Witch_Engine

The rotating dialog was something I was pretty proud of, thanks for commenting on it. That entire hopsital map (you know the one) was definitely tricky to make - probably took as much time as the rest of the arc combined to get right!

I tried to cram the arc as full as possible with game lore, little references to other things in game, hints, easter eggs, and clues in the same manner as in game missions, lots of things to keep the 'twist' in mission 3 both obvious in hindsight, but still keep you guessing in 4 and 5, and so on.

I've got a ton of generally positive feedback on those things, so it's nice to know they're being noticed and appreciated. I did the same thing with the parallel structure of missions 1 and 2, then 4 and 5 - I'm a fan of repetition of theme.

As far as the $tags, I am aware it happens sometimes, but it's never consistent when and where it happens. Thankfully it seems to be fairly rare though. Might have something to do with stealth powers? I've tested the arc to death and when it does happen, it's never the same NPC twice. I apologize about it, but it's sort of out of my hands.

Thank you to the over 90 players who have 5-starred this arc - I logged in today to a massive wall of positive comments. It is my philosophy that if you write quality material, you don't have to advertise, but rather, word of mouth and creation of a unique, memorable experience will do the job for you, and it seems it has in this case. Thank you again everyone for playing my arc, and enjoying it so much!

I'm going to ignore Venture since I'm pretty sure he just gets paid by the folks at tvtropes for the number of times he can mention something from their site in an interview. :P

His feeback was pretty much just a mild troll - nothing constructive at all - just 1 star and feedback 'too many sins to list' which not only doesn't help whatsoever, but also more or less completely contradicts almost every single piece of feedback I have ever recieved on this arc, ever. So, what can you do.

On the plus side, I guess if I ever start advertising it, I can be all like 'Experience the player-reknowned arc that made Venture literally speechless with rage!'

By your own admission the PvP IO system does nothing whatsoever for PvP and only encourages PvE 'wannabes' to enter the zone and cause problems, so I fail to see how fixing at least one of those two problems by removing the PvE 'wannabes' from the equation doesn't improve PvP for you.

You're being intellectually dishonest. You argue that the PvP loot should be uber, rare and powerful, but then in the same breath say that loot is not the point of PvPing, and that people who come primarily to get that loot are ruining the PvP experience.

You can't have it both ways. Either the loot is rare and people will come to harvest the valuable commodity and 'bring pve into pvp', or, they're common and there's no incentive to go after them, removing the pve-ers only after loot from the pvp situation. You contradict yourself saying PvE mentality ruins PvP, and then are against a change that makes the PvE mentality unappealing in a PvP zone.

poopy, can I ask you a serious question here?

You've spent a ton of posts ranting that rewards are not in any way the reason a PvP player plays, and how loot is never the focus of 'true' PvPing, and how PvE-ers farming drops will be the death knell of PvP.

Given all that, I can't even begin to understand why you're opposed to these drop rates being wildly increased in frequency, or heck, even being made ultra common. Making them super common would get the farmers out of the zone much more quickly,since they'd get the drops and be done with it, and wouldn't have to bother the 'real' pvpers again.

FURTHERMORE, since PvPers, by your own admission, don't care about loot, and only about the fight itself, and, how the loot should never be the focus of 'true' PvP, they should be outright celebrating a change that would make the drops ultra common - it would make having the loot irrelevant (since everyone could easily get it, putting them on even footing), and, since you'd be getting them constantly, it would even further emphasize that the fight isn't about the loot rewards, but rather about the fight itself, since getting one wouldn't be at all special.

The fact that making them very common would drive their price to next to nothing would also drive home that PvP would be about the fight rather than the reward - since there'd be no incentive for PvE-ers to farm them at that point, leaving the zones only for PvPers by and large.

So my question is: Given that increasing the drop rate and accessibility of these drops helps every single one of your points, why are you arguing for the exact opposite to happen?

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CoX has never marketed itself with an uber raid mentality. The game has ALWAYS been focused on all levels of game player rather than lvl 50 end game content.

Just because other games choose to utilize that design is not really a logical reason for CoX to, especially given how the game was launched and has grown. Even if we agree that ultra rares (like beyond purple rare) is acceptable, it should never be the pvp class of rewards.

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A person without ultra, uber rare items in CoX isn't restricted from any actual game content. Unlike WoW, where you need raid gear from a lower level raid just to survive a higher level raid, CoX is balanced around SOs. Unlike FFXI, there are no content practically restricted to the uber guilds, requiring a huge application just to get in (after a "trial" period). CoX is far, far removed from hardcore MMOs.

This really isn't about casual-friendly anymore. It's about people always wanting what they don't have, the "credit card" mentality. People can still be casual and experience everything in the game. Person A having better gear doesn't negatively impact Person B, other than the latter's inherent jealousy. That's a human flaw, rather than game design flaw.

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Actually, that's really sort of the point, isn't it? It seems incredibly silly to have ultra super-rare items in a game that is completely and utterly otherwise "far, far removed from hardcore MMOs." This applies to purples and PVP IOs.

When the entire rest of the game is built around being easily and immediately accessible to players, sticking in items that require huge amounts of grinding, luck and time to get when nothing else in the game is similarly inaccessible is both inconsistent, and clashes with the rest of the game design, which does nothing really except encourage deviant gameplay in order to achieve them. When you make a game so casual-acessible, adding items that are counter to that encourages them to play the game in unintended ways to achieve those items.

'Breaking' the intended system via farms, arena farms, etc. becomes the only way the target audience of the game (which, by all indications, are those players who do not have the time/desire to spend their lives slaving/raiding away as they would in more 'serious' MMOS) ever sees themselves obtaining any of the items, ever. Given that all other items are accessible fairly easily accessible to them, it creates a perception that these items should follow this same pattern, and really, the system as it is currently designed isn't really set up at all to handle drops this tedious to get while playing missions and pvp the 'intended' way, as is evidenced and pointed out repeatedly in this thread.

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I wouldn't know as I always 1 star Defeat All containing arcs. That's a hint.

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That's pretty idiotic, really, considering a ton of maps have 12-8 spawn points or less for mobs. If that's too much for you to handle on occasion...

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I 0 star them ...

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That's pretty sad, but whatever floats your boat I guess. If that's what you have to do to get your kicks in game, well, I suppose you gotta do what you gotta do.

It makes me wonder how these people ever managed to actually play the real game in the first place, given some of the existing in-game missions and their objectives.

A mission full of bosses or multiple avs, or click 500 glowies or something, sure, but normal, reasonable in game objectives encountered hundreds of times in the normal game like an EB or a defeat all? If that's too much for someone I don't even want to think about how they bumbled through the game before MA.

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I wouldn't know as I always 1 star Defeat All containing arcs. That's a hint.

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That's pretty idiotic, really, considering a ton of maps have 12-8 spawn points or less for mobs. If that's too much for you to handle on occasion...

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There are a lot of very good missions to run in MA. The problem is that they tend to get buried behind hundreds of pages of farms and crap.

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You keep telling yourself that. No one would play the "good" mishs if they took all teh "crap" out, because without the "crap" no one would ever be in AE.


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This statement runs so amazingly opposite to my experiences, I don't even know what to say. Pretty much all of my SG mates who've given up on the architect have done so exactly because it's glutted with farms and there's not much 'real' content. We're not even an RP group - just that if we want inf, we have infinitely better ways of getting it than AE provides, and we've all got enough 50s to know there's pretty much zero point in racing up levels any more - it's not like there's an end game.

Wow, way to be a giant agressive jerk for no reason.
If you can't control the flow of a spawn with knockback/knockdown and slows, don't take it out on the rest of us with dumb semantics games.

Well that sucks. Uncreation was one of my favourite arcs, and I was gonna take my next character through it.

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Geek - "Blight" is my arc. You're thinking "Uncreation"

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DOH!

This is what I get for posting at work. Too bad it's currently unplayable.

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Uncreation or Blight? Blight is perfectly playable, it's my arc "Closer to the Heart" that's broken at the moment.

Geek - "Blight" is my arc. You're thinking "Uncreation"

It still says "PVP IT IT"

Thank you to everyone who's given positive comments about my design! And thank you especially to the dev team for choosing it for second place. I'm honoured!

I once got two back to back feedbacks on one of my arcs:
first one was (paraphrased):
"Awesome arc - was a total breeze with my level 11 blaster on invince, but fun to play anyways."
second one was (paraphrased):
"This arc is horribly overpowered and completely impossible, you're obviously just trying to godmode NPCs, couldn't beat the first group with a duo of 50 brute/48 corruptor, quit."

...I don't know either. The arc in question had zero elite bosses/avs in it, and extremely simple mob groups made from either basic/basic simple sets like dual blades, or were all mobs from existing in game factions. I ran the arc with a level 10 stalker with zero enchancements slotted treating it as a 'defeat all' and then again with a level 26 triform peacebringer without using any forms, or any armors, or any insps, again as a 'defeat all' and mowed through it easily, so I to this day have NO idea what that corruptor/brute duo was doing.

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OK having looked over Heaven's Agent's review of the arc, and seeing what ludicrous things he's docking stars for, I'm absolutely convinced he's just a troll - nobody can actually be this petty and overanalytical and be serious about it.

Some highlights include (paraphrased, and this is only a handful of them):

"Arc did not go in depth to explain every nuance of Red Shift's time travel plugging all possible interpretations of it against possible plot holes by over analysis of the arc"

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After I read this, I couldn't believe a word you said.

You start off by saying that you may paraphrase BUT everything you attribute to Heaven is in QUOTES. Quotes mean that something ISN'T paraphrased.

So I don't believe you when you say Heaven "griefed" this arc because it didn't meet EVERY NUANCE and ALL POSSIBLE INTERPERTATIONS ... and OVER ANALYSIS ...

I believe those are your words, not his, that you're placing in HIS quotes.

And if you can't believe the messenger, you can't believe the message.

The fact that you and your SG all played and loved an arc doesn't mean that everyone else will - or should. The intensity of your anger at Heaven for what is, basically, his opinion leads me to believe that you are NOT some disinterested party defending a stranger's MArc.

Don't know what your hidden agenda is, but I don't believe a word you say.

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Wait, let me get this straight...

You think I have a "hidden agenda" (seriously now - conspiracy theories?) because...

I explicitly say I am paraphrasing and picking 'key highlights' (read: extreme outliers), you fully admit I am paraphrasing, but since I put the paraphrasing in quotes (after saying they're paraphrased, and you reading them knowing they're paraphrased, and nobody in their right mind reading it thinking they're his exact quotes especially given the preceding unless they're really stretching or not paying attention,) I am lying and not paraphrasing them at all but am claiming that he said them exactly (which I never did at any point)?

Am I just about right here? Really now...come ON, you're coming across as pretty silly here.

That sounds terrible - I have way more than 10 arcs I've played that I'd reccomend, and I can play more than 1 arc per hour. Your proposed system seems to discourage voting high as much as possible while giving no similar incentive not to constantly vote low, since voting low could be done as much as you want, and wouldn't cost you precious 'reccomended' slots.

Plus, under your system you can't give the top ranking to an arc you enjoyed without removing your reccomendation of another arc, so even if a player really, really loved the arc, if they also like every arc on their reccomended list, might vote it lower just to avoid changing their list, so you're back to not neccessarily voting what it 'deserves' in that player's eyes. If anything, it would make the voting even less honest than it does now, since everything in this system (timer, limits, etc) encourages lower votes, since even when the player honestly enjoyed the arc, they have incentives NOT to vote accordingly, but no penalty to low-vote it instead, whereas grief voters are given no restrictions or penalties for grief voting at the same time as high votes are severely restricted.

If anything, it would compound the problem of votes - since in your system it would be that much harder to get high votes, the low votes that have no penalty to administer would be that much more potent. As it stands now, if an arc legitimately has a 4 or 5 star rating, a single 1 vote cancels out 7 or 9 other votes respectively. That's the main problem with the system - that the opinion of a single low-voter can override several other people. They already have horribly skewed ability to alter arc ratings, and you want to increase that power by limiting the abilities of people to vote higher without limiting the ability of the much more potent low votes, as well?

It's 9 5s to cancel out a 1 and put it back to 4.5.

The irony here is if he didn't have the EBs, people would be screaming that the army of enemy EBs was unfair and docking stars.

Not to mention it says right in the arc description that you'll be getting tons of EB allies and little xp on the mission, so anyone who is suprised by this didn't read the arc warning, and also that if you don't want to rescue the Red Shifts you don't have to; it's really easy to just rescue the single one you HAVE to then ditch him, if you're so concerned about it.

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The only issue here is that Geek's arc does have a disclaimer in the description text that XP can be affected by EB/allies. He's very upfront about it, so it isn't like this was an accidental oversight.

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It's not a matter of the xp; I didn't take any stars away for that. I was quite simply unimportant in the big climax of the story, which in turn made me very bored.

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I think you pretty much completely missed the entire point of this mission, and it's a pretty damn big one to miss -

The entire army of Red Shifts battle was the entire justification and setup for the final mission - that Red Shift had literally removed himself from the timestream through collection of his dupes to make this final stand against Aeon, and so it fell on YOUR character, the one who -would- be returning to the timestream, to witness what had gone down, so that someone else could reign in Aeon in the places that Red Shift could no longer go, as the result of his sacrifice.

The entire point of the mission, from the get go, was that you WERE there to observe his sacrifice as his overwhelming numbers saved the timestream, so that you - yes you, the character playing the arc, could carry on some small part of his legacy, now that you understood the sacrifice he made, and could accept the taking up of his mantle.

It sounds like you pretty much missed the entire point and lesson of the arc, to be honest.

OK having looked over Heaven's Agent's review of the arc, and seeing what ludicrous things he's docking stars for, I'm absolutely convinced he's just a troll - nobody can actually be this petty and overanalytical and be serious about it.

Some highlights include (paraphrased, and this is only a handful of them):
"Arc had too many commas"
"Arc did not go in depth to explain every nuance of Red Shift's time travel plugging all possible interpretations of it against possible plot holes by over analysis of the arc"
"Arc contained time travel"
"Arc contained 'clones'"
"Arc had clues that were fun, instead of adding to the plot"
"Red Shift was not a lieutenant"
"Red Shift's name was coloured red in text"
"Red Shift casts speed boost on his party members"
"Contact addresses the ally you have to escort out of the map, but that ally isn't physically in the AE building when you exit the mission"
"Mission goal text isn't orange"
"1960s Paragon isn't destroyed don't use the destroyed Atlas map" (Ignoring the whole fact that you're being shown an alternate history on this map)
"Map uses council empire map, council empire didn't exist at time depicted" (Ignoring the whole fact that you're being shown an alternate history on this map)
"Map says 'find mysterious benefactor and take them out' instead of 'defeat Dr. Aeon'"
"Map uses Dr. Aeon instead of a custom brand new enemy"
"Contact summarizes what happened in a mission after the mission ends"
"Mission with the Red Shift time duplicates deserves 0 stars by itself because there is no challenge on it"
"Last mission on the arc exists at all"

...in other words, he sounds like the most bitter, petty, pendantic, anal rententive person to play/review content you can pretty much find, anywhere. Several complaints were either really tenuous/stretch/grasping at straws, were asking him to change things in a way that's actually completely impossible to do in the MA, or weren't actual critiques, simply zrbitrarily docked marked for perfectly valid content because it doesn't fit some arbitrary criteria he seems to have made up on the spot (ie 'I don't like this colour of text' or 'I don't like time travel')

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Tickets divided by ratings, mostly.

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Can you be more specific? As I understand it, the number next to your rating isn't entirely reliable. Also, this doesn't distinguish a 0 star rating from a 2 star rating, since neither of them give any tickets at all - right?

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I know for me, as long as your arc doesn't have a ton of votes, and they're coming in slow enough, it's fairly easy to tally up the number of votes you get that don't increase your tickets, and then watch for how many it takes to drop you from 5 to 4, or 4 to 3 stars.

Then it's fairly easy to mathematically figure out roughly how many each of 0, 1, and 2 star votes would be required to drop it that star, given that you know how many 3, 4 and 5 stars you have, and then I sort of average it out between them. It's not exact, but gives you a pretty good ballpark figure.

To Heavens_Agent:

Seriously, after almost 300 player arcs played, Speeding Through Time remains probably my single favourite arc except MAYBE Uncreation, by @muu. My entire supergroup on virtue has played it multiple times, and every time we do we're STILL giggling with glee about the 'time dupes' mission.

You really, honestly think this is a one star arc? REALLY? It sounds like you're being insanely petty and have an axe to grind, to be honest. That or you're purposely picking a high-profile arc and 1-starring it to try and 'prove' there's no ratings griefing going on, I think, based on my experiences with the average quality of MA arcs in general. Think about it:

Given the literally tens of thousands of missions that are blatant farms, brokenly unplayable, filled with typos or are written by illiterates, outright inappropriate, don't even HAVE text or contacts, are just a stock NPC with all text being 'meow', have blatantly untested NPCs, have a plot as deep, literally, as 'There's a guy here beat him up I dunno lol!' etc. etc. etc... you still feel that the arc, which if nothing else has carefully selected maps, well-written, intelligent dialog, a good sense of humor and adventure, a coherent plot, and nice-looking custom enemies, and a unique gimmick I've seen literally nowhere else...deserves the lowest possible 'normal' rating? Really? I'm interested in hearing why you feel that the arc is on the same level as the absolute filth and dregs of the MA. Have you even PLAYED other MA arcs? I don't want to sound fanboyish here, (I'm not even on the same server as Geek,) but seriously, even if you hated the plot and the NPCs, you put it on the same tier as the worst of the worst in the game? Come on now.

I want to see what you consider a 5-star arc if you think Speeding Through Time is really one of the worst of the worst. Please, give me some arc numbers of 'good' arcs for comparison here. I'd like to see the review too, so I can see what he did that's so henious that you think the arc is ratings-equivalent to the scummiest of scum arcs the MA has to offer.

The problem with giving well written, even exceptional arcs 4 stars, is that even though this is by all accounts an excellent rating to give a story arc, if the writer is hoping for the arc to eventually become player's choice, that 4-star rating is actually a punishment. Each 4-star rating requires 2 5-star ratings to counteract it, or it will never see Player's Choice status.

This is probably a big reason why there's no stable player's choice arcs - even people who think they are being kind and generous by 4-starring an arc, are ultimately punishing that arc writer's chance of the arc staying there.