Sunday morning I was up a bit early, so I hopped onto CoX with some Atlas-level characters on Freedom and Virtue (the only two servers worth PUGging on, given populations.
Now, normally, the Atlas Broadcast channel is filled with (a) invitations for sewer missions and (b) inane chatter, often around costume contests past or future. Not Sunday. Wall-to-wall AE mission solicitations. And not just “I wanna run some Mission Architect stuff,” but “LF AE farm mish” and “AE farming team LFM.”
Yes, it was around before, but farming has now Officially, Really, Truly come to CoX — not as an odd manipulation of certain missions and rules, but as an integral part of the game structure.
Now, there are limits as to what you can do farming. Yes, you get XP. But you also “just” get tickets, which are partly usable for more Mission Architect building swag, or for chances for high-level bits. But that seems to be enough to make AE a big, green farming machine.
Hopefully, this is a matter of novelty. Because, while farming is sketchy per se, the worst part of about this farming is that it’s on generally craptastic missions, which can only hurt the CoX brand. And, meantime, it’s seriously cutting into PUG activity … unless it’s a PUG to do some farming.
I strongly suspect something will be done about this by the Devs, if it continues to be a problem. We’ll see.
On the other hand, there are some good AE bits. We played “The Butterfly Effect” last evening with a couple of 21s (Leilah and Kazima), and had a fun time. It’s clear that while there are some fun things you can do with actual mission construction, a lot of the fun is with dialog and color text. Which, upon consideration, has been true with a lot of my favorite arcs.
Margie’s Old Star, fire/rad controller, has hit (solo) 48. Woot! She finding limitations on being able to solo AVs (her control can’t overcome their recovery for long enough, and she just doesn’t have the sustained DoT to take them down.
But there’s a lot of other goodies she can use to grab for the brass ring. She’s a great soloable character (and the inspiration, power-wise, for my rebuilt Al McGordo).
It was “Bring your old account back for some fun” weekend, and it was nice to see Doyce back on with some old names.