Aquathing

Thankfully, my arc hasn't been played enough to come anywhere close to being griefed (yay for the MA backwater!).

The 5-star rating system isn't a bad idea, really. The main issue is that this rating system is the only, Dev-given way for a player to judge the arcs that they stumble across in MA. Not only are the ratings themselves subjective to the player (ie: this thread), but there's no real way for a player to know -why- an arc has a 2 Star overall rating. It could be a surprise! all EB mission, or the story could need a lot of tweaking, or it could appear to have been created by a hyper small child.

We need ways to mitigate and contextualize the ratings for an arc, really. One way to do this would be to have an arc's "reviews" be visible to the playerbase, as perhaps a tab or button next to the arc's title that brings them up. There would have to be a system for flagging posts that are spam/griefing of course, but it would give the potential player a better way to know if they want to play an arc, based on more than "hey, it's 2-3-4 starred!"

Then again, I'm also in favor of allowing anonymous reviews/feedback. It would give griefers the anonymous-shield, but it would also protect a person who gives concrit to a writer from being griefed in return. (I know that I'm kinda wary of the g-tell method as it currently is.)

This was something that came up when I was fixing up my arc, and I was curious to hear how the issue was viewed by other MAers.

My arc is story/RP-driven, based on the way that normal in-game arcs are currently handled, and I've used one of my toons as the contact. However, when it came time to write up the intro text and mission search text, I kinda ran into a problem. I didn't really know how to articulate just how the player came to find my contact, or why they would be interested in starting up the arc.

So, I made my mission search text into a "broadcast" by my contact, asking for help and giving a bit of a summary of the arc the player would be starting, then starting the intro text with her greeting the player as if they've "heard" her broadcast and contacted her.

Am I being insanely weird about this, or has anyone else had this issue come up when it came to their arcs? Is this something viable, or am I being too much of an RP dork about it?

If you're still taking on arc requests, I'd love to toss mine into the ring. I haven't really started to promote it, so it's had one (1) play/review since it was first published at the start of May. ...it's not that bad, promise!

The arc is titled Paragon's Abyss, # 161540.

It's listed as very long, with 5 missions on small and medium sized maps. The current play suggestion is 40+, and it does contain both custom units and a custom boss/EB.

I would love and appreciate any feedback on this arc! Thanks in advance!

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In my opinion, the only ranged attack that is really too strong is Shuriken. That thing is so strong it HAS to be a mistake. Take a look at it sometime, and compare the damage on Shuriken on a boss at level 50 to every other attack out there. It seriously outdamages nearly every non-nuke attack. It outdamages full auto, headsplitter, I think even KO Blow. The other ranged attacks don't come close to that ridiculous.

But here's the thing. At low levels, they don't even outdamage the tier 1 melee attacks. All of the melee set ranged attacks scale like this. I don't know if this was a mistake or intentionally designed to try and deter farmers, but the scaling on the ranged attacks for melee sets is truly wonky.

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From what I've heard, Shuriken is the worst of the lot. Having what was originally a melee boss be able to just about one-shot a level 50 Blaster with Shuriken? Something isn't quite right with that.

I'm also slightly annoyed by the assumption that melee-only mobs were created solely for hover-sniping/farming. The way that the original I14 custom character creator worked, there was no way to create mixed attack sets in the same way that normal critters have, since the powers available were the player ones. I certainly didn't mean to create "broken" critters when I gave them powers like Dark Melee/Willpower and Elec Melee/Elec Armor, especially when one keeps them on Standard.

I wasn't in either beta for MA, nor did I really hang around the boards. Was the issue of melee powersets addressed before I14 when live?

I'm not sure if average deaths would be a viable way to tell an arc's difficulty. As a previous poster stated, there are a lot of variables involved in why a character/team might die a lot in a mission, and it might skew the results. My Scrapper, for example, only has trouble with EBs and AVs, but sometimes I let her die because I like using my rez. It would be hard to determine how many deaths were actually because the arc was hard, and what is a person's gameplay strategy. It would also be very dependent on who played the mish.

Perhaps they need to create a way in which player's can rate an arc's difficulty as well as the overall rating. Or, have arcs rated by several categories like "story" and "playability" that would average into something akin to the current 5-star rating that's used.

I think that if there was an ability to place arcs into actual, search-able categories some of the ratings problems might become less visible. If I were able to narrow down the arcs by clicking on the "heroic" category and the "mystery" subcategory, then that is going to narrow down the arcs I see a great deal. A side effect would be that, despite the ratings given, a player would be able to read the descriptions on missions which would normally be buried in the backwaters of the MA system.

If the rating system remains after I15 hits in its current form, or even a modified form, there should be a better way to mitigate the problems it brings. Right now it's easier to find arcs via word of mouth or their ratings, and only then the player is able to read the arc's description.

Er, I think I went a bit off topic there...