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

[Wizardkiss]

Sep 22nd, 2004, 09:22:12

So, as I explained earlier the XP you get from killing Aliens has been increased by around a factor of 4. This means a highlevel (200+) player starting from Alien Title 0 will use about 2 months of real hardcore playing. A careful estimate I have done, based on feedback from players and my own numbers, is that it will take around 200 Alien city attacks for a player to max out everything.

Marius Enge
Game Director, AO

After the AXP nerf and subsequent readjustment Maruis made the above statement about how long it was supposed to take hardcore players to reach DR30. It's been 2 months now and apparently no one has yet reached DR30. This is particularly surprising as a number of the more hardcore alien killers got a major head start reaching DR20 or so before the nerf. They should have had a relatively easy time hitting DR30 since Marius' 2 month estimate is based on starting at 0.

Is it true that no one has yet reached DR30? Anyone know what the highest current DR is?

Edit: Added "DR" to the numbers for clarity.

[Elucidate]

Apparently the highest AT is 21 or 22 on RK2.

Rough guess is 3-4 months before the first AT30 happens.

[MEDICI]

Can’t wait till auno updates their character search function as the AI level is already in the data. If you look someone up on the anarchy online home page it gives there alien level but if you look at the xml version it doesn’t have a variable for Defender rank. Must be some genius in the community that could make a search function for defender rank.

[Cz]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20. Marius said it could be done, not that it would be. Barring changes to the system I personally doubt we'll see a player with DR 30 this year.

Also, DR is supposed to be added to the XML. The web guys have been very busy with other work lately, but I'll see what I can get done about it next week.

[Wizardkiss]

He said that it could be done with 2 months of hardcore playing or by his careful estimate with 200 city attacks. That's based on starting at level 0 but as I noted many hardcore players got a major head start before the nerf. If no one is even close does this mean that no one is playing hardcore anymore?

[Cyani]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20. Marius said it could be done, not that it would be. Barring changes to the system I personally doubt we'll see a player with DR 30 this year.

Also, DR is supposed to be added to the XML. The web guys have been very busy with other work lately, but I'll see what I can get done about it next week.

Yet NT's are forced to get DR 17+ to use our new dots.

[Metalynx]

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.

Problem is the grind is worse than SK'ing. to SK you need a team and some hecklers..and decent faction. To get axp..you need a few teams..and cru's (whitch not everyone is tempermentally set up to blitz a few dozen missions a day to get a off chance to get cru's.)_

I suggest you give it a shot Cz, or maybe suggest to a few of yoru fellow arks to bust out your normal toons and see how many cru's you can get in a few hours of blixing team mish boss's. Belive me..this is somethign I do pretty much full time (on accoutning that if I see one more friggn heckler I swear my head will explode). I do this for 2-5 hrs a day, blitzing Team boss's. I even do 40% missions (roughtly Ql 180-190), which makes them a breeze. In a given day, if im really lucky,,..I can get enough crus to heal the CC once comeplatly. Then I log offline becasue I cant stop the feeling of wanting to puke from such repetative stress (isnt ADD wonderfull??).

Some people are luckier than me..some have worse luck. Given that in a guild your only goign to find a few people who are insane enough to do this constantly without committing haery carey, this set ups a trend that makes doing axp very slow in most cases.

Then we could get into the factor of loss of axp etc etc when the occasional wipeout happens.

Hell im only AL 8 now....almost 9, and it takes me about 5 full blown raids to ding now. God knows how bad it be arounf AL 25.

Methinks the number of "2 months" might have been a bit ....underestimated. I can see 2 months if one had a extremly easy access to CRU's, or you managed to get at least half of a large guild blitzing like crazy to heal the damn CC.

Of course...this number might be accelrated...if the promised "sk" addition to Aliens were introduced (you know,the thing that was offerd to us from day one..that still isnt implimented).

Spare me the "send this to feedback" mesage...it gets old. Ive done that. So have many others. I'm sure its a task to get SK fixed for Aliens, but you would also see a trend of people being interested in doign raids once more if it was ever impplimented.

[Satenia]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20. Marius said it could be done, not that it would be. Barring changes to the system I personally doubt we'll see a player with DR 30 this year.

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?

If Marius definition of a hardcore player is someone launching an alien attack every 2 hours with no break for 2 months, then maybe this is making any sense.

But as it stands we have players with 15k+ kills, which I consider pretty hardcore (my guild does like 1-2 raids a day and the dude with the highest kills got 7.5k and is AI level 18) and all they got is AI 20 at best.

Personally I think there are more constructive ways to approach this topic then to cheaply talk yourself out of a drastic miscallculation.

[Rtnelien]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20..

I really hope something is being done about this.

Thats all I'm going to say without inciting a riot

[Beach]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cz
Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20..

I really hope something is being done about this.

Thats all I'm going to say without inciting a riot

Ditto

[Wizardkiss]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20.

If that's true then maybe the grind is somewhat extreme for a system with relatively little reward. That's kind of the point people have been trying to get across since the axp nerfing first began. It would be like if Shadowlands was released but the only thing you got for dinging a shadowlevel was the perk point.

The end result is an expansion that provides a very unsatisfying experience. It could all be turned around with a few keystrokes, but nothing changes.

[Doctorfun]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20. Marius said it could be done, not that it would be. Barring changes to the system I personally doubt we'll see a player with DR 30 this year.

Sorry Cz... but that is a twisted interpretation

The message that was conveyed was that by their calculations, FC EXPECTED the first power levelers to reach AT30 in 2 months.
Many of us pointed out it wasn't feasible, and offered a better estimate of 4 months for hardcore players. But we didn't take into account the effect opf the CRU grind. It is discouraging so many people that even most large orgs are doing raids at a rate that doesn't even come close to the estimate for 4 months.

The highest players in AT terms are around the low 20s. That's about 25% of the total grind, as I'm sure you are aware.
So... I still like AI and think it has a lot of good stuff. But the AXP curve/delivery rate seems to have been grossly overestimated, at least according to the announced expectations.

I know, this is sort of a dead horse, calculations have been posted all over the forums.
To me it's not about who is right or wrong. I won't get any satisfaction whatsoever if FC admits a mistake or not. But I feel it is time to look at the numbers (player ATs, average number of raids per day or week) and maybe rethink this. Since us players can't have access to that kind of data, we can only suggest and hope that FC is monitoring this to tweak it in a way that satisfies us. We don't want it easy, we just want it possible, fun and worth the effort.

[Arinia]

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

I think either way you look at it, there's something seriously wrong with what he wrote.

[Cyani]

The end result is an expansion that provides a very unsatisfying experience. It could all be turned around with a few keystrokes, but nothing changes.

Gah.. Snowglobe what's wrong with you.. Nerf Logic!!!!

[Jingjing]

Lol AI is almost turning into a joke at this point

Asking in /org chat to do a high level alien raid is usually met with laughter or silence. Trying to get people to farm CRUs is rediculously futile. Realizing that it would probably take about a month to go from alien level 9 to AL 10 doing 1 raid a week (thats pretty much what most normal sized orgs are doing) is just that last nail in the coffin. Trying to construct the "perfect" raid force to even stand a chance on the ship is tiring and the loot tables and drop rates are borked beyond recognition.

Lets see ... whats on the horizon....O look an outdoor zone of aliens that will just be some massive grief/campfest where all the people who have been able to do a decent volume of alien raids already will be farming/claiming/camping/ODing/griefing/being elitist about it and will reap the most benefit.

[Liwa]

Sorry Cz... but that is a twisted interpretation

The message that was conveyed was that by their calculations, FC EXPECTED the first power levelers to reach AT30 in 2 months.
Many of us pointed out it wasn't feasible, and offered a better estimate of 4 months for hardcore players. But we didn't take into account the effect opf the CRU grind. It is discouraging so many people that even most large orgs are doing raids at a rate that doesn't even come close to the estimate for 4 months.

The highest players in AT terms are around the low 20s. That's about 25% of the total grind, as I'm sure you are aware.
So... I still like AI and think it has a lot of good stuff. But the AXP curve/delivery rate seems to have been grossly overestimated, at least according to the announced expectations.

I know, this is sort of a dead horse, calculations have been posted all over the forums.
To me it's not about who is right or wrong. I won't get any satisfaction whatsoever if FC admits a mistake or not. But I feel it is time to look at the numbers (player ATs, average number of raids per day or week) and maybe rethink this. Since us players can't have access to that kind of data, we can only suggest and hope that FC is monitoring this to tweak it in a way that satisfies us. We don't want it easy, we just want it possible, fun and worth the effort.

I agree ... it would be nice to know if FC is looking into this ... feedback is tired of hearing from me about CRU's ...

How many guilds have paid their November upkeep payment? ... we haven't paid ours yet ...

How many alien raids are happening now vs before the Sept 10th patch? ... 10% as many?? 1%???

How many guilds are leaving their City Controller healed enough to allow for any random attacks? ... not my guild ...

Redwood

[Inari]

What I belive was really lacking in FCs calculations was the impact of the casual players.

By making AXP very long winded and futily many of these players simply dont do aliens at all or very rarely. In order for the more hardcore players to get good axp they depend on the rest of their organisations showing up and helping spawn large numbers of aliens.

When this is not happening most raids tend to yeild less than 150k and for my own org we are usually having less than 2 teams now(before the nerf we were 3-5 teams in most cases).

[MEDICI]

My AXP bar has been at 50% for the last month simply put I don’t want to blitz CRU’s and I’m not paying 23mil for more than likely a big nothing but a bit of AXP in return. My feelings atm are if I join the raid I’m just leaching off others work and I’m not going to do that. So I’m just waiting till the new pf aliens with ought CRU’s sounds great to me.

So maybe two months after the new pf is in game there will be someone with DR 30 as the new pf should do away with the cru problem. Then again who knows the new pf might have mission terms that require CRU’s to function.

[Haxukthx]

My AXP bar has been at 50% for the last month simply put I don’t want to blitz CRU’s and I’m not paying 23mil for more than likely a big nothing but a bit of AXP in return. My feelings atm are if I join the raid I’m just leaching off others work and I’m not going to do that. So I’m just waiting till the new pf aliens with ought CRU’s sounds great to me.

Something tells me the axp in the new pf won't come as quickly (lololol) as it does in normal alien raids which leads me to believe it won't be terribly worth while to xp there, but then again I dunno because we aren't given any details

The AXP curve is painful and something needs to be done. PLEASE!

[Hamini]

Nobody has reached Defender Rank 30 yet. I dare say nobody have tried either, as many say they find little purpose of going much past 20. Marius said it could be done, not that it would be. Barring changes to the system I personally doubt we'll see a player with DR 30 this year.

I could go out and rob a 7-11 right now. I could do it. That doesnt make it a good idea, or likely to happen. When marius says something like a hardcore player can make it to level 30 in 2 months, we assume that he is referring to a realistic scenario of a real player, not a completely hypothetical situation that will never happen like me going to rob the 7-11. Its a basic trust that the playerbase needs to have, that we can take the game director at his word and not have to read between the lines. Saying things like "he didn't say would, he said can" undermines that trust.

I think either way you look at it, there's something seriously wrong with what he wrote.

couldnt agree more.