I was trolling the boards for issue 15/16 news and well:
BOOM! Badges go bye-bye! Farming for Badges is
*against the rules of fun*
All my shiny AE badges.... *sob*... :p but at first glance this looks like another step in the right direction on the dev's part to clamp down on farming.
I liked my Story Teller badge. It told me that I'd made a product people wanted to play, and my ego needed that. It's probably a good idea, but I'm
still a little sad.
... Also, they need to use some of those badge names somewhere else. Seriously, 'Pressed the Red Button'. That's just awesome.
F@*king Yuku ate my post.
Short version.
Here's the thing - these badges were attainable by normal means. If they were impossible to get by normal play, the devs would never have included them.
So what's the problem? Well, people don't want stuff eventually. They want it now.
How do you get stuff now? Some folks would resort to obvious exploits. A mission filled with nothing but glowies...to get the click badges, for instance. I'd call that badge farming. Mild farming, but farming all the same. If you do that then...I'd agree, you don't have a leg to stand on.
But...you can also have folks who just run lots of regular AE content with the badges in mind. To give a basis of comparison, when I wanted to help earn the SG healing badges for the Legendary way back in the day, I didn't set up a healing farm.
I just played my defender more.
I'd have been rather annoyed if the SG healing badges were removed shortly after they were acquired.
So. There's gonna be people pissed off by this change. No big deal, right? Players are always pissed off. And you could say it takes major balls on Synapse's part - major balls for him and his colleagues - to admit they were wrong in their design choices and take a step back.
Except...they haven't apologized. The developers have never said... 'we're sorry, guys, this was bad design on our part'.
No, it's always been 'we didn't expect players to do this, so we're changing it'.
That implicitly puts the blame on the players, and not the developers.
I don't like this.
-- Acyl
As an addendum, I'm not saying that players who abuse the system are blameless.
I also believe the developers were genuinely surprised by how people abused the MA. It seems they really weren't expecting this.
But they should have. Is that an unrealistic expectation? No, not really. It's their job to do so.
Yes. Predicting crap is hard. There's no crime in screwing up. It's called 'failure of imagination'.
It happens.
But when you fail to predict something, you should acknowledge your responsibility as well. Particularly if you're dealing with paying customers - who don't like being told they're wrong.
-- Acyl
I'm totally agreeing with Acyl on this one. But I'm going to add that a lot of the people who're abusing the MA system have NO IDEA that Devs plan
on revoking the rewards. I keep turning down AE/MA mission teams because of the very real threat of being sucked into a farm map and having badges, xp, pres
revoked.
Suffice it to say between the abuse and Devs I don't WANT to create or play MA content.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here and take a look at it from Synapse's side.
First of all, the whole "we didn't expect these would encourage excessive farming". Sure, that happens all the time, but you were so excited about the other things that you didn't see that coming. No big deal.
As to the bit where Synapse didn't apologize for faulty design...I dunno. I may be too working from the framework of my current job where even if you're doing the best you can do, the cab fares will bitch, the cab drivers will bitch, and you just have to realize you'll never make everyone happy all the time, but I don't see how this is offensive.
Yes, they're saying "we didn't expect the players to do this, so we're changing it." Yes, this places the onus for the change on the playerbase, which is accurate. And it's not like they're saying "all our players are bad". And yes, it's punishing the blameless along with the guilty as sin.
But frankly....does this change what I was going to play AE for? Interesting content that's new as opposed to rerunning the same arcs in CoH/CoV over and over and over again? Aside from some nifty badge titles that'll probably get put back in eventually, does this lose me anything? I say no, and the other points they've made, about cutting out the badges that are near impossible for others to get to cut down on griefing (Dev's Choice, HoF, others) frankly I can get behind 100%. The fact they're dropping counter badges entirely also makes me immensely glad. No more stalking Striga at night for that twelve more Vampyri necessary for future accolades. This decision does not and can not change the way I use the AE function, and thus all the read-between-the-lines overreaction to the "intents of the devs" and the "implications of the devs" is meaningless to me, because I don't get that into the game to care about more than the "actions of the devs", and in this case, I approve of every single one as an overall improvement.
So I guess I don't see what the big buzzkill about this announcement is besides losing a few clever badge titles.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
Synapse Wrote:All badges unrelated to the Mission Architect will remain unaffected by the changes
Just to point out here, the changes on badges have no effects whatsoever outside of the MA.
---
The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
Quote:So I guess I don't see what the big buzzkill about this announcement is besides losing a few clever badge titles.
I agree with this. Also, I'm allergic to DOOM.
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm going to side with Ops on this one -- and that's not just because he knows where I sleep.
However, I said it to him and I'll say it here: @#$@#%**! dammit, I'm going to miss that Engineer badge. It -fit- so many of my characters _so well_.
But Ops pointed out how easily it could be abused. And he's right. "Hey, buddy, rate me 5 stars and I'll give you $$$." A few of those
and, bam, Engineer badge.
I didn't earn it that way, and it's mildly frustrating that I'm going to lose it, but I can deal.
I also mildly resent the fact that, as Acyl points out, the devs are essentially saying "You see? _YOU_ are why we can't have nice things."
... and they're right, yes... but at the same time, it would be nice of them to admit that they, too, are at fault. Yes, the unwashed masses abused the
toys they were given, and the devs need to fix that. But the devs were the ones who made it possible to abuse in the first place -- not just possible, but
_easy_.
It'd be nice of them to own up to it, at least. Fix the problems, sure, but acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, this wasn't the Ultimate Perfect Idea
they're behaving like it was before us grubby players got it all dirty.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
i only have one toon that uses a AE badge title, Gir... and she gets to keep her's, as for the other badges being nerfed... i don't see it afecting me
I'm not a badger. It doesn't affect me personally. I use 'Engineer' as a title on one character. Other than that, I don't really care.
I used to, at one point, but I pretty much gave up on badges when the market was introduced, and Ouroboros then came around and put the nail in the coffin. There were simply too many, by that point.
My vague disquiet - I wouldn't call it annoyance - is on behalf of the people who do care. And there are quite a lot of folks who are peeved that particular badges are going poof.
It looks like I didn't say this in my original posts...it was in the version Yuku ate, but pfeh.
Let me stress this: I actually agree with the decision they've made. I do think a lot of those badges need to go.
What I dislike is how it's being handled.
Likewise, I think the stance regarding powerlevelling and XP farming is the correct direction. But I don't like how it came across.
Like I said, while the devs have been quite polite about it, the implicit message is - hey, it's not our fault, it's yours.
And we're taking your stuff away. Players don't like seeing stuff get taken away. Doesn't matter if they didn't 'deserve it'. It's their stuff. Folks in modern liberal societies have very strong senses of entitlement, property rights, and ownership. That's just how it is.
Mine!
-- Acyl
... Now I'm seeing the CoH board posters as a certain flock of seagulls.
"Mine! Mine Mine Mine!!"
Quote:Now I'm seeing the CoH board posters as a certain flock of seagulls.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Quote: Matrix Dragon wrote:
... Now I'm seeing the CoH board posters as a certain flock of seagulls.
"Mine! Mine Mine Mine!!"
...you mean it
isn't? o_o;;;
-- Acyl
Post from a day ago that I didn't look at til now:-
Positron revisits the badge thing
That's really what I was looking for, actually. Admission of a mistake - 'I was wrong'...an apology, etc. I don't agree with all the points raised, but the
tone of the thing is what I'm really looking at, not the reasoning. I wish this kinda thing was said sooner.
-- Acyl
And of COURSE there are the crybabies on the CoH forum going "WAAAH ME NO LIKEY DAMAGE FARM! CHANGE IT NAOW!" in response to Posi's well-reasoned
explanation. >
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll