XP Farming
Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 12:37 pm
In the patch122.txt notes:
76. No xps for dodge moves if titan is not in danger being shot.
I tested this and my jocks are still getting piloting experience for dodging when they're not threatened. This is an incentive to engage in silly behaviour like dodging when there's no reason to dodge, which brings me to the subject of XP farming:
One weak spot in TOS is that it allows players to farm PXPs by performing movements that repeatedly cause piloting skill checks. There's many ways to do this. One is to dodge your titan to all of its destinations (or even around in a circle). Another is to repeatedly crouch/stand. Still another is to issue a move command, make attack wait for 1s, then when the attack menu comes up use it to break the move, then repeat the cycle. I consider this to be an exploit and for me it can easily put a damper on what otherwise is an outstanding gaming experience.
I would suggest that NO PXPs be rewarded for any piloting skill check unless one of the following conditions is met:
1. The titan has a threat level. The XP reward could even be scaled to the threat level (20% * threat_level, or some other scheme).
2. The skill check fails and some match-affecting consequence occurs, like the titan suffering damage (something went wrong and the jock learned from it).
3. The skill check occurred because of some event that wasn't controlled by the player. An example of this would be a jump stunt.
While I was doing some testing I had a crouched titan stand up and the jock failed his skill check (99/98). I looked at the team statistics HUD and saw that he had been rewarded somewhere around 150 OXPs for this. Not sure why that happened.
76. No xps for dodge moves if titan is not in danger being shot.
I tested this and my jocks are still getting piloting experience for dodging when they're not threatened. This is an incentive to engage in silly behaviour like dodging when there's no reason to dodge, which brings me to the subject of XP farming:
One weak spot in TOS is that it allows players to farm PXPs by performing movements that repeatedly cause piloting skill checks. There's many ways to do this. One is to dodge your titan to all of its destinations (or even around in a circle). Another is to repeatedly crouch/stand. Still another is to issue a move command, make attack wait for 1s, then when the attack menu comes up use it to break the move, then repeat the cycle. I consider this to be an exploit and for me it can easily put a damper on what otherwise is an outstanding gaming experience.
I would suggest that NO PXPs be rewarded for any piloting skill check unless one of the following conditions is met:
1. The titan has a threat level. The XP reward could even be scaled to the threat level (20% * threat_level, or some other scheme).
2. The skill check fails and some match-affecting consequence occurs, like the titan suffering damage (something went wrong and the jock learned from it).
3. The skill check occurred because of some event that wasn't controlled by the player. An example of this would be a jump stunt.
While I was doing some testing I had a crouched titan stand up and the jock failed his skill check (99/98). I looked at the team statistics HUD and saw that he had been rewarded somewhere around 150 OXPs for this. Not sure why that happened.