Kitsune9tails

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Lets address your last point 1st. There is no way to get a pool c recipe other than to complete a tf. They are not generated in any other way. Thus, that content is no longer available to casual players.


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It is still available to all players, it's just more troublesome for PuGs. PuGs, are not the same thing as casual players. This content is intended for "casual groups of friends" (Posi's words) who know each other and can rely on each other.

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exploit. Tf''s have been around for how long? and they just decided that this was a horrible exploit that desperately needed fixing? This is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.


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I don't have the Dev's numbers, but with this being pushed through as an exploit fix, it sounds like someone gave the order to FIX IT NOW. Perhaps some recent activity uncovered the need? Or perhaps something is happening to TFs in an upcoming update?

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It is already hard enough to get the required 7 playeers to do manti. Onc you have people forming tf's and kicking the "excess" non sg members from the team to make the spawn sizes smaller, it will become near impossible. I predict your will see this form of asshattery within 2 weeks of this going live.


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I am sure that @ssh@ttery will happen. That is the fault of the @ssh@ts, not the Devs.

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The more stupid, reactionary, poorly thought out changes you see like this, the more players this game will lose. I see less of th long term players that I used to see on all the time. BS like this won make it any better. This fix is most likely a way to blow off he promise to actually fix the old tf's.

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I have yet to see an alternate suggestion by any player that is any better. Every suggestion that makes it more difficult to softload is going to be trouble for PuGs by definition; the game can't tell if you are logging off to save a baby or to start another TF with your other account. I do hope tech can be developed to kick offline players from TFs, but players will abuse/exploit that, too.

I am more confident now than ever that the TFs will be redone. The first step in that direction was Ouroboros, IMHO. They can make all the TFs Flashbackable, and the people who will inevitably complain that they preferred the OLD Positron TF can be directed to Ouroboros.

I don't disagree that most TFs are PuGs.

I do infer that this fact is not in accordance with the design and intent of TFs.

In any case, TFs aren't being denied to PuGs, but they are being made a little more difficult for them. Hence the testing. If the typical Positron PuG TF recruits 3 members and loses one due to RL, then the two remaining will have to deal with missions spawned for 3 IF they disco but do not quit. That's still within the realm of doable, and an improvement over Live.

I do agree with being able to kick offline TF members, but I'm not sure if it can be coded quickly.

I refer you to the design of the TF itself:

- hours of content.
- can't invite more people to replace dropouts.
- designed with code to allow play over multiple sessions.
- Can't do regular missions in between.

Also, this quote by Positron:

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However, we saw a desire for a group of friends to get together and do some hard, lengthy content for good rewards. This is how Task Forces were born. They are the "casual" raid, something you can plan with your buddies that you are going to do on a certain day and for a certain amount of time, but you didn't need 30 or 60 people to pull it off.


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also

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Now TFs and SFs were made for the casual group of friends. This means that the group could persist over several game sessions. To do this we made it so that when you logged off, or lost connection, you didn't drop out of the group. Coming back into the game you would find that your character was still on the TF. This way you could run a TF "every Friday night from 8 to 9" and if all the participants agreed, you could progress the TF a little bit every week.


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Granted, he does use the phrase 'casual group of friends', but he goes on to describe play that is definitely NOT PuG style.

Casual != PuG in this case, it would appear.

Okay, bad metaphor, but I think you get the point: if you can do a TF or SF with a few PuGers instead of a minimum or larger team of people you play with often and can rely on, you are doing something exceptional and unintended. Good for you.

If TFs are content for the average PuG in practice, they may be unintentionally easy and need some beefing up when they are reworked

Also, the CoX playerbase is only down about 2%, totally within expected paramaters for a 4 year old MMO.

It does improve the QoL of a casual player over the previous change.

However, it does not improve the ability of the casual player to do TFs in the first place, nor is it intended to. It is an exploit fix. Exploit fixes take priority over QoL. If TFs are played less often as a result, that will be addressed later as necessary (on the other hand, maybe SF/TFs are being played more often than intended as it is).

TFs and SFs are intended for groups of players who know each other, not PuGs. If you can do one with a PuG, that is allowed and encouraged, but not supported. This may be a bad metaphor, but turbocharging your car engine may be allowed and even encouraged by your car manufacturer, but it is not necessarily supported, or considered normal use.

There is plenty of casual team content in the form of Invincible missions, AV missions, ans such, and can always be more.

Outliers don't count. Anything the average player can solo probably shouldn't be worth a C drop. The Devs have the numbers on what the mythical average player can do.

Unfortunately, they system can't yet tell WHY you logged out for awhile. Maybe it was the crying baby, maybe you are playing an alt meanwhile. Then we'd get another round of whining about punishing the good for the actions of the bad...

However, that can be overcome...you DO have a webcam, right?

Great move, Devs. Well done.

IF they really want to fix farming, they'll make it so you can't reset missions.

I'm not saying that would be popular, mind you...

Do you want a response about the reason for the change?
Given. You may not beleive it, but it's been given.

Do you want a response about whether the change is working in their opinion or whether a different change would be better?
Check back after a few weeks of datamining.

But you are right that if mass inf farming becomes an exploit, something will be done.

Let me be clear: although I am in favor of the change itself, I don't think it's perfect, and I don't think it's an elegant solution to the problem they want to solve. I am also not happy that the notes on the change were lost. But the Devs have nothing to gain by malice in this case. They just want a game that works.

People complain about every aspect of every game. In this case, the people who were complaining about the farming got listened to.

IMHO, you are wrong.

1) Regardless of how big a change is, exploit fixes are not snd should not be tested without an NDA. NDAs are fairly useless for testing exploit fixes, since honest folk who would abide by an NDA don't knowingly exploit. Hence, no warning.

2) The change is receiving plenty player feedback.

3) The change will not be rolled back so that the exploit can resume. That would be dumb.

If the change is rolled back, it will be because the fix breaks something else worse or because the fix mechanically doesn't work or because the fix plain doesn't solve any problems.

If you want it rolled back, start by proving one of those premises.

You aren't being ignored; the Devs had the Community Rep explain the situation; they're done.

If you want a direct response from Posi, PM him. I'd advise politreness if you actually want a response. But he's just going to say, "LH was confused, he got informed, he gave you the info."

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This was far more fun than having someone solo the whole thing though.

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Mission Accomplished?

Glad you like my idea. I think we agree about most things except the unknowable and resumed veractiy (or lack thereof) of the Devs.

That's cool. I'll just sit over here with my half full glass

Interesting. If you are wrong, what reasonable evidence would you accept?

Maye you have been given the straight story and you are simply refusing to beleive it.

In any case, it seems that the changes to the task forces may have simply shifted the farming from recipes to inf. Do you beleive that farming is an issue? What other changes should be made to task forces in your opinion?

I can get behind that: just make all TFs with the exception of those that are intended to be 'hardcore' have a minimum spawn size of 4, regardless of how many you need to start the TF.

I'm not arging that they should stay with the original design. I'm just saying that since the current statement by the devs states that they are not intended to be casual content, that the design supports that statement as it currently exists.

I am in favor of casual TFs existing as well as hardcore ones.

The ones we have now (with the possible exception of the most recent ones as you have pointed out) are more hardcore. Having there be 'softcore' TFs in addition would itself be a change.

Maybe even a change they have already moved towards. And that's fine.

I disagree.

- Just look at the number of missions in the typical TF: hours of content for the average player.
- Just look at the fact that there is a minimum number to start it.
- Just look at the fact that you can't use normal contacts during it.
- Just look at the fact that they typically end with AVs.

This is obviously not content that was intended for the average PUG.

As I said before, the Devs may want TFs to change to be intended for average PUGs. If so, THAT would be a change, and a lot more than soft spawning would need to change to accomodate that.

That does not meed that there does not also need to be hardcore content.

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Some AVs are most certainly NOT a challenge at all for 6 people. Others most certainly are.

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While this is true, a more pertinent issue here is that an AV that is a challenge for:

- a SS/Inv Tanker, a fire/fire Blaster, an empathy/dark defender, an illusion/storm controller, an BS/Regen Scrapper and a Human Form Warshade

May or may not be a challenge at all for

- 4 Rad/Dark Defenders and 2 Fire/Kin Controllers.

But I don't think the tech is in place to dynamically build a mission based on current team makeup. If it were, that might solve the 'causal vs minmax' issue right there.

Heh, What are they going to say, besides, "What Lighthouse said."

Not that anyone with a tinfoil hat would beleive them if they did.

I'm not particularly concerned that it took them two days to organize the info. My concern is that their patch notes process is still not fixed. Keep an eye out for other oversights, for both their and our benefit.

If they haven't already, the Devs may want to consider setting up a server that is constantly under NDA just to test/discuss exploit fixes.

Of course the problem with that is that the people you would trust with an NDA are not the people who would be best at finding a way around exploit fixes. Hmmm...

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How is arranging a large block of uninterrupted time a challenege? It's like the challenge of "earning $X a year" or "living in North Dakota." Those are things that, while malleable, are usually thought of as beyond the scope of a game.


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All challenges in the game require you to make a minimum amount of money, live in one of several locations, and invest a minimum amount of time. It's just a matter of degree.

I do agree that the TFs should not be long just to be long. But any content that is designed for teams, is by definition designed for people with a certain amount of organizational skills. The longer the team has to stay together, the better those skills (and the better knowledge of the participants) has to be.

Some % of challenges are not intended for PUGs. I beleive that some TFs should be PUG friendly, and that some should not be. Ideally, they'd also be labeled that way.

All of the content should be fun and part of an engaging story. But part and parcel of the TF concept as realized in this game is "you must have x people to start, and y people to be able to finish it".

It also follows logically that any mission that requires you to defeat an AV should requre a minimum of 6 people, since AVs are designed to be a challenge for 6 people. Except when they're not.

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Put simply - the winners are:

Infamy farmers
Powerful characters who can take on huge mobs alone
RMTers
People who sell rare recipes for huge prices

and the losers are:

People who want xp (from big team farms)
People who like running SFs
Pool C/D recipes and those that want them

Now um...doesn't that seem like the reverse of the intention?


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Put that way, it does. Which would mean that there may be more changes coming.

Regardless, the change in and of itself is a good one, and I don't think it goes far enough: if all TFs required a full team to start, fewer people would start them with the minimum players and then be stymied because one person dropped out.

Unfortunately, there is no way to reward casual play while locking out the minmaxed RMT farmers, so the only alternative is to have NO hardcore or difficult content, which then dissuades the people who like that sort of thing.

As it is, people can level to 50 fine solo with almost any build at reasonable risk if they play smart. IOs and HOs and Badges and Raids are not needed to play the game, and in any case are available from the market for just hours (granted, possibly dozens of hours) of play, or you can get them faster by taking the time to organize a good team.

That sounds like the kind of MMO I want to play right there.

That was indeed the stated intent at the time.

I that TFs have been getting shorter, and that that's a good thing. But there's a limit. They are only supposed to get So short, So easy. And where ever that line is drawn short of getting rid of TFs completely, there are people who will want them to want less commitment and time.

This is as good a place to draw the line as any.

There are many forms of challenge in a game, and 'time spent' is as legitimate a challenge for a goal as 'sufficiently minmaxed', 'can team', or 'is level x'.

The thing is that TFs/SFs have fallen victim to skewed player perspective.

They have never been intended to be easy or fast, or for the average PUG. They are content for hardcore players willing and able to run for 4-8 hours at once, or to reorganize on a regular basis: content for teams of RL friends or SGs.

- It was always intended for TFs to become 'impossible' if too many people quit (that's WHY you can't add more people: it's part of the challenge).

- There have always been outlier builds that can accomplish the theoretically impossible, but those are supposed to be outliers, not the norm.

- The Dev overvalued the rewards that TFs give. The rewards needed to be bigger to make them attractive. Shivans would be an example of a reward that would be appropriate for a TF, IMHO.

It would not suprise me to see a major revamp of the TF concept upcoming this year, and to find that these changes are part of that.

But the game was overpowered vs the critters, and the TFs became easy/standard content. Now people expect it.

I think the change as it stands is excellent, but here's what I suggest going forward:

1) Redo the current TFs, and make them expressly team content for PUGs: a little shorter, a little more variety, same rewards. However, these TFs should always require more people to start than the minimum spawn size. For instancem, 8 to start, minimum spawn for 4. If you are forced to have 8 people to start a team, it's a little less likely to dwindle to 4 in 2 hours. And if it does, guess what: bad PUG, start over.

2) Add a new class of uber TFs that are intended for hardcore players: spawn for a minimum of 8 at +2 to the leader, 4-6 hours of content, larger rewards (primarily temp powers, to add replay value and to prevent gating content to more casual players). Set the expectations right from the beginning. More content is always good!

3) Concerned with farming? Put more missions on timers. Put more rewards on 'lockout' timers.

4) Have bot critter groups occaisionally run game content and then sell the proceeds on the market. This will increase supply in a natural way and help prevent market manipulation, while ensuring that people who avoid certain content with unique rewards still have a chance of getting some.

Just some thoughts.