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Curbing Farming

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Gangrel
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syntaxerror37 wrote:
syntaxerror37 wrote:

Radiac wrote:
Minotaur wrote:
Another possibility would be some missions where you could prevent farming without an in mission timer by saying "this is urgent, if you don't complete it in 24 hours (character in game) time, I'll have to get somebody else to do it". This would allow a little farming, but not months of it.

Yeah, since I felt that timed missions in CoX were a scary thing to people (what if I have to log off before I finish, unexpectedly?) I didn't go that route in the original post.

Actually the timers being game-time based would be a boon in general.

Unless you were an avid RP'er...

Of course, this is something that I just picked out of the air that I could see being a problem... which is why I am normally against one time only *timed completion* missions.

Being able to restart them for X/Y/Z reason is something to be considered.... (ie going off to help someone else with their content means that you would still be counting down on yours)

So I think that these timers would have to be used carefully...

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Segev
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The question really is: what

The question really is: what is it that we, as game designers, want players motivated to do?

What is it about farming - of any sort - that is harmful to the game experience as we want players to enjoy it?

Is it power-leveling? In that case, the easiest solution would be to simply not award exp for kills. This has the side effect of nullifying "street sweeping" as a viable play-style if that's your level-up model, and it would mean that we'd need to ensure sufficient other sources of experience were around that there was never a need to work through a "dry spell" with mob-slaughter in order to gain the exp to get the next level.

Is it currency inflation? Again, fairly easily solved if currency doesn't drop just based on kills/arrests/whatever-you-call-them. But again, this also shuts out players from the option of going out to grind a few more units of currency to buy that item they really want.

Is it just that the idea of "repeat mission farming" is silly? While I admit that I don't see the problem here (it's not like it hurts other players, does it?), the solution here can show up in a couple of ways: either of the above would make "farming" a mission for its kills nearly pointless, or we could go the other route and deliberately invoke arena/survival mode maps that are more or less designed for farmers: go here and fight mobs in rounds of combat, or face wave after wave of enemies coming at you. The fluff explanation could be anything from sporting events to holographic training simulations to open tears into alternate dimensions through which pour endless streams of bad guys (usually kept sealed, but always under guard and available for heroes to show up and fight to relieve the pressure).

I think we really need to identify why farming is viewed as a problem, why people do it, and what we want to motivate people to do. We design our motivations to direct players towards what we consider good behavior. If farming is bad behavior, we do not encourage it (no badges for it, no straight-forward rewards for simple farming exploits). If it isn't, but it has unfortunate effects on other players somehow, we can go for the "designated farming mission" styles mentioned in the last paragraph.

If we wanted to enable street sweeping while making "mission farming" nonviable, we could make the rewards for street sweeping be tied to the indirect influence your behavior has on factional control of a region. Gain exp and currency for increasing your allies' control in an area or decreasing factions you oppose's control. Street sweeping would achieve this, but the rewards for it would not be based directly on dropping individuals but on the efficacy of your actions in curbing (or promoting the right kind of) crime.

But again, it comes down to identifying the problem and seeking to solve the CORRECT issue. What is it we want to avoid, and why? Alternatively, what do we want to actively encourage?

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For the record, the main

For the record, the main thing I find unsavory about mission repeat farming (that is accepting a mission and milking it with no intention of ever completing it) is the idea that the NPC mission giver has asked my character to do a job for them, and I agreed to do it, and then YEARS later, it's still not done and they don't know any better or seem to care. I feel like there ought to be a point, in any mission, where the NPC giving it to you says "What are you doing? Why isn't that mission done yet?" For me, this issue is entirely about immersiveness and RPing. I feel that the mission, as a thing, ought to be accepted and completed (or failed) by the hero in due course, not simply used as a means to a selfish end. My RPer sensibility makes me feel like a total @$$hole doing that stuff when an NPC gives me a mission. It's just not heroic. I have no problem with the need for repeatable missions, as long as they're being completed and repeated. I mean there isn't going to be infinite content to do, so doing a lot of it many many times I feel is something that just has to happen. But mission repeat farming crosses the line, for me.

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And then there are the Non

And then there are the Non-RPers, like myself, that, forgive my bluntness, don't give a crap about all that. I don't role-play every aspect of a game I play. I know that there are others that do, but I just don't have time for all of that. I want to play a game because it's fun. I want to go in, take a mission, beat some bad guys, get a reward, wash, rinse, and repeat. You have to keep these kind of players in mind too.

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Quote:
Quote:

" In my opinion, the min/maxers really love taking a system and trying to break it, meaning finding the most optimal stuff, etc"

I was a min/maxer in CoH and I never did this. I min/maxed my builds but I spent bugger all time finding he most efficient way to gain levels. Sure I ran the Battle Maiden mission again and again but only very rarely.
We have different definition of what makes someone a min/maxer.

Also in regards to your concerns about immersion and a Hero taking too long to hand in a completed mission this wont work in the following scenario:
I have 9 active missions and accept a 10th - "Quick %Hero% you must help save %person% from the nasty %villain%. They are going to kill %person% if you don't get there in time!!!!".
Nahh I'll do the other 9 first.
Completes Missions 1-9 then does 10.
NPC: "Wow good job Hero you arrive just in time. [Now for the immersion text] I had no idea the %villain% was going to wait 5 days before killing %person% I thought it was going to happen in the next 30 mins which is why I wanted you to hurry".
Immersion is broken.

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Radiac
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cybermitheral wrote:
cybermitheral wrote:

Quote:
" In my opinion, the min/maxers really love taking a system and trying to break it, meaning finding the most optimal stuff, etc"
I was a min/maxer in CoH and I never did this. I min/maxed my builds but I spent bugger all time finding he most efficient way to gain levels. Sure I ran the Battle Maiden mission again and again but only very rarely.
We have different definition of what makes someone a min/maxer.
Also in regards to your concerns about immersion and a Hero taking too long to hand in a completed mission this wont work in the following scenario:
I have 9 active missions and accept a 10th - "Quick %Hero% you must help save %person% from the nasty %villain%. They are going to kill %person% if you don't get there in time!!!!".
Nahh I'll do the other 9 first.
Completes Missions 1-9 then does 10.
NPC: "Wow good job Hero you arrive just in time. [Now for the immersion text] I had no idea the %villain% was going to wait 5 days before killing %person% I thought it was going to happen in the next 30 mins which is why I wanted you to hurry".
Immersion is broken.

Your first statement is self-contradictory. First you point at what I said about min/maxers as being people who try to optimize the game and then you say , in effect, "I was a min/maxer and I never did that, I tried to optimize the game."

Also, not everyone who defines themself as a min/maxer is necessarily the type of person I'm referring to. The min/maxers I was referring to are the people who enjoy the challenge of trying to find a most-optimal route through the game, in whatever form that takes. Once those people do that and make their results known, there will likely follow behind them a slew of people who just do what the first guy did so they get the same results without the bother of having to actually figure it all out by themselves like the first guy did. These people, the min/max followers, will generally follow along with whatever the original min/maxers find to be most optimal, whatever that is. In CoX it might have been most optimal, in some ways, to run through a single mission map 50 times without ever completing it. Just because that was the most optimal thing in CoX doesn't mean it needs to be the most optimal thing in CoT, as far as I can tell, noir does that prove that it even needs to be allowed by the rules. CoT is going to be its own game, saying that it is meant to be a spiritual successor to CoX doesn't mean it has to have ALL o fhte same properties as CoX, right down to the stuff that didn't work right. I mean, do you expect them to have HamiOs that can be slotted into powers that were never intended for the HamiOs to slot into and give you buffs that work better than originally intended? CoX had that, is it a travesty of CoT doesn't? I don't think so.

As for the argument that we can't solve ALL of the immersion-breaking problems, I agree that we can't solve ALL the immersion-breaking problems, but I do believe I've found a way to solve THIS ONE, and I feel that solution has merit, in the limited cases where it applies. The attitude of "Well, we certainly can't solve ALL the problems, so therefore THIS problem should be left unsolved, even though we might have found a solution to it." is ludicrous, to me. I never demanded that all aspects of this game be perfectly immersive for RP, I'm just suggesting ONE solution that solves ONE of those problems, as I see them.

I'd also point out that in you scenario you describe, the hero did in fact complete all 10 missions in some order or another, without intentionally milking one of them for 20-30 run-thoughts, did they not? This is therefore not an example of anything my suggestions in the original post would affect or be affected by, as far as I can tell. Is your scenario immersion-breaking, I don't think so. Is it a problem for me, personally, no it is not. Would my suggestions in the original post make any difference in this scenario, I don't think it would.

I think this really boils down to a question of where you draw the line, so to speak, and clearly different people have different places where they would do that. I just happen to be a stickler for some degree of RP-immersive realism, compared to some, I guess.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Hi Radiac,

Hi Radiac,
I was pointing out that what you define as a min/maxer is different to what others may define as min/maxer and by ignoring the differences it increases the perceived number of people used in your argument.
Also in the quote you state min/maxers try to break the game. I didn't try to break the game by making my Tank as survivable as possible by getting my SD/BA Tank to ~52% Def to all 3 positions using IO Sets. The game allowed it and I could have gone further so maybe Im not a TOTAL min/maxer but I still tried to maximise my Def using the rules of the system not breaking the rules.

In my example I followed my own order for simplicity of the example and because I personally like to get rid of the mission on the top of my list even if a later mission is more urgent from a story perspective.

One of the greatest things I liked about CoH was how certain parts were unrestricted and the amount of freedom I had to play as I want. Allowing me to repeat a mission by NOT handing it in and MISSING OUT on the End of Mission Reward was my choice and I took the good with the bad.
Freedom to play as I want and to make my character as I want was GREAT!!!

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In general, players will

In general, players will always try to optimize for something to some degree. This is not only unavoidable, but desirable. What we need to do is make sure we know what it is we want to showcase, know what behaviors will bring players into contact with what we hope they'll find the most fun, and design our game system such that optimal behavior is also, ideally, the most fun behavior. That is, that the "desired player activities" are as close to being the optimal behaviors as possible.

This is generally better done by consciously designing reward systems to reward gameplay of the sort that is deemed appropriate, rather than to try to erect restrictions and penalties to punish gameplay that is deemed undesirable.

And even where we, the developers, did not intend for a mode of gameplay to be used, as long as it isn't somehow damaging others' enjoyment of the game (possibly by being "the best way to achieve X goal" when it is also not the fun and immersive way to achieve X goal), it probably isn't really a problem to solve. We're not in this to tell people how to have fun, so long as their fun isn't penalizing others who don't share that sense of it. Admittedly, what penalizes others is not always obvious, so we do need to be very conscious of the consequences of our design decisions.

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I don't consider the idea of

I don't consider the idea of making the NPC mission givers hold the heroes they give missions to accountable for their mission completion status as a punishment of the players. I would expect an NPC that's working properly to be mad at me, as a hero, for doing mission repeat farming instead of just doing the mission and finishing it in due course. Or, if the mission was a "kill all" mission, just racking up the kills to a certain total ought to be enough to consider it done. To me, that's what those NPCs should do if I decide to go off and make a mockery of the mission they gave me after I agreed in good faith to accomplish that mission. If an NPC is an object in the game that gives missions, I feel like this is what that process ought to be like. If you want to have a thing where people just get to fight wave after wave of mobs ad infinitum, I'm fine with that, but let's do that in such a way that it is designed to work that way from the start, instead of relying on flawed mission mechanics to provide it. As I said, the open world street sweeping and repeatable missions (which you complete and can then get another one right away, like radios) already served this purpose in CoX, basically, so what would have been so bad about curbing the mission repeat farming, had they chosen to do that in the way I describe?

I mean, the argument could be made that some city zones in CoX, like Independence Port, were "punishing" in that they were very large and took considerable time to get across, even with Fly, SS, etc. But if you made the conscious decision NOT to have stuff like that, then the "world" would not feel like a world, it would be too small and confined for the sake of people not having to make the long haul from the TV door to the train, etc. So for the sake of having an outdoor world that feels like an outdoor world, and is immersive in that, they made zones that were large and took a long time to cross, etc, despite the fact that people hate having to traverse a long boring distance like that. There's such a thing as making the parts of the game work in such a way as feels right for what they are, and that sometimes equates to building in realism where it doesn't help the player be more efficient, because the world shouldn't reasonably be expected to be that efficient. As soon as you get to the point in your mission repeat farming where your internal monologue is "Whee! I'm racking up the lootz by scr3wing my NPC contact and not completing my mission for them! I'M A HERO!" *GIGGLE*" then something's wrong with the mechanics of how missions work, if they're actually supposed to be missions in any believable sense of the word. That's my take.

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As many have said before -

As many have said before - CoH was a game that could be enjoyed in many different ways by the players. I was not a great fan of farming but i did not have a real problem with those who did enjoy it. It was just up to the player to select the play style that seemed best to them at the time.

This seems to me to be very similar to my attitude about RPing. I never got into it but i certainly had no problem with the players that did, live and let live.

The thing that does concern me is that there are a few threads dealing with subjects that some feel should be cracked down on - such as marketeering for example. While it could be argued that some aspects of a new CoH type game should be regulated for the good of all, i feel that the act of regulation - and complex implementation involved in this - would end up detracting from the players enjoyment.

I think that in a computer game, regulation would be best kept to a minimum. The danger of too much oversight is that the game becomes more about the limits imposed on it and not enough about simply choosing to do the things that you enjoy and avoiding the things that you don't.

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Radiac, to be blunt, while

Radiac, to be blunt, while mission repeat play may be a problem for you because of the loss of immersion due to the npc giving out the mission is not having the mission appropriately completed, it isn't a problem to others who don't play for the sake of immersion. Typically, most mission farmers are either on a solo run, or on a team with like minded individuals. If instances occur where the immersive-player and non-immersive play mix, the only instance that isn't a desirable outcome would be for the immersive player to get caught up in a farm-team.

In this particular case, if something like this were to happen to me, I'd leave the team. And I'd probably make a note of the person that invited me if I didn't want to make the mistake of accepting their team invite. Given we plan to implement a difficulty slider and auto-adjusting side-kick system, there isn't much reason for a mission-repeat-farmer to want to invite people who aren't into that play .

Just as Segev said, so long as both types of players are having fun, they should be able to have fun the way they are playing.

The specific mechanics you sight as being flawed that allow mission-repeating to be possible are not flawed in of themselves. The capability of resetting a mission is actually a QoL feature that gives the player the power to resolve certain problems for themselves. Yes, players can use it as a loophole to farm certain mission maps if they find that mission map and spawn type to be efficient for their type of character build. This isn't so much as a real problem unless that mission someohow yields greater reward for play when compared to other content - in which case its more of the dev's flawed design of that particular mission. This isn't so much of a problem for the type of game we plan to create with CoT as most times a flawed reward typically stems from specific spawn-dropped or searchable loot systems.

If we do impelement spawn-dropped-loot, it'd be closer to a reward for actually completing a mission, like earning a HamiO upon successfully completing a Hamidon encounter. Which means its closer to something like a raid, with multiple players involved and not an insignificant amount of time and difficulty involved to earn reward. Most definitely not the result of repeat-mission-farming.


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As far as CoT goes, I'm not

As far as CoT goes, I'm not designing it and I'm not privy to things being done behind the curtain, so I'm apt to leave that right there. As far as what CoX used to be like, and how I think it could have been improved, I have the following to say in response to Tannim222's recent post:

First, I personally consider a "loophole" as you called it or anything that "can be used as a loophole" to be a flaw. Loopholes, and potential loopholes, are flaws, in my book. So CoX mission mechanics were, to me, flawed, because part of making a more flawless game is making a mission behave like a mission, and to me that implies there will be an onus on the person who accepts the mission to actually complete it, and some kind of reaction by the NPC when it becomes apparently clear that they have no intention of ever doing such.

Second, there are a myriad of things that the immersionless gamers don't care about, and which don't harm anyone by their existence, and which would not harm anyone if they were taken out or changed. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the game, for the sake of the game itself. I mentioned the vast distances people had to travel. Also, the NPCs had text that you were generally expected to read in terms of what the mission was. They didn't just put "blah blah blah go do this mission, or don't, who cares, I'm not even real, this is a game, stop reading this you silly goose and go get yourself some swag" in there for the flavor text, they wrote stories. Despite the existence of people who didn't even read it, it needed to be there for the sake of the game itself.

Third, I hope this is the last time I have to repeat that I am not against making missions resettable. In the original post I only mention placing an upper limit on the size of the body count you can rack up before the NPC cuts you off, and my suggested maximum would be very generous, in my opinion. Other comments I made later on in this thread were not meant to be taken as a serious suggestion on my part (e.g. never refilling the mission map, etc) just as a comparison of what COULD have existed, and would have been even more realistic and unpopular. OF COURSE you need to be able to reset missions, for a number of QoL issues (your friend just logged on and wants to do the mission with you, or your LFG message just got a hit and you want to stop and start over later, etc). I have nothing against that.

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Ok, let's examine the problem

Ok, let's examine the problem that mission resetting is attempting to resolve for the sake of the game.

It is not solving the problem of mission completion for the sake of an NPC. An NPC can not know that a mission was reset as its a mechanical feature of the game, not an actionable piece of the story (success / failure / or levels of success). What then is the problem that limited mission resets solves for the game? The only other possible perceived problem that falls under this category as mentioned in this thread is that of farming.

Farming is only a problem if the rewards obtained are above the bounds of expected reward gains intended within the game. Some players may be on the high end of those bounds while others on the low end, but players utilzing mechanical features to use missions which are most efficient for their particular build. As long as they are within the bounds of performance (which includes all rewards) then this isn't a problem.

Things farming may contribute to, that is players amassing in-game wealth at even the upper bounds of expectancy are only problems if their amassed awards (wealth / drops) negatively impacts the game economy. Farming may be a factor here, but it isn't the major contribution, this has more to do with the nature of the economy system as a whole to which there are a number of possible avenues being explored for this game into which farming should not have a negative impact.

Then let's take this a step further, there are two ways to impart expected behavior, the carrot or the stick. What we want to do is encourage players to play the game as intended, that is to complete missions. The way we are exploring how to do this is to provide rewards based on achievements earned within a mission upon completing a mission. Therefore, completing a mission yields the weighted result for reward. As previously stated, time can be a factor where speed of play may be possible to achieve comparible results to farming or completing, but note it would probably require multiple resets to obtain those comparable results anyway, which can be well within whatever "genrous limit of resets" would probably need to exist if we were to apply a limit.


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So, to recap the last 100

So, to recap the last 100 posts and 2 pages, only one person has a problem with repeatable missions while everybody else is okay with it or doesn't really care. Also I believe 3 red names have stepped in and said that this isn't a problem, everything is okay, it will be "working as intended", and it's being handled. Cool.

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Everyone has the right to an

Everyone has the right to an opinion. And even one lone poster could pose as a voice for an number of non posting people. At the very least, there is something to be said of having concern and passion for the game while its in early development.


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CoH offered several solutions

CoH offered several solutions to Player A's perceived problem of Player A not completing a mission to the NPC's satisfaction:
> Player A could turn off XP before calling the contact, so as to receive a reduced reward for their failure.
> Player A could delete some of the rewards received during the mission, as punishment for missing the NPC's expectations.
> Player A could drop the mission and not speak to the contact again (for some time or never), roleplaying that the contact has lost trust in them, or as if their own code of ethics required them to restore honor elsewhere before returning.

CoH even allowed Player A to act as a team leader or supergroup leader, with the power to control who played with them, so that those of like mindset could set various rules to maintain their immersion, such as roleplaying that NPCs have more complex/stringent objectives, morality, or time constraints. Player A could also turn off OOC chat channels, avoid small areas such as AE buildings, and ignore players whose actions put their desired level of immersion at risk.

What CoH didn't offer was a way for Player A to set their preferred immersion level onto the entirety of the playerbase.

CoT can (and it seems, will) generally follow in the footsteps of CoH, with some adjustments to the balance between enemy-defeat rewards and mission-completion rewards, so that players can be happy playing the game in their own way without creating a significant economic imbalance. I'd like to see rewards balanced so well that most players feel that they're making solid progress toward their long-term goals, regardless of the playstyle and content they choose at any given time, but that's not easily done. As an example, CoH's mentoring option and taskforce merit reward system combined to create a better approach than most games have managed. Its design allowed players across all levels to make steady reward progress toward desirable midgame and endgame goals (assuming that the merit counts and IO recipe costs were set wisely, which wasn't always the case), and didn't strongly discourage L50 players from low level TF content through reward obsolescence.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

The question really is: what is it that we, as game designers, want players motivated to do?
What is it about farming - of any sort - that is harmful to the game experience as we want players to enjoy it?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with farming as long as it works both ways.
Players who enjoy the activity should be able to do so, but players who don't like that playstyle should be able to avoid it with equal ease.
This was not always the case with CoH towards the end of its run. Plenty of times did I roll a new hero only to find that the only requests for teaming up was with somebody who wanted to powerlevel a new alt through the low levels and needed some warm bodies to fill out the mission while the powerleveler rounded up the entire map, stuffed them in a dumpster and alpha'ed them down.
On more than one occasion was I told upon accepting the invite to 'enter the mission, do not move and pick up a book'. On other occasions the group was told that anybody who accepted the reward would be kicked and put on ignore (because the group leader wanted to repeat the exact same mission another dozen times that day and did not want the lockout timer to get active).
Any way you look at this, this was destroying the fun of the players who wanted to play the game, and basically drove me from the game with my beloved defender for quite a while. Had I been a new player I would have cancelled my subscription there and then.
So, while I agree that this behaviour was both rude and unusual, it was far from being rare. It was for a while common enough that it severely impacted my enjoyment of the game.
Part of the problem was not with mission farming but with the heroes being generally overpowered to the point that they could solo a group mission at maximum difficulty level (except for the boss fight which they planned to skip anyway so as not to trigger the lockout), and part of the problem was that the mechanism made this the most time/reward efficient way to play the game. At the cost of telling several other players that their presence was only required to boost the mob numbers and that they were otherwise useless.

In excess there is a potential problem with mission farming,. In small doses it is helpful to many players who have a specific goal in mind with their hero and don't want to wait as long to test it out. So the question is not simply should or should we prevent farming (and there are many different ways to farm in any MMO) but, how do we strike a balance that it remains a feasible activity for players but without allowing it to take over as =the= playstyle.
I do not have an answer to that question sadly.

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All I can say is welcome to a

All I can say is welcome to a problem that was relatively unique to CoX in terms of how the farming was setup. And it was a combination of factors that allowed it. The main parts would have been (in my eyes) the extreme instancing of the content along with the ability to select the difficulty as well (which changed according to number of people as well in team, so some AT's were better than others at level X range).

In most other games it was "find an area and kill the mobs" so the person doing the farming is competing with other questing players to achieve their goal. And if you do it in a mission area, you might be making it easier for the other players to complete their content as well (depends on mob tagging/loot reward rules). Bonus points are awarded if you use a bot, you are more detectable as well in these public areas... so using teleport hacks/faster travel than normal to achieve goals would get you banned as well[1].

So there are pros and cons to both sides of the game, but CoX's seemed to have more of a problem with it. Hell the AE was *filled* with AE arcs that were X/X farms, which players used to get tickets/pl their characters with.

[1] Of course, this is all dependent on the GM's of the game as well... some companies are bad with it, others are prompt (Carbine studios ended their problem rather rapidly. I stopped seeing bots after the month of the game if not faster...)

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Again, I think a large part

Again, I think a large part of this could be solved by setting up deliberate cases of farm-able missions/instances/zones/etc. Create places for those who want to farm to just go and do it. But don't make it more rewarding than mission-play, if you can avoid it. And don't make farming missions any more rewarding than farming "official farming" areas.

Not necessarily trivial, but certainly, I think, doable.

It would keep the farmers happy and not require them to manipulate a system designed for the fun of non-farmers.

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For what it's worth, I think

For what it's worth, I think this post has become more of an academic discussion about philosophies than anything actionable, and I'm fine with that. It was only an idea, and not a perfect one from the beginning in trying to do what it was trying to do. As I have already said, even my original ideas (1 and2 in the OP) weren't going to be perfectly immersive, just a little closer to what I feel is realistic behavior from an NPC, to me. From what the rednames have written on this topic, I'm fully convinced that they are being duly diligent in the game balance and XP and gear issues inherent in this that really do need to be looked at.

In CoX they didn't give us wings until they got them to flap and move and look right. Wings looked too fake if they just remained motionless when you fly. They would have looked, at best, like a halloween costume, not like real, working wings, so they made them move and flap, etc. and we got really cool wings as a result. The game didn't need that from a mechanics standpoint. People could fly using Fly and come up with some other excuse for how they were flying, but we got the wings anyway, and the good kind that actually look realistic in flight. This, to me was an example of quality control where things in the game were actually expected to look, feel, act, and behave as you'd expect them to, based on what they are. I personally think a "better" NPC would have been one that DID know you were screwing around punching goons instead of just completing the darn mission already, but that's apparently just my opinion.

For the idea of carrot vs stick, I sincerely hope you can get people to actually finish missions in due course using the carrot, and I look forward to doing content that is by design able to be repeated ad infinitum without putting an NPC contact on hold for 7 years.

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Just to throw an idea out

Just to throw an idea out there, what about deferring rewards for defeated enemies in missions until the mission is complete? For instance, while you're in a mission, you only get 20% of the usual XP and currency rewards from defeating enemies. At the end of the mission, you get the other 80% for each defeat. You get 100% of the rewards for defeating enemies after the mission is complete. If you reset the mission, you don't receive the other 80%.

This would create a strong incentive for players to complete every mission because farming a mission by resetting it would effectively reduce your leveling speed and cash flow by 80%. You could even throw in some other fun end-of-mission bonuses like I suggested in another thread to sweeten the deal.

Tying this to Segev's idea about "sanctioned farms," this would effectively guarantee that resetting normal missions would not be able to compete with official farms by ensuring that deferred rewards don't apply to official farms. It would also make it easier for the devs to create a clear dichotomy between farming and content completion.

I'm really just sharing this idea as a means of implementation. If the devs want to discourage players from creating farms out of normal missions, this would be one way to do it. Whether or not this is necessary or desirable remains a subject of debate (and indeed a key subject of this thread).

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We have discussed this very

We have discussed this very idea and decided against this for multiple reasons. The major factors are psychological in that earning rewards during combat provides stimulus. We do want to include various end of mission bonuses which are either equivalent to play styles used or provide additional reward. Withholding all rewards until the end also can be prohibitive to people who need to leave or get disconnected from missions making going into instanced content more of a risk. There is also the matter of consistent systems being used to provide rewards throughout various types of content.


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Also I liked being able to

Also I liked being able to level up during a mission and becoming partially more powerful mid-mission (unable to chose new power/slot until reaching a trainer).
Having my XP held back until the mission is complete removes that most of the time. Also if we get the Level Up Bonus tat CoH had (max Health/End/every INSP added) then this is wasted as the mission is complete (on Kill All's for example). If Co will not have this type of Level Up bonus well then this is less of an issue :)

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

We have discussed this very idea and decided against this for multiple reasons. The major factors are psychological in that earning rewards during combat provides stimulus. We do want to include various end of mission bonuses which are either equivalent to play styles used or provide additional reward. Withholding all rewards until the end also can be prohibitive to people who need to leave or get disconnected from missions making going into instanced content more of a risk. There is also the matter of consistent systems being used to provide rewards throughout various types of content.

I can understand your points about rewards during combat providing positive psychological feedback and penalizing people who disconnect. This is why I suggested a percentage and not an all-or-nothing approach. The key is balance: making the up-front percentage too small may leave players feeling slighted while making it too large makes the penalty for resetting negligible.

I think a healthy ratio could satisfy both sides along with ensuring that players who leave a mission still get credit for their contributions to defeats if it's completed after they left. In addition, a visible tally of pending rewards during a mission could help bolster players' morale.

Anyways, I respect that you've already considered the idea. I just wanted to share my take on it as some food for thought.

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Just wondering, but how would

Just wondering, but how would holding the XP back count for Missions that are in the open world? Would it be all "relevent" mobs being limited this way, or just "everything you have killed" being limited in XP rewards?

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I like Plexius's "XP and Inf

I like Plexius's "XP and Inf escrow" idea for missions. It makes me wonder about missions and getting DCed though. For one thing, getting DCed sucks no matter what, but is there a way you could get DCed while soloing a mission, then when you log back in, perhaps days later, you're still in the mission you were in right where you got DCed and can continue on from there? And if that is possible, is it possible to continue to track any banked XP and Inf so that you still get it when you log back on?

As far as the stimulus effect, I personally never looked much at the XP and Inf drops I got when defeating individual mobs in missions, I might have checked it once in a while to gauge what the rewards were like for that mission for me, etc, but I don't think I was ever that mindful of it as an instant total gratification thing for defeating a mob in a mission. What did feel good was getting the SO drops, Inspirations drops, salvage, etc. Assuming all the randomized drops like that are still happening in real time, I think the escrowing of XP and Inf rewards could work, personally.

On the subject of carrots and sticks, I wonder what the reaction of the player base does in response to the different things there. For example, CoX offered the player a set of possible options that included street sweeping, soloing missions, teaming up to do missions, TFs, Incarnate trials, the Rikti Mothership and Hami raids, the respec trials, etc. Over time street sweeping became the least popular thing, from what I remember, and I think it was probably at the bottom of the list because the rewards for completing missions were an added incentive to do missions (and complete them), and STILL there was mission farming for a number of different reasons, badge hunting, power leveling lowbie alts, generating large amounts of swag quickly, testing builds, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is I worry that the carrot only works when it turns a given option into the most attractive option, and when that happens, then you get people mostly doing JUST that option. If you want the mobs that exist in outdoor zones to be things people actually engage in combat once in a while and not just window dressing, it might be good to have a rotating schedule of different promotional things every so often to encourage different things. Like make certain play options better, in terms of rewards, on a rotating basis. Fior example this week its "clean up the streets week" for Heroes and "advance your sinister plot week" for villains, so the heroes get bonuses to doing open world hunting and the villains get bonuses for completing missions. Or you could sync the weeks so that you encourage everyone to do the same stuff this week and then switch gears to something else next week. Then when there's seasonal stuff to do like Christmas and Halloween, you make that the weekly promotion fora week or two.

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Other than seasonal and

Other than seasonal and specific game events, keeping track of a rotational basis of gained incentive rewards might be something of a challenge, and given some of the possible inclussions we are considering for the game, may not be necessary, though I'll put it on my white board for discussion.

We did have something outlined that did fall along the lines of the escrow idea, and its something we may explore as we itinerate. When we did go over it, considering the systems we intend to use for earning rewards, it was determined that it may not be necessary. Hence, its on a list of back-up plans.

Recall the kick starter update about player agency where an example of a player getting involved in some action on the street can result in finding a clue that leads to a random mission. There was no NPC contact to talk to to get that mission, it was found by earning a type of reward drop, a clue or lead. Any clues earned within a mission will most likely pertain to furthering the story related to that mission. Where as some of the starts, or finding additional bits of information, or even the one-off mission (called a plot) is earned while street sweeping. Street sweeping then has a benefit of being able to end up with a pay off in essentially unlocking missions which in turn yield additional rewards.

Another part of street sweeping rewards under consideration is providing rewards based on achievements and challenges just like with missions. Clearing out a small location of a certain NPC presence may unlock an achievement for that area, yielding additional reward. Areas may be in sections - an small network of alleys or a small neighborhood. Clearing out an NPC presence in a given location may result in triggering a small event in that location, such as a the affected NPC faction responding to action, an opposing faction moving in and attempting to deal with the PC that created the opening for them to do so (no use in letting someone hang around that could end up affecting them too). Succeeding in meeting the challenge would result in an achievement award.

If street-level spawns yield the same reward results as instanced spawns, and both street sweeping and instanced content yielded weighted rewards for earning achievements, we are essentially using the same metric for earned rewards for both types of play. This avoids having to create two separate systems for reward earning and tracking results of play, one where street level spawns provide one set of results and another where instanced spawns provide another, and that how those rewards by the player end up feeling different. One system providing consistent rewards between world-level and instanced level play makes the game feel unified instead of separate.


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That sounds great, seriously.

That sounds great, seriously.

For what it may be worth, I used to love the Weekly Strike Target that CoX had. It gave people who like to team up and do TFs a reason to do specific ones at specific times. There's nothing better than the words "ON SALE" to get people to buy specific items that you're overstocked with, and I think giving people a specific thing to do in a specific time frame adds an element of predictability to the game which allows the teamer-uppers to more easily find teams for stuff. I used to plan certain toons respec trials around that schedule, plan on getting certain badges for certain toons, etc. CoX had SO many different TFs and trials, you wished they had more than ONE weekly strike target per week sometimes, but apart from that I liked it.

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You know you have the option

You know you have the option of not farming? That's the beauty of choice and why CoH was wonderful; people would rp, some might speed run, others would just stand about talking or maybe enjoy some PVP...and ofc players would farm all day long...because of that choice.

The more options you have in a game, the more people will want to play it and the better chance it will have of surviving; let's not shun people because they like to farm or do something that you might not do. I for example wouldn't rp but I'd never get rid of it, it's a vital part of the game.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

... , and I think giving people a specific thing to do in a specific time frame adds an element of predictability to the game which allows the teamer-uppers to more easily find teams for stuff. ...

+1 for the use of Teamer-Uppers. Quick Picker Upper! ;D

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Awes wrote:
Awes wrote:

You know you have the option of not farming?

Sure, and I don’t’ want to sound rude here, but that's like saying you have the option of not posting. It's a little demeaning and dismissive.

I'm pretty sure no one, anywhere, under any circumstances, has been unaware they have the option of not farming. While I get the logic behind "You don't have to do it," keep in mind this is still a forum on the development of the game. If farming becomes too rewarding, too easy or too common place, then it can potentially fundamentally change the landscape of the game. While you might not personally care about that, or you might even embrace the change, we should still be careful not to take the attitude that players aren't allowed to argue against an option at all because "Hey, you don't have to do it."

After all, City of Heroes had enemies that didn't fight back at all in the first week yet gave exp as normal. We had the *option* of "just not fighting them," but it would have been ridiculous to keep them in the game. Likewise, players have the *option* of not farming content.. but they have the additional *option* of posting suggestions to the game in regards to common farming tactics, and if the relevant parts of the game should be handled differently.

If that makes sense. On a completely different topic..

Radiac wrote:

I like Plexius's "XP and Inf escrow" idea for missions. It makes me wonder about missions and getting DCed though.

I have a worse example from not long after the City of Villains launch trying to solo a mission on a low level Dominator with no travel powers yet.

As most of us know, Dominators were designed to build up to using their Domination ability to increase the damage and length of holds. I came to a mission where I wasn't able to get past the boss, mostly due to problems being able to 'time' the Domination right, or .. something. It was a long time ago. The problem? Every time I'd walk back from the hospital after dying, the mission had gone ahead and reset itself. I got by after a few times, but it was very annoying having the mission reset due to factors that wasn't exactly easy to mitigate. Had I not been getting experience for the battles early in the mission, I would have been punished even further.

This probably won't be an issue in Titans, but with the game being over a year away still, I think we can assume it's possible it'll have its own set of bugs and issues, especially early on.

Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
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Pursuant to the original post

Pursuant to the original post, I would like to ask the audience, if there still is one, about the question I had posed therein. IF mission repeat farming (and by that I mean running through the first 90% of a mission then exiting and resetting over and over) were to disappear as a possible option, what do you think you'd do instead?

Would you complete more missions? Would you do more open world street sweeping? Would you do more repeatable content like TFs, trials, etc? Would you feel the game needs more repeatable missions like the radios and alignments missions in CoX so that you could do those?

I'm still interested in what the at-large player base's response would likely be to this, even if it's only a purely hypothetical discussion.

If your answer would be something like "Why get rid of mission farming in the first place?" then please understand that we've covered that in the first ~100 so responses on this thread already, the rednames have weighed in, and that fight has been fought.

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MISSION COMPLETE... To curb

MISSION COMPLETE... To curb farming and I don't care if you do or do not like it... it will happen in one fashion or another... But a simple way to get past it... If you exit a mission the XP/INF bar drops so that the next 'run' wont be near what the first run was... say 50%... then goes down from there until you do a Mission Complete... Once a mission complete is done... NO CHARACTER that has spawned into such mission can access the mission again for 24, 48, 72, 120s hour +/-... Yes, then there is the ALT scenario to where it's the same thing, guy/gal running a different toon leading the Herd... Same applies... but if that is the case, then make the respawn much lower and the reward much less...

Farming has many advantages to the 'market' and many disadvantages to the balance of the game... but unless you completely nerf the ability to make XP or earn INF in this game... then you will not 'control' farming...

However... in nerfing or curbing... you change many aspects of the game as a whole... Do I think there should be limits to earn per toon, account?... Yes I do... but that's just my opinion... do i think farming should be 'stopped'... no... this game (any game) would change... and possibly not for the better.

I was not a farmer and do not agree with farming for only personal gain... Farmers will take NEW toons and PL them to 50 without regard to the game itself (some, not all) and wonder why those that choose to grind to 50 are upset with the 50 asking how to get to Talos... It's not that we are upset with either the farmer or the new 50... but the farmer should be responsible to get that new 50 to Talos and should share in their eventual debt (tied to farming debt) for at least a certain period of time until that toon becomes self sufficient through the non farmers actions to make that new character learn the game... The non farmer gets penalized because we are slowing down to help the character the farmer only wanted to gain XP and INF from...

Okay... I am starting to ramble... I did not earn The Drunken' Dragon moniker for nothing... Long Live CoT (Once alive) and... Let's get back to the game... :D

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IF mission repeat was taken

IF mission repeat was taken away, I would either find something like AE, Danger Room, etc. that would allow mission repeats OR I'd run TF after TF after TF. Most of the times the missions themselves don't really interest me all that much, not speaking for anybody but myself here, so I tend to just blow through the missions as fast as I can until I find one that I really enjoy playing. Most of the time that I ever did missions themselves was really when I was teaming with my fellow Repeat Offenders. If it wasn't a mission that involved achieving some kind of badge I really didn't care what we did. I was mostly just interested in playing with all my friends, shooting the shit, and having fun. As I've said, I'm not a RP'er, I'm not interested in doing all of that. I just like to go beat some bad guys up or blow up some stuff to smithereens.

I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!

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Honestly if there was a legit

Honestly if there was a legit way of stopping repeat mission "farming" it would have virtually no effect on the way I play the game. The way I leveled most of my 50's was by running on teams. Whether they were friends or just random pugs, I was pretty much willing to team up with whoever had a mission team, or preferably a TF since you were somewhat locked in for the duration or I could honestly consider you a schmuck for quitting part way through.

If I decided that an alt was in need of some bonus levels I would attempt to get on a higher team running ramped up content, or just answer the call for people to run the fotm PL method.
All that said I don't personally think that banning mission repeating is a good thing. I don't pvp, and I generally didn't farm, but I don't see how someone who enjoys those activities are a problem unless they are earning in game currency or xp at a rate which bothers the developers. In the case of pvp'ers, as long as I don't have to continually reject fight quests or try to dodge your AoE attacks, more power to you.
In that same vein if I could convince RP'ers to use a channel other than the main chat, that would make me happy, but I don't want there to be a "mandate" to enforce it.

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I never understood why some

I never understood why some people get offended by the way other people want to play. It's really none of anyone's business. If you don't like farming don't farm.
Personally I hated farming because it was boring but I did it because the xp requirements for the higher levels were stupid high. Also a lot of the adventures at upper levels were dumb anyway so I had lost immersion already.
You want to do away with farming here's a perfect solution. Do away with experience points and levels. Just let us make the characters we want and do the missions that suit us. If we try a mission we're not equipped for the game can warn us that we'll need help and give us a choice to team up with other players or with NPCs. (I've never liked playing online games with other players).

Here's a quote from a pnp rpg that I'm making:
WE DON'T USE LEVELS
In a typical game that uses levels, a hero will start out fighting minor opponents, and, as he gains more experience and powers he moves to new places to face new and growing challenges. That's OK for what it is, But It's Not What Action Adventure Stories Are Usually Like. An action hero is usually created with a particular environment, and kind of adventures, in mind. Of course, anything can happen and occasionally being taken out of your element can be interesting, but a leveling up game never gives a hero a chance to be at home in any element. A player who wants a cosmic hero has to start out fighting skeletons and wait for the kinds of adventures he really wants. If a player wants to fight street crime, then advancing to a point where that type of adventure isn't any challenge, means the character stops being what the player created him to be.

just some food for thought I hope you consider it.

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It seems like some rancor is

It seems like some rancor is being generated by a confusion in terms.

Radiac is saying that he objects to 'mission repeat farming', but that's not quite what he means.

People are mad at him, because they want to be able to repeat missions without being tagged with a negative term.

Radiac replies to them, that he has no problem with repeatable missions. This leads to confusion.

Because, Radiac does not actually object to repeating missions. The thing he dislikes (and I agree), is when people misuse the 'mission refresh' feature to repeatedly run the exact same mission without ever completing it. These people say, "Don't click the Glowie!" or they refuse to fight the final boss, because that completes the mission. Then, once they've gathered all of the experience and loot from the mission, they Exit, trigger the mission refresh, and go back in, to do it all over again.

So, this thread is about controlling abuse of 'Mission Refresh Farming'.

Those who enjoy 'Mission Repeat Farming', by running a mission or type of mission through to completion, over and over, don't need to be defensive about it. A lot of the alternate commentary surrounding these issues is useful and interesting.

Meanwhile, Segev and Tannim have been weighing in with Clever ideas and insights into the Devs decision-making, that make me think, 'Hmmm!'

Be Well!
Fireheart

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If I understand Radiac's (and

If I understand Radiac's (and others') problem with it, it's not that the very thought that some players might be "mission-refresh" spamming offends them. After all, what difference does it make to Radiac how, say, TheMightyPaladin chooses to play the game?

The problem he has is that he doesn't want to do that, and yet he too often found himself being yelled at for wanting to, of all things, complete the mission when he was on a pick-up team. This is not fun for him.

He comes at it from a position of, "well, clearly the ability to mission refresh is the problem. If that weren't possible, there wouldn't be teams formed with leaders yelling at their pick-up members not to complete the mission, and I would be able to enjoy PUGs more."

I think the simplest solution to this would be simply to allow players to repeat missions even if they'd completed them. Maybe they can't get exp for the final boss or mission-complete exp or something again, but they can replay for the mooks' exp all they want. I am not certain at this point that that's the best solution, but it would resolve the conflict between the "I want to complete the mission" crowd (who, I might add, are quite reasonable to expect that to be a goal) and the "I want to be able to farm this mission over and over" crowd (who are not wrong for wanting to play the game that way if they like just running around that map and beating up bad guys).

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TheMightyPaladin wrote:
TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I never understood why some people get offended by the way other people want to play. It's really none of anyone's business. If you don't like farming don't farm.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say if someone is posting a way to stop an activity or alter it so it's less rewarding, we can go ahead and venture a guess that they're probably not using that system.

Posting a suggestion or idea on the suggestions an ideas forum does not require or in any way suggest that the poster is offended by the thing he or she wants changed. Regardless of if some people realize or would admit it or not, how this game handles exploiting the game (and the definition of exploiting and whether or not that includes farming) will not only say a lot about the game and the developers, but will likely have a serious impact on what the typical team does and how they play the game in general.

You called farming boring but said you did it because the experience requirements to level were too high. Farming isn't addressing the root issue, though. The root issue, I would suggest, would be better addressed by giving a way to get to the next level faster (if it's determined that it needs to be faster and it often was made quicker in City of Heroes through various means).

Or the solution might be to make waiting on the next level more fun, or to do both.

If farming is in the equation, will people focus on getting those changes made or just say, "If you don't like waiting for the next level, shut up and farm"?

I don't think that's good for the game. That doesn't mean I'm breaking into your play sessions, screaming about how offended I am and demanding that you burn at the cross for daring to enjoy a playstyle I didn't enjoy engaging in myself. Posting a suggestion doesn't imply Radiac is freaking out over your playstyle. It just means he's posting a suggestion he personally thinks would be good for the game. It’s unfair to act as if he’s acting “emotional” over this issue. (Radiac, you’re a ‘he’ right?)

Dismissing it with "If you don't like it, don't farm" is just like saying "If you don't like suggestions that might impact farming, don't read the suggestions forum."

It's just trying to shut down a valid discussion with an emotional response.

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As I've already mentioned, I

As I've already mentioned, I think the biggest reason that exists for getting rid of the ability to farm a given mission for an unlimited number of repeats without ever completing it is that the NPC whose story arc you're doing SHOULD, in my opinion, if they're a "smart" NPC, eventually catch on that this is what you're doing and cut you off (either in the good way or the bad way, based on context).

By asking the question "What would you do if mission repeat farming (where you never complete the mission) were not a possibility?" I had hoped to get a better understanding of WHY people were doing that in the first place so as to be able to try to design a legitimate mission, TF, danger room, etc that might serve the same purpose without having to break immersion for it. Unfortunately, most people who have chimed in are apparently not interested in considering what they'd do in a world without farming.

Some things I've thought of on my own that mission repeat farming was done for:

1. I want to power-level a lowbie.

My response to that is to tell people that the sidekick XP gain system was what allowed for that in the first place. I mean you could have just done open world street swweeping instead of missions for that and gotten basically the same results. Farming missions was only done in that sense, I believe, because it was the most convenient and maybe a little faster than completing missions. You could still PL a toon by completing level 50 missions with them sidekicked, so this is not being affected in any large way, I don't think. You just have to go to a different door every so often. If that's too much trouble, then the problem is that the open world zone is too large and requires you to travel too far between missions, which as I've already pointed out is what makes the world feel like a world. If you made it any smaller, you'd feel like a guy trapped in an amusement park for eternity, and that would be worse, in my opinion, than having to haul yourself from one mission door to another every so often.

2. I want to generate large amounts of swag by filling a mission and clearing it quickly because I can easily mow down that particular type of mob.

My response to this is that completing missions against that faction ought to give the same rewards, and more in fact given the mission completion drops. So as long as you can always get a mission of some kind against that faction (Radios, tips, etc) then you're not affected by the loss of farming here either. Here I think is where we need more missions that you can just do, and complete, and get another one over and over and over, like the radio mission in CoX.

3. I love to just team up and go around beating on baddies without having to read flavor text.

You can do that in the open world, assuming there are areas to street sweep aplenty, which there ought to be if there's instancing of the open world as I've heard there will be. You can also do that in most missions when you complete them, you just have to relocate to another door every so often (see point 1).

4. I want to stress-test my new build by running the same mission as a baseline, and I want that baseline to be unchanging in terms of the mobs' type, number, and disposition so I have a fair standard to compare builds against.

I can see a few ways to provide something like this. The "danger room" idea being one, and that might be a thing that your personal lair or SG base could have (may cost something to have/use/maintain it). Also this could be done reasonably well in open world areas I feel, but there might be disagreement on that. Of course there could be a specific mission (or several) where you discover a portal to the nether world out of which pour demons periodically, and you can never destroy or close the portal, so you just end up going there once in a while and clearing out the demons. I can see that as a possible "storyline approved unfinishable mission" which basically functions in such a way as to give you the ability to go back and defeat those demons to your heart's content. Or robots, or aliens, or soldiers from another dimension, etc.

As long as I don't have to suspend my disbelief that the NPC will wait essentially forever to get that mission done, feel like I'm happy. If there's an aspect of mission repeat farming that I haven't covered above, please tell me what it is and why you feel you need it. Whatever it might be, I don't think it will absolutely require us to have to string the NPCs along for 7 years like mission repeat farming did.

I don't know if this last thing I'm about to say is the one that people liked about farming, but If your whole reason for mission repeat farming was "bypassing the expectation of having to complete a mission makes me feel like a bada$$ because I'm essentially breaking the law and getting away with it, which makes me feel like I outsmarted the devs" then all I can say is "Oh, grow up."

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Radiac, I'm not quite sure I

Radiac, I'm not quite sure I follow why this bothers you so much if OTHERS with whom you're not having to interact are doing it.

To approach it from the point of view of your immersion, how long should an NPC wait for you to finish a mission before they get annoyed with you? Not "how many times should you be able to repeat it?" but "how long should they have to wait, and should it be measured from how long your PC has been logged in or in real-world time?"

Because he's not going to know, realistically (immersion-wise), that you tried the mission 5 times and reset it 4. He's only going to know "hey, I asked you to do this [time period] ago."

Consider your answer here, carefully, because it comes back to a question of, should players be punished for taking a mission and then having to log off for two weeks due to real life events?

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

The problem he has is that he doesn't want to do that, and yet he too often found himself being yelled at for wanting to, of all things, complete the mission when he was on a pick-up team. This is not fun for him.

I can see why that would bother someone. The obvious solution is to do what they do in Dungeons & Dragons Online. Don't give xp during a mission only at the end. So if you don't complete it you get no reward at all. If you want to fight mobs or monsters and get xp without being having to do missions do it in outdoor encounter areas.

Or you could use the suggestion I gave above about doing away with xp and levels altogether. That's what I'd prefer myself but this suggestion also works (just not quite as well).

I'm sorry if what I said wasn't appropriate, but my emotional response was based on personal experience (that I guess didn't really apply in this case). I have often been ridiculed for my play style (both for farming and for Not farming) and for the way I build my characters. That's part of why, as I said before, I've never enjoyed playing online games With other players and I really hope this game makes teaming up with NPCs an option.

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The problem with not

The problem with not rewarding xp until the end of mission complete is that if someone has an ISP issue, storm knocks out their interwebz, or for RL reasons has to log out of the game before the mission is complete that person gets nothing for their time and effort. That would lead to a lot of unhappy people. It's not their fault, they did everything they could but now are being punished because they couldn't stick around for mission complete. It's better to reward a player xp throughout the mission just in case something like this happens, then they don't feel so bad for being randomly disconnected.

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oOStaticOo wrote:
oOStaticOo wrote:

The problem with not rewarding xp until the end of mission complete is that if someone has an ISP issue, storm knocks out their interwebz, or for RL reasons has to log out of the game before the mission is complete that person gets nothing for their time and effort. That would lead to a lot of unhappy people. It's not their fault, they did everything they could but now are being punished because they couldn't stick around for mission complete. It's better to reward a player xp throughout the mission just in case something like this happens, then they don't feel so bad for being randomly disconnected.

+1

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oOStaticOo wrote:
oOStaticOo wrote:

The problem with not rewarding xp until the end of mission complete is that if someone has an ISP issue, storm knocks out their interwebz, or for RL reasons has to log out of the game before the mission is complete that person gets nothing for their time and effort. That would lead to a lot of unhappy people. It's not their fault, they did everything they could but now are being punished because they couldn't stick around for mission complete. It's better to reward a player xp throughout the mission just in case something like this happens, then they don't feel so bad for being randomly disconnected.

I would also echo this. Something I feel is not done enough in other games is to have a massive bonus at completion of story arc, so it pays to do the whole arc. CoH was part way along that road with the merits awarded on arc completion and XP bonus.

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Still haven't seen any

Still haven't seen any response to my suggestion of doing away with xp and levels altogether. It would solve the problem completely.
This is what I said about it, (it's a quote from a pnp rpg that I'm making):

WE DON'T USE LEVELS
In a typical game that uses levels, a hero will start out fighting minor opponents, and, as he gains more experience and powers he moves to new places to face new and growing challenges. That's OK for what it is, But It's Not What Action Adventure Stories Are Usually Like. An action hero is usually created with a particular environment, and kind of adventures, in mind. Of course, anything can happen and occasionally being taken out of your element can be interesting, but a leveling up game never gives a hero a chance to be at home in any element. A player who wants a cosmic hero has to start out fighting skeletons and wait for the kinds of adventures he really wants. If a player wants to fight street crime, then advancing to a point where that type of adventure isn't any challenge, means the character stops being what the player created him to be.

just some food for thought I hope you consider it.

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While it's not a terrible

While it's not a terrible idea, I'm not all that much of a fan of it. I guess I'm old fashioned. Perhaps it's the Pavlovian Dog Syndrome, but people like the sound of the Ding. A lot of people like the feel of starting out with a weak character and through hard work and determination, slowly working their way up to a full fledged super hero. Plus leveling and receiving experience while doing missions give people a positive reward. This way they don't feel like everything they are doing is for nothing.

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Radiac, in answer to your

Radiac, in answer to your question "What would you do if mission repeat farming (where you never complete the mission) were not a possibility?" I answer that I would street sweep. In fact, I did not save missions to repeat them in COH. I occasionally played such missions from others, but I think I was an outlier for street sweeping. i really liked it. I felt like I was "learning" the zones by going into each one sequentially, and just killing bad guys (oh wait, I was "arresting" them) in huge numbers.

I also played missions in AE, and ran TFs like crazy. And by the way, I did NOT like the rule in COH that your rewards for running an ITF declined if you repeated it. I mean, come on, I was playing with buddies and having fun, running teams, and enjoying the game. Where's the harm in that? That last was rhetorical, of course.

It seems to me that you are really concerned with something that looks to you like an exploit. I get that. Exploits should be suppressed. But I don't support limits on how much XP or INF a character can earn, either in a day or over ten years, through regular, sanctioned play. We need to make sure we are not saying "you can't do that, it might be too much fun" to players. Legitimate play should be encouraged and rewarded. The more, the better. It's the exploits that should be suppressed.

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"What would you do if mission

"What would you do if mission repeat farming (where you never complete the mission) were not a possibility?"

Let me preface this with the only significant Mission Resetting (new term) I did was the Battle Maiden story with Statesman in it.
Why did I do this for the XP to get a new toon up beyond 20-25. I had a LOT of toons of most AT's and making another Tank (I liked Tanks :)) with a new powerset combo (SD/BA = check. Inv/FM= check. SD/FM = new toon) and slaving to get them to the IO ranges was a bore for me after playing the game for so many years.
Also I never got a new character to 50 in a single week.
Double-XP weekends were about getting as many of my characters some extra XP as possible. Sure I'd focus on 2-3 primarily but id also be the Level 50 running the content for my friends taking my turn "at the helm".

So if I was unable to join a high-level team of friends and run this same Mission at +4/x8 and reset it I'd probably just join a high-level team of friends at +4/x8 and do Paper Missions/etc.
If I could also do TF (no Min Level Requirement) then I would do that also.

But I'd only do that if I had done that AT/Class/Powerset and KNEW it very well. Or If I was stuck at a certain level and just needed a 1-2 level boost.

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TheMightyPaladin wrote:
TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Still haven't seen any response to my suggestion of doing away with xp and levels altogether. It would solve the problem completely.
This is what I said about it, (it's a quote from a pnp rpg that I'm making):
WE DON'T USE LEVELS
In a typical game that uses levels, a hero will start out fighting minor opponents, and, as he gains more experience and powers he moves to new places to face new and growing challenges. That's OK for what it is, But It's Not What Action Adventure Stories Are Usually Like. An action hero is usually created with a particular environment, and kind of adventures, in mind. Of course, anything can happen and occasionally being taken out of your element can be interesting, but a leveling up game never gives a hero a chance to be at home in any element. A player who wants a cosmic hero has to start out fighting skeletons and wait for the kinds of adventures he really wants. If a player wants to fight street crime, then advancing to a point where that type of adventure isn't any challenge, means the character stops being what the player created him to be.
just some food for thought I hope you consider it.

I will try to answer this adequately for you: because that is not the game we are making. Using pen and paper design as the sole source of knowledge for MMO game design can lead to flawed thinking. Using it as a reference can be ok, but it can not be the filter through which an MMO is made.

Yes there can be level-less MMOs. These are typically best made as sand-box games, utilizing both gear and skill systems to represent the difference between new and more seasoned players. Most pnp super themed games utilized a point buy system and some used levels in all but a different name, like point class. The worst of the sand box games has seasoned players far out classing new players to the point that the level-less system is hurt for not having levels separate players, the best (of which there is varying opinion) result in such a minor desire panty between character build that player skill itself is the main separator of performance.

In a level-less game such as our own, a generic thug has to be a relatively same challenge rating for a new player with 3-5 powers as it is to a seasoned player with a character bearing upwards of over 20 powers. The entire power set structure from primary to tertiary, to the tiered set up would probably need to be rewritten to make powers more like skills, improved over time, changed or altered by trees, resulting in far fewer powers over all with varied efficiency from new to seasoned builds. It would be a vastly different game that would not resemble the game we are trying to hail back to and improve upon, one which must be both familiar to players of that game as well as provide newer, hopefully improved experiences.


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Not using levels was

Not using levels was discussed a few months ago, and ultimately rejected for a variety of reasons, largely based on the kind of game experience we want to offer. So there will be levels. Sorry if you felt your posts were being ignored on the topic.

Honestly, I think the best solution, assuming there's no reason why "mission repeat farming" is inherently a game balance problem, is to make it not the optimal way to get whatever it offers. That is, provide avenues for doing the same thing, but without having to exploit a feature not intended to be used that way, and without conflicting with people who might be teaming with you because they want to play the way the game expects to be played.

For example, just provide either "danger room" exercises, or the ability to complete the same mission over and over (rather than having to reset it every time). Possibly deny any unique end-of-mission rewards for subsequent efforts if those would otherwise be a reason to prevent it, but that way there's no reason to stop people from "clicking the glowies" or taking out the mission boss in order to preserve your ability to replay the mission.

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Some responses and another

Some responses and another reason for farming:

To the idea of getting rid of levels altogether: I'm personally against it but I think that idea deserves its own thread entirely. Since I don't want to have this thread hijacked by that topic, I'm reticent to say any more here. If you're interested in seriously considering that idea, please start a thread about it and I'll chime in there.

To the question of how much farming should the NPC consider to be enough: my method counts mob defeats because you can set that to be something like double the number of mobs a maxxed out map could possibly have, which should rule out the possibility of cutting off a guy that's just doing the mission legitimately. I'm not counting times you hit the rest button on the mission, I'm counting total mobs defeated under the auspices of doing the mission of that name, and that counter would continue to count up and increment every time you defeat a mob in that mission, so you go through it once, defeat 50 mobs, then reset and go through again and the counter goes up to like 100, etc. It doesn't reset the body count number when you reset the mission, it keeps counting. How much of the NPCs time you've wasted in that sense is expected to be proportional to the number of mobs defeated. That seems reasonable to me.

To the idea of "just award all the XP and swag at the end, when you complete the mission." I'm not against that. Othwer games do this, so it's certainly not unprecedented or radical. If people get DCed in the middle, they should be able to log back in and the game puts them right back on the mission map where they got DCed, or it respawns you in the hospital and leaves the mission map unreset and allows you to go back and pick up where you left off, like if you had dies in the mission map, or you just have to restart the mission all over again. That last option sucks, but getting DCed is going to suck no matter what, or at least should. You definitely don't want to reward people for uplugging their cablemodem so as to work around something and game the system that way.

To the idea, which I think Segev mentioned, of whether there ought to be some kind of timer instead of a "mobs defeated cap", I would say that I'm not against that, but I think it would need to be measured in "time spent playing that toon once the mission has been accepted, whether you're actively doing that mission or not" not "real time" like the mission timers were in CoX. Also, I think it probably ought to be at least 2 hours of "time on that toon since mission was accepted" if you want an actual number I'd put on it. If you accept a mission, then log off and get on a different toon, that shouldn't operate against you in terms of that mission, I feel. You have to let people alt, after all. It is my belief that this idea would have less traction among players than the mob defeat cap idea, if only because it opens up several possibilities I think that are bad. 1) a person who's really bad and has their difficulty up too high could take too long to complete the mission and get cut off despite not farming it. 2) you could get timed out like RIGHT before you complete the mission, thus invalidating all the time spent in it so far. With the mob defeat cap, I envision it as being a thing where you get a running "### of ### mobs defeated" counter that you can see and plan accordingly. When you're too close to the cap for comfort, you click the glowies or drop the boss or whatever and move on to the next mission.

To the issue of "you can still choose not to farm" I agree. And that brings up my other reason for why people farm that I thought of.

In CoX I still did farm, even though I didn't really want to or feel good about doing it. I had two warehouses full of Carnies on Radiac at the end which were leftover from when I was trying to get the Archmage Accolade. I didn't LIKE having to do it that way, but I felt it necessary to get the accolade. Even then I had to convince people to do the missions with me, because Radiac was a defender and not terribly good at defeating Carnie illusions by himself. So badge hunting is another reason to farm, and for that I think there needs to be consideration toward the badges and how to get them without farming being the best option to get you there the fastest.

But as I keep saying, there are some things I think the game needs for it to be a good MMORPG to begin with, and in MY opinion, smart NPCs are necessary for that. This isn't so much about game balance or people being able to get an advantage over other people. It's not like playing chess and moving an opponent's piece when they're not looking. Its more like playing DnD and telling the DM with a straight face that you're going outside the dungeon, smoking a cigarette, then coming back to defeat all the same stuff all over again to get another level before you take on the dragon, or better yet, never mind the dragon, I'm just going to level my guy and get infinite gold pieces off of the trolls and orcs, thanks. I feel that MMORPGs need immersive, realistic elements like smart NPCs to keep them engaging and entertaining and to avoid silly stuff like that altogether, whether some players would want to do it or not. You can say what you want about how it doesn't hurt the people who don't care about it. Those people apparently aren't really interested in playing an MMORPG, or any RPG from what I gather, which is what this game is supposed to be in it's heart and soul, at least as far as I'm concerned. Therefore I feel it's counterproductive to design an MMORPG with their best interests in mind in all cases. That's like designing a bicycle to be ridden by a fish, IMO.

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Oh, also, If you can really

Oh, also, If you can really get people to not want to take advantage of "dumb" NPCs by using the carrot instead of the stick, more power to you.

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Radiac, this has been

Radiac, this has been addressed. NPC's are not being taken advantage of due to use of a game's mechanic feature which is mainly to solve QoL issues. It is not the same as playing at a table with a GM in the scenario you attempted to comare this to earlier. A "smart NPC" has nothing to do with the NPC knowing about what mechanical features that make up the technical side of the game being used.

And just as Segev said, if the issue is to avoid ending up on a team with players who don't want to lose out on a mission because they want to reuse it again later, make the mission accessible post completion. This goes to the more robust style of flash back system that may be implemented. Even so, with weighted rewards upon completion, dimishing returns of completion rewards, and repeatable completed missions, players will probably find builds and missions that can reap rewards within the mission that can match the reward of completing misions (over time). Thus, farming itself, is still possible, only we provide a way that it doesn't have to require a reset of a mission.


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Now suppose I try a mission

Now suppose I try a mission and fail. Not because I wanted to reset but because I was beaten. Then I keep trying. Eventually in the process I earn enough xp from fighting that I level up and now I can finish the mission. Was I farming?
If I can get xp during a mission without completing it. ANYTHING I do is farming, unless I'm a perfect player who never fails at anything. Which is only achieved by never doing anything that's actually challenging.
If xp is only awarded at the end of the mission it stops that.
Another thing D&D online does is reduce the xp after the first time you run the mission, unless you're doing it at a different difficulty setting. You can keep running the missions as often as you like but you're better off looking for new missions if you want more xp.

As for badge hunting and the like encouraging farming, it totally does and I've never met anyone who did badge hunting by any means that I wouldn't call farming. When you're grinding out tons of kills with no story involved you're farming and the game was not only rewarding it but making special rewards that could be gotten by no other means.
I never hunted badges at all I never cared. I never even looked at the badges I got because they weren't anything that mattered to me or to my characters (except the explorer badges I had all of them so I could have the teleporters in my base. I'm so glad I only had to do that with One toon)

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I think, Radiac, that you're

I think, Radiac, that you're missing the purpose of the "mission reset" feature. If the purpose was the endless repetition of missions, then it wouldn't be considered an exploit in any way. It would be working as intended. It's considered an exploit because it wasn't designed for players to do that. It's not a serious one, nor against any rules, but it is an unintended result and unintended-by-the-designers use. So talking about designing the game for people who enjoy that style of play as if it's "designing a bicycle for a fish" is flawed. It wasn't designed for use that way. It's designed to help out players who ran into various issues while trying to play the game more or less as intended. Players just found an alternate use for it that made it used far more often.

That's why the solution to it, if there needs to be one, is to remove the motivation to do it by making other methods to get that play experience (whether literally the experience points or more generally the personal experience of playing the game that way) more useful/profitable/convenient than this unintended exploit. Do that, and it will remove the problem by giving players who want that style of play a better way to achieve it through intended pathways.

Is your immersion similarly destroyed, by the by, if players can just choose to go to a "replay gallery" and re-run missions they've completed, or something? Or, heck, if dealing with an NPC contact, go to him and ask, "hey, can you help me evaluate how I could have done that better?" to trigger him giving you the mission again, this time supposedly being something you and he are discussing. Or any number of excuses for a replay mechanic.

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To Segev and Tannim222, I

To Segev and Tannim222, I appreciate your efforts in this regard and I want to reiterate that if you truly can achieve what you're saying with the carrot alone, it sounds like a good thing. There have been many different things discussed on this thread about the topic at hand, and I never really thought that the original post was the only solution, just one that I managed to think up that made the most sense to me. If the repeatability of the mission or danger room or whatever is well and truly "baked into the story" then the immersiveness is preserved, to me.

For example, you could have a mission where, at the end, you're left with the problem of "We've managed to contain the threat, but there's this door that they might start coming into Titan City through, so we have to put a "Do Not Enter" sign on it and guard it very carefully from now on." which leaves the hero with the ominous sounding ever-present threat of impending invasion by baddies, but also leaves the gamer with a door he can always open and go in and fight those baddies, just to thin out their ranks, get information from them, try once again to seal the portal, etc. I could see that as a possibility.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

I think we really need to identify why farming is viewed as a problem, why people do it, and what we want to motivate people to do. We design our motivations to direct players towards what we consider good behavior. If farming is bad behavior, we do not encourage it (no badges for it, no straight-forward rewards for simple farming exploits). If it isn't, but it has unfortunate effects on other players somehow, we can go for the "designated farming mission" styles mentioned in the last paragraph

Ah...we come to the heart of the matter. I'm a 'root cause' kind of guy. Don't treat the symptoms...find the root cause and fix it. Then the rest of the issues take care of themselves. Long post warning kiddies...I've been holding it in since the thread started... Btw I'm defining Farming as 'repeating the same mission over and over because it happens to give a disproportionate level of rewards'. If you're re-running Dr Tyche's Funhouse for the 11th time because you LIKE it that's not Farming to me.

Why is Farming bad? There are a number of thoughts from 'it's not' to 'it's the ultimate evil!'. I'm very middle of the road on the matter because I understand that we don't live in a perfect world. Everything we do is connected, however tenuously, to everything else. If CoT is to reach as broad a player base as possible, and be successful which is something we ALL want, it's going to have to accommodate as many players as possible.

The players with more free time than sense? They're going to burn through content. They're going to HAVE to be allowed to repeat some missions or they'll run the game out and leave out of boredom. As long as they don't receive more rewards than they would from the next mission who cares?

The min/maxers who have their entire team tweaked out and can do +4 against the toughest foes? They might not consider most of the foes they face to be a good match. They might INSIST on facing only the gnarliest opponents in order to get a good fight. Again, as long as those opponents don't give more rewards than they should who is harmed? If such a team could earn MORE rewards hacking through easier enemies and they PREFER to repeat only the toughest missions then fine by me.

On the flip-side there's me, who started out as an uber-casual player. I HATED TFs because I started on a low-pop server and had trouble finding teams. On the higher-pop servers there always seemed to be timing issues. I never wanted to be THAT guy who had a RL distraction drag me away in the middle of a fight. So I avoided TFs for quite a while. As a result, I reran a LOT of content and it got old. If I had not been able to repeat some missions I would have stalled several of my earlier toons in the 30s before Level Balancing came in. Again, I'm not gaining more stuff per minute than I would from any other mission so what's the harm?

It's the REWARDS that cause the problem, not repeating the MISSION. I see where the OP is coming from. He doesn't like the idea that an NPC might be willing to wait 6 days to rescue the hostages because the team is farming the Halloween merits or whatever. I get that. Several suggestions have been made (many of them good) to deter farming. However the OP, and others, have to accept that though this is an mmoRPG, role-play is not the highest priority to some players. Some players will NEVER role-play in any way and could care less about the story. They're here for the teams, the powers and the fights. As many have said in the past they pay their subs so why shouldn't they be allowed to play as they like? As long as their play style isn't a detrement to others or the game as a whole then let them do what they want.

Others (including the quoted above) have asked WHY Farming is bad? If the players doing it did not come into contact with the general population then it wouldn't be. However there is one place where everyone comes together: The Market. To me the greatest evil of Farming takes place there. This is where the new player who just wants to try Crafting is shut out because some guy is in from his 11-hour marathon run of Katie Hannon and is running up the prices. New player gets frustrated...maybe leaves the game. We lose a player and the playerbase may be diminished as a whole.

So all of the efforts to curtail Farming to manageable levels, if they work, are fine with me. There will need to be tweaks along the way but that's how a game IS. It HAS to be organic...living...malleable. Life is change and we have to accept that. But we need to remember that this game will be complex. It will have LOTS of moving parts. Adjusting one might break ten others. If my friends and I are on a team and one of them needs to run the Dr Mystery arc because he's never done it before but the rest of us have and so no rewards for us then that's bad. Some other guy is street-sweeping to get his 'Defeat Agent Z' badge and so ruining the fun of the lowbies in the area that's bad too. Some people on the Greed Empire SG farming the same mission over and over to glut the Market with Magic Powder is bad.

You want to kill 1000 of Creature X to get a badge? You can do that easier on Map Y than any other map? Fine...go nuts...as long as that badge or the other rewards from Map Y are no greater than the same amount of time and effort on any other map. I'll admit you can't exactly balance everything. There are too many permutations in the game for that. If, after hundreds of runs, it's determined that running a specific Powerset on a specific map with specific enemies gets you 10-12% over the norm I don't care. The variance is too small to be significant to me. It's the combinations that give 25%+ that need to be looked at.

Be careful with broad, sweeping changes...sometimes the broom catches things you hadn't thought about.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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One quibble... wouldn't

One quibble... wouldn't somebody coming in from an 11-hour farming marathon be running DOWN prices as he sells lots of farmed stuff?

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

One quibble... wouldn't somebody coming in from an 11-hour farming marathon be running DOWN prices as he sells lots of farmed stuff?

Depends, if it's going to have much of an effect, he'll sell them one at a time while he farms something else

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

One quibble... wouldn't somebody coming in from an 11-hour farming marathon be running DOWN prices as he sells lots of farmed stuff?

In theory, yes. After farming, everything that I did not want to craft for myself or store in SG bins was priced to move immediately. For years, I just sold commons for 5 INF. I don't think I ever sold a purple that fell into one of my toon's pockets. That was for me or my buds. But like Minotaur said, individual sellers over time were just drops in the bucket.

WRT to farmers and market impact...at least as it related to CoX...most multi-billionaires that I comm'd with were not farmers. Most farmers that I knew were not folks with 10B, 20B, 30B in assets and INF. I interacted with both camps. At a few different points in the game, I was in both camps. From what I gathered, I was a bit rare.

The multi-billionaires of CoX that I knew, didn't farm at all b/c it was simply an incredibly inefficient method for acquiring serious in-game wealth. However, both the farmers and the Rockefellers did what they did b/c to them, it was a fun game-within-a-game.

Edited...

Overall, it's very clear to me that a lot of thought has, and will go into COT's economic architecture; and I expect that it will operate between very reasonable control limits over the game's lifespan.

CoX didn't have a variable economy until 3 years post-release; and when it launched, it had a very deliberate, and very intentional, dev-created imbalance (dual markets). There were exploits (some related to IT security, actually) that exacerbated the imbalance. All the while, with no true INF sinks, inflation exploded. Flawed design all-around no matter the intentions. I really, really don't think that CoT is going to have those problems.

(Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative)

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As for what I'd do if

As for what I'd do if repeating a mission without completion was not an option.

The same thing I was doing when it was an option. Won't say I never did it but the few times I engaged in such practice deliberately (vs getting dc'd etc.) was many many many issues ago. If nothing else it strikes me as silly ... I can run newspaper missions (something I rarely did), RWZ missions and Ouroboros all to completion, exit and phone the contact and rapidly be on my way again. Yes I might have to travel a bit vs stand by the door but sheesh. Still if someone wanted to do it no worries here.

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Minotaur wrote:
Minotaur wrote:

Segev wrote:
One quibble... wouldn't somebody coming in from an 11-hour farming marathon be running DOWN prices as he sells lots of farmed stuff?

Depends, if it's going to have much of an effect, he'll sell them one at a time while he farms something else

Probably, but I was taking the assertion that one person "in from his 11-hour farming run" could impact the prices at face value for the moment, because I wasn't sure how somebody coming in from a farming run and dumping stuff on the market is going to run up the prices.

Though it occurs to me now that perhaps it's not what he's selling, but what he's buying with the proceeds from his sales, that is the problem.

I think, though, sufficient currency sinks will help with this, if only by keeping inflation under control so that the newbie is never totally shut out.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

Minotaur wrote:
Segev wrote:
One quibble... wouldn't somebody coming in from an 11-hour farming marathon be running DOWN prices as he sells lots of farmed stuff?

Depends, if it's going to have much of an effect, he'll sell them one at a time while he farms something else

Probably, but I was taking the assertion that one person "in from his 11-hour farming run" could impact the prices at face value for the moment, because I wasn't sure how somebody coming in from a farming run and dumping stuff on the market is going to run up the prices.
Though it occurs to me now that perhaps it's not what he's selling, but what he's buying with the proceeds from his sales, that is the problem.
I think, though, sufficient currency sinks will help with this, if only by keeping inflation under control so that the newbie is never totally shut out.

And THIS is my most fervent desire. I have no problem with characters amassing great wealth. For some that's their goal and that's fine by me. I should have clarified that the guy at the end of the 11-hour marathon isn't just DUMPING his stuff on the Market. He may have done that because that TF gave bonus rewards in the form of drops or whatever. Now he's in the Market with a disproportional (for the time spent) amount of stuff to trade with. If he would have earned only about as much as he would have playing 11 hours of normal content then I'm not worried because his actions will be offset by the next 11 players that only had an hour to play. In the end that all evens out.

As I mentioned before everything is connected. How the Crafting system works will have a HUGE impact on the Market. If there are a few sets that everyone considers 'must-haves' because they grant some special bonus (like KB resistance or whatever) then those recipes, and the items to make them, will always be expensive. If some of those items ONLY drop below say level 25 then anyone with a toon above that may need to 'shop down' to get it. This means the lvl 40+ toon with greatly increased earning power is bidding against the lvl 25 guy who just wants KB resistance. This, and other reasons, are why the Market and Crafting HAVE to be built to compliment each other or we're going to have a mess.

CoH suffered from the fact that for 3 years there was virtually nothing to spend Inf on. Huge fortunes were accumulated as a result. Then the Market opened and players flooded it with idle wealth and inflation went through the roof. Since CoT is starting with a Market this will likely not be the case.

With regards to Inf sinks I'm still strongly in favor of Bases and the like being a big part of that. The multi-currency system of Inf and Prestige in CoH was, at best, clunky. I say make the smallest base free (and therefore accessible to everyone) and the really good toys simply cost Inf. Those that want the really nice bases can pay for them therefore removing Inf from the system. Those that are just starting out can have a little place to experiment with and hang their hat.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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I just feel that a "mission"

I just feel that a "mission" if its going to be called that, needs to be a thing that, once you accept it, you will have the expectation placed on you that it must get completed at some time in the future, or else, somewhere down the line, it will be considered failed because you took too long. That, really, is the main thrust of what I'm getting at. Missions, as designed in a game like this, ought to place a real onus on the persons accepting them to actually complete them, or, at some point after, have to deal with the negative consequences of having not done them. I'm ALL FOR having the ability to reset the mission, for QoL reasons. I just think the missions aren't really "mission-y" enough for me if the player never actually has to complete them at any point. I would prefer all missions to have some kind of closure, either for better or worse in terms of the effect on the hero and their status with the NPC, etc. To that end, I think some amount of "stick, not carrot" might be needed to accomplish this, but that's a question of implementation. I mean, in a game where nobody apparently ever tries to milk a mission for 25 run-throughs, because it's simply not lucrative to them, then mission curtoff points are not needed because the missions do in fact get finished anyway in like 99% of cases.

If they rolled out an Oroboros type thing whereby you could go and do ANY mission in the game, at ANY level (assuming you're already that level or higher), as many times as you want, over and over and over, I would be fine with it as long as A) you have to actually complete the mission eventually or be counted as failing it, and B) the rewards aren't out of whack, and C) there's some serious attempt at a storyline-immersive excuse for having it. Same with danger rooms, same with "unfinishable missions" as I've described them, which wouldn't or shouldn't be called missions, just "doors you know about and can open to go to a map and fight stuff". You could call them items, locations of known offenders, etc

All of the other concerns about the effect farming has on the economy, power leveling, etc are, to me, OTHER aspects of the game that need attention in their own right, and indeed there will need to be fairness and balance and rewards that are not out of whack with the risks/work needed to get them, etc. I fully expect there will be mid-course corrections like CoX had, like when they switched from "random recipe drop at the end of every TF" to "Reward Merits", etc.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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The issue with forced mission

The issue with forced mission completion is that it can result in being prohibitive. Ive supplied examples previously. Take a player with limited time to play or the chaotic life with kids they accept a mission and the. A friend asks them to join in on some other fun or life happens and because we placed a limitation of forced completion when this player comes back in several days or 1 week they faced with a big mission fail flag for either deciding to opt out of their current mission because they wanted to have fun or because life happened.

With regards to comments on farming and amassing a substantial amount of wealth in a given amount of time, this has more to do with what the expected bounds of reward over time. It will always be possible for players to push the envelope of earning rewards within a given time frame so long as what the even high end of acceptable is over a given Amount of time there is nothing wrong with that inherently.

The market itself will always have fluctuations wether its the rarer player who achieves the high end of gain performance on an hourly basis or daily basis or the player who plays the market and amasses wealth and dumps it into the market to buy up what they want. Market fluctuations are inevitable the important part is the putting pieces into place to help it stabilize.


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Quote:
Quote:

CoH suffered from the fact that for 3 years there was virtually nothing to spend Inf on. Huge fortunes were accumulated as a result. Then the Market opened and players flooded it with idle wealth and inflation went through the roof. Since CoT is starting with a Market this will likely not be the case.

But at that stage you didn't need excess wealth, so people gave loads away to newbies. Me and a friend offered up the fortune teller at that pre ouro stage and were given 1M each by a badger for example. The main people accumulating wealth were those that wanted to buy wings in the first few days, so getting 37M for a set of fairy wings on my level 9 was a delight. I made a fortune selling common IO recipes to the vendor as people were putting them up for next to nothing, so I was buying multiple stacks of 10 for 1000/recipe and selling them to the vendor at 100K/recipe.

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syntaxerror37 wrote:
syntaxerror37 wrote:

Radiac wrote:
Minotaur wrote:
Another possibility would be some missions where you could prevent farming without an in mission timer by saying "this is urgent, if you don't complete it in 24 hours (character in game) time, I'll have to get somebody else to do it". This would allow a little farming, but not months of it.

Yeah, since I felt that timed missions in CoX were a scary thing to people (what if I have to log off before I finish, unexpectedly?) I didn't go that route in the original post.

Actually the timers being game-time based would be a boon in general.

It does seem a bit unfair to count the time you're not logged in the game (thus, unable to complete the project) against you.

Might be cool to see a few missions written with a little nod to it: "I thought so and so would take care of it, but they didn't, so it's up to you."

Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

For the record, the main thing I find unsavory about mission repeat farming (that is accepting a mission and milking it with no intention of ever completing it) is the idea that the NPC mission giver has asked my character to do a job for them, and I agreed to do it, and then YEARS later, it's still not done and they don't know any better or seem to care. I feel like there ought to be a point, in any mission, where the NPC giving it to you says "What are you doing? Why isn't that mission done yet?" For me, this issue is entirely about immersiveness and RPing. I feel that the mission, as a thing, ought to be accepted and completed (or failed) by the hero in due course, not simply used as a means to a selfish end. My RPer sensibility makes me feel like a total @$$hole doing that stuff when an NPC gives me a mission. It's just not heroic. I have no problem with the need for repeatable missions, as long as they're being completed and repeated. I mean there isn't going to be infinite content to do, so doing a lot of it many many times I feel is something that just has to happen. But mission repeat farming crosses the line, for me.

How does what someone else is doing break your immersion? I can see how you wouldn't want to engage in repeat mission farming and you wouldn't want to be on a team that is engaging in such farming, but how does someone doing this when you are not involved break your immersion? If you don't like it, don't do it. But don't insist that no one else should be allowed to do things just because you don't like doing it yourself.

Me, I hardly ever exited a mission without completing it and when I did, it was usually because I had other uses for the mission. Maybe it was a really good setting for RPing in and I wanted to keep it available for that. Or maybe I didn't have as much time to play as I thought and I left in order to do it later. Or maybe I needed a rare spawn type for a badge and that mission had a lot of them. But that's my decision to make, not yours.

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The only thing I have to add

The only thing I have to add is that we should remember that what you enjoy in a game changes over time. I love role-playing at the beginning, and thoroughly enjoy a good story. But after I’ve taken a few characters all the way to level-cap I get increasingly interested in character builds and power-leveling. My impression is that the people who stay with a game year after year tend to be the min/max crowd.

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