Nethergoat

r/e your list:
some small % of players will do just about ANYTHING just to do it, that's part of the appeal of the game and the value of having a wide range of activities available, whether or not they're equally rewarding. As I noted badges are great for them because they soak up gameplay hours of a devoted demographic for an insignificant investment (of course, MA was a GIGANTIC investment).

But ask yourself this- are there more people hunting GMs now than there were when they gave phat XP?

When you have two paths of advancement and one is demonstrably more efficient than the other, that is where the bulk of your players will go. That's why "everyone" is camped in MA now. It's why "everyone" would leave MA if rewards were gimped too hard.

Unless they want MA to be a dusty mausoleum like the Arena they'll keep its rewards in line with the 'real' game.


You're entitled to that belief, and I'm entitled to laugh my *** off about it.

Not everyone cares about "max xp".
But very few people are going to accept gimped XP.

The Sims has its own reward structure and its own player base.
That's an apples and oranges comparison.
I had players on my CounterStrike server who decidated hours of their lives to racking up kills with the lamest weapons available (the TMP being one favorite- mine was the Mac 10, before they ruined it by making it accurate).
That doesn't mean that 99% of everyone who logged on didn't buy the "best" weapon they could afford.



On this subject I define "my way of thinking" as saying nearly everyone will opt for 'normal' rewards over gimped rewards.

I mean, you've presumably played a lot of games, seen how MMO communities act. I'm not sure how you can look at the evidence and arrive at any other conclusion.


Turn down the XP and see what tune these defenders of the purity of the game sing.

I'm not talking about "half of farmable XP".
I'm talking about underperforming compared to the rest of the game.

Not everyone cares about hyper-efficient levelling, true.
But most everyone cares about not feeling like they're stuck in the mud compared to everybody else.

You should change your forum name to Pollyanna.
There's no way more than a handful of people would opt for reduced rewards in MA when they could get full rewards from the 'real' game.

That isn't how the general public is wired, and it is even less how MMO gamers are wired.

farmers do nothing but interact with game entities defined by developers.
they have zero ability to change anything in the game world.

Badges are binary content, you either have them or you don't (and care about the or not).

Given the tiny amount of energy they take to create (think up a title, attach an arbitrary number to it, slap a graphic on it) they probably deliver a wonderful return on investment for the devs, since the players who love badges tend to REALLY love badges.

I don't pay a lot of attention to accolades, but the ones I can think of give you some kind of in-game payoff (a little more end, a few more HP, whatever), which again appeals to some folks.

If there were two ways to earn a badge and one was comparatively much faster than the other, that's the one nearly everyone would choose.

I throw up a bunch of low-ish bids on respec recipes every time they hand out a Freespec, reliably pick up a handful at a discount, then sit on them for a while.

It's a tidy, low risk profit.

I like messing around with really expensive recipes because I'm knowledgeable and lazy. Giant profit, low turnover items are my favorite kind.

to paraphrase Brody, "he's gonna need a bigger boat".

WOW!

I guess there is something new under the sun!

+rep for you, good sir or madam!

MA - rewards = ten RP'ers hanging out shooting the breeze. They know this.

In the entire history of the game is there one example of players flocking to content that under-rewarded?

Gamers are simple creatures.
While I'm sure a handful of zealots would just LOVE for MA to be cleansed of all those grubby XP loving degenerates and restored to its pristine dream state, everyone else in the game would treat it like a horny leper and run the other way.


And some people would love for them to be totally XP free.
That doesn't change the reality of games, which is that ~99% of your players want their shiny and most of them will happily ignore anything that fails to deliver in sufficient quantities.

The dreams of some narrow player demographics aside, I doubt the devs would consider an MA used by some tiny % of the population to be a worthwhile return on their gargantuan investment of time and energy.

Then why not release it reward free, or reward gimped?

Because they want people to use it.

It's fine for players to be exclusionary purists who think everyone should play for "the right reasons", but developers have to cast a wider net if they want to keep cashing a paycheck.

The point of that first post was that repetitive content that is convenient is a bigger draw than repetitive content that is annoying, which is why lots of players have opted for MA (and before MA radio missions).

The "story" rarely even tries to justify why you get run halfway across the city to beat up a generic office building full of goons and is not a mitigating factor in the generally terrible design of the older content.

plz PM me a synopsis of the post, the curiosity is killin me!

From a dev standpoint it makes more sense to spend resources on a cool *new* TF than to re-do a lame old one.

I'm sure one of the reasons for the recent supercharging of leveling speeds (compared to the old days, anyway) is to zip players past all that crummy, outdated low level content and get them to the newer, funner stuff. AE also helps with this (although there's no guarantee the stuff you find is any better than kill everything in this string of generic warehouses, at least you're not getting run all over the city while you're doing it).

I hated to finish it so much I've been running it for years!

*rimshot*

Also, I meant UNAI not Cadao, disregard the link in the previous post!

ditto.

I haven't been paying much attention to the MA nerfs, but in my experience custom enemies are generally WAAAAAAAY more dangerous than 'stock' factions, to the point where I won't bother playing arcs with 'custom' foes unless I'm on one of my bulletproof characters (kat/regen scrapper, fire/dark corrupter, fire/rad controller, all 'well geared' as the saying goes).

These Draconian sounding measures will ensure very few people bother playing arcs with custom foes, in which case why have them at all?

Rewards need to be comparable between MA and 'real' content or people won't bother. Likewise they won't bother with 'custom' enemies that are much deadlier than standard foes but for some reason yeild less XP.

I'm sure I'll steal this one at some point in the future.

It'd be great if someone reminds me to pay Bill royalties when the inevitable happens.

I went with

"save the freaks!"

My delicate feelings have suffered injury.
Now I must retire to a dark room to weep and console myself by counting my ill gotten inf.