Marius said 2 months to AT30 for hardcore players, reality or fiction?

[If6was9]

All you peeps responding to CZ's post seem to think he's disagreeing with you and the tone of the original post.

Try rereading his post as if he agreed with you but had a job that required he not criticise the peeps paying his rent.

Someone is underfunding AO in order that some other damn project can get off the ground... so bugs and balance issues are being addressed slowly or not at all. The people at FC that love this game must see the way its being driven into the ground and don't like it... but they can't say anything about it... least not like that. What they CAN do is state facts.

CZ stated facts. Interpretation is up to us.

I - for one - don't want a dime of AO/SL/AI money going to anything but AO/SL/AI. This isn't realistic, I know, but that's how I feel.

What IS realistic is stating that the veterans of this game are not going to feel kindly disposed towards FC's next project outside this world given that we will know it was created at the expense of maintaining and updating this one. The more dragged out the bugfixes and the balancing are, the LESS i would bother to check out Midgaar or Zombie Bowling or whatever the next bleeding project is. I love THIS game.

I hate to see her getting kicked to the curb.

[Cz]

Oh belive me Cz..many are trying (even if "they say there is no use beyond 20" peopel are trying). You dangle a "ultimate goal" in fromt of a bunch of users..and some will try.

I'll meet you half-way and say some are trying - there always are, of course. It was just a poor figure of speech (overstatement to make a point) from my end.

Beg your pardon? So you're bascially saying Marius wasn't wrong, it's just the inability of the playerbase to go through another grind?

No, (as usual) I'm not saying what you think I am. I did not speak of any inability, nor about anybody being right or wrong. I said that nobody have tried for or reached DR 30 (see my correction to that in the paragraph above), that I doubt it would happen this year, and that we said it could be done. That's all. If you re-read the first paragraph of my post you'll notice no further statements among those 40-50 words.

The message that was conveyed was that by their calculations, FC EXPECTED the first power levelers to reach AT30 in 2 months.

Some exact words from Marius were "This means a highlevel (200+) player starting from Alien Title 0 will use about 2 months of real hardcore playing." I see how you can interpret that to be an expectation, but it wasn't. This is talking semantics though, which I don't think any of us are really interested in. Bottom line is that nobody have reached DR 30 yet, and we didn't expect people to have done it by now.

CZ stated facts. Interpretation is up to us.

Thank you.

Stepping out of this one as I don't really have more to say on the matter. As usual, if you wish to give us feedback about the DR / AXP system send an e-mail to feedback@anarchy-online.com.

[Whitesand]

But not sure whats wrong atm. I rarely see ppls doing aliens atm. In our org we are doing zero or maybe 1-2 alien raids in a week atm! Thats horrible. When I ask in guildchat if someone wants to do aliens, then I maybe get 3-4 ppls wanting to do, when I ask those ppls if they are willing to help getting some crus then 3 of them need to log

I don't know if Funcom is running stats atm or have log files and can check the number of alien spawns atm. But it looks like that many ppls are not interessted anymore in doing those aliens. The xp curve is to high in later alien lvls and the reward is also not good. I rarely find good items atm. No high ql stuff etc. cause the outside aliens are to low lvl. Inside the ship 99.9% of the aliens drop absolutly nothing and thats horrible. Not that it is already damn boring and reminds me doing bs missions over and over again atm. I mean it was fun the first time, but actually I hate those alien ship missions, they took to long then reward is damn weak and the xp? Well I don't care much about the xp anyway, cause it took to long to level anyway. And I get more xp outside aswell, just cause its a lot faster to kill. 30mins outside gives me 50-60k xp. After that its mostly 1-2 hours inside the ship, till you have killed the fleet admiral for another 60-80k xp. Well in that time I could do 1-2 more ground force kills in neighborhood towns and get more xp. The reward inside is more worse as outside. As I said 99.9% of the aliens just don't drop anything, the only items you get are from the fleet admiral and he doesn't drop anything more valuable as the outside general drops. But its easy to farm the outside general, just get a team of 3-4 ppls and you can kill him every 2 hours.

Increase the reward inside the ships pls and give us some bonus xp when we kill the fleet admiral. Maybe 10times the xp of an normal alien kill. This would give us at least some reasons to enter the ship and kill those guys. I mean a normal bs missions gives you some mission reward, but those ship bordings doesn't do.

[Slipster101]

What is the definition of 'A hardcore player' ?
a >> Someone who spends 30 hours a week ++ in the game.
b >> Someone who logs in to do a lot of talking and helping people.
c >> Someone who logs in 24/7 every couple of hours to do an Alien raid.

I nosedive into catagory 'a' there.

When AI first became available to the masses 'EVERYONE' wanted to do Alien raids, preferably all day long People got Alien levels and perks for their efforts, and boy was it an effort when being struck for 10k nukes left right n centre. People generally could NOT get onto the ships after killing the General....... mainly due to the landing position of the ship (our guilds got fixed last patch).

There was a major feeling of this expansion being one great big anti-climax.

The 'GRIND' factor is beyond that of level 200+ earning their Shadowlevels, and the loot drops are in my opinion absolutely appalling, the percentage of what most people would consider 'nice loot' dropping from an end boss, be it the General, or bosses on the ship is non-existant.

The Alien XP earnt from killing a ql300 General is equal to that earnt by killing a lv220 Alien..........the only difference being the General, nine times out of ten, will drop 4 Fuzzy Fabrics, Some NT Cyberdeck item, and a Canister of Powder or two. There has been the rare occurance, and I really stress the 'rare' part due to it only being seen by myself once where something useful to someone at the raid actually dropped from the General.

The word 'PWND' springs to mind when discussing aliens.

I truly do lub AO but is driving me crazy watching this game literally 'go down the toilet'.........I dont need to see log files or statistical data to know that way way less Alien raids happen now, that way less people are even attempting to earn Alien levels ~ possibly partially due to the fact they have actually stopped playing altogether.

Has anyone noticed how fewer peope are logging in now ?

Its due to dis-illusionment, knowledge bugs will not be fixed for a long time (IF EVER). But worst of all it is due to broken promises (or should that be a broken game), talk is cheap and action is everything.

I wonder how a small contingent of 'clone made' lv220 ARK's would fare at a Alien spawning........they get to choose their own armour, weapons, items, absolutely everything....... pwnd in 15 seconds ??? Thats how borked things are when even a group of 'Dream Toons' cant last the distance to even find out what loot is on a single mob ~ Tell me I am wrong.......

[Winterizer]

I think that Funcoms view of a "hardcore player" is someone that is so badly addicted to AO that he leaves time and space to play the game. That is what is needed to get to alien lvl 30 in 2 months.

[akgishf]

FC defenition of "Real hardcore player" is a automated mechanins programed to Do aliens every single time and roll CRU's in the downtime.

[Aveline]

Lets see...

I was going to look at the AXP formula again and see what would be needed to reach level 30 in those 2 months, but the scenario got so artificial that i stopped.

Belive Cz said the most important thing:
"Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either,.."

That sentence should strike funcom Devs like a lightning

And now i'll go back to making a 2nd or 3rd 220 character before i would consider trying to get AI30.

[Vixentrox]

Maybe they meant two months of /played time doing aliens?

[Sylverbane]

FC defenition of "Real hardcore player" is a automated mechanins programed to Do aliens every single time and roll CRU's in the downtime.

Autocamp 2000 ofcoz..

Maybe they meant two months of /played time doing aliens?

O.o

[Wizardkiss]

Some exact words from Marius were "This means a highlevel (200+) player starting from Alien Title 0 will use about 2 months of real hardcore playing." I see how you can interpret that to be an expectation, but it wasn't. This is talking semantics though, which I don't think any of us are really interested in. Bottom line is that nobody have reached DR 30 yet, and we didn't expect people to have done it by now.

So then no one in the game has participated in 200 city attacks yet? No highlevel (200+) players in the entire game have been playing the expansion really hardcore? Wouldn't that indicate a fairly major waining of interest in the expansion, and subsequently the game overall? That's not good.

On the other hand if there are people who have been playing hardcore and still haven't gotten anywhere close to DR30 then that answers the original question; what we were told was fiction.

[Trgeorge]

Snowglobe you might want to take a step backwards and relook at situation. You made couple of assumptions, that crumble under closer inspection ( this might get your blood pumping, but read on). Marius estimated (or calculated) 200 raids to get from 0axp to AI level 30. But some toons already had several AI levels. Curve is really steep, so this might not account to much, but it's headstart. So let's say those have 1 week advantage. Numbers seem even more depresing now. But there's more. With current axp fix we got explanation that boost is 4x. Then some players started to make some calculations and discovered that boost for them was more like 2,5x. Official response was that level affects axp boost. That would meant in theory that first char with AI 30 would probably be sub 200, but as usually there's catch. I don't believe anyone seen promised 255k axp per raid. That number might hold true, but with AoE nukes, those lower level players teamed up (or just in same raid) with higher level chars sooner or latter die and simply don't survive whole raid. Futhermore, noone can guaranty you, that you'll be invated in ship and/or you'll end in same gs as rest of raid force. So while it seems that for sole purpose of geting to AI 30 would be best to take out mid level char, you might end up with less Axp as with higher one. So basicly we have no win-no win situation. While Marius might mad ecorrect estimate (calculation), it seem to be based solely on number of aliens and their best axp that can wield. He left out other factors like invitation, surviability and CRU awiability. So even if someone with fresh start would be able to do 6 or 7 raids each day (think that I seen hardcore player defined so somewhere), he/she would still be some way off. Endgame hardcore players (if they are hardcore, one would expect them to be endgame, right?) might still be 5 weeks off that goal (provided that started without any axp, simply based on 4x/2,5x axp ratio).

[Wizardkiss]

Huh?

[Hamini]

Some exact words from Marius were "This means a highlevel (200+) player starting from Alien Title 0 will use about 2 months of real hardcore playing." I see how you can interpret that to be an expectation, but it wasn't. This is talking semantics though, which I don't think any of us are really interested in. Bottom line is that nobody have reached DR 30 yet, and we didn't expect people to have done it by now.

if you didnt expect it, then you shouldnt have told the playerbase that. You're right its an issue of semantics, but thats exactly the problem. You tricked us into believing something using language that you could later deny.

Good job.

[Streaz18]

Everybody seems to think that adding SK to the aliens is the key. This really doesn't make much sense as the most hardcore players have been 220 for awhile already. I mean SL has been out for over a year already and if you're really hardcore you already are 220 and adding sk to the aliens gives no incentive. For alien raids to be interesting, more loot needs to drop and alien xp needs to be multiplied by a factor greater than 4. With the direction AO is currently heading, there is no reason for a 220 person to really play anymore as the only content worth doing anymore is pandemonium with all of its 6/18 hour timer issues and alien raids which are worse than penumbra heckler grinding ever was (mainly due to the massive preparation effort required). A new zone and easier access to aliens in an outdoor playfield with new bosses and loot could revitalize the game for a bit.

[Inari]

well aliens at the moment feels a bit like doing sk with 13k faction(the situation before the temples in penumbra opened up).

[Naiddean]

When Snowglobe wrote this post I doubt she'd want someone like rhyztaz0 to flame FC up and anyone in her path. If you're mad at FC don't whine to us about it.

[Blisterpalms]

I wish someone could figure out, just make a rough calculation, the number of hecklers you hav to kill to get to 220 vs. the number of aliens to get to DR30. Yes, you can AOE gobs of aliens, but I'm betting if everyone knew that they'd be killing 5 times as many aliens as hecklers there would be more of an outcry.

[Doctorfun]

It's a bit pointless to make the comparison in such terms.

That's because the way AXP is distributed among players is completely different from the way SK is.
And such a comparison isn't really needed to understand that the AXP grind is horrible and the reward minute.

Everybody seems to think that adding SK to the aliens is the key. This really doesn't make much sense as the most hardcore players have been 220 for awhile already. I mean SL has been out for over a year already and if you're really hardcore you already are 220 and adding sk to the aliens gives no incentive.

Everybody seems to realize that the adding of SK to the aliens isn't directed at hardocre people only or even mainly. It's a way to make alien raids more atractive for the average 200+ player. Adressing a solution to such a selected group as hardcore players is hardly effective in game terms, so it definitely makes sense to make aliens give SK.

[Roedran]

I made AI 17... and now see very little green movement when I raid aliens towards the 1.2M or so axp to 18.

And insane camping for... what? 7 more into my weapon skills?

To say the bloom is off the rose would be an understatement.

I'm just glad we got Pande worked out so I can readjust my focus every other week into something where the work is worth the reward.

WTB Pande w/a dedicated clan and omni zone.

And WTB alien instanced dungeons where I can earn 1k axp/kill at 220 AI15+.

That's progress IMHO.

[Deathstalker]

Maybe they meant two months of /played time doing aliens?

WTB AO Alien/CRU Script :lol:

You tricked us into believing something using language that you could later deny.
Good job.

Nah, not really.
In germany we call that "Juristen Deutsch" which would translated into legalese (i think).
So its okay.
I just never knew game-developers have to do that too ...

Everybody seems to think that adding SK to the aliens is the key. This really doesn't make much sense as the most hardcore players have been 220 for awhile already.

Well, SK from Aliens would give the 200-219 Players a reason to do Aliens ...
Get SK, get AXP and perhaps (if you are really really really really really [repeat]) lucky a nice item.

Personally i went from 36 mish/day to perhaps 3mish/day and do some camping/heck grinding/exploring when i log in instead.
The reward just does not pay off imho.

Its sad, when sitting around 20mins (or more) to wait for a mob to spawn is more appealing than killing aliens ...