Alari_Azure

I'd appreciate it if you could review one of my arcs, Lazarus, since I ran your MacGuffin arc yesterday (and loved it). I'll just submit a short one for you, to get some feedback on my custom group and the storyline of the new gang. (My longer arc featuring them will be getting an overhaul in the future <likely I15>, so it's not what I would consider 'finished' at this point.) I've already gotten some great feedback from other people, and, I have done a few rewrites because of their suggestions.

I also toned down a few of the customs that were a bit overpowered. I will warn you, and anyone else that plays it, that there are a few axers in the mix, including 2 bosses that can be rather annoying because of their hard hits and knock-back. But, all of the customs are set on standard/standard. They can still hit pretty hard, though. Anyone that has a PC that is weak to knock-back may find it difficult to deal with if they're squishies. Some lower level toons may also have a problem with them. There are no EB/AVs, though. I want my missions to be somewhat challenging, but not designed to repeatedly send people to the hospital. I hate when that happens.

Arc: Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons
Arc ID: 100045
Author: @Alari Azure/Telstar
Number of Missions: 1

Description: Slash DeMento and his new gang, the Demon Spawn, have stolen some weapons and a bomb from the Paragon City Armory. Slash is a former Outcast that decided to hit the big time because he was tired of just stealing purses from little old ladies. He and his brother, along with a few other Outcasts, gave Frostfire a beating and took off with half the gang to start a new one. You need to defeat him, destroy the bomb and confiscate all those stolen weapons before they can blow up their target, somewhere in Atlas Park.

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I hate the AE textboxes, they are so damn buggy that I'm writing all my stuff in notepad now. I found the typos you pointed out and fixed them.

[/ QUOTE ]That's what I've been doing, too. It looked like it was one of those annoying cut/paste errors that places your pasted text somewhere other than where you intended it to go. I really hope they'll do something about the NON-functionality of the text editing system in MA. It's driving me nuckin' futz!

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The fact that anyone is playing at all and not sending me death threats and internet hatemail is good enough for me.


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Ha! As someone who posts regularly on an internet politics board, that's good enough for me too.

[/ QUOTE ]So do I. Looking at it from that perspective, I guess I'd have to agree, 100%!

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OK, you're right. But, it has crossed my mind that a little payback to those guys would be great.

[/ QUOTE ]Completely agreed. And it's crossed my mind, too. Multiple times.

Use the SPAM button. It flags the account sending the email for investigation, and appears to delete ALL emails from that account from your inbox. At least, I've seen multiple ones disappear with a single click.

[/ QUOTE ]Yep. That's what I do all the time. It's nice to know that it does more than just add the name to 'ignore'. I've gotten 20+ e-mails and had them all disappear with only 3-4 names added to the list of ignores. These guys are tenacious to say the least. They most likely just get free trial accounts and only use them long enough to spam until they get shut down. Then they just sign up for another freebie.

OK, you're right. But, it has crossed my mind that a little payback to those guys would be great.

I just ran the "MacGuffin Delivery Service" this afternoon on my lvl 39 magic DB/will tank, solo. Now, I understand why so many people have given it rave reviews. It was a lot of fun. There's a lot of humor mixed in that had me trying to finish the maps even after I got the 'mission complete' exit button, just to see if there were any more chuckles to find.

I started the arc on tenacious, but when I hit the CoT, I got creamed by a very large group of mages and behemoths waiting for me near the entrance. I decided to lower my difficulty to heroic for the rest of the arc. I was also a little more cautious about moving in to the fray without assessing the situation a bit more carefully. That did the trick. I had no more problems with the rest of that mission or the others. I don't usually do villainous arcs, but this one was definitely worth the slight deviation in my character's usual 'heroic' personality. It actually had a great moral to it that should make any villain think twice about stealing something that doesn't belong to them.

I did find some text problems in a couple of places. In one of the mission intros (can't remember which, 2 or maybe 3) this line seems like it was edited, but it got a bit messed up in the process. "You knew that that to the next group of villains who came to take it from you weren't going to buy that explanation." I think it's supposed to read something like this, "You knew that the next group of villains who came to take it from you, weren't going to buy that explanation."

In the CoT mission there's a glowie that has this one, "You don't know how long you've been starring, but you do have a headache now." Also, the interaction text for it says, 'Starring..'. Both of those should be 'staring'. I didn't notice any other text problems, most of it seemed just fine. Very good formatting for titles, etc., too.

Overall, it's a very well polished arc. I had to give it 5*s. Great job.

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Did you host some type of 'event' related to the arc? I didn't find anything about that, either.

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I've seen a number of arcs where they've had their banners posted. I assume they've extended this service to include MA promotion, even though that's not explicitly stated.

[/ QUOTE ]Hmmm.... Maybe I'll see if I can come up with a poster and give it a shot.

Thanks for the great idea.

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yeah, but that doesn't send a message to the people doing the spamming.

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Hmmmm.... what if everyone that got an e-mail sent one (or 100) back to the spammers? <evil grin>

I'd rather see the limit at 15 or 20 per day. That seems much more than adequate for cutting their ability to mass e-mail down, while still allowing us enough to be able to send plenty of e-mails to other people. Also, adding a 'no limit' for people on friend's lists/SGs would ensure that we'd have plenty of wiggle room for our own personal use.

I feel your pain. When I did a rewrite (and had to unpublish/republish ) on my 'Deal with the Devil's Pawn' last week, I got a flood of action that had me at 5* through 13 plays. Suddenly, I got a message that someone had rated it, but with no tickets. Now, it's up to 16 plays and is still languishing in 4* limbo. I can't figure out why someone out of the blue would give it 0 stars, but apparently they did. My other 2 arcs are also in the 4* category and all activity seems to have stopped completely over the past few days.

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OK, that is kewl! How does promotion of an arc qualify as an event and how can I do something like this with my arcs?

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Click on the picture and it will give details. However, they ignored my email initially and I ended up having to PM Nivienne.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't know if it's just me, but clicking on the pic does nothing at all. Clicking on your 'banner' link just shows the pic, too. I went to the link that Niviene posted for events, but that really hasn't got any specific info about using that kind of thing as a means of promoting MA arcs.

Did you host some type of 'event' related to the arc? I didn't find anything about that, either. I really wouldn't have a clue about how to run that kind of event, if it involves contests, teaming for running the arc, etc.. I probably wouldn't be able to run any teams for it, since that's one of my biggest problems in CoH. I can't do team missions without crashing.... a lot. So, I have to solo missions or street sweep.

That's one thing I love about MA, there are a lot more missions that I can run without having to do the usual radio missions or just run around the streets of Paragon. At this point, even if I could run teams without crashing, I wouldn't have a clue what my character is supposed to do in a team. I'd be one of those annoying higher level toons that 'doesn't know how to play it'. I only know how to play solo. Unfortunately, that also limits my number of in-game friends that could help me out with any kind of promotional 'event'.

I guess I'm just going to have to keep sending out an occasional post to broadcast and the Mission Architect channel to advertise. I hate doing that too often because I don't want to become one of those annoying chat spammers that people tend to put on 'ignore', either. lol

Just my $.02, Avast is a huge memory hog. Maybe you could try using AVG instead?

<<<<<<< I'm not a computer geek. But, when I tried Avast on my old xp machine, it couldn't get out of it's own way. It slowed everything down to a crawl.

Hitting the spam button should automatically send the e-mail to a special place for the devs to check them out so they can ban all of the PL/inf spammers' accounts. They'd have to ban the actual name of the person connected to the account, that way they couldn't just start another account. Maybe that would slow them down for a while at least. Maybe if they put in a spam filter that would automatically delete anything referring to PLing or buying inf for cash, we wouldn't get any spam-mail at all. Then our ignore list would be left open for people we really want to ignore for other reasons.

When I go into the manage enhancement screen and try to read details by mousing over enhancements, I keep getting the power's mouse-over descriptions popping up at the same time, underneath it. It doesn't matter where I try to mouse-over, I keep getting both the enhancement description/power description boxes. It makes it impossible to read either of them. It's very annoying. I don't know how long it's been doing it because I just noticed it happening the other day. I haven't tried looking at that screen in a while. I don't think it's been doing it for very long, though.

OK, that is kewl! How does promotion of an arc qualify as an event and how can I do something like this with my arcs?

Are you using copies of your own toons that you have capes on, or auras, etc., or some other player specific items? Weapons that might be player specific or 'vet rewards'? That's all I can think of that might show up as an error.

I feel your pain. I have 3 arcs published, now. Two of them have been overhauled in the past couple of weeks. The third is next on my list to hack away at. I'm not looking forward to all that rewriting, but I think it needs it. Since I love to use my custom critters, it makes it hard to tell a good story if you want it to be longer than 3 missions. I made the mistake of making it 4 missions, but it really did cut down my ability to add more story text. I'm probably going to cut one of the missions out so I can expand the text, but it's going to be painful to have to do that. Even if I15 hit tomorrow, I'd still probably have to cut one to improve the story itself.

You're welcome. I had the same issue in my arcs and it was the only thing that worked for me. Even using copy/paste directly in the MA text boxes can add crap. I've tried changing text around within MA and always end up with it pasting in odd places (within a word, instead of where you place the cursor) and adding formatting characters that don't belong.

One other tip. If you delete the text in a description field, make sure that the character count is at '0' afterward. I've had problems with phantom stuff being left behind when deleting the text. The best way that I've found to empty the invisible crap is to highlight the entire box again (from right to left) and backspace it until it shows as having '0' text in the box.

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This problem is why I stopped using the excellent Word document template to write my missions in advance. Now I'm forced to write them in MA, Alt-Tab to Word and paste it for spell checking or using the thesauraus or whatever, then manually correct the MA. Not exactly an ideal situation.

I suppose what I could do is use the template, then paste the whole thing to Notepad to get the flat text, then paste from that into the MA... hmm...

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That is the best solution I've found. I use MS Works, then paste it into Notepad because there's no hidden formatting in there. It's a pain in the butt to have to do it that way, but it will save a lot of frustration in the long run.

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Telstar, that looks to be the problem. Don't mean to sound like a jerk but I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem.

My method of dealing with it was to just start over, and copy and paste stuff over, republishing every 5 min so I don't lose so much text/dialog. Really hope they fix this soon!
I spend so much time editing and re-editing I hardly have time to play the game I love!
Thanks all for respones!
drg-

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I'm sorry it happened to you, too. So many people have had this happen that, as soon as you described it in more detail, I figured that had to be it. I think the problem is related to the way the description fields are 'monitored' for 'hidden text' as a means for unscrupulous people to try and sneak things past the censors. Because most word processing programs use hidden text as formatting tools, they show up in the description and it trips a flag. Unfortunately, the error flagging system in the MA doesn't always show it as an error in the orange error code. It's also responsible for some wonky fluctuations in file sizes when they show up after trying to republish an arc.

First off, what level and type of character are you playing it with, and what is your difficulty setting? If you are playing at anything higher than heroic (blue side), then that will effect the strength and numbers of the mobs in your mission. As far as strong minions goes, they do tend to be a bit stronger than standards. A lot of that depends on what power sets you are choosing for them, too. Some of the power sets can be very tough.

I played the Chris Jenkins arc on my little axer earlier tonight and I agree. It was a fun lowbie arc. I loved the clues, including one that speaks about the player. I thought that was a great little touch of humor.

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Is this the EB?

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No... But don't think I didn't give SERIOUS thought to it

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As soon as I saw the title, that is exactly what I thought about. I loved that TZ. It was always one of my favorite episodes.

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i know about the orange box in upper right hand of screen. it's not a problem with that. the problem is that after it is already published and i am editing/updating the arc or i am just trying to publish it in general that i get an error message that pop's up and says something like "publish failed : field description unformated HTML" something or other, not sure of wording coz i am at work right now... it would be nice if this stuff was caught before i hit the publish or republish button coz everything i changed is then thrown away and i get to do it all over again

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OK, that sounds like the MA editor problem that many people have been experiencing. For some unknown reason, if you edit your text in the description by using ctrl c/v for copy/paste it seems to add extra invisible formatting characters in the text. Sometimes it's just that there's an extra space somewhere in the text. If you edit in a word processor that uses formatting (Word, MS Works, etc.), the same thing can happen. What you have to do is check all of your 'description' texts by copying them and re-pasting directly into the box or into notepad (no formatting) first. If there are invisible characters there, they will show up in the description box. Clear the box and paste from notepad and it should be fine. Or you can edit the gibberish out and fix it that way.

This is a major problem in MA because it doesn't always set off the orange flag that there's a problem, or show you exactly where it's located.

I suppose that could work if you don't mind waiting a year or two for approval to get an arc published, since there are thousands created per day and only a small number of GMs that could approve them that way. I would definitely think it would also have to be absolutely perfect before submitting it, with no flaws in functionality, no typos, no overpowered/underpowered enemies, no missing text of any kind, etc., etc., etc., because if it's locked, you can't edit it.