Xaphan

This would just lead to people arguing over who gets the star. While it's true that group leaders provide a neccesary function, I feel that adding a reward to being the leader would only serve to destabalize things even more.

I think it'd be a better idea to just give the leader some sort of ability to simply "kick" people from the team if they're being troublesome, such as in the examples you provided above. Though that might be too difficult to implement...

If they're removing maps, why is that darned destroyed Atlas Park map without the minimap still in?

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I'd go with the backwards compatible route. Which is to say, "CoH2" would be an ugrade/remake/revamp of the core game engine and associated systems that, while redoing things to run better and allow more cool stuff, would still allow the stuff we already have.

In other words, the initial release of CoH2 would be what we have now, without losing our characters or anything... but the devs would have the ability to add in all the things they wanted to but never could. Power customization, wall crawling/running, grappling, etc...


Of course, the engine we have now isn't ALL that BAD. Other than a few problem, it works well. And apparently the devs are working on ways to upgrade it further. But if it ever DOES get to the point where replacing/remaking the engine is the only viable way to move forwards... Backwards Compatibility is the best option. Especially for an MMO that prides itself in it's retention rates.

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The solution to the problem of low level characters getting purples is what dawned on me this morning and prompted me to post this. All you would have to do is make the ticket cap scale based on the character's level. Then make the ticket cost of a purple recipe such that a character can't buy one until level 45 (or whatever level the devs deem appropriate). So for example, if you made it so the ticket cap was 10,000 tickets at level 1 (the same as now basically) and grew by 200 tickets per level, then you could just make sure a purple roll cost 18,800 tickets, and therefore you would have to be level 45 to be able to store up enough tickets to buy one.

[/ QUOTE ] There's currently a series of badges built into the Architect system to reward for ticket "overflow", or number of tickets you earn when you're at the 9,999 ticket cap. So, this suggestion of having a variable ticket cap would break some of the rewards already in game. Not a good idea.


Though I'm fine with making the cost of a purple recipe be 18,800 tickets. Just don't increase the ticket cap past 9,999.

There are lots of arcs out there already. An absurd amount. Enough that many people fear they have no chance of anyone ever finding their story amongst the masses. Quite a few of those people are right, as nearly no one is playing their arcs.

Three arcs per person is already enough content to drown out the gems, and make it truly hard to find something playable.


I really don't think we need any more, at the moment. If you want more slots, make an arc good enough to be a Dev's Choice.

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Arc # - Name: #2050 - The Outcast Outcasts
Rating: ****

When I first heard about the Mission Architect coming over the horizon, one of the ideas I had was using it to fill in holes in the badge-verse. Making arcs where heroes could fight Longbow, heroes could fight Goldbrickers, and where Villains could fight Outcasts, all leapt into my mind. I recommend more people look into this, by the way. These blank spots in the game continuity are rich with fodder for possible additions to the game.

This arc is a good demonstration of what painting in existing space in the game can do. The Outcasts are one of the only mutant groups in the game, and one that drops off, sharply, at level 20 after being the most important thing in the world for most Hollows-like folk. Frostfire defines a lot of lower-level characters... and then, boom, nothing. You don't encounter later Outcasts, or even former outcasts. I feel that's one of the waknesses of the Outcast myth arc. Surely they could show up villainside somehow?

Well, Xaphan produced a really good explanation for this. The arc is sensibly offered by a good contact; it deals with the Outcast s and explores their themes and their concepts well, and uses interesting, diverse maps.

So, perfect arc, right, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, because the arc is so solid in a lot of ways, the places where it falls down are all the more maddening. Outcasts are highly homogenized as it is, so homogenized bosses make things worse. The dorky outfits and dialogue work well enough, but on the other hand, there's this awkwardness about it...

The arc is a really strong 4, and a little polish is going to push it into the 5 category.

[/ QUOTE ]I had originally wanted the bosses to just be replacements for the current bosses. I had designed them to be, more or less, dressed up versions of the existing Outcast bosses (within the limits of the system, of course). Their outfits are similar to the original bosses, but cheesed up a bit. I had actually originally intended to remake the entire group like this, for the later missions, but that ended up taking up too much space, and just wasn't practical.

Unfortunately, I didn't think of them as being unique characters (as that wasn't my design from the beginning). So when I used them as end mission bosses, I wrote them all the same... thugs that wanted to be heroes. So you're right about them being very generic, because they ARE.

So I'm going to fix that.

The existing custom bosses will remain, but will only be seen in random spawns. The end of mission bosses will be redone with new costumes, maybe new powers, and a unique backstory and character for each. I'll try my best to have each one sound different, too, though I admit that character dialogue isn't my strongest point.


Since I'm adding a lot of new characterization and dialog, I won't have the new version up too soon, but I hope to have it done before the end of the week. Thanks for the feedback!

/signed completely.

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I make an arc that is essentially incompletable. Either using a bug to make the mission impossible to complete, or simply make a series of missions so absurdly hard and long that even the most devoted 1-star bandits won't bother with it. I keep the flag up almost all the time, EXCEPT I take it down for a few minutes every five days, letting my SG and global friends rate the arc 5-stars without needing to complete. I immediately put the flag back up afterwards.

Doing this, I can very easily (if slowly) climb the ranks with a permanently max-ranked arc. Regardless of it's content.

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The only reasoning I can see for this is that Atlas and Mercy AE Buildings are too crowded. But... it's not like removing them will make the crowds suddenly disappear. They'll just move somewhere ELSE. Which really isn't fixing the problem at all.

Besides, having an AE in the starting zones makes it a lot easier for the people who want to level from 1-50 entirely on MA missions.

And I haven't noticed any zone-wide lag due to the crowds. Maybe when you're in the building itself, but... yeah. See above.

Love reading these reviews, so figured I'd throw my hat into the ring. I've been trying to get people to try my arc since I've revamped it, and this seems like a good option. Still trying to decide if I want to change the title or not...


Author: @Xaphan
Level Range: 5-20 (15-20 in the third mission)
Subject: Fresh out of Paragon, a faction of the Outcasts come to the Rogue Isles! But they're not here for villainy...
Arc # - Name: #2050 - The Outcast Outcasts
Rating:

We are not allowed to have short or single word responses such as "No" anymore, since the recent mod crackdown on this (which I actually think is the second such crackdown, if I remember correctly). Though even though this suggestion only really deserves a simple "No", I'm going to have to ramble on like this in order to make it a valid reply.

I just simply think this idea is really, really bad. However, I want this reply to be somewhat constructive, so I'll go ahead and give some advice/feedback. The forums have a cool new feature called the "search" function. It's located near the top of the screen, so you may have to scroll up a bit to see it. I suggest you click on it and familiarize yourself with it's uses. It can save you a lot of time if used properly!

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Will we be able to use Giant Monsters like babbage in our Mission Archs?

[/ QUOTE ] Not at the moment. They're thinking of allowing giant monsters in outdoor maps in version two, which means an update at some point after MA goes live. But at release, there will be no giant monsters.

We'll likely never be able to use GMs on indoor missions.

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... even trade-within-account, I am sorry, but that's not going to happen. Characters of different levels earn Merits at different rates. Merits are supposed to streamline the reward process for that character, and that's not going to be changing any time soon.

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Boo.

Of course, I can earn merits faster on one of my 50s, buy a recipe and give it to another character on my account with the help of a friend. Does this make the 'other' character's earn rate higher? It virtually does, but requires a middle man.

It's the same end result, but the middle-man can be taken out with account-wide rewards. Same could be said with influence, recipes, enhancements, salvage etc. I Don't get why the Devs feel like they need to make us jump through hoops. Timesink, I guess.

[/ QUOTE ]The devs would have to have a majorly defeatist attitude to think "Well, we don't WANT people to do this... but we can't stop them... so we might as well make it as easy for them as possible!"

It's not like the devs WANT you to twink out your lowbie characters, but make you jump through hoops as a time sink. They don't want people to twink (it's generally bad for any MMO, no reason to ever encourage it)... but it's not a big enough problem to worry about, and any potential fix would do more harm to the general players than is worth it.

But that doesn't mean they have any reason to make it easier for you. And as for people who get suckered when a stranger steals the enhancements or influence they said they were gonna help transfer: Well, I don't think the devs lose any sleep over it, to say the least.

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Will you personally be able to get these tickets from playing arcs yourself, or will it only come from other players playing YOUR content? As in, if you create things, nobody tries it, will you be unable to get tickets, or if you don't even make things, will you still be able to get tickets?

[/ QUOTE ]Yes. The tickets you get in the place of random drops in missions (and there's an end of mission ticket bonus as well!) are the same ones you get when people play your missions. So you can get enough tickets to buy what you want without making a single mission (though all those tickets will be on the characters that earned them, not global)... or you can earn a ton of tickets by making some really awesome stories, without ever needing to fight a single enemy!

So there's a few options on how to gather your loot, here.

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Before if you wanted a Numina, you had to farm KHTF, or farm for influence to buy one. If you did not find those things fun you had two choices. Not get a Numina, or do something you didnt think was fun.

You now have a third choice, and you can play one alt to get it quicker, or play your alts regularly and you will get there eventually.

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See, the problem is that some of us don't consider farming Ouroboros for merits to be fun. And the drop rate (even the increased drop rate) for doing arcs is just insufficient to generate the merits needed for good recipes. When the two rares in a 6-piece set cost 200 merits each, and you can barely pull in 250 merits from running *EVERY ARC* from 10'ish to 40'ish, then either:

a. Merits aren't dropping at high enough numbers, reward isn't equal to time put in, or

b. Costs of the 'non-uber' recipes is just plain too dang high.

But now they can't FIX things, because the imbalance has already gone on too long. The markets are drained, and people are now so flush with influence/infamy, that a sudden increase in recipes wouldn't alleviate the issues...they would only exacerbate them further.

The devs broke the market with the merit system. I think they saw that set IO bonuses were getting too good on too many people. I don't think they did it intentionally, but the end effect is still there-they showed us a supermodel, then swapped in her old maid sister after 4 issues.

Bait and switch.

Edit-Oh yeah, and don't even get me started on how merits destroyed teaming. Why team, when you can't get merits for someone else's arc? It doesn't advance your characters quest for the recipes you want to get!

[/ QUOTE ]I think the only problem with the merit system is that it doesn't do enough to encourage you to use random rolls. If you just do those, then you usually come out ahead of what you would have pre-merits (excluding the katie farmers... which let's face it, the devs don't owe them anything). Of course individual recipes are expensive, because you're SUPPOSED to save up for them, and work towards them.

It's pretty obvious that the merit system was designed around the random rolls, and the individual recipes being much more expensive based off of that... but the problem is that most people are completely ignoring the random roll options! (Which is a shame, because you can make a FORTUNE off of the market with them, right now).

Really, the merit system isn't so bad if you don't try to save up for anything, or only try to save up for one or two specific things... but a lot of people have decided to buy their ENTIRE builds using merits, and end up hating it.

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If you spend tickets on a specific reward, like an Inspiration or Recipe Roll, then that is only given to the character spending the tickets.

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I had not thought about it before, but this quote points out that Inspirations will probably not be dropped in the MA. That might be a problem: I know I've been burning through Inspirations like candy as I try to get my Peacebringer through the EB infested Hero's Hero arc.

Obviosuly, this isn't going to be an issue for Rikti War Zone Challengees, but none of my characters have ever been in that league. I'd hate to have to interrupt an otherwise enjoyable arc multiple times to go buy Inspirations for my squishy.

[/ QUOTE ]I wouldn't be so sure. We can already buy inspirations with merits (1 merit = 1 random large insp), but it's not like merit drops replaced large inspiration drops or anything.

Posi was only giving examples of things you can buy, and outlining the difference between global and local things you can purchase. If you decide to spend tickets on an inspiration, then only that character gets that inspiration. If you decide to spend tickets on something global (like an AV for MA), then any of your characters can use that AV when making missions, not just the one that bought it.

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How about this for "rating" poor arcs:

If you don't complete it, you can't rate it. However, each published arc also keeps track of the total number of times started (and perhaps also number of times completed), and displays this on the GUI in the list of MA arcs. If you see an arc with few or no ratings but a large number of times started, that should indicate that it probably isn't worth the attempt.

This doesn't do much to help those first people who try the arc, but such is the risk that you take when you play untested player-created material

[/ QUOTE ]But if people are trying to troll a specific arc or content creator, wouldn't this just make it much, MUCH easier?

Get a bunch of people to just start the arc, drop it, and repeat again and again. Something even a single person could do, actually, no SG needed. You'll give the arc a huge amount of starts but very few completes/ratings. If people are looking at those stats as a guide to how good an arc is, then it's an easy troll. If people DON'T care about those stats, then it's a pointless suggestion.


The devs are at least thinking about ratings trolls, have lots of datamining hooks, and have said in the past that they'll be keeping an eye out for rating trolls. This idea just makes it easier for anyone to do, and makes the potential problem a whole lot worse. IMO.

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When people play your arcs, tickets earned that way go into a pool.

You can then claim tickets out of that pool onto any character.

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This needs to be the way that reward merits work :/

[/ QUOTE ]Good news, reward merits ALREADY work this way!

From my understanding, for both tickets or merits, if you complete anything on a specific character (such as completing certain content, completing arcs, etc) then you get the ticket or merit on that specific character.

If you do something not specific to any given character (such as people playing an arc you published which gets you tickets, or the 60 month veteran reward which gets you 5 reward merits) You can claim that reward on any character you want.

I'd actually say the system we currently have for merits is a bit superior, even, because with tickets we can only claim them on one character, and then those tickets are gone. For merits we can (probably maybe most-likely) claim them on as many characters as we want.


So yay! It already works the same way!

Personally, I don't want to have to play through a truly horrible arc in order for my vote to be worth anything. Plus I'm honestly not convinced the problem of mass-downvoting will be as bad as some people are fearing. However, I do like the idea of encouraging people to finish arcs before they rate (though not necessarily punishing them when they don't finish).


So, I propose a type of token that lets you make one of the votes on your mission now count. So, if I have a mission with a dozen "5"s and three "1"s, I can remove three of the "1"s with three tokens, and be left with all "5"s. So, it lets you counter those nasty downvoter groups that are gonna bring down the entire system apparently.

Make the tokens reward for every ten arcs you complete and rate (not necessarily all at once. If I drop an arc and rate it a 1, but then complete it anyway at a later date, I still get credit). So you get one credit for every 10 unique arcs you do. You don't get credit for repeating the same arcs over and over (since you can only vote once). This SHOULD keep them rare enough to avoid being abused, but still plentiful enough to be useful.


Of course there'd be the problem of people hording them, and then using them all on their really BAD arc to keep it from getting a bad rating... but really, if people play a 5-star arc and it's completely horrible, they're naturally gonna downvote it. As long as people keep their bad arcs on the list with good ratings, it's eventually gonna have enough exposure and enough low scores that it will be impossible to keep it up. Especially if there's a limit on how many tokens you can use on an arc.

Personally, I wouldn't consider doing a KHTF every three hours to get the reward an exploit. Power gaming perhaps and going a bit against what is intended, but still operating inside the rules of the system. Just pushing those rules as far as possible.

Somehow doing a KHTF every 30 minutes and STILL getting the reward every time WOULD have been an exploit. It's operating outside the rules and logic of the game, is very obviously not working as intended, and offers a far greater reward than should be allowed. It's breaking the rules, not just pushing them.

Of course that's an example from the old TF system and not really valid for the new merit system... but it's still the metric I go by. Pushing the rules but still working within their bounds is power gaming. Breaking the rules is exploiting.


Note that I'm not saying "if it's possible ingame, it's not a cheat". Obviously with my example, getting a reward from the KHTF every 30 minutes would be "possible ingame", since in the example people could exploit it... but it still very much goes against the established rules.


And example for MA (which probably isn't real. but still needs to be watched for!) is the rule where we can't get regular kill badges in MA missions. That's how it's intended to work. If there is a way to get (say) the Illusionist badge through MA missions, then that would be a bug. Using that bug to get the badge would be exploiting.

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Hrm... guess that particular question got buried:

It's looking like this is a no, from the phrasing of answers to questions that skirt the periphery of this one, but:

Is it possible to give NPC-only powers (like Warwolf transformations, or the Tsoo Sorceror teleport) to our Custom Critters?

[/ QUOTE ]Kinda answered in pohsyb's response to another power question, but I'd guess no. We get to choose two powersets preloaded with powers to give to our custom foes. We won't be able to pick and choose powers... so if there isn't a powerset that includes the Warwolf transformation, we won't be able to use it.

HOWEVER, looking at the screenshots, we actually have THREE power choices. The two sets, and a travel power. So I'd guess that if you choose Teleport as a critter's travel power, it would probably be the same as Tsoo Sorcerer teleports.

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$himher
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$hisher


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Some of these need to be used in existing missions. It always amuses me when my female character is called "him".

[/ QUOTE ]Some missions do, some missions don't. The devs seem a bit reluctant to go back and change old missions... sometimes just because it's too much work going through all the old missions and looking for stuff like that, and their time could be better spend elsewhere... and sometimes because they don't want to mess with the work of people who no longer work there.

But it IS used in some existing missions. Just not some of the older ones.

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What happens to arcs if the player who created them goes inactive?

Can trial accounts use the MA? ( Better not... )

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I'm still on my first cup of coffee, and haven't been able to kindle the CT reactor yet this morning, so apologies if it's obvious to everyone but me, but what am I missing? What's the problem with letting trial accounts use the MA?

[/ QUOTE ]Well, obviously if Trial accounts have access to the MA, they might enjoy the system too much and become paying subscribers. And we wouldn't want that.


Ok, seriously though, there's a potential for people to make a mass of trial accounts, run them through an arc, and either upvote/downvote it with each one. Since you can only vote on each arc once per account, that would be the most obvious work-around.

A good solution would be a restriction on rating missions. So Trial accounts can play MA missions (and maybe even make them, because what's the harm in that? For the devs to decide, I guess), but not allow them to rate missions. That way they can still enjoy what is potentially the biggest addition the game will ever see, while still not abusing it.

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I have a question for if the devs come back to this thread. For the mission search interface, will we be able to make a "Favorites" list? ie. I find an arc I really like, and rather than having to remember it's name or ID or something, I can just click a button and add it to my favorites, so that I can go back and play it at any time without needing to search for it? (As long as it still exists, anyway)

Because I think that would be nifty.

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Student - I have several characters in their early and mid teens. And one or two who're even younger than that.

[/ QUOTE ]This just brought up an important thought... can we define what job we have, if a certain location has multiple job types? For example, if I log out in the University, am I a Student or am I a Teacher?