Slate’s published an article on the whole Mission Architect / farming foofoorah. Not much new news here, but a decent analysis.
The face-off underscores an iron law of MMO play: Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they’ll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible.
Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early.
The article gets a bit apocalyptic over what the undefined (and unpredictable) crack-down on AE farming might mean to CoX — if people will leave an “unfair” situation once other super-hero MMORPGs come online. I don’t think that’s the worry. Instead, I think AE was a tremendous opportunity to instill some new life into CoX (steady new content and QoL improvements notwithstanding). Unfortunately, the flood of farming has turned a lot of potentially creative folks off of the Mission Architect (too little signal to noise), and the PLers, who are bearing the brunt of the crackdown, were the folks most likely to jump ship anyway,
Because of the folks “racing to the bottom,” and the Devs inability to predict or prevent them before the fact, one of CoX’s best chances for some serious reinvigoration may have been lost.
Time will tell on MA. It seems it’s heading towards being used by a relatively small subset of the player base, not unlike PvP (just with a bigger audience than 10% of the population).
My own use of it has dropped off precipitously. Why level my lowbies at 75% the speed of the standard content, and with inferior rewards? No reason to.
I find myself using it when I just want to play one of my 50s and have little interest in generating Inf, or want to go after a specific Rare or Uncommon salvage. Also, interesting arcs I hear about will typically get played as well.
I lament that the level 17-21 SOs were removed as rewards. They were a strong incentive to play lowbies in MA. And the mission complete ticket bonus nerf annoys me to no end.
I think there are a lot of similarities between MA and PvP — though they have managed so far not to warp the non-MA game in order to make MA work.