Sins of the Devs are visited upon the players

[Coyotedancer]

RL is such a grindy game... 

[ivanhedgehog]

6 hours ago, The_Warpact said:

I think everyone is missing a couple of key things. Hard Mode isn't a required way of playing.

Secondly, you do have the right to choose to play on those teams or more effectively start your own.

@Sanguinesun if "min/maxed" players are spamming Barrier then they aren't min/maxed.

 

 

Hardmode is not required. but it is required if you want to get enough prismatics before the heat death of the universe. 24 million each? buying them isnt an option for most. they dont drop for non 50's from the wst. They are pretty much designed for either real deep pockets or HM. They have done exactly what wow did when they locked the good rewards behind mythic. Its not required until it is.

[The_Warpact]

17 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Hardmode is not required. but it is required if you want to get enough prismatics before the heat death of the universe. 24 million each? buying them isnt an option for most. they dont drop for non 50's from the wst. They are pretty much designed for either real deep pockets or HM. They have done exactly what wow did when they locked the good rewards behind mythic. Its not required until it is.

Yeah in that instance it should be unlocked across the board. Waiting till 50s incarnate stuff to unlock costume pieces that should be accessible as soon you can start playing your toon seems stupid.

What happens if you have a theme and want to play that part, wait till 50+? 

Unfortunately, I paid zero attention to this during beta, I have little interest in pay2costume options.

[Luminara]

27 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:

Waiting till 50s incarnate stuff to unlock costume pieces that should be accessible as soon you can start playing your toon seems stupid.

 

[ivanhedgehog]

3 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

of course you have to do thousands of missions to get the prismatics....you will probably be on your 6th 50 before you unlock enough. if you do every mission in the game. they drop at a 1 in 50 rate from missions. 500 missions to unlock 1 basic costume. not gonna happen

 

[Bionic_Flea]

I do think that Aethers should drop for non-50s in the WSF arcs.  I don't think that there is a good reason to prevent non-50s from acquiring them that way.  It's not incarnate related; it doesn't add to any power creep; it is only cosmetic.

[Luminara]

11 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

of course you have to do thousands of missions to get the prismatics....you will probably be on your 6th 50 before you unlock enough. if you do every mission in the game. they drop at a 1 in 50 rate from missions. 500 missions to unlock 1 basic costume. not gonna happen

 

 

I've acquired four doing nothing but tips and scanner missions, on four different characters.  A drop each day, less than an hour of play time.  The one shown in that screenshot, I just selected that tip and ran it to see if I could get a screenshot of a prismatic dropping on a sub-50 character.  1 mission, base difficulty, five minutes, prismatic from casual play.

 

Looks like you're wrong again.  At least you're consistent.

[Black Zot]

6 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

I've acquired four doing nothing but tips and scanner missions, on four different characters.  A drop each day, less than an hour of play time.  The one shown in that screenshot, I just selected that tip and ran it to see if I could get a screenshot of a prismatic dropping on a sub-50 character.  1 mission, base difficulty, five minutes, prismatic from casual play.

 

 

Lucky you.  I've had exactly ONE drop since the patch.

[Seed22]

1 minute ago, Black Zot said:

 

Lucky you.  I've had exactly ONE drop since the patch.

Same. But I also do HM for the fun of it(3*. 4* is not happening) 1 drop from mishs so far 

[Coyotedancer]

12 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

 

Lucky you.  I've had exactly ONE drop since the patch.

 

Same here.

 

I've gotten only one as a mission drop in the last two weeks. On Tenkyoku, a 50, from a Dark Astoria mission. My other four? From duoing a pair of WSTs with the White Thorn version of Kai, My two in=progress lowbies have yet to see one, 

[Bill Z Bubba]

29 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Looks like you're wrong again.  At least you're consistent.

 

18 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

Lucky you.  I've had exactly ONE drop since the patch.

 

RNG is gonna RNG. I've gotten exactly zero... but I'm not playing CoH either. Guess I could take a break from killin zombies and run 10 DA repeatables... see what's what.

[Coyotedancer]

3 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

 

RNG is gonna RNG. I've gotten exactly zero... but I'm not playing CoH either. Guess I could take a break from killin zombies and run 10 DA repeatables... see what's what.

 

I ran enough of them to build all of Tenk's iToys and only got one... So it's not impossible that you may come out of it still a member of the Zero Club, The RNG is a harsh, harsh thing. 😝

[Yomo Kimyata]

I'd like to remind everyone of two things:

 

1.  If there is a 2% drop rate, you have a 50-50 chance of having had [EDIT: at least] one drop after completing 34 missions.  I don't know if you think that is a lot of missions or not, and it certainly isn't a guarantee that one will drop.  Or maybe 34 will drop!  But I wouldn't count on it.

 

2.  As far as I recall, every method listed in this Guide of Guides still works.  You may choose to not use marketing techniques to accumulate inf, as is your right.  But it's a heckuva lot faster than farming, taskforces, or even complaining to the devs!

 

Happy hunting!

Edited September 5, 2022 by Yomo Kimyata

[ivanhedgehog]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

 

I've acquired four doing nothing but tips and scanner missions, on four different characters.  A drop each day, less than an hour of play time.  The one shown in that screenshot, I just selected that tip and ran it to see if I could get a screenshot of a prismatic dropping on a sub-50 character.  1 mission, base difficulty, five minutes, prismatic from casual play.

 

Looks like you're wrong again.  At least you're consistent.

they told you the drop rate if you can read. 2%. 1 drop in 50. your anecdotes dont change that. math is hard for you I guess.

[Luminara]

47 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

they told you the drop rate if you can read. 2%. 1 drop in 50. your anecdotes dont change that. math is hard for you I guess.

 

It's a 2% chance every time a mission is completed, not a restriction which prevents a prismatic from dropping more frequently than once in every fifty missions.  That's not how the math for determining averages works, and it's not how drop chances work in this game.  After 34 missions (thank you, @Yomo Kimyata, for the starting point for this math), the likelihood that at least one has dropped reaches .98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98*.98= 0.5031373679776309%, which we can round down to 50%.

 

@Yomo Kimyata dropped that information, as well as the layman's explanation, in the post just above yours, more than half an hour before you launched this miserably failure of an attack on my intelligence.

 

You also didn't punctuate don't.  Or capitalize your sentences.  And you're missing a comma in the first and last sentences.

 

Next time you want to start a battle of wits with me, come armed.

[ForeverLaxx]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

Next time you want to start a battle of wits with me, come armed

To be fair, it's rather difficult to have a debate or "battle of wits" with someone who tends to be overly self-righteous and believes themselves to be faultless in nearly every encounter. When you're not posting silly nothing-posts for stickers, you're declaring yourself the smartest person in the discussion currently at hand. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but you seem to believe you've always got the answer regardless of topic.

 

I don't actually care about these vanity costumes, but since you want to talk numbers and belittle people who do basic logic (I mean honestly, a 2% chance means every 100 runs should net you 2 drops on average, or 1 drop every 50 runs; it's not a question of probability over consecutive runs and a 50/50 probability after 34 runs still isn't a guarantee. There's a reason you look at the entire picture and not just a tiny slice of it), I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that these 34 runs always coinflip in my favor and I get a drop. For the record, this would be 3 drops per 100 runs, which is more than the expected value, but let's roll with it. What does that look like?

 

34 runs for a single drop translates into 340 runs for 10 drops (the minimum reward level for the most basic outfit). This is already above the expected threshold and would constitute "good luck" to the player, but let's go with it anyway. With your own claim of 5 minutes of casual play in a mission, 340 runs becomes 1700 minutes of play time. Cut that into hours, because that's more useful, and you have roughly 28-29 hours of time to get the most basic level reward from this system doing 5 minute radio missions back to back. This means if you play for one hour each day for a month, you could reasonably expect a single vanity costume, but only if you're lucky and only if you do nothing else with your time. If you want the basic modal costumes it will take you a month and a half at this generous rate. And all of this assumes that you do nothing but run radios for an hour, have zero travel time, and complete each mission in the span of 5 minutes on top of winning a coin flip on every 34th run. That's not realistic but those are the numbers you want to play with and I still think it's too much.

 

Again, I don't actually care about these costume things, and "heat death of the universe" is a bit hyperbolic, but it seems a bit excessive that the lowest level reward for an entirely cosmetic item requires an entire month of daily 1 hour play doing nothing but 5 minute radio missions without ever taking a break. Can you get slightly luckier than even this and maybe cut a session or two out? Sure, but you can also go on longer streaks without any drops and end up taking longer. Remember, even with this apparent best-case scenario, you're running 340 missions for minimum drops when the expected count for 10 drops would be roughly 500 missions over a long enough sample period. You're already assuming good luck to counter the argument and that's not a great place to be, if you ask me, and this says nothing about how long it's going to take for the real vanity rewards that are going to cost hundreds or thousands of aethers.

 

Of course, you didn't ask me but, like you, I don't care if you asked me or not.

Edited September 6, 2022 by ForeverLaxx

[lemming]

Yoma gave the math, Luminara punctuated it.   0.98^50 gives 36% chance of you not getting one during the streak.   I got blessed by RNG the other day by getting three Prismatic's in six missions, but the RNG is a fickle beast and none of my other characters has had one drop at the end of a mission. 😉

[melancholicmoods]

On 9/2/2022 at 3:31 PM, biostem said:

First, when CoH was young, there were only Blasters, Defenders, Scrappers, Tankers, and Controllers.  Blasters were the only ones who had extensive access to both ranged and melee attacks via their primary or secondary sets.  Instead of calling them a "ranged blaster" or a "melee blaster", the term "blapper" was coined for the latter.  I do recall the term "scranker" being used somewhat for a scrapper who invested more in survivability and the presence pool, however.  After CoV was introduced, there were some people calling themselves "tankerminds", and controllers who slotted their primaries more for damage were sometimes called "blastrollers"...

Exactly, blappers were those blasters who almost solely fought in melee range, and often got themselves killed because of it since blasters were much squishier back then. But most of the strongest blaster powers are in the secondary so if you want to do the most damage you're going to "blap"!

[Neiska]

I have found four prisms in total since the patch went live. I gave them to a close friend because she adores the costume stuff, and I don't. And she's helped me out in the past so I thought she might appreciate them more than I.

 

But I would like to take a moment and gesture upwards. The people who wonder why there are those of us who don't run ITFs and so on? This. This right here is why. If I wanted to deal with aloof egotistic people, I could do it in any other game. Just take a sit back and see how people treat each other. How they speak to one another here on the forums. Now put that into an ITF or worse, a hard mode, 2 or 3 stars. Now "your" runs might be all grand, but for some of us, it is such an unpleasant experience that we don't care what carrot or stick they use, we flat out won't do it. Because it's really starting to look like Wow Barrens Chat/Diablo Pvp/League of Legends/Call of Duty communities.

 

It's okay to disagree. People get heated. I am guilty of that myself. But we are a small community, and an older one at that. I would hope that such things were beneath us, at least on face value. But it's gotten to the point that if it is no longer feasible to solo play or farm, a growing number of people will sooner leave than partake of those activities, even if they gave a billion inf and every purple.

 

My two cents for what it's worth.

[espectro]

Simple. 2% chance every time. After 34 tries, 36% chance you don't get anything. 75% chance that forgot to keep track of the runs at some point. 50% chance that there's something wrong about the calculation anyway.

[Ukase]

7 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Hardmode is not required. but it is required if you want to get enough prismatics before the heat death of the universe. 24 million each? buying them isnt an option for most. they dont drop for non 50's from the wst. They are pretty much designed for either real deep pockets or HM. They have done exactly what wow did when they locked the good rewards behind mythic. Its not required until it is.

I just did the math. 
If the objective is for badges, you need 150 of them, at 24M each, you're looking at 6.3B. 

I realize for ...half of you, maybe, that seems like some obscene amount of influence. 

I'm not going to win any affection by stating it's a pittance. IF you wanted to, you could earn that in, well, hard to say, as it would depend on how you spend your time in game. If you run level 50 content with a large team, and did no traditional AE farming or marketing, I think the math works out to: 

25M hour, so, about 6 weeks if you played an hour a day. That's just going off of my memory on a kill most ITF from a couple of years ago. I recall it getting me about 25M. I can't recall what the difficulty setting was, as I despise a kill most anything unless I'm in a specific mood. I'm sure others will have some fun coming up with their own math. 

If you crafted your drops, used reward merits to get converters and used the converters on your crafted IOs, sold those crafted IOs that typically went for 2-4M, you can get that loot a lot quicker. Exponentially quicker. Do you want to spend the time crafting, or bashing heads running content? Maybe do a little of both. Whatever's fun for you. 

I'd also like to offer up this for your consideration:

Just suppose you were gifted with the 6.3B or, someone traded you the 150 Prismatics for all the badges for nothing. 

You'd have no goal. No reason to run the new stuff. No figurative carrots to chase. Is that really what you want? One less figurative carrot? There's no wrong answer, it's a rhetorical question. Food for thought, so to speak. 

 

[lemming]

For most players, 6.3B is a large amount of influence.  If you consider it a pittance, then yea, you're getting higher returns at a much higher rate than normal play.

 

I play a decent amount, but I don't try to max my influence return, it's not what I find interesting.  If I want to outfit a character it just takes me a few days of screwing around either seeing which characters have the recipes needed, or a bit of converter roulette.   I do have 99 50s, most are just outfitted with generic IOs, and between drops etc, it's not a big deal.  Occasionally I'll build up some influence via AH crafting, etc...

I probably have 2-4B influence total in liquid inf.

 

For the aethers, I doubt I'll bother buying any and will just build them up via the occasional HM and other methods to get the badges, then will see how the other tiers get priced.  150 is doable and an alright amount of effort.

Like I said earlier (or maybe elsewhere) on the number of aethers needed for costumes, the tier 1s seem to be at an OK price, the other tiers first proposed prices are more inflated.

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, ForeverLaxx said:

To be fair, it's rather difficult to have a debate or "battle of wits" with someone who tends to be overly self-righteous and believes themselves to be faultless in nearly every encounter. When you're not posting silly nothing-posts for stickers, you're declaring yourself the smartest person in the discussion currently at hand. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but you seem to believe you've always got the answer regardless of topic.

 

Regardless of your opinion of me, I am intelligent enough to know that engaging in a pissing contest in this thread would just lead to it being locked, a slap on the wrist for one or both of us and even more unpleasantness in the future.  Go antagonize someone else, I'm not biting that worm.

 

2 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

a 2% chance means every 100 runs should net you 2 drops on average, or 1 drop every 50 runs; it's not a question of probability over consecutive runs and a 50/50 probability after 34 runs still isn't a guarantee. There's a reason you look at the entire picture and not just a tiny slice of it

 

Focusing on the 2% is looking at the little picture and ignoring the big picture.

 

2 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

34 runs for a single drop translates into 340 runs for 10 drops (the minimum reward level for the most basic outfit). This is already above the expected threshold and would constitute "good luck" to the player, but let's go with it anyway. With your own claim of 5 minutes of casual play in a mission, 340 runs becomes 1700 minutes of play time. Cut that into hours, because that's more useful, and you have roughly 28-29 hours of time to get the most basic level reward from this system doing 5 minute radio missions back to back. This means if you play for one hour each day for a month, you could reasonably expect a single vanity costume, but only if you're lucky and only if you do nothing else with your time. If you want the basic modal costumes it will take you a month and a half at this generous rate. And all of this assumes that you do nothing but run radios for an hour, have zero travel time, and complete each mission in the span of 5 minutes on top of winning a coin flip on every 34th run. That's not realistic but those are the numbers you want to play with and I still think it's too much.

 

I ran to my mission.  I cleared the map.  I fought a +1 boss.  So now let's factor the rate for players don't do that, who game the system.  -1/x0/NoBoss/NoAV, Reveal, ghost to the end with Super Speed, insta-gib three minions or one minion and one lieutenant and maybe click a glowie.  How long does that take?  90 seconds?  Let's factor for the zero travel time that you posited, since it didn't apply to my run.  And we can't forget that they almost certainly have SSHDs (this is not up for debate.  i have one and i bought it when i was earning less than $6000/year (no, there isn't a zero missing, i really do live well below the poverty level.  slightly higher now, but still below the line).  if i have one, there's no reasonable argument to be made that the average player doesn't), so load times are a few seconds.

 

Ultimately, these players can complete missions in ~2 minutes, back to back.  That's 30 missions every hour.  SS to the end, stab stab stab, click, Exit Mission, select mission, TP, rinse, repeat.  68 minutes to reach the 50% statistical likelihood that one drops, culminating in an 11.34 hour average, instead of 28, for 10 prismatics.  Solo, zero risk.

 

That is realistic.  We know players can do this because they were doing it on the original servers, they're doing it on these servers.  They talk about doing it on the forums.  They share their builds.  *Fs aren't the only thing  people "speed run".  Hell, I do it when it's an enemy group I'm just sick of dealing with, like Freakshow.  A petless mastermind can pull off ~2 minute runs back to back.

 

I'd also like to emphasize that last sentence of the second to last paragraph.  Solo, zero risk.  That's why it's a 2% chance.  It's not fantastic, but since it can be done rapidly and without a chance of being defeated, it's a fair compromise between Hard Mode rewards and zilch.  It's more than zilch, which, if this were still under the purview of Cryptic or Paragon, is exactly what it would be.  Or they would've gone through every mission in the game and made them all Defeat All.  HC went a different way.  2% limits the casual player, a little, but it limits him/her less than 0%, or being forced to play a specific way or through specific content, and it's not such a drastic limitation that experienced players can't leverage the system to accumulate them in a reasonable time (11.34 hours is barely more than an hour a day), without spending inf* or running Hard Modes.

[ForeverLaxx]

40 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Go antagonize someone else, I'm not biting that worm

Antagonize? Merely pointing out why so few people who don't agree with you choose to engage. You prove the point with your followup "uh, actually" rant.

 

At any rate, you did as predicted and gathered up a bunch of new numbers once your original set was proven to still be a problem for casual play standards. If you want to move the goal posts, fine. I played soccer for 17 years and can hit a moving target. That said, nothing of what you claim can be considered "casual play," merely optimized play. Casual players aren't often going into a session with the express purpose of SS/Stealthing radios for an hour a day for 2 weeks straight just to get an NPC Costume. It can be argued that "casual play" isn't meant to get more than the most basic NPC Costume Vanity but that wasn't the contention. The contention was the time it takes for a casual player to get them and, using your original numbers (which you proclaimed to be simple, casual play), an entire month of spending 1 hour every single day chaining Radios is what's expected as a best-case scenario. That doesn't sound like casual play to me at all. Honestly you'd probably earn enough influence doing that to just buy them from the market directly instead of wasting your time to maximize such a poorly thought out "casual earning" system.

 

And that's the real problem.

 

You want to harp on that 50%? Hitting that 50% three times in a row is only a 12.5% chance, and that's just for the first 100 runs. You have to do that 2 additional times, plus another two more 50% rolls to get what you claim. That's why it's useless to consider it a given as you want so badly to do. Am I to assume that your 50% hits 12.5% of the time 100% of the time? There's a reason I pointed out that that would be considered a lucky streak, but you really want to base your entire argument on anecdotal lucky streaks and modify it further with intentional min/maxing of time vs reward (plus PC hardware!) just to pretend you continue to have a leg up with the figures?

 

Don't make me laugh. I've said my piece and shown how relatively unreasonable the base system is. It's only going to be worse for the higher tier rewards. I suppose those filthy casuals aren't meant to have them, or something.

Edited September 6, 2022 by ForeverLaxx

[Glacier Peak]

20 minutes ago, ForeverLaxx said:

Antagonize? Merely pointing out why so few people who don't agree with you choose to engage. You prove the point with your followup "uh, actually" rant.

 

At any rate, you did as predicted and gathered up a bunch of new numbers once your original set was proven to still be a problem for casual play standards. If you want to move the goal posts, fine. I played soccer for 17 years and can hit a moving target. That said, nothing of what you claim can be considered "casual play," merely optimized play. Casual players aren't often going into a session with the express purpose of SS/Stealthing radios for an hour a day for 2 weeks straight just to get an NPC Costume. It can be argued that "casual play" isn't meant to get more than the most basic NPC Costume Vanity but that wasn't the contention. The contention was the time it takes for a casual player to get them and, using your original numbers (which you proclaimed to be simple, casual play), an entire month of spending 1 hour every single day chaining Radios is what's expected as a best-case scenario. That doesn't sound like casual play to me at all. Honestly you'd probably earn enough influence doing that to just buy them from the market directly instead of wasting your time to maximize such a poorly thought out "casual earning" system.

 

And that's the real problem.

 

You want to harp on that 50%? Hitting that 50% three times in a row is only a 12.5% chance, and that's just for the first 100 runs. You have to do that 2 additional times, plus another two more 50% rolls to get what you claim. That's why it's useless to consider it a given as you want so badly to do. Am I assume that your 50% hits 12.5% of the time 100% of the time? There's a reason I pointed out that that would be considered a lucky streak, but you really want to base your entire argument on anecdotal lucky streaks and modify it further with intentional min/maxing of time vs reward (plus PC hardware!) just to pretend you continue to have a leg up with the figures?

 

Don't make me laugh. I've said my piece and shown how relatively unreasonable the base system is. It's only going to be worse for the higher tier rewards. I suppose those filthy casuals aren't meant to have them, or something.

I'm a casual player. I went on to the beta server and granted myself 10,000 Prismatic Aether Particles then proceeded to unlock everything, then granted myself some more when I ran out. Took me about 10 minutes to do that. Tried on all the cool tier costumes. Instant gratification and all that. 

 

I'm thinking, what's the point beyond vanity? I don't need other people to see my character in an NPC costume and say how awesome I am for wearing an entirely cosmetic reward offered voluntarily with multiple methods to earn. I enjoy the look all on my own and can appreciate the effort it took for the devs to make it happen. And if, for some reason beyond my concern, the need to earn these entirely optional cosmetic rewards on the live shards arose, I'd earn them over time as they were intended to be earned because that's the way this server is ran. These are the rules players play by. I don't play with an ounce of entitlement, so that's probably why I can't empathize with the crazy people I keep seeing in this thread who are just complaining because this is a platform to do so and think they are owed the world. I say go to the beta shard and enjoy the instant gratification there 😆 

Edited September 6, 2022 by Glacier Peak