Let us make a pact concerning Foundry and its rating system.

[ragnarlawl]

While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!

It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.

Not entirely true. If thats the case-- why do being play DnD outside of published modules? Its very much in the spirit of DnD to let people create and share their own campaigns and for the designers to provide tools to do that.

Dungeon Master's Guide comes to mind.

[keirkin]

While I understand the sentiment of "death to the exploiter!," what you guys don't seem to get is that nobody'd exploit the Foundry system in CO/STO if Cryptic would just MAKE SOME FRIGGEN' CONTENT!

It's only an issue because Cryptic expects the players to make the content themselves, so Cryptic doesn't have to.

Are you serious? So people cheat and play exploit missions to level and get stuff fast because Cryptic won't make more content that would have them leveling slower and getting less stuff? If you can't see amazing flaws in what your wrote, no one can help you.

[keirkin]

Only read tl;dr because am drunk after party - hope you dont mind.
But it does not adresses the main issue. The main issue here is exploiting - not farming,. Both are very different. Exploiting is defined as playing the game as it is not intended to be. It is like a crime.

Farming is like unethical but legal thing to do.

Farming is unethical? Games are designed to be farmed. Any game that requires a player to gather X resource to do Y thing is requiring a player to farm those resources.

Now I am totally against exploiting, but it is hardly like a crime unless you are calling it a crime like j-walking is a crime, it is more unethical. Don't agree? That's okay everyone is entitled to their opinion. However once you have been the victim of a serious crime then you can reanalyze your opinion.

[goose1009]

**Signed in blood**


Although they could probably stop the exploitation pretty easy by putting a timer on mission repeatable's.

[keirkin]

**Signed in blood**


Although they could probably stop the exploitation pretty easy by putting a timer on mission repeatable's.

Nah, just make 10 missions that are exploitable and cycle them. Then to stop that you would have to put a restriction on how many mission someone could pick up and x amount of time, and that could just as easily restrict the people not looking to exploit. To many restriction will make the system less fun for the people who are using it as intended. If you keep restricting things so 1% of the people who are bad eggs can't exploit something you make it less fun for the 99% who are playing by the rules. The only people that suffer are the 99% not the 1% much like real life.

It an interview I saw that one way STO people were exploiting the Foundry was they would make a mission with a HUGE number of very weak mobs in a mission all right on top of each other. Then people would run over and AOE the huge group and kill them all with one shot getting TONS of XP. Now the interview said they put a stop to this by limiting the number of mobs that could be hit with a single AoE, but lets just use this as and example. Room 1 100 trash mob AoE. Room 2 100 trash mob AoE....Room 50 100 trash mob AOE. This would make the person in the "exploit" adventure get HUGE amounts of XP per encounter, but it would take awhile for them to get through the whole thing. Then they could just pick it up again when they got out because the timer would have run out with the mission being huge.

I agree that same things need to be done to curtail the exploits, but Cryptic needs to be careful to evaluate what they do as to not put restrictions on the players that are playing the game as intended. This is like making laws in real life that don't really stop crime but just inconvenience law abiding citizens which humorously happens all the time just about everywhere.

[aavarius]

Then I guess you are ready to understand why am I so pessimistic.

- There is no point of mobs - they dont have numbers. It fails anyways - one way or the other.
- Cryptic solves it by removing foundry features limiting it slowly. It cripples the features of foundry.
- Because of number, exploiters escape action as it becomes too much of a bother to hunt all down.

There is just no optimist-ism here at all. So your 'faith' will end up reducing features of foundry. 'Mobs' as you say, or otherwise will fail. It is a losing battle against exploiters.

I hear you. I don't agree with you, however. I think you're making too many assumptions.

[goose1009]

Nah, just make 10 missions that are exploitable and cycle them. Then to stop that you would have to put a restriction on how many mission someone could pick up and x amount of time, and that could just as easily restrict the people not looking to exploit. To many restriction will make the system less fun for the people who are using it as intended. If you keep restricting things so 1% of the people who are bad eggs can't exploit something you make it less fun for the 99% who are playing by the rules. The only people that suffer are the 99% not the 1% much like real life.

Very true. Still has to be a way to fix it...

If anything as long as we vow to vote it down and refuse to take part, it should work well enough for us at least.

[keirkin]

Very true. Still has to be a way to fix it...

The thing you want to look at with any fix is does the "fix" do more damage to the "lawful" people than the damage without it would do to the "Lawful" people. Now the intersting part to me is that The Foundry is not a new thing for Cryptic that is being released in a new game. It has had a long time to use STO as a beta test bed and a lot of the knee jerk reactionary nonsense that people do to stop "bad things" has already been worked out of it. I am sure there will be problems and loop holes like anything else, but at least in is not being launched on its maiden voyage with a brand new game in an untested state and I think that is going to give it a big leg up.

[zaphtastic]

The thing you want to look at with any fix is does the "fix" do more damage to the "lawful" people than the damage without it would do to the "Lawful" people. Now the intersting part to me is that The Foundry is not a new thing for Cryptic that is being released in a new game. It has had a long time to use STO as a beta test bed and a lot of the knee jerk reactionary nonsense that people do to stop "bad things" has already been worked out of it. I am sure there will be problems and loop holes like anything else, but at least in is not being launched on its maiden voyage with a brand new game in an untested state and I think that is going to give it a big leg up.

Yep, this is what I've been saying in my long ranty post on the last page (though the Mission Architect has been around a lot longer than the STO Foundry -- April 2009 until Dec 2012, RIP). People will need to accept that there WILL be farm content, it WILL be more efficient than just running official content, and most of the people using the Foundry WILL use it to play such content. The goal is for all players and playstyles to coexist, and not start witch-hunts against one another to protect the 'purity' of the game. I also have high hopes for the Foundry in NWN simply because it's a much more integral system than it was in COH or STO (neither of those games launched with it, for one), which will hopefully lead to a lot of high-quality stories.

To reiterate: I personally dislike farming and think it is boring and monotonous -- I exclusively played (and created) story-driven content in COH's Mission Architect. But really, other than the improved efficiency, creating a farming dungeon and running it over and over again is no different than someone running a particularly lucrative 'official' quest over and over, or killing enemies that have good drops in an area over and over for hours. Yeah, a player using only frost attacks and optimizing their gear to resist fire will probably have an easy time farming player dungeons full of fire elementals -- but they could just farm fire elementals in official dungeons / in the world for the same effect.

Really, it's simple - the things that make it possible to have 'farming' content is due to the Foundry
A. being open to all players
B. allowing players to create content with rewards comparable to official content
C. being (presumably) flexible enough to optimize enemy encounters for max rewards / least risk

You can NOT remove any of these, or you remove the entire point of the Foundry in the first place. City of Heroes decided to cripple C, which ended up hurting 'legitimate' story arc writers just as much in many cases.

The other way to 'cripple' farming in COH was to nerf specific enemy XP (or make specific enemies harder) based on datamined information. In each case it took less than a day for the 'farmers' to come up with another optimal configuration, and suddenly thousands of new farming arcs appeared in the system -- with the thousands of the pre-nerf ones still there and clogging up the interface, making it even harder for story-seekers to find their arcs. Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.


Now exploitation is different, of course... and unfortunately it can mean the Foundry losing some of its flexibility to address the exploits. As a simple example, a player may be able to set up two enemy groups that fight each other with their power calibrated so one of them kills the other, but ends up with very little hp left -- then the player can swoop in, use an AOE attack and rake in massive xp at no risk. These should be solved at a basic game systems level (ie. if an enemy didn't start at 100% hp when a player engaged them, scale their reward xp appropriately), but the easier solution is to remove the option for enemy groups to fight each other in player-created content. Or if there are special geometry configurations that allow a player to kite a melee enemy indefinitely at no risk due to the AI not being up to the task, it's a lot easier to disallow the creation of custom geometry in player-created dungeons instead of making the AI more aware that it's being kited. Etc.

[keirkin]

People will need to accept that there WILL be farm content, it WILL be more efficient than just running official content, and most of the people using the Foundry WILL use it to play such content. The goal is for all players and playstyles to coexist, and not start witch-hunts against one another to protect the 'purity' of the game.

Good luck on that one, tolerance is a dirty word to most people. They are going to flail and rail against anything they don't like. I do it with the idiots that keep pissing and moaning about this or that is pay to win, I am sorry to say. People can't just play the game they want and enjoy it. They have to start witch hunts against perceived slights. They will say the farmers are ruining the economy and the grinders are ruining the game by leveling to fast. They will whine stamp their feet and scream its not fair its not fair. The game isn't even out and it is already happening. Eventually they will whine and scream so much that the coolest feature of this game (the Foundry in my opinion) will be restricted into uselessness and then they will cry about being so restrictive and sucking. It is human nature I am again sad to say.