content in order to get rewards. So in this mindset, you can remove one incentive and put something different in play and as long as the end result is more or less the same numerically, all is good.

 

To me this is more along the lines of an employee at a company who has been working remotely for a couple of years due to the pandemic or some other reason. Management decides that the in-office culture of the company is suffering because a lot, if not most, of the employees prefer to work remotely. So they mandate a pay decrease for remote employees and offer a bonus for working in the office. And then they are confused when employee morale drops even though people could make more money working in the office.