Dispari

Well I don't know what to tell you. I lead teams about 90% of the time when I play, both because my friends are lazy and because I'm good at it. I can fill up a team from 1 to 8 with entirely pubbies in about 5-15 minutes, every single time, any time of day, no matter what I'm doing. I don't have this "drama" or "headache" you speak of. I don't send blind invites either. Sounds like a problem on your end.

A small purple offers you more mitigation than a large orange. The only time I use oranges are on my characters who are already soft-capped.

Why only buffing is impractical and a terrible idea, starring my favorite analogy:

Let's say that we represent all the power in the game with glasses of water. As the head of power balance, it's your job to make sure there's an equal amount of water in all the glasses. Everyone whose glass isn't as full as the others is going to complain, and everyone who has more is going to sit quietly and smugly. As soon as you try to take away water to balance things out, the haves are going to complain. Now your task is to follow the new arbitrary rule that you can only add, not take away.

Now let's assume that your original intent was for all glasses to be at 50% capacity. Because a few glasses have, say, 60%, you now have to fill all glasses that aren't yet at 60%. If you have for instance 100 glasses and 10 are already at 60%, you now have to fill 90 glasses instead of taking water out of 10. You've now done nine times as much work for no real reason. Not only that, but every one of the glasses now has 20% more water than you originally intended.

Also, because comparing powers isn't an exact science, all you can ever really do is tweak things and hope they line up. When powers behave nothing alike it's really hard to fill things into a chart and reach a conclusion that will absolutely be perfect. For instance, all throughout testing, everyone looked at Willpower's numbers and said that the set would be awful. We now know that that's not the case. Quite the opposite in fact. Spreadsheets don't always tell the whole story, and what's represented in the math isn't necessarily how things work in practice. So while you're filling glasses, not only do you have to eyeball it, but the glasses look like this:



So while you're doing nine times as much work to fill everything to 60%, you accidentally fill one to 70%. Because this is extremely easy to do. Now instead of correcting this, you have to fill 99 glasses to 70%. You've now done more than eighteen times as much work, and all the glasses now have 40% more water than you originally intended. Repeat this a few times until you have to buy entirely new glasses just to fit all that water in them, which throws budget and effort onto a totally different department, again, for absolutely no reason.

Not only does the buff-only approach require a ton more effort from the power balance department, but left unchecked it can even bleed over into most other departments and throw off the balance of the entire game. If we keep buffing powers to be on-par with eachother, nevermind the fact that the powers team would have to buff thousands of powers instead of just nerf a couple, we'd eventually have powers so strong that no enemies would be any challenge to us whatsoever. Which would mean now the critters team would have to rebalance all the creatures in the entire game.

Most people don't like nerfs, but sometimes nerfs are the best solution.

Actually defense does have different caps between ATs. ATs will hard cap at DEF somewhere between 175% and 225%, I think, off the top of my head. It's just that those values are totally irrelevant. Seems like one of those things that the original devs put in without realizing the actual end results.

Some of us prefer to post in the smaller threads, thank you.

Confirmed: Castle is increasing Tanker damage scale to 0.85.

Um, no they're not. Non-vets would still have to wait for 14 until Fly, and 20 for Group Fly.

The most difficult things for vet rewards are trying to not make them too good.

Bonuses like tailor tokens, respecs, merits, and things like that are fine to give out. Those are all things that people can get in other ways. However, when you hand out things like the world traveler, that gives a clear advantage to vet players who can use it to change their builds and eke out that last bit of effectiveness. Imagine if Ninja Run had been a 60+ vet reward and not a pay pack (arguably, everyone has equal access to pay packs).

Now the issue becomes keeping vets interested without annoying the lower-tier people. Even with the most recent bonuses I've seen vet posts who say things like "This is a crappy bonus, why can't we have (insert extremely powerful/advantageous bonus here)?" For every overly useful perk that vets get, that's another thing for non-vets (or at least lower-tier vets) to fuss over.

I only just recently earned my team recall power. I've been waiting on that one for a LONG, LONG time. It completely changes the sorts of tactics you can employ for certain task forces and can dramatically speed up your run time. That's the sort of thing that gives clear advantages to vets that non-vets are within their right to complain about.

It's not a "fix" any more than animated tails are a "fix." It'd just be a change to allow more options and flexibility.

The logical thing to do would be to increase the max slots to 48 and give GR buyers +4 slots. That's sort of what happened with CoV.

Having one (1) single ally does not impact your exp via penalty. If that pet happens to be a buffbot, they won't take any experience whatsoever, because they're also not dealing damage.

If you have more than one (1) ally, even if those allies are friendly bosses, captives, escorts, or whatever, you start to get a global experience penalty for all enemies killed in the entire mission.

Additionally, any enemies that actually deal damage will take experience based on the amount of damage they deal. Therefore, while attacking pets have always given a penalty, you can still use a single buffbot ally and not have it impact your experience.

I said, and I quote, "it encourages everyone to use one (because there's no penalty for using one)." Using one single buffbot will not impact your experience.

You're going to need to read the thread a few more times then.

People are complaining because 1) this patch is bugged and penalizing players for every single ally, hostage, rescue, or friendly NPC on the entire map, 2) it doesn't stop buffbotters; in fact it encourages everyone to use one (because there's no penalty for using one) and make sure to never ever use an offensive pet -- especially more than one

I've created the following arcs. None of which have buffbots. None of them even have a single ally with a single buff power. However, all of them give reduced rewards because of this patch:

David and Goliath - Two missions have you rescue scientists from super-advanced Trolls. Another has you save cops. This patch reduces exp in those missions.

Nocturnal - This arc has 4 missions with allies. The main ones are DP/MA and Mercs/Traps. They don't buff. They take exp already because they deal damage. In addition to one of the missions having both of them as allies (for story purposes and so I have more people who can talk), one mission has 3 additional allies who turn on you when you start to fight a boss. Now, these count as allies even if you don't rescue them, and you get reduced exp.

My Date With a Celebrity - This arc is five missions, mostly a joke arc, with very little fighting. As such, most of the maps are full of friendly patrols, friendly bosses, friendly ambushes, captives, and other things. Not one of them is a buffbot, and only one of them (the "celebrity") ever follows you -- and she's MA/regen. Now even the small amount of exp you do get for doing this arc is reduced to almost nothing.

Not only that, but I looked through the list of Dev Choice arcs. Of every single Dev Choice arc currently existing, only one single arc has no objectives that would result in reduced experience by this patch. One, out of more than two pages. That's something like a 95%+ hit rate on things that weren't exploiting, cheating, or buffbotting.

You are flat out wrong if you think this only affects exploiters, cheaters, farmers, and buffbotters. The fact is this affects more than half, if not more than 90% of all arcs in the entire game. Almost every legitimate arc out there has been hit by the patch catching "allies" and giving an exp penalty to the mission.

People are mad because this causes damage to almost every arc that exists, legitimate or not. Not because they're all cheaters.

Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalm.

I can't possibly fathom how "knowing how the game works" is some sort of punishable offense. Arc didn't break into NCSoft headquarters and make off with secret code on a flash drive after doing a flip-kick over the fence and battling Jackie Chan on the roof. She just talks to devs a lot. But somehow, between "scouring the wiki every day" and "being Arcanaville" is "wtf what's with the insider knowledge you wicked person?" Who's going to punish her anyway? The dev she talked to that told her how the game works in the first place?

I won't be modest in saying I know a lot about the game. I'm OCD about learning as much as I can about any game I'm playing, and I usually become "the expert" in my circle of friends. But I don't know as much as Arc, nor would I attempt to argue with someone about a topic I know little to nothing about. And I definitely wouldn't attack someone for knowing more than me.