PapaSlade

I would be one of these people. I am on this channel with both of my accounts and probably play 75-90% on red side. So give a shout....you might have to shout twice because I am old and my eyes don't always register chat movement while I am in the middle of killing things.

Your welcome. I don't think I ever argued otherwise.

So knowing your story will under perform the best PVE farms in the game by 10%-15% (because of a mission xp cap) you won't write the story?? It would not stop me from playing it because I don't expect to reach that type performance in most dev created content and I still play that.

If the exploiters new going in that they could do 10%-15% better elsewhere, would they be inclined to go eslewhere??

So legitimate users will stop using MA because the best reward their story can genrerate, or the mission they are playing, will never give them more than 85% (just a rough number) of what they could get under optimal circumstances on the best PVE farm in the game??? How many legitimate story missions approach those kind of rewards???

First off, I have never made a "kill stuffz" mission in MA and don't play them there. There are plenty of PVE missions for me o go do that. Excuse me for trying to find some way to end the exploit/nerf cycle that some how works for everybody. I should know better.


If capping works for tickets why can't it work for XP? The problem is it doesn't appear the devs can make the system work as intended. From everything I have seen, every "fix" hurts the intended use as much or more than the unintended use. If that is the case then the devs and the community as a whole need to find a happy medium of allowable unintended use that brings the system back to where authors can make quality stories that people will want to play.

Arcanaville even said (and I am going off of memory from a post a little way up) that MA will likely never be exploit free but could possibly be made as close to PVE exploitable as possible. That is all I am trying to do. Figure out how to make the exploiters hit that PVE ceiling or even lower it a bit so there is incentive for them to go elsewhere.

I may not be smart enough to figure out why an XP cap won't work but you haven't explained it to me either.

Given what you just described, the difference between running the Liberate TV mish over and over and an MA mish over and over would be what? If they could not surpass the XP of the Liberate TV mish because of the cap who cares?

Ok, if I am reading what you just said correctly, the ally problem made everyone equal to an IOed out multi-billion inf Toon. So are you saying it leveled the paying field for people with low dollar builds? and that you should only be able to do that after spending billions?

If speed is the real problem then there should be a way to figure that into the XP cap. There has to be a hard limit to how fast a toon, or a group, can mow down mobs given damage per second, recharge, maximun buffs each attribute will accept, and whatever else would go into figuring that out. If that can be figured out then there has to be a way to use that to say "If you are running at peak efficiency, speed and damage then the max XP that can be generated is "X".

Once that number is determined, the devs then decide how close they will allow an MA mish to approach that number. The average story arc is likely not constructed in a manner that will approach that number. I have no idea what that number would be. If that max XP number was set to 10% less than the total XP possible from a +4 x8 spawned Liberate TV mission (just for an example) would that be enough for people to say I can farm/PL better on regular missions? Would that be enough XP available to not punish the authors?

The "survivablity" issue granted by allies is a different problem. I am not sure that allies can push you past the peak efficiency/speed/damage number given the buff caps for character attributes. Can they make it super easy? Looks like it, but I have been on a lot of 8 person teams that make PVE content look like it has zero risk. If telling folks they can put as many allies in as they want, make it as easy as you want, but the best you can do is "X" amount of XP and "X" amount of Tickets, I think they might find something else to do. Especially if the best they can do is smidge less than what they can do in the best PVE farm.

I think once you find that peak XP number you can reduce that number to point that the Authors are happy and the farmers will just settle for it being about the same they can get doing anything else.

Okay, all the talk throughout this thread about the Korean Won, exchange rates and doom is hurting my head. This is how a simple old ditch digger looks at the financial health of the game I love to play:

For the sake of arguement, let's say CoH/CoV currently has 80,000 subscriptions, NOT players, subscriptions (some folks say its more but I doubt its less). Each subscrtiption is paying $15 a month for a given year. This gives Paragon a gross annual operating budget of $14,400,000.

If the grand-pooh-bahs in Korean take a 15% cut off the top for profit that comes to $2,160,000 leaving $12,240,000.

If Paragon is running at the high end of the payroll to income "comfort zone" and spends 30% of revenue on payroll expenses, that comes to $4,320,000 per year or an annual average salary of $86,400 per year for the 50 Paragon employees. If you would like, throw in an insurance/benefit package of $35,000 per employee for another $1,750,000

After Korea's cut and payroll/benefits there is $6,170,000 left to run and develop the game. Someone with more knowledge of the costs to do those things will have to tell me if that is enough. I am guessing it is sufficient.

None of this includes booster packs, GR pre-sales, or any other source of revenue. That is just what they have to work with based on 80,000 subscriptions.

This is all a very rough estimate from a guy that plays with giant tonka toys for a living but I think they are doing ok.

If it means the system is not gutted for use by authors of quality material then yes. We just need to come up with a "cost" of some kind for being able to run that high reward content. If the tech is not available to judge the xp rate on a mish based on the tools/mobs being used then its back to the drawing board for my idea. I run giant tonka toys for a living so I am some what lacking in my tech knowledge.

Perhaps they just cap XP rate per mission like they capped tickets. If there is an acceptable rate for xp/hour in dev content then make it within a certain percentage of that for AE. Then make dbl xp weekend count in AE as well.

I quantify risk vs reward by what the devs have set forth in the content they create. If "Teen Phalanx Forever" allows a player to level faster than double XP weekend because of multiple allies then the cost to play that mish would be high. If "Teen Phalanx Forever" let's you level the same as doing and arc from an NPC contact then no problem it's a cheap 100 influence to play mish.

Personally I would love to walk into MA and look at a menu divided by cost:

Dev choice, guest author and whetever else the Doc decides = free to play

Arcs with rewards equal to dev content: 100 inf flat rate

Arc with rewards equal to dbl XP weekend: 5 mil per player on the team

Arcs that surpass dbl xp by 10%: 10-50 mil per player on the team

Then I know anything on the menu over 100 inf is a farm and I can concetrate on the stuff that isn't. People that want to fight easy maps for easy xp pay a premium.

It's no different then hunting. If you are in it for the experience of being in the woods and absorbing the sights and sounds, you buy a $15 dollar hunting license and park yourself in the woods early in the morning and absorb the ambience. You are happier with a successful hunt but happy either way. You are in it for the story. If you want a garunteed trophy kill with no challenge you pay $5,000-$10,000 to go to some private animal preserve and shoot something that was no challenge at all. You are in it for the reward to hang on the wall so you pay to get it.

From what I can tell the ally patch ruined a lot of what were once very well done arcs that were in no way farms. If the collateral damage from all this farm control is to kill quality work then it is counter productive. I would rather charge the big game hunters for their easy kills then to continue down this exploit/nerf path that has rendered the MA a shell of what it should be.

I think we may agree on this but I tend to lean towards more of that money coming from vendoring/marketing than from kills. For me, the tickets just replace the drops.



I am saying it doesn't appear that the system is capable of giving the story writing crowd all the tools, mobs, whatever, needed to both make compelling arcs that offer enough incentive for the general public to play without leaving the loopholes that turn into some form of xp/infamy/ticket farm.

If that is the case, then make the system so all the tools are there for making great arcs but charge infamy to play. Stories that fall within the designed xp/whatever that dev content provides charge a minimal fee. Arcs that provide accelerated rewards pay an accelerated fee and I mean way accelerated fee. If you want to PL a toon from 1-50 have at it. Running high reward content is going to cost you 10 mil a run (again, random number could be 50 mil for all I care).

Look, I really want MA to work. I have lots of stories I would like to try out, both writing and playing, but the constant exploit/nerf cycle makes it seems like any attempt is a waste of time. If the cost of having a functional story telling tool is people can still farm then perhaps we all have to live with that side effect. All we can do is cushion the blow and I think charging infamy/influence to run low risk - high reward content is an idea worth thinking about.

Perhaps I missed the infamy farming in MA but I thought most folks farmed it for XP and turned in tickets for high dollar rolls or recipes. Even if you farm regular content for infamy you are really farmimg to sell the drops, in this case tickets are the drops. Yes you will make infamy off the kills but selling reg IO recipes and good drops is where the real money is at.

If all you want to do is use the story part of MA then the cost to play those type of arcs would not require other types of mini game play.

3 times?? Thats it? Am I the only one that thinks BAB needs to get out more?