Emgro

I don't think it's an exploit, that's what the target cap is for. No matter how big your make your shadow maul cone, you still hit (or miss) five enemies.

Any sort of sandbox element relies on players to behave constructively. In SWG, you could build your own buildings in-game. The server-side city of CoroNet on Corellia was surrounded by a green doughnut of no-build space, which is turn had a belt of highly developed player-buildings that took up more space than Corellia itself.

For shoppers, this was incredibly convenient. Just a bunch of buildings close together offering all the goods a player might need. Guns, armor, resources, and so forth.

For those running missions, it was a nightmare. Enemy spawns would get stuck inside buildings, mission targets would end up in the wrong places, enemies would wind up on top of buildings and be easy targets for ranged attackers and impossible to reach for melee users.

To get to the point, I'm very torn on the so-called "issue." I believe the devs should savagely cut MA rewards until the farmers move elsewhere, implement better tools for finding missions for a given level range, and improve the flexibility of the MA. Then, rewards should be gradually increased over a period of weeks until the devs find a happy medium between story building and farming that suits them.

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It seems to me that everytime someone finds a problem with MA it turns into a big discussion -- and often ends up with the devs nerfing something great.

For example, power select customization: For story tellers, it would have been great if you could delete certain powers from characters like MM (the pets!!!) But because farmers could exploit this, everyone loses it!

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BUT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE FARMERS!!!!

Farmers don't affect the way we play. But by fighting against them tooth and nail we keep affecting the way WE play. It's self-defeating.

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Farmers, and I mean the grind-to-fifty mindlessly farmers, not the "I'm a lvl 50 fire/kin with massive IOs that wall sweeps for drops", do affect the way we play. Instead of joining normal teams and contributing to the game world by become skilled, knowledgeable players, they instead grind away in the Atlas/Cap AE, never actually engaging the core game. Which isn't so bad if you've already played the core game umpteen times; but if you're relatively new, we end up with people who can't find Steel Canyon and complain that they can't figure out how to get a cape.

They spam broadcast mindlessly instead of using the LFT flag properly, they spam the AE with shallow farm missions, usually so lazily designed that they are inefficient even as farms, and generally generate an unpleasant atmosphere for everyone, including themselves.

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I'm not talking about exposing exploits. But I am talking about exposing "exploits" that if dev's fixed would destroy your enjoyment of the game.

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So... exploits that are not exploits because they are fun? Fun for who? We have arbiters of allowable fun already; they are called the devs. If I report that there's an exploit because I think I get too much XP for killing Malta, and Malta should be tougher, I'll get ignored.

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We complained about farmers getting rewards too fast. And it resulted in everyone getting rewarded at HALF the rate. Who do you think this hurts most? Farmers? Or people who don't farm?

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I don't recall getting my XP cut. Or my Influence cut. I've hit the ticket cap exactly twice on missions, and once only because I ran around and killed everything on the map after the final bonus. What is this reduction in rewards?

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The most recent example: I'm reading a current thread about people wanting devs to "fix" rezzors because some nincompoop tells everybody that players can kill a boss over and over, and let the rezzor keep rezzing him ... for tons of experience. The proposed solution: "fix" rezzors!" Eliminate them from the game or allow them to rez once or eliminate experience after the first defeat. This is all absurd!

If some farmer wants to spend 2 hours killing the same boss over and over again, it will not affect you or me. But "fix" rezzors and destroy your ability to use them the way they were meant to be used is ridiculous.

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Any reason why changing the recharge to 20 minutes or similar will prevent them from being used they way they are meant to be? I don't see that as impeding my gameplay, that an enemy will rez or be rezzed one (1) time rather than infinitely?

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We are shooting at vermin with elephant guns ... and all we are accomplishing is blowing giant holes in our own MA homes.

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You know what the biggest hole in the MA is? Last night I spent 10 minutes looking for a short AE mission to run solo on my blaster that wasn't a farm. There are literally dozens of pages of poorly-assembled wanna-be farms.

Player misuse is the flaw of the MA, and cannot be cured.

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Just the fact that sidney has an EVE avatar makes her awesome in my book. WALL-E was an awesome movie, if not a bit sad.

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In my book, sidney_b is made awesome about 60% of the time she says something needlessly sarcastic. Which is a sizeable percentage of the time, so that makes sidney awesome about 47% of all the time.

*wanders in, half asleep as usual*

Hello Lightslinger.

Hello everyone else.

Cheers to those I teamed with last night, was fun. For those who haven't already done so, join the Rookery. global channel and team with Emgro regularly. It will keep him from going mad from soloing and randomly eating people's faces.

Years ago, I knew a girl who had dreams about me eating her face. Yes, in the cannibalistic sense. I have no idea what this means, but it was creepy, and I think put an unpleasant friction on our relationship.

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Virtue needs more RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!

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No it doesn't! You shut up! It's fine just the way it is, you ungrateful HEATHEN!

...That enough, or shall I continue? :3

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No, because we don't need your stupid, irrelevant opinions. They are just fluff! Fluff, I say, and again, fluff! Your post, your thoughts, and you are no more than fluff.

Dweoruks and fanfarons the lot of you.

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((You know, when you think about it, this is a game forum and games are pretty fluff to begin with. So people who play games and complain about people wasting their time with fluff are pretty silly. ))

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The internets is serious business, neophyte.

I've gotten more teams from Rookery threads than farming ones.

I recall my Earth/Psi Dom didn't have too much trouble with him, though I have a fondness for munching Inspies like candy and using Shivans. I think Shivans are just compensation when you're a dom going against AVs with PToDs.

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That's leet for bewbs right?

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That'd be 80085, actually.

I roll more MMs than anything else; most never get to 20.

I've spent more time thinking about controllers than playing them.

I've rolled exactly two doms. One I got into the 40s, the other didn't make it to 4.

My first character was a scrapper; I haven't rolled one in months.

I have one Brute. He is level 50, making Brute my perfect play-to-50 ratio. I don't want to play another.

Stalkers and Tankers are my "hey this is fun... wait, no it isn't" ATs. They go from enjoyable to suddenly hitting a wall of dull in the teens.

Defenders and Corrs I get into the 20s, 30s... then lose interest as I run low on teams.

Blasters... heh.

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Go Rogue...lots of opportunities for cash on the other side :P

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Exactly! Something like 85% of the prostitutes in Hawaii used to be men.

Or was that not the side you were thinking of?

The Rookery is pretty damn pointless. And in view of the mods recent statement about pointless threads taking up too much of the internet, the Rookery should be canceled to make room for yet another thread in which the less-literate and more guilty farmers and antifarmers can aimlessly defend themselves or attack each other in ways that make even semi-sentient adherents of either side blush and facepalm.

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Only one thing...

After Hellgate London fiasco... I will NEVER pay for a lifetime sub again...

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Okay, someone point me towards where I can find out about this place. I keep hearing about Hellgate, but I don't know the story. Enlighten me on this bit of MMO history.

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None of the metaphors in my mind regarding Hellgate London are suitable for posting in this forum. Basically, the game featured an anemic playerbase, minimal content, horrible gameplay, and very little anything else.

Imaging playing a single-player game with dozens of other people playing the same single-player game at the same time.

I had pizza for breakfast and lunch. Lamentable lack of girls, however.

*appears from nowhere in a puff of ninja-smoke and punts Fedor into a low orbit, then grabs the wagon*

Yep Fey, got a whole bunch of chocolate here for you... where'd the sack guy go?

All I know is, my Mercs/Poison MM was by far the weakest MM I've played.

They provide less damage than other sets, do nearly all lethal damage (the most heavily resisted redside, with Longbow bosses bring up 50%+ resistances regularly), have no real defense bonuses, and the tier 2 support pet is neither reliable nor completely functional. Worst of all, in my experience the Commando, who a Merc MM really relies on, doesn't cycle his powers in an efficient or even sane way.

To me, the issue is obsessive level of lethal damage. The only other MM set with so much focus on a single damage type is Bots with Energy. I don't need to point out that energy resists are both less frequent and less ridiculously high.

*staggers in late, wearing a poodle kilt*

Well, SOMEBODY had to wear it.

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a volcano splitting the island into 4 is silly. It would have been far bigger than Krakatoa. Assuming a natural volcano - which don't occur on the east coast.

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Your presuming that the explosion did the job. Its perfectly possible that collapse of a caldera or magma chamber did the job, or one heck of a landslide caused by the eruption. Besides, there is heavy implication that magic was involved in some way.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Sharkshead is between Bloody Bay and the rest of the former Grandville, and the other geographical inconsistencies.

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Magic? Pah. One day, Blue Steel said there were about 12 islands in the Etoiles. Statesman pointed at a map and said, "Look, there's only like three."

Blue Steel was so annoyed, he went back in time (he is also Mender Silos) and smashed the Etoiles into about twelve islands. He then rearranged and renamed them all.

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I don't believe nobody's done this yet, but in a vaccum wouldn't robots or zombies be best because they don't explosively decompress and die?

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Lavitae already did it, first page, seventh post.

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Also, the ninjas would be fine. They wouldn't survive a vacuum, sure, but what are the odds the ninjas would actually end up in the vacuum without being told PASSIVE FOLLOW PASSIVE GOTO GOTO GOTO DEFENSIVE ATTACK GOTO GOTO PASSIVE GOTO ATTACK repeatedly?

Not going to happen.

I'm pretty sure it's just you.

Most of those controllers are Fire/Kin to boot. I was in the MA working on a mission once, and out of eight people in the room, five were Fire/Kin Trollers.

The world has gone mad.

I refuse to get suckered into a discussion on the hydrology of the Etoile Islands, no matter how tempting you make it seem.

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Do so Neko, it's hilariously fun. Play on easy though, friendly fire doesn't count there. Let me know when you have it online sometime we can shoot zombies together.

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Go expert or go home! Well, after you learn how not to shoot your allies. L4D is great fun.

About ten of my thirteen Virtue slots are villains at the moment, including one 50 and two more over 40. I'm currently leveling up a Widow, so give me a holler if you ever want a team redside.

Gname is @Emgro. If I'm around, I'm either on a team or looking for one. Be forewarned I may be doing Ouro stuff for old badges or random storylines, or weird non-farm AE stuff.