Reduced sourcemarks in fos3, why?

Thank you for explaining that because grade school math can be tricky sometimes.

I did use my fingers and toes...but I lost a thumb in a tragic pie eating contest years ago. I do my best.

This change was made to impact the farming groups, the people not spamming stand to be impacted very little by this change because they were never "spamming FOS3" in the first place - it's that simple.

So you agree that it was to direct endgame players to other content?

In part, at least, yes - I know you've been on a massive hiatus from the game, I'm not sure when you left and when you came back, but I haven't seen you resurface again until recently - welcome back for what it's worth; to explain.

Prior to the development of omnibus massive segments of the game were dead. in fact virtually everything outside of the EG relevancy window was dead - the only content any EG player had to run, that was meaningful, at all was in relevancy (3 DLC's)

Unfortunately also the game was developed in a manner that encouraged new players to reach end game as quickly as possible so they could play with friends, but I'd assert also because it allowed them to be better monetized - this was also when event type contents got pushed.

The consequence of this was, of course, poorly equipped, damaged players frequently complained about by more experienced EG players (they'll commonly be referred to as 'skip toons, CR boosters' all that stuff). They had no skill points, they had learned nothing and their prospects of getting anything done in old content to get those skill points was dismal and the EG veterans certainly weren't willing to help them.

There was no motivation for EG veteran players to step foot in EEG content because it offered them no reward that could be used for their own progression, so when they did go in there, they were doing it for fun and just destroyed everything creating a negative experience for anyone else in there that might have been learning.

The chances of getting a specific instance at all was limited to the whims of any individuals that might have been doing this. If anyone tells you they were farming EEG prior to the clamp for the reward, they're lying.

Not only were there loot locks, the reward was only a few marks, even with the relative ease that existed it simply wasn't worth an EG players time.to go in there for a reward.

In an ideal world you'd have a wealth of players to support their respective populations at each tier, but not only does this game struggle at times to sustain growth the system pushing players to EG as quickly as possible made this idealistic narrative entirely impossible.

Not to mention the overpowered state of players was causing instances to break, the game to crash and feats not to pop anyway because you were too powerful to actually have mechanics of requirements register.

The excessive damage output had actually become a legitimate hindrance. I know some players loved the hulk smash, even a part of me did, but if we're being honest, it was a negative player experience - this is part of what made me change my mind towards the clamp in the first place.

Omnibus and the clamp was therefore created and put in place in an effort to improve this problem, help grow the game and provide a platform where all players regardless of their progress within EG found a place to play together.

In order to achieve this, the EG players had to be reasonably rewarded for running that content, so unlimited source marks and no loot locks came about, as a pay off this though content had to be clamped and fixed to avoid the prior issues and to avoid the content becoming trivialized by overpowered EG players.

A lot of time was put in to finding a balance between still feeling powerful and giving players a sense of progress but still ensuring against the trivialization of content. That balance naturally brings with it a "content time restriction" the balance between all of this prevents a player from "beating content" outside of what the clamp deems reasonable within the parameters.

There is of course movement within that parameter, it's just a lot slower than what occurs within the persistent EG window (3DLCs) progress within EEG is primarily driven by artifacts, generator mods, augments, things you'll see referred to as "piercing".

With all of this there also came the vaster use for source marks we now see in game, motivating all players alike to farm in Omnibus for the marks.

Originally they actually wanted to limit all source marks within omnibus, even I packed a stink at that, and I was quite sternly rebuffed by Mepps, so much so I backed off that point entirely only for it to be revisited by the developers later upon further complaints where they eventually relented and put source marks back in the EG relevancy window.

This was mostly done because some people complained about wanting to participate in omnibus at all but would naturally still require source marks due to the expanded rewards that even involve progress.

With all that being said the idea behind omnibus and EEG was to push players together to play as much old EEG content as possible, this helps players grow together, expose them to content, reward them for running content and creating an active EEG environment that attracts new and old players alike, but almost certainly new players who still need a lot of this content.

All of this is the eco system that Mepps referred to when he stated that earlier in the thread.

The purpose of omnibus and EEG, however, becomes diluted, if not defeated entirely when people start fishing for particular instances because some become disproportionately more appealing over others. FOS has been like this since the inception of omnibus, so much so you've now got a deserter on the omnibus queue itself when you cancel, because people were and continue to quite literally fish for instances like FOS and they're not doing it for any reason other than quick easy marks, both for the instance itself, but also that weekly journal entry you see.

All of that behavior is detrimental to the intent of the omnibus and EEG custom queue system.

The thing as well about pre formed groups is that if other instances were actually providing better reward for the time spent, those pre formed groups would be considering other pieces of content in equal fashion to FOS,

A lot of these groups aren't even always full, they notoriously custom blind queue allowing remaining slots to be filled by the omnibus system, that person fishing the omnibus queue cancelling everything but FOS is hoping for just that scenario.

When the only raid being run by these groups becomes FOS and because of the sheer volume of people now doing it, it is naturally detrimental to a system that is attempting to get all content equally popping more frequently.

This became all too obvious last week when they ran a Wonderverse Spotlight to encourage people to run Wonderverse content only to see FOS still being spammed irrespective of the additional marks provided by the spotlight.

The nerf to FOS was entirely unsurprising at that point and ultimately the quickest and easiest solution for the devs to attempt to rein in the problem - they haven't nerfed the marks in FOS to piss anyone off, despite the fact it obviously has that effect, lol, They've done it to try and improve an eco system as described here that clearly wasn't functioning as they'd like with FOS being used by the players the way it was to simply farm out marks as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

In an ideal world I entirely agree that they'd go through all content and decide where they think everything should fit, I would love them to do so and as quickly as possible, unfortunately this is the fix we've got for now. I suspect further nerfs will be incoming because the players don't tend to modify their behavior for the better very easily.

We've said as much here, they'll be off to necro once this Legion Spotlight is over, which for the record shows the improvement the nerf has made, had it not been nerfed FOS would probably still be run or at least still heavily considered, despite the fact it's not the raid on a bonus.

Most COU runs tend to take about 8-10 minutes, If FOS was left as it was it would have been rewarding 20 marks as well despite the fact it was not on a bonus, now it isn't it's rewarding 12 in those 8-10 minutes, which means COU has won out with the spammers this week, which is exactly what the developers want from the omnibus/EEG system even more so, content being given a spotlight.

Next week they'll either be in necro or back in FOS, but at least the system will be heading in a direction that better allows for at least a side glance at other content.

Hopefully this history background and post provides you with a bit of a better understanding of where I'm coming from, 16 pages in, but here nonetheless.

I still don’t see how this makes the game better.

There’s an obvious problem, but I don’t think this was the solution.

All those raids that people avoid, are still going to be avoided. It’s like the happiness home raid when people were farming first boss for loot over and over. They removed loot until later in the raid. So people went back to fos3 spamming. Now they are just going to go the to next raid that requires little time, effort and attention.

Taking things away doesn’t make unappealing things more appealing. What it leads to is settling and settling leads to disgruntlement.


If I own an amusement park and I have a bunch of rides no one really likes, I’m not going to make the really fun rides less appealing to funnel traffic to the crappy ones. I’d do something to make the ones no one was riding more appealing.

10 you know this yourself so not sure why ask

You’re trying to compare a formed fos group to a not formed FGs group. A pre formed fos group will always be faster than a formed FGs group. A que fos group will be faster than a que FGs group.

And I can’t see how people can’t understand why they did it after straightforward saying why they did it. A raid not giving double marks having higher marks per minute than a raid receiving double marks to the point that they completely ignore said content even with the spotlight is why they did it. It’s not that complicated.

Yes there will always be raids people avoid for various reasons. There will always be raids that people prefer. They aren’t changing that. What they are changing is that the gap between these mark areas are that much better than other areas even with double marks

Because I don't normally run old content is why I ask. So you're saying FGS normally rewards 5 source Marks on the non-bonus week? That doesn't seem strange to you?

No. I'm not....that's what you guys are doing. You refer to these 5 min repeat runs...fine, no problem. They exist for sure, but not in the wild for the most part. They exist in cultivated groups. If a queue group, the queue time itself makes a 5 min run near impossible (oh wait, you guys also don't include the recycle time in between as part of it.....I forgot). In those groups, the rest of the 'eco-system' is not impacted. In those queue groups....10 min runs? Sure. 20+ min runs? Maybe. Fail runs...you bet.

fgs gives 10 marks and 20 during spotlight

You are the one comparing apples to oranges. If you take a group that fails fos than they will struggle just as much in fgs. You take a competent group and have them run fos than they won’t struggle just like they wouldn’t struggle in fgs.

Most competent groups will do fos in 6 minutes. Most competent groups will do fgs in 18 minutes. Both gave 10 marks. Under double marks youd get 20 marks in 18 minutes with fgs while getting 30 with fos. You can deny basic math all you want but that’s the reality.

You want to compare fos spammer runs to random fgs runs. If you want to compare one to the other than at least try to be unbiased. Randoms would normally do fos in about 12 minutes. Randoms will normally do fgs in about 30 minutes. That’s still about the same as the before numbers. And then you have bad groups who can take any number to time to beat them cause they are that bad. These failed groups exists in every raid yet you want to imagine that they only exist in fos. You have players in fos to scoreboard chase and ignore sentries that wipe groups. You have players who literally struggle with going around a big hole in the ground or breakout and kill their group or even stand in the storm. You have people who don’t block on skulls and use orbitals that trigger one shots. You have people who can’t even count to 3 and hit a cog at the same time. Regardless all these runs are 0 marks per minute if they can’t do simple mechanics.

If you want to compare than actually compare real situations

Correct. And if a group of 8 shifts from content A to content B, but is still a group of 8....what impact does that have to me? What impact does that have to anyone outside that group of 8? Well....besides someone getting a little less marks if they do run those runs non-spamming.

So if all this really all boils down to there weren't enough spam groups forming for FGS last week. Boo hoo....who cares? A bunch of spammers? I mean really....FOS3 was ran more than DD for the last year by spammers even though DD technically paid better (you know...cause of the '2.5 min' runs vs 5). Yet no one was asking for or making changes because there weren't enough DD spam groups. Why...oh yeah, cause that's a dumb idea.

And who was surprised by this? I said as much at the start of the bonus week:
"Once things hit EEG, a spotlight mainly means just some more source marks...which is always nice, but source is available everywhere and might not drive traffic to these runs/areas on their own, which I'm guessing is the whole point of a spotlight...to get people to run content them might not otherwise run."

It will be funny though...cause once they 'fix' Necro, COU, or Escape, or whatever the next high value 'outlier' target is on the war on 'spam-terror'....and all the 'quick' runs are equal, guess what? People will just keep spamming FOS3 vs run MoM, BBS, Khandaq, Spindrift or the Batcaves even if they introduce 2x weeks on those...heck, they might spam it MORE now as it's less efficient per run.

I don't really disagree with anything you say here (other than the 6 min random runs in FOS3...I'd say it's more like 8-10...but I'll accept 6 for the example), but I disagree with the fact that it's repeatable on randoms. Getting the higher average return relies on repeat runs in the queue. Repeat queues will increase the chances that you'll land in that FOS3 fail group so using it as some basis for your math is flawed as it's not a constant(unless its a made group). Repeat queues increases the chances of longer queue times or cherry pickers who opt out a few times. The chances of you having a repeat 6 min run several times over is low and gets lower the more you repeat, and involving random non spammers is where it impacts the magical 'eco-system'.

Again...I'm not really concerned with spammers who are making proper groups, as I'd never land in them, yet this is who the change was targeted to impact the most. It does however impact everyone else if they land in one of these runs randomly. You know...that pesky 'eco-system' of other players we are concerned about so much. It even impacts some random groups who might now 'opt out' of these runs as they know they will only get 6 marks for their efforts. So cool....more opt outs for someone to complain about.

So I say again.....

Not sure why you quoted me and lead off with a sentence like that?


No where in my post did I imply I don’t understand why they did it. I very clearly said I acknowledge there was a problem, but disagree with the solution.

Please slow down and read and understand if you are going to quote me, otherwise don’t bother and the back and forth can just end here.

Bingo.

I don’t see how this will have the desired effect.

It won't just be the quick runs equal, the time investment of the quick ones will be loosely equal to that of the long ones, you wanna run FOS, it takes 6 minutes, cool here's 6 marks, you wanna run FGS and it takes you 18 minutes, cool, here's 18 marks.

Incremental improvements towards a better balanced omnibus eco system are still improvements, eventually we will reach our day of glory and it will be beautiful.

In the meantime you'll be fine, you can just keep clicking "Ready" and "Cancel" until one of the easy ones like FOS pops to get you that omnibus journal entry each week. Hell, don't you have 6 accounts Reinheld, you could nearly form the group yourself

Oh wait, actually I've seen those runs, I should've known, I always wondered why I'd get into a FOS run and only one other person was helping, while, 6 others stood around an R&D table back at the door. I thought they perhaps had full inventories, but it all makes sense now

BINGO!!!

Why do so many people care what other people run really this thread is so dumb, others forcing their agenda down other people's throat!

Let people play the game how they want, some in here going back and forth and this dumb eco system, when they are no better! Why are these same people running 100 elite solos/duos Only to finish their renown or elite alerts and raids, everyone has their own way of playing this game.

Veterans like myself of this game can only run the same content so many times after 8 years of playing this game on and off, the reskinned content after content, the same bosses fights, same mechanics it gets soo old!

Many who don't even login because they are just tired of the content it's not engaging anymore!

No one and I mean NO ONE! has the right in here to tell anyone how they should spend their time playing a Freaking Game , it is a game people, let others play it their way and how they want to spend their time, if they have limited time or whatever they want to do.

Honestly who cares how and where people farm source marks, when that is all this game is, Farming Bounties, Renown, EEG Currency, Source Marks, Catalyst, Gear and the list goes on.

Some prefer only dailies, while other's solo, then alerts, I know some people just reset the EEG bounty only till all their gear is done and they are gone till the next DLC, you can't force people to login, you can't force people to run certain content, This is Not a Job it is A Game!

If anyone's interested Prime Battleground only rewards 4 Source Marks.