Farm nerfs

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

Playing on test is sooo easy now.

Insta50 and Incarnates. Can even export an file with all the enhancement shopping in it. I don't know what folks don't play there more. Sure it can get wiped but it's so easy now to spin or respin up a character.

Yes, but then my old undead brain thinks I have a Elec/Dark whatever and I look for it for three hours then remember it was only on test.  All the work I have done on ATs is saved on live, many still fully built out.

[Glacier Peak]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

Playing on test is sooo easy now.

Insta50 and Incarnates. Can even export an file with all the enhancement shopping in it. I don't know what folks don't play there more. Sure it can get wiped but it's so easy now to spin or respin up a character.

You know what, I've started to do the same! Had a character on there since Issue 26 and it hasn't been deleted or wiped. Though I do know it could be at any moment. 

[Wavicle]

It sounds like maybe the mission you were in was out of date.

[MistressOhm]

I do recall that it's not nearly as easy to set up a map with EB's - now the most you can get are bosses, which aren't as valuable XP wise.    

[QuiJon]

On 10/9/2022 at 8:34 AM, Coyotedancer said:

 

I suspect they really, really wanted us all to give up our farms and run their Hard Mode content as often as possible. In spite of a lot of us being people who either don't have that kind of time or don't have any desire to team. 

Even if this is the case, frankly to me the hardest of the hard modes require that you have a built up character. And to get that with out a ton of time investment requires influence. Yet they seem dead set on nerfing the people that want to farm because they falsely seem to thinking CREATING money farming causes inflation in a game with fake money. Yet someone can play the market take the money being made by farmers and stockpile it into billions in far less time then the farmers spent earning it playing in missions (even if it was a farming mission they are playing) and that seems perfectly acceptable. 

 

And yet each time they nerf farming or "fix" a exploit as they want to call it, what we see is not a decrease in the value of things on the market, but an increase. If they truly want to get people out of farms, and get them playing they need to address both farming AND marketeering. 

 

When the game cost money i get why you wanted time sinks to create need to keep playing. We dont need that anymore. So fine, take away AFK farming i get that is kind of cheap to begin with. But in game farming i dont think should pay any less xp then being able to get full xp with the boosters, which costs you all your influence. Or half xp and normal influence with no boosters. But we need to fix marketeering to where people have options to NOT need hundreds of millions of influence to deck out a toon in a timely manner. 

 

My first suggestion is to lower all the costs of items to obtain with merits. 50 merits per purple, winter, or ATO IO. 40 merits for PVP IOs, 30 for normal Orange, 20 per Yellow.  Also increase the drop rate of purples a couple more percentage points so they naturally fall faster, and make ATOs reward drops with the current level of purple drop frequency. And half all the costs of the packs that grant Winter and ATOs.

 

Doing that would make it easier to earn merits to build your characters faster, make drops a bit more frequent and make you have to buy less from the market, and lowering the merit costs and pack costs puts a ceiling on what is worth actually spending on the market bringing down the cost of the IOs that do go on the market. And the last thing is to only allow convertor use on IOs that are locked to your account. So thus giving you personally the ability to play the random game to build your own character, but once they are converted once they become account locked and can not be sold to another. So the marketeering of people converting crap into billioons of influence is over. You can only sell what you naturally obtained. 

 

The only way to control the problem of needing the cash to build a toon is to make the cost cheaper across the board and the only way to do that is to not only limit the cash flow INTO the game, but to control also ultimately the cost of items in the game to a level that the time investment to build a character naturally seen as the BEST option to finish off your toon build instead of the least effective. And right now market games still make that an easier option then farming, it is just less visible because it is mostly a solo effort. 

 

[BlackSpectre]

On 10/9/2022 at 1:38 AM, Coyotedancer said:

 

You would have gone faster with one farmer and one lowbie. Having three or more people on the map slows you down, since the increase in clearing speed and "team bonus" won't really be enough to offset the reward splitting. 

Not entirely true. Depends on how you run it. If the farm is being farmed by 2 toons that can both easily farm the mission solo, and if they start on opposite sides of the map and meet in the middle... the map ends up being completed in half the time... which doubles the XP rate (XP over time).  

[BlackSpectre]

7 hours ago, QuiJon said:

If they truly want to get people out of farms, and get them playing they need to address both farming AND marketeering. 

I see your point. When I first joined Homecoming, I hopped on my fire/spines brute and farmed up a storm just to get Inf. I did calculations and time/cost benefit spreadsheets, and figured out the best missions to farm for the best Inf yield. The best I found yielded 41 million inf per hour. However... that was before I started playing the market. For 15 minutes of buying and selling per day, I can earn 1 Billion inf in 10 days or less. A couple months of that, and I haven't had any monetary issues whatsoever since. I just buy whatever I want, when I want it. In fact, if it wasn't for me bankrolling everyone in my SG, I wouldn't have had to play the market ever again. As it is, I've only played the market again once in over 2 years. So I see your point, but frankly the whole monetary thing doesn't apply to me anymore.  It doesn't have to apply to you either. However...

 

What if you're here to play a superhero and not a stock broker? Valid point. Then you're forced to farm if you want anything other than basic IOs.   

 

 

7 hours ago, QuiJon said:

My first suggestion is to lower all the costs of items to obtain with merits. 50 merits per purple, winter, or ATO IO. 40 merits for PVP IOs, 30 for normal Orange, 20 per Yellow.  Also increase the drop rate of purples a couple more percentage points so they naturally fall faster, and make ATOs reward drops with the current level of purple drop frequency. And half all the costs of the packs that grant Winter and ATOs.

This is actually a good idea. I've never bought recipes using reward merits because it's just too expensive in time spent earning reward merits to do it that way. I don't know about the reduced costs suggested above, but maybe some sort of price drop would be a good idea to help support the new player base The average Reward Merit to time ratio in the game seems to be about 30 reward merits per hour. That is without attempting to hunt down and farm the missions with the best Reward Merit yields. There are, of course, better yields in the game. If the reason to farm is to earn Inf, then increasing reward merit yields or reducing reward merit costs (or both), sounds like a very good idea to get many people out of the AE buildings.

 

P.S.  Leveling a character from 0-50 yields  me  about 150 reward merits by the time I'm 50. This is with an XP booster. Without an XP booster, it would probably be double that because I'd be able to complete more mission arcs, but also double the time.  This should give you an idea of what a new player might earn just by playing the game and not farming at all. At the current 50 reward merits per recipe, a new player would be able to buy a total of 3 set IOs... not even a complete set! 

 

If you instead farm for inf for 1 hour, 41 million will buy you 8 set IOs (probably more actually, but I went high). Whereas, farming for reward merits for an hour wouldn't even allow you to buy a single set IO.  See the imbalance?

Edited October 11, 2022 by BlackSpectre
P.S.

[LockeValken]

I was in that tunnel; can tell you it was nothing like it was 1 year ago. I read the patch notes and think it was definitely due to AE mob xp changes (not exactly sure how that works, i dont make AEs) and the x3 bug. Was faster to get a couple levels the ancient way, but wasn't a big deal either way, had fun chatting and dying.  

[Ukase]

On 10/8/2022 at 11:04 PM, Snarky said:

I seriously used to take a level 1-50 in 3 hours like clockwork, just me solo.  There were three of us farmers pulling one guy for almost an hour and got two levels

 

Bottom line… I am not buying the 2x was 3x but it is fixed. It does not take the ability to do calculus to know there was a way bigger nerf than a 50% difference.  
 

They nerfed the crap out of farming from what I just saw.  

So, while you were in WoW, a lot of things occurred that had a genuine impact on afk farmers, for sure. And active farmers were also impact, but to a lesser degree. At least, with an active farmer you can gobble a purple insp or some reds or maybe a green if you need them. 

With these changes - and tons of heated debate that went with them - we learned that incoming damage is now going by a different set of rules, and it's not terribly clear to me what those rules are - I just know my afk farmers could no longer afk farm without a respec.  And after the next patch, given the proposed changes to the procs in irradiated ground, they may (or may not be) tenable any longer for afk purposes. For me, not a real big deal. I've already made my loot. For others, yeah, it's going to bug them. 

Consider your afk farmers as the baby, and the concept of afk-farming as the bath water. 

Well...that may be too harsh. Some folks will adjust and still be able to afk-farm, most likely. 

So, there is this whole 3x to 2x fix...and candidly, I didn't think it was broken. But I never paid attention. It's still faster xp than we had on live, so I'm all for that. 

Rather than rehash all the stuff that I've been in words with so many people about on these forums, ask me about it over discord and I'll do my level best to explain what they've done, why they've done it and my best guess as to why they're going the direction they're going. 




 

[biostem]

2 hours ago, Ukase said:

So, there is this whole 3x to 2x fix...and candidly, I didn't think it was broken.

It's not hard to test - take a sub-50, defeat 1 enemy, note the XP, then go and get the double XP buff, defeat another enemy of the same type, and note the XP.  If the one from the 2nd test is twice that of the first, it's working correctly.  Next you need to examine the farm you're using, or if you don't have access to it, note the exact powers the mobs are using, and try to create a similar enemy in your own AE mission, and see what % of XP they grant, because that has been lowered unless they have more powers.  Lastly, enemies beyond the aggro cap will still fling ranged attacks at you, unless there are other player characters in range of them, so that will account for increased incoming damage. 

[Ukase]

25 minutes ago, biostem said:

It's not hard to test - take a sub-50, defeat 1 enemy, note the XP, then go and get the double XP buff, defeat another enemy of the same type, and note the XP.  If the one from the 2nd test is twice that of the first, it's working correctly.  Next you need to examine the farm you're using, or if you don't have access to it, note the exact powers the mobs are using, and try to create a similar enemy in your own AE mission, and see what % of XP they grant, because that has been lowered unless they have more powers.  Lastly, enemies beyond the aggro cap will still fling ranged attacks at you, unless there are other player characters in range of them, so that will account for increased incoming damage. 

It's not a question of difficulty of testing for me. It's seeing a need to test it in the first place. Why would anyone do this? Further, why would they report it? 

As a real life example, if I notice I got more xp than I expected to get, I might retry it, just to confirm. And if I did, I would say to myself, "interesting". But in order for me to see it as an actual exploit worthy of reporting, it would have to give me a f**kton. Like, 50 to 100X for me to even notice it. 

The only time I notice XP is when I'm not getting any, (for whatever reason, like the game somehow turned it off, or for whatever reason, I turned it off) and when I complete a story arc, I make a note of how much I got, to see if the story arc is worth repeating on the next character. For whatever reason, some pay more than others. 

I cannot fathom what kind of person said to themself "Hey! This is too much XP. We better put a stop to this!" And then that same person actually reports it as if they were doing the game a favor. It's just being insane. We were all doing fine with it, oblivious to the fact it was more than we're supposed to get. It's like a kid in elementary school raising his hand to be the hall monitor, ratting on his classmates. A legit nerd. I just hope they got bug hunter for such nerdish behavior. If not, shame on the devs. Because if it was bad enough to fix, then it's good enough to reward the badge. 

 

 

[biostem]

3 minutes ago, Ukase said:

It's not a question of difficulty of testing for me. It's seeing a need to test it in the first place. Why would anyone do this? Further, why would they report it? 

Some people care about that stuff...  *** shrugs ***

[lemming]

On 10/10/2022 at 12:07 PM, MistressOhm said:

I do recall that it's not nearly as easy to set up a map with EB's - now the most you can get are bosses, which aren't as valuable XP wise.    

That is not my experience.   As long as the mobs have EBs, it will use them in the Boss portion of any mob.

You do have to have bosses turned on for notoriety, +4/x8 to be sure to have a large enough group, yada yada yada

[Number Six]

42 minutes ago, Ukase said:

It's not a question of difficulty of testing for me. It's seeing a need to test it in the first place. Why would anyone do this? Further, why would they report it?

 

Nobody reported it. It was discovered somewhat accidentally when a developer set the AE XP scale on their local box to *0* for a different test (don't freak out, it's not what you might think) and found, much to their surprise, that they were still getting XP.

 

Turned out to be because a booster was active, and investigating that led to discovering that the way the separate XP scale for AE was implemented was completely wrong and boosters stacked additively with it instead of multiplicatively. There was some initial disbelief that it could possibly have been wrong the whole time without anyone noticing, but at that point it was tested on live to confirm and sure enough turned out to be the case.

[Cyber Bishop]

On 10/9/2022 at 6:01 AM, America's Angel said:

In Page 4 this is still possible.

 

I was going to say this as well.

[Ukase]

16 minutes ago, Number Six said:

 

Nobody reported it. It was discovered somewhat accidentally when a developer set the AE XP scale on their local box to *0* for a different test (don't freak out, it's not what you might think) and found, much to their surprise, that they were still getting XP.

 

Turned out to be because a booster was active, and investigating that led to discovering that the way the separate XP scale for AE was implemented was completely wrong and boosters stacked additively with it instead of multiplicatively. There was some initial disbelief that it could possibly have been wrong the whole time without anyone noticing, but at that point it was tested on live to confirm and sure enough turned out to be the case.

I think we need a historian to keep these interesting tidbits available so we can look at them later. 
So, it was discovered by accident. And fixed on purpose. 
Generally, as an outsider looking in, every change comes from someone. And if we're all players, the impetus for the change came from a player. So, the question is still worth asking. 

The person that discovered it - do they not play the game? Did they not see how it would impact the perceptions of players?  

On the other hand, with 2xp(fixed version) giving plenty of XP, I don't want to overact - but still, why would anyone fix this? If they level up their characters, they'd have to appreciate the boost. And if they PL to 50, they'd certainly appreciate the saved time. 

I just don't see it as a win/win fix. More like a lose/lose fix. But that's just my opinion. 

I'm of the mind that we should have insta-50 as an inf sink for a nominal 10m to 50M inf cost. I understand why some folks would be against it, but I certainly get why some folks want it. 

See, if I were in that closed Beta and this discrepancy was brought up, I would have suggested they forget about changing it until we get another 50 lower level story arcs in place, which would give a reason for many folks who farm to 50 to level up organically. But, that's just me. Other opinions would vary, as they should. 

[Black Zot]

15 minutes ago, Ukase said:

I just don't see it as a win/win fix. More like a lose/lose fix. But that's just my opinion. 
 

 

You could say the same thing about them deciding to break Rage way back when.

[Grouchybeast]

21 minutes ago, Ukase said:

On the other hand, with 2xp(fixed version) giving plenty of XP, I don't want to overact - but still, why would anyone fix this?

 

With software, it's generally a good idea to fix bugs.  Especially with a codebase as old and convoluted as this, you never know when ignoring an apparently trivial bug could have bad consequences further down the line.  The more that code doesn't work how it's supposed to work, the more it doesn't work how people expect it to work, or it doesn't match the design, the more potential there is for things to go wrong.

 

What you really don't want is for someone to devote a huge chunk of their time to tracking down and fixing an issue, and then when they finally solve it someone else says, oh yeah, I noticed that last year but I thought it didn't matter so I left it alone. 

[ivanhedgehog]

2 minutes ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

With software, it's generally a good idea to fix bugs.  Especially with a codebase as old and convoluted as this, you never know when ignoring an apparently trivial bug could have bad consequences further down the line.  The more that code doesn't work how it's supposed to work, the more it doesn't work how people expect it to work, or it doesn't match the design, the more potential there is for things to go wrong.

 

What you really don't want is for someone to devote a huge chunk of their time to tracking down and fixing an issue, and then when they finally solve it someone else says, oh yeah, I noticed that last year but I thought it didn't matter so I left it alone. 

Back on live, they "fixed" clear mind to not stack. That broke a lot of things. The devs were smart enough to revert the change because it was too great a change. sometimes the bug is a better way to leave things. Irradiated ground...they fixed a bug. but the rest of the power does not comply with other auras and the set as a whole kinda sucks now. did they fix anything or just moved the set to the "do not consider" set.

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, Number Six said:

 

Nobody reported it. It was discovered somewhat accidentally when a developer set the AE XP scale on their local box to *0* for a different test (don't freak out, it's not what you might think) and found, much to their surprise, that they were still getting XP.

 

Turned out to be because a booster was active, and investigating that led to discovering that the way the separate XP scale for AE was implemented was completely wrong and boosters stacked additively with it instead of multiplicatively. There was some initial disbelief that it could possibly have been wrong the whole time without anyone noticing, but at that point it was tested on live to confirm and sure enough turned out to be the case.

Thank the Cosmic Origins of Comic Book powers you guys got that nerfed.  Who knows what could have happened if you let it go on...

[Ukase]

1 hour ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

With software, it's generally a good idea to fix bugs.  Especially with a codebase as old and convoluted as this, you never know when ignoring an apparently trivial bug could have bad consequences further down the line.  The more that code doesn't work how it's supposed to work, the more it doesn't work how people expect it to work, or it doesn't match the design, the more potential there is for things to go wrong.

 

What you really don't want is for someone to devote a huge chunk of their time to tracking down and fixing an issue, and then when they finally solve it someone else says, oh yeah, I noticed that last year but I thought it didn't matter so I left it alone. 

I haven't seen this code. I want so much to download it and look at it, but I shudder to think of how much space it would take up on my machine. 
That said, not having seen the code, my first mind told me that it was simply a math error. No doubt that's presumptuous of me. But, it makes sense. It's an easy error to make, depending on how the formula was initially laid out. I guess what I'm saying is, it wasn't a bug. It was just an incorrect value used instead of the proper one. That's my theory anyway. 

Anyone know how many terrabyte of room I'd need to download the code and my system still function? 

[Snarky]

17 minutes ago, Ukase said:

I haven't seen this code. I want so much to download it and look at it, but I shudder to think of how much space it would take up on my machine. 
That said, not having seen the code, my first mind told me that it was simply a math error. No doubt that's presumptuous of me. But, it makes sense. It's an easy error to make, depending on how the formula was initially laid out. I guess what I'm saying is, it wasn't a bug. It was just an incorrect value used instead of the proper one. That's my theory anyway. 

Anyone know how many terrabyte of room I'd need to download the code and my system still function? 

You are wasting your time.

 

As I understand it, it was a simple math statement error coded into the game.

 

What you are missing is that whoever looked at it had the ability, authority, and oh so importantly the desire, to "fix it"   

 

Might as well try to float the Titannic.  Got a few million ping pong balls?

[lemming]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

Anyone know how many terrabyte of room I'd need to download the code and my system still function? 

Quick glance at src directory, a bit over 2GB for the i24? code

[Sneakers]

I noticed this in game after the patch. I don't fire farm much anymore I had gotten away from it even before the patch.

But I heard the commotion, and I loaded up my fire spines brute. Sure enough I could tell a difference.

Couldn't AFK farm like I used to. Even had to change the way I approached and fought enemies.

 

Don't really matter much to me. I can see how the farmers are upset.

 

I am sure with a bit of build change and even maybe some new AE missions using mobs that don't even have a ranged attack might could solve these new challenges.

Once I altered my attack pattern, I didn't have a problem fire farming myself.

I've experimented in the past with enemies that don't have a ranged attack. It's difficult to max the exp on them but its possible with the right power sets.

 

[biostem]

7 minutes ago, Sneakers said:

I noticed this in game after the patch. I don't fire farm much anymore I had gotten away from it even before the patch.

But I heard the commotion, and I loaded up my fire spines brute. Sure enough I could tell a difference.

Couldn't AFK farm like I used to. Even had to change the way I approached and fought enemies.

 

Don't really matter much to me. I can see how the farmers are upset.

Were you running someone else's farm, perhaps one not adjusted to account for the new changes?  The game will change over time, and you either adapt or fall behind...