TheMESS

because there's more than likely a processing time frame it'll go something like

NCsoft refund 5 quid -->instructs there bank to give money to your bank---->Nc softs bank gives money to your bank---->your bank place money in your account

now between those stage's there can be several days its like if you have a credit card with a bank and you also have a bank account with the same bank you can pay money to your credit card and it'll disappear immediately from your account but take 2 or 3 days to appear on the card.

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when I see a granite tank

[/ QUOTE ]Fixed that for you.

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You implying all granite tanks are from PL/farming?

[/ QUOTE ]No, I'm implying they're useless compared to other tanks in the majority of the game.

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As much as it pains me i have to agree with this stone armour is a badly thought out power set all the armours pre teir 9 pale in comparison to granite even the one that gives def to psy pales in comparison to granite because there are so few mobs that do purely psy damage that its far easier to run granite and just heal back any psy damage.

all stones pre granite armours need buffing and granite needs nerfing its sad but true

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In a sense i kinda agree Granite shouldnt be a toggle it should be on par with other defensive sets and used once every 3-6 minutes draining the stone brute/tanker of all end and health as such a feat would hurt anyone .

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No that would be bad better that they remove some of there resistance from granite and share it amongst the lower armours (or defence in the case of fire/cold) in effect turning a pre tier 9 stone tank into a hybrid of defence/resistance/regeneration

then take granite and turn it into a stacking armour adjust its def/res so over all you have the same res/def values as current granite maybe slightly higher actually. what you now have is a tank who can scale his defences to the situation but pays for the flexibility in increased end usage

Further make the use of granite fix your run speed something like 10mph (tho idealy if they could add some kind of variable momentum that would be even better so that you were slow to start moveing but once moving would get faster but would then find it dificult to stop & turn that would be even better)

Also for the love of god remove the -dmg and replace with a +dmg modifier

who ever thought getting hit with a granite covered fist is going to hurt less than being hit by just a fist needs there head looking at

if this needs some form of counter debuff add a -to-hit or -acc to represent your slower swings are easier to avoid.

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when I see a granite tank

[/ QUOTE ]Fixed that for you.

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You implying all granite tanks are from PL/farming?

[/ QUOTE ]No, I'm implying they're useless compared to other tanks in the majority of the game.

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As much as it pains me i have to agree with this stone armour is a badly thought out power set all the armours pre teir 9 pale in comparison to granite even the one that gives def to psy pales in comparison to granite because there are so few mobs that do purely psy damage that its far easier to run granite and just heal back any psy damage.

all stones pre granite armours need buffing and granite needs nerfing its sad but true

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I recall the original intention for MA rewards was for it to be limited to Half XP/Inf for published arcs, with Dev Choice Arcs getting elevated to full xp/inf.
Would setting the rewards to that level solve the PL/Farming problem?

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Correct and it was abandoned due to peoples general reply of "why play for half XP when i can do paper missions for full XP" and thus the idea was abandoned.

And as i said any reduction of 50% in XP is not going to stop farmers as there still going to be racking in XP far quicker than doing normal missions.

something dose occur most farm missions I've found rely on having a single mob as the enemy you face even perhaps some kind of minimum number of enemies in a group something like

1x Boss variant
1x lieutenant variant
3x minion variant

also a reduction in how many rescues you can have mite help

and if nothing else a variation in mob type may make farm missions more interesting as there would be more things to kill.

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/Unsigned

Given the 100k limit, enforcing that people HAVE to have arcs a certain way is Dev suicide.
On of my arcs uses normal Crey for two missions, then moves to the custom mob. This Custom mob has no minion class, simply because I tested them over and over and found them too easy for the story I had in mind.

Whatever happens;
CHANGES TO 'FIX' MA SHOULD NOT IMPACT THE NORMAL GAME.

All this 'Have to train after levelling' nonesense...I have grown fond of Atlas Sewer runs, as not only does it save me the hassle of going through the same intro arc over and over, but it actually FEELS Heroic. Band of Heroes scouring the sewers from the evil of the Vahzilok/Hellion/Lost. It might not be IC, but it is FUN. It is worthwhile.

Anything that affects the entire game for the sake of attempting (and, like normal IMO, failing) to contain farming, is Silly. The Sort of Silly that you should be allowed to hang people for...

/Rant and Opinion

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I actually agree with pretty uch all of this the 1,1,3 or even the modified 1,1,1 minimum on rank types was just me fireing of random suggestions.

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I recall the original intention for MA rewards was for it to be limited to Half XP/Inf for published arcs, with Dev Choice Arcs getting elevated to full xp/inf.
Would setting the rewards to that level solve the PL/Farming problem?

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Correct and it was abandoned due to peoples general reply of "why play for half XP when i can do paper missions for full XP" and thus the idea was abandoned.

[/ QUOTE ]Well there's the catch 22. You either make the MA less efficient and therefore undesireable for PL/Farm teams and consequently diminish it's appeal as a source of regular xp when compared to the likes of scanner missions. Or you leave it as it is with all the broadcast spam, "2 mission 50s" and poor impressions for ~30% of the new players we currently have. As with many things in life, you can't always have your cake and eat it.

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And as i said any reduction of 50% in XP is not going to stop farmers as there still going to be racking in XP far quicker than doing normal missions.

[/ QUOTE ] For something (PL/Farming) that is based around getting "the most milk for the least moo" I'd expect a 50% reduction in milk would make the proportionate increase in moo much less appealing.

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The thing is i don't think a 50% drop would stop farmers i did some experimenting last night using my 2 accounts

my first run on the TV mission populated with nemesis and devoured set to difficulty 3 with lvl 50 dark/fire brute and lvl 20 thugs/pain MM had to keep the MM within SK range (which was good for the added heal any ways) got about 4 bars on the MM but he's in a leveling packed so in reality that's 8 bars so not bad.

second run on Funny XP farm mish outside map all mobs are rikti communications officers consists of 40 rescues and 20 destroy objects MM got a full lvl so in reality that's 2 lvls so even a 50% reduction would leave the farm map a winner

Run 3 lvl 32 (and a bit) MM and lvl 21 brute (the other member of the leveling packed) ran the mission 1 and a bit times the MM is now a bar of 35 and the brute is a hair from 22 and probably will be 22 when the XP catches up with its self)

now the MM on the 3rd run was only on difficulty 2 so mob spawn size would be different but he was still fighting lvl 54 mobs at 32/34 getting him loads of XP for very little danger plus i was able to leave the brute at the door of the mission as he was auto SKed to the lvl of the mission net result lots of XP for me far more than i could get with that combination running other missions as i would have never out leveled that mish so for the pre 50 farmers the MA is definitely the best option for farming even if it was given a XP nerf

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something dose occur most farm missions I've found rely on having a single mob as the enemy you face even perhaps some kind of minimum number of enemies in a group something like

1x Boss variant
1x lieutenant variant
3x minion variant

also a reduction in how many rescues you can have mite help

and if nothing else a variation in mob type may make farm missions more interesting as there would be more things to kill.

[/ QUOTE ]The problem there is that it interferes with the making of custom groups by setting a requirement of having two types of mob in the minion tier, not everyone can spare the storage space for that extra mob (it's suprising how quickly that 100k can disappear). Additionally all a canny PL/Farmer would need to do is clone and rename the original mob.

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Very true so perhaps reduce it to 1 of each or slightly increase the 100k limit to compensate?

your right the farmer could and i think that demonstrates the fact that farmers like software pirates are always going to get round whatever protection is in place.

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I'm curious, how do rescues contribute to farming? Is it a way of increasing the number of mobs in a mission?

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It dose seem to be I've not tried to actually create a farm mish and the manipulated objectives to see what increases spawns but i can only assume that having a objective that is guarded dose increase the spawns. From what i observed from the funny XP mission it dose seem to be correct.

When i originally played it there was only the 40 rescues with each hostage guarded by about 4 mobs so basic maths of 40 x 4 gives us 160 mobs to defeat from rescues alone there was also a smattering of normal spawns.

When i repeated the mish in the above experiments the destroy objectives had been added these were also guarded by 4 or so rikti so that's another 80 mobs, and the original standard spawns were still there so they had not been replaced so the mission maker had increased the number of mobs on the map meaning it gives even better XP per run.

I would further assume that adding ambushes could be used to bump the number of mobs in the mish higher but that's probably adds unpredictability and the farmer could find them selves over run by mobs if ambushes take a while to catch up to them.

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Just a quick question. Is the website fixed yet?

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It worked just fine for me when i used it (15th/16th) and I've not seen any more reports of it mucking up.

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so you think all of us trying to purchase the pack at the same time and constantly hitting refresh for the hours before its release had no contribution to the web site having a wobbly

Or the fact amongst those that were over charged there would have been those that tried clicking the button twice (yes i know it greyed out after clicking but who's to say it still didn't register a click) or those that tried refreshing when the page stopped responding had nothing to do with compounding the problem

or hows about those people who sent multiple tickets because they didn't get a response to there first one quick anuff I'm sure having multiple tickets from the same player concerning the same transaction helped matters no end

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Mess, I think you may be mis-reading my post, I'm not saying that those things didn't contribute to what happened, I'm saying that the site should be designed well enough to cope with these factors, as running the risk of double or treble charging customers should not be acceptable in any circumstances.It is possible to have a process flow to restrict this activity.

Also as I posted much earlier in this thread, the poor communication regarding the release/timing of the pack only helped to cause this, as people had been waiting for hours to buy it, this practicually ensured that the site was "bombarded", also this was compounded by it being released in the Easter holidays where a lot of people were off work/school etc.

For my part I did not refresh at all, I just tried to complete the transaction, as I understand about basket sessions for some sites. Indeed as you rightly put in your post - hopefully NCsoft will learn lessons from this and get it right next time.

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Sorry Horrnet that post wasent really aimed at you or any one in particular for that matter it was more general rant.

and your right the comunication could have been better tho at the same time if there drowning under a hail of tickets probbaly processing those tickets (rightly or wrongly) takes priorety over keeping the customer updated.

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I was very surprised to see Blue Shield's signature shield being unlockable for this very reason.

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Is it unlock able?

I know it appears on the wiki as a unlock able shield but there's no how to unlock instructions (or there wasn't when i looked) i had reckoned it was added as a shield because at some point blue shield is going to appear as either a ally or foe in a mission.

so you think all of us trying to purchase the pack at the same time and constantly hitting refresh for the hours before its release had no contribution to the web site having a wobbly

Or the fact amongst those that were over charged there would have been those that tried clicking the button twice (yes i know it greyed out after clicking but who's to say it still didn't register a click) or those that tried refreshing when the page stopped responding had nothing to do with compounding the problem

or hows about those people who sent multiple tickets because they didn't get a response to there first one quick anuff I'm sure having multiple tickets from the same player concerning the same transaction helped matters no end

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I recall the original intention for MA rewards was for it to be limited to Half XP/Inf for published arcs, with Dev Choice Arcs getting elevated to full xp/inf.
Would setting the rewards to that level solve the PL/Farming problem?

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Correct and it was abandoned due to peoples general reply of "why play for half XP when i can do paper missions for full XP" and thus the idea was abandoned.

And as i said any reduction of 50% in XP is not going to stop farmers as there still going to be racking in XP far quicker than doing normal missions.

something dose occur most farm missions I've found rely on having a single mob as the enemy you face even perhaps some kind of minimum number of enemies in a group something like

1x Boss variant
1x lieutenant variant
3x minion variant

also a reduction in how many rescues you can have mite help

and if nothing else a variation in mob type may make farm missions more interesting as there would be more things to kill.

While i can understand why people are upset about being charged twice (god knows I'm first in the que if im ever charged wrongly for something) a refund within 7 days is pretty quick I've waited more than that for a refund from my bank

And while much of the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of NC soft we the players have to acknowledge we had a part to play in this as well how many people posted here saying just tried purchasing the pack but the web sights slow or the websites working weird i don't know about any one else but when i went to purchase the pack and it was taking it 10 mins just to load up the details little alarm bells went off and i decided to wait till it settled down.

But hopefully lessons have been learned for Super Booster 3 (whens it out whens it out ) and they will have a more robust purchasing system in place for it.

Personally i think any kind of XP nerf would be a bad idea. People would be less inclined to play architect missions I know i would. Leveling is a inherent part of the game getting that new power in the early levels can often be the driving force to keep going (for me at least) and then in the higher levels it moves to getting slots to make your powers better any slowing of this process is going to drive people away from the architect.

However it would appear the majority are convinced that farming needs to be stopped because its damaging the game. I'm not convinced were not even a month after a the architects release so how claims that its destroying the market can be made I'm not sure as everything's still up in the air. Though i will admit its changing the market but I'm not sure its changing it in a bad way as some one else mentioned the red side market is having a boom.

As to how to dissuade farmers as i already said any kind of XP nerf would be bad IMO its not going to stop any dedicated farmer just look at the claims in this thread of people going from 1 to 50 in 6 hours, so its going to take them 12 hours big deal that's not going to stop them even a reduction to 10 percent of the current XP is still going to see the most dedicated lvl to 50 within a week. But in the process of increasing the time to farm from 1 to 50 you've killed architect it would go from a something that was universally played by players from lvl 1 to 50 to something that is played by lvl 50s and even then many of them are going to be running normal missions in the hope of getting purples.

When i first read this i did consider suggesting that the amount of inf be decreased as it would make sense from a game lore point of view after all defeating virtual bad guys isn't going to gain you as much influence compared to the real versions. but doing this is again going to harm the non farmer much more than the farmer the farmer more than likely already has loads of inf.

Something that mite work could be a severe form of diminishing returns do the same arc more than once and you would receive a hefty drop in XP, Inf and tickets by hefty I'm thinking 50% drop for the second run and 100% for run 3 and above with a 48 or 62 hour cool down period of course this could still effect the normal gamer as they may find a mish they like and want to runa it a few times plus there's also the abundance of farming arcs so its possible that the farmers mite not be effected if they switch arks constantly.

another option is to actually take a official and public stance on farming which is something i don't think has been done yet they could actively encourage players to report farm missions.

The gimps a pretty good program to use defnetly recomended it over photoshop/painter if your just going to play about for a bit (why pay hundreads of pounds when you can get basically teh same for free)

others out there are paint.net which is again pretty good and importantly free there's also a program called al.chemy its very basic and really meant for hashing out basic ideas and general random shapes that you can then work up in other programs into something more specific (think of it more as a aid to brake the creative block) but it still has the off interesting feature and some of the things people to with it are pretty neet (take a look on there forums)

another is Artweaver never tried this my self so cant comment on how good/bad it is

and another is Inkscape its free again (woot) i do have this installed but haven't really delved into what i can do. it differs from the Gimp and Art.net tho as it deals with vectors i cant remember the proper definition of vector art but basically you create a shape be it circle, rectangle, whatever you can them enlarge (or shrink) that shape without it becoming pixelated i would guess its a program like this that the city of cute characters are created with as well as Doc destines Art.

the underlying workings mite not be all tha new tho

So remove them i only used the rikti as a example because i new they had a special spawn that would only spawn upwards of 51.

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Ah that mite be it then.

though i would think it would be far simpler to just remove mothership raid rikti from the MA as normal rikti run from about 25 to 54 dont they?

[/ QUOTE ]You'd only need to put one 54-54 mob on the map and all the mobs would spawn as L54 regardless.

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well yes but as the rikti mother ship raid mobs spawn only at 53 or 54 removing them would remove that ability as it is on the map i mentioned i could enter that mission with anything from a lvl 1 to a lvl 50 set on any difficulty and teh mobs were always 53 so while yes my lvl 1 scrapper stood no chance my lvl 30 mastermind could quite happily kill them all for uber XP

remove the lvl 51+ mobs from the architect and you force people to use the normal mission mobs which have a range so for example my MM would face lvl 30 rikti reducing the amount of XP i got dramatically while this wouldn't cure farming it would at least make it more difficulty (marginally granted)

Not that i see peoples problems with farming any ways each to there own in my opinion

Ah that mite be it then.

though i would think it would be far simpler to just remove mothership raid rikti from the MA as normal rikti run from about 25 to 54 dont they?

That's what i thought but weren't they removed from the architect? and id they were shouldn't that have made the mission invalid?

Happy Cake day Knightly, hope you have/had a good one

Well that'll be me happy then i like the invasion events

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I tried one of those 'farming' missions yesterday, more out of boredom than anything else.Funny thing is, it was actually more fun to play than some of the 'proper' arcs I've looked at. only thing it lacked was a coherent story.



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Me to was a board last night and spotted a mission called funny XP or something like that and decided what the hell i would give it a go. Was set in one of the outdoor maps with rikti communications as enemies and lots of statesman's as hostages had great fun as just a quick 30 mins of destroying everything tab would lock onto. in fact stick in more variations of rikti (i did get some monkeys if i ignored the portals) and some kind of flimsy "the rikti have invaded zone X get in there and kick there A** and it would have been really fun

One thing i did notice was that all the rikti were 53 which seemed a bit strange until i read the full mission statement and it had lvl range 53.

This would seem a good thing to sort being able to have lvl 53 minions all by them selves seems a bit of surly all mobs should have some kind of lvl range so something like 35 - 50 not just strait forward 53.

not that i know of if anything i would imagin its somthin the peeps across on the wiki mite dig up

Happy birthday

that actually looks dam good

Am i the only one that's getting the impression that there using the main servers as test servers?