Please automatically report foundry quests where <5% of the encounters killed do any damage to PCs.
Flag the quest as pending violation investigation and remove from foundry searches.
Foundry UGC quests are ridiculously overflowing with worthless "kill pit" quests.
If not even 5% of the mobs damage the PC that should indicate something is drastically wrong and likely an exploitation quest.
I do not agree with the implementation, though I agree with the intent IF it is technically possible somehow.
The reason I disagree with the implementation is that there are famous and extremely useful (testing Powers, playstyles, damage, CC, movement, healing etc) and fun Foundries like "50 Hulk Challenge". On some classes, being hit by even one enemy from such a collection of monsters, probably means you will be hit by many more or you are playing far from optimally for that class.
Automatically reporting or removing such quests would be a disaster and would be the final nail in the coffin for many to even touch the Foundry once the novelty wears off.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, each melee mob should have a massive damage ranged attack that they only use if they cannot find a path to the player.
I do not agree with the implementation, though I agree with the intent IF it is technically possible somehow.
The reason I disagree with the implementation is that there are famous and extremely useful (testing Powers, playstyles, damage, CC, movement, healing etc) and fun Foundries like "50 Hulk Challenge". On some classes, being hit by even one enemy from such a collection of monsters, probably means you will be hit by many more or you are playing far from optimally for that class.
Automatically reporting or removing such quests would be a disaster and would be the final nail in the coffin for many to even touch the Foundry once the novelty wears off.
I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and since you provided the actual name of one, I tried the 50 Hulk Challenge.
I wasted 15 minutes of my life simply "kiting" 50 nice slow moving Hulks around a large empty outdoor "arena" with a nice respawn campfire right in the middle. What "challenge?"
From my experience, "testing XXXX" 99.9% of the time means worthless exploit exactly like "50 Hulk Challenge." It is simply yet another "how many mobs can I AOE at once" and gain "experience" and "loot" as fast as possible.
Absolutely pathetic. That is EXACTLY 100,000% the type of garbage that should be eliminated -- and could be automatically.
Edit: And those people that would be the final nail in the coffin for them to even touch the foundry -- I say GREAT, I don't want their exploit foundries wasting space for people that want to actually create something more than a wide open space and 50 encounters dropped in one spot.
Then either I have no clue about Foundry (which is entirely possible) or we totally disagree about the breadth of experiences Foundry is meant to be able to provide. Assuming the latter,
How else is someone meant to achieve all the things I mentioned before with the Foundry?
How do I discover the target caps of Powers, test my healers mitigation or debuffing and healing, learn to tank and kite on my GWF or GF, learn to escape and chain my TR's skills for maximum survivability, test aoe CC and damage feats and Powers on my CW, time my damage speed? All in a consistent solo instance that I can do as many times as I like?
The only interaction I have ever had with Foundry has either been helping me understand my player characters or gaining a small amount of Foundry XP during Foundry Hour when I was bored from questing on early characters. I soon stopped the latter because I quickly realised that questing provides by far the fastest XP gains.
Furthermore, from my understanding, the OP and subsequent posts were talking specifically about maps where there are no paths from enemies to players. That is ALL. Nothing else! As far as I can tell, you are bringing in an off-topic discussion.
Then either I have no clue about Foundry (which is entirely possible) or we totally disagree about the breadth of experiences Foundry is meant to be able to provide. Assuming the latter,
How else is someone meant to achieve all the things I mentioned before with the Foundry?
How do I discover the target caps of Powers, test my healers mitigation or debuffing and healing, learn to tank and kite on my GWF or GF, learn to escape and chain my TR's skills for maximum survivability, test aoe CC and damage feats and Powers on my CW, time my damage speed? All in a consistent solo instance that I can do as many times as I like?
The only interaction I have ever had with Foundry has either been helping me understand my player characters or gaining a small amount of Foundry XP during Foundry Hour when I was bored from questing on early characters. I soon stopped the latter because I quickly realised that questing provides by far the fastest XP gains.
Furthermore, from my understanding, the OP and subsequent posts were talking specifically about maps where there are no paths from enemies to players. That is ALL. Nothing else! As far as I can tell, you are bringing in an off-topic discussion.
As I *am* the OP, I think "If not even 5% of the mobs damage the PC that should indicate something is drastically wrong and likely an exploitation quest." pretty much covers endless kiting and AOE burn-down of 50 encounters all placed on top of each other.
I'd say every "test" you mentioned can be easily accomplished in PvE zones and quests. You want to analyze your DPS? Install ACT Advanced Combat Tracker.
Edit: Removed "can" (here and in OP) from "can damage" which is probably what lead you to leap to "tjere are no paths from enemies to players."
As I *am* the OP, I think "If not even 5% of the mobs damage the PC that should indicate something is drastically wrong and likely an exploitation quest." pretty much covers endless kiting and AOE burn-down of 50 encounters all placed on top of each other.
I'd say every "test" you mentioned can be easily accomplished in PvE zones and quests. You want to analyze your DPS? Install ACT Advanced Combat Tracker.
Edit: Removed "can" (here and in OP) from "can damage" which is probably what lead you to leap to "tjere are no paths from enemies to players."
1. Then you must believe virtually every single T2+ boss encounter is an exploit and that both tactics you mentioned, despite being heavily used all over the game, are exploitative. In which case, we have nothing more to talk about since you should not even be playing this game and you should report EVERYONE, including the moderators and developer staff.
2. No, not every test that I mentioned can be easily, or even remotely, possible in some cases be accomplished in PvE zones and quests. There are other "Player Development" style Foundry quests other than the one I mentioned, and they do not all involve that many adds in one place or issued as challenges, but neither are they story-oriented or whatever else it is that you appear to be looking for in a Foundry (*).
3. I already use ACT + Neverwinter Plugin. It is completely and utterly irrelevant to the thread. How do you think I track my damage and indeed why do you care? Damage by itself means nothing when testing or optimizing. It is the testing parameters under as close to controlled conditions that matter. Damage is also irrelevant to many other tests such as CC, mitigation, debuffing and healing.
In short, it seems to me, you are just randomly assigning a rough parameter to categorize anything that does not match your particular threshold of quality (I am not even going to dignify it with a rank because it is subjective) in Foundry. Even when this categorization includes whole swathes of gameplay and player experiences from the game itself.
There would be no reason for me go anywhere near anything if it did not help me with the game. Foundry at the moment does do that and does it legimitately, using the very own resources, tools and styles of the game itself.
Find some other parameter or means to catch actual exploits, i.e. something that does not or could not ever exist ingame or completely invalidates the premises of the game. Otherwise, this entire thread is not a meaningful set of ideas to improve anything, but actually a subjective opinion of Foundry categories/quality being thrust onto others in the guise of "game improvement".
(*) Heck, checking now, there is even a whole category in the Catalog of Foundry search called "Challenging"...
Find some other parameter or means to catch actual exploits, i.e. something that does not or could not ever exist ingame or completely invalidates the premises of the game. Otherwise, this entire thread is not a meaningful set of ideas to improve anything, but actually a subjective opinion of Foundry categories/quality being thrust onto others in the guise of "game improvement".
How about...
More than 10 encounters spawned within 50' within a 10 second period
Same mob used in more than 25/50 of encounters
Quest Overview doesn't' even contain a complete sentence
If less than 5% of mobs damage PC, award 0 XP and 0 Treasure
-- it is just a "test" of powers, CC, etc, right?
If a mob does zero damage to PC, mob drops no treasure
-- once again - just testing mitigation, and debuffing, right?
Total Quest "development time" was less than 2 minutes per encounter placed.
Of course, "does not or could not ever exist in game" means EVERYTHING that could possibly be produced by the Foundry because by definition it "could exist in the game."
I actually fought hard for "Farming" tag to be added to tags so that all of these types of quests could be properly tagged and excluded by people that didn't want to see them. I think I'll re-request that now that we've seen how poorly the tags worked for these types of quests.
OP you claim to hate these maps but threads like these just seem to highlight the problem and make more people aware, even to giving specific quest names. Rather counter productive.
If less than 5% of mobs damage PC, award 0 XP and 0 Treasure
-- it is just a "test" of powers, CC, etc, right?
If a mob does zero damage to PC, mob drops no treasure
-- once again - just testing mitigation, and debuffing, right?
The problem with this, is that you don't consider the fact, that a player who can kite 50 mobs w/o even 1 touching them, can do a legit foundry too with 0 mobs touching them, if there are no rangers.
The problem is that most people only do foundries because it's a daily and rewards AD. Foundries are not good for XP farming, that issue was solved a long time ago, it is much faster to level by questing, and the drops are not as good either, again you get same/better drops by running around in a questing zone and killing everyone. Not to talk about the end reward, you get a green piece of junk, even if it was a really well written 2h long foundry.
This is an MMO, a big part of the population of the game, doesn't even know what the game's story is, they care even less about a foundry, which rewards them with nothing.
0
orangefireeMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,148Arc User
Cryptic has had this problem in previous games. The easy fix was to simply let the mobs, all mobs, jump obsurdly high.
If a pit or ledge can no longer contain the mobs. The problem will solve itself.
Actually, that is done is some dungeons, Throne of Idris comes to mind, there is at least one wight that jumps over a rather large pit to reach the players. They could probably give that "Super Jump" ability to melee enemies in the foundry which would pretty much put an end to exploit quests.
Neverwinter players are stubborn things....until you strip them down to bone. (Cursed players, my flowers, MINE!) Oh how I plotted their demise.
Careful cw +
Repel, entangling force, shard of the endless avalanche, sudden storm, and arcane singularity.
Its a regular occurance for mine (sub 9k gs) to take on even hard encounters in sharandar and dread ring without a scratch. So a better player could probably complete even the man game lair raids in dread spire and only take any damage from the lair boss.
Since farming can do most of the exploitative stuff thats left, I don't think there is any need to deal with these things other than give them their own category. (Although categories seem rather difficult to get right. >.<)
I suggest this because I'm sensing that the problem is more one of clutter than exploit.
The problem I see here is that Cryptic could take their own action to remedy this 'problem' - and probably an action that prevented some timer workarounds.
(Selfishly, I actually have a very small 2 floor room that I use for mob kill timer testing and working on boss fight 'kill zone' mechanics, which would probably be caught by Cryptic action on this.)
Comments
The reason I disagree with the implementation is that there are famous and extremely useful (testing Powers, playstyles, damage, CC, movement, healing etc) and fun Foundries like "50 Hulk Challenge". On some classes, being hit by even one enemy from such a collection of monsters, probably means you will be hit by many more or you are playing far from optimally for that class.
Automatically reporting or removing such quests would be a disaster and would be the final nail in the coffin for many to even touch the Foundry once the novelty wears off.
Problem solved.
I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and since you provided the actual name of one, I tried the 50 Hulk Challenge.
I wasted 15 minutes of my life simply "kiting" 50 nice slow moving Hulks around a large empty outdoor "arena" with a nice respawn campfire right in the middle. What "challenge?"
From my experience, "testing XXXX" 99.9% of the time means worthless exploit exactly like "50 Hulk Challenge." It is simply yet another "how many mobs can I AOE at once" and gain "experience" and "loot" as fast as possible.
Absolutely pathetic. That is EXACTLY 100,000% the type of garbage that should be eliminated -- and could be automatically.
Edit: And those people that would be the final nail in the coffin for them to even touch the foundry -- I say GREAT, I don't want their exploit foundries wasting space for people that want to actually create something more than a wide open space and 50 encounters dropped in one spot.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Then either I have no clue about Foundry (which is entirely possible) or we totally disagree about the breadth of experiences Foundry is meant to be able to provide. Assuming the latter,
How else is someone meant to achieve all the things I mentioned before with the Foundry?
How do I discover the target caps of Powers, test my healers mitigation or debuffing and healing, learn to tank and kite on my GWF or GF, learn to escape and chain my TR's skills for maximum survivability, test aoe CC and damage feats and Powers on my CW, time my damage speed? All in a consistent solo instance that I can do as many times as I like?
The only interaction I have ever had with Foundry has either been helping me understand my player characters or gaining a small amount of Foundry XP during Foundry Hour when I was bored from questing on early characters. I soon stopped the latter because I quickly realised that questing provides by far the fastest XP gains.
Furthermore, from my understanding, the OP and subsequent posts were talking specifically about maps where there are no paths from enemies to players. That is ALL. Nothing else! As far as I can tell, you are bringing in an off-topic discussion.
As I *am* the OP, I think "If not even 5% of the mobs damage the PC that should indicate something is drastically wrong and likely an exploitation quest." pretty much covers endless kiting and AOE burn-down of 50 encounters all placed on top of each other.
I'd say every "test" you mentioned can be easily accomplished in PvE zones and quests. You want to analyze your DPS? Install ACT Advanced Combat Tracker.
Edit: Removed "can" (here and in OP) from "can damage" which is probably what lead you to leap to "tjere are no paths from enemies to players."
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
1. Then you must believe virtually every single T2+ boss encounter is an exploit and that both tactics you mentioned, despite being heavily used all over the game, are exploitative. In which case, we have nothing more to talk about since you should not even be playing this game and you should report EVERYONE, including the moderators and developer staff.
2. No, not every test that I mentioned can be easily, or even remotely, possible in some cases be accomplished in PvE zones and quests. There are other "Player Development" style Foundry quests other than the one I mentioned, and they do not all involve that many adds in one place or issued as challenges, but neither are they story-oriented or whatever else it is that you appear to be looking for in a Foundry (*).
3. I already use ACT + Neverwinter Plugin. It is completely and utterly irrelevant to the thread. How do you think I track my damage and indeed why do you care? Damage by itself means nothing when testing or optimizing. It is the testing parameters under as close to controlled conditions that matter. Damage is also irrelevant to many other tests such as CC, mitigation, debuffing and healing.
In short, it seems to me, you are just randomly assigning a rough parameter to categorize anything that does not match your particular threshold of quality (I am not even going to dignify it with a rank because it is subjective) in Foundry. Even when this categorization includes whole swathes of gameplay and player experiences from the game itself.
There would be no reason for me go anywhere near anything if it did not help me with the game. Foundry at the moment does do that and does it legimitately, using the very own resources, tools and styles of the game itself.
Find some other parameter or means to catch actual exploits, i.e. something that does not or could not ever exist ingame or completely invalidates the premises of the game. Otherwise, this entire thread is not a meaningful set of ideas to improve anything, but actually a subjective opinion of Foundry categories/quality being thrust onto others in the guise of "game improvement".
(*) Heck, checking now, there is even a whole category in the Catalog of Foundry search called "Challenging"...
How about...
Of course, "does not or could not ever exist in game" means EVERYTHING that could possibly be produced by the Foundry because by definition it "could exist in the game."
I actually fought hard for "Farming" tag to be added to tags so that all of these types of quests could be properly tagged and excluded by people that didn't want to see them. I think I'll re-request that now that we've seen how poorly the tags worked for these types of quests.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
If a pit or ledge can no longer contain the mobs. The problem will solve itself.
The problem with this, is that you don't consider the fact, that a player who can kite 50 mobs w/o even 1 touching them, can do a legit foundry too with 0 mobs touching them, if there are no rangers.
The problem is that most people only do foundries because it's a daily and rewards AD. Foundries are not good for XP farming, that issue was solved a long time ago, it is much faster to level by questing, and the drops are not as good either, again you get same/better drops by running around in a questing zone and killing everyone. Not to talk about the end reward, you get a green piece of junk, even if it was a really well written 2h long foundry.
This is an MMO, a big part of the population of the game, doesn't even know what the game's story is, they care even less about a foundry, which rewards them with nothing.
Actually, that is done is some dungeons, Throne of Idris comes to mind, there is at least one wight that jumps over a rather large pit to reach the players. They could probably give that "Super Jump" ability to melee enemies in the foundry which would pretty much put an end to exploit quests.
Repel, entangling force, shard of the endless avalanche, sudden storm, and arcane singularity.
Its a regular occurance for mine (sub 9k gs) to take on even hard encounters in sharandar and dread ring without a scratch. So a better player could probably complete even the man game lair raids in dread spire and only take any damage from the lair boss.
I suggest this because I'm sensing that the problem is more one of clutter than exploit.
The problem I see here is that Cryptic could take their own action to remedy this 'problem' - and probably an action that prevented some timer workarounds.
(Selfishly, I actually have a very small 2 floor room that I use for mob kill timer testing and working on boss fight 'kill zone' mechanics, which would probably be caught by Cryptic action on this.)