Amberyl

The issue is serious for melee toons, as well, as unless they're stealthed / superspeeded, the ranged attacks will hit them as they close. It's not a big deal on higher-level characters with slotted-out defenses and mitigation capabilities, but at lower levels, they're very nearly as vulnerable as ranged squishies.

I am highly supportive of giving melee sets a ranged attack, insofar as I recognize that there's a legitimate interest in preventing players from hover-blasting helpless mobs into oblivion.

However, I want those ranged attacks to be comparable to the ranged attacks given to other melee mobs in the game. For that matter, I'm not even sure that the ranged attacks are comparable with the ranged powersets.

Brutes, scrappers, and tanks are going to power through practically anything; I'm frankly not worried about balancing my missions for them. However, story-focused, text-heavy arcs are best seen solo, and I want my arc to be soloable by as many characters as possible. Prior to the change, a mid-teens defender could solo my arc on Heroic, playing normally (i.e., no hover-blasting or the like). That's no longer the case.

And no, I don't want to use the same old enemies that people fight in regular missions. A custom look to the critters, along with custom descriptions, are vital to me.

The new ranged attacks for custom melee sets seem more than a bit overpowered. I'd expect to see them in line with normal ranged attacks on primarily-melee mobs, but these seem to be considerably more vicious.

I was testing one of my missions, which is designed for "soloable by a defender", which means all minions standard/standard. I was more than a little surprised to find that opening with Fire Cages meant that I was almost instantly brought down to red health. This was on Tenacious, all white-con minions (four or five of them, I think).

That seems a bit much -- I have not yet tested on my other toons, but I suspect my defenders will be pwnzed.

Current-generation iMac, 4 GB, up-to-date OS X install, no changes. The system isn't running anything other than CoH, Firefox (for the forums), and a terminal window.

Ironically, following your guidelines (1) and (2) about a more conservative use of /reloadgfx made my play experience much less stable.

Obsessively hitting my reloadgfx macro, before and after every zone, and after any heavy gfx experiences (like going to any place that's got a lot of toons) has resulted in fairly solid stability -- I was able to play for several hours straight without crashes, as was my husband.

Waiting to do so, or not doing so immediately after zoning: Crashes during zoning, or crashes shortly after zoning (usually within two minutes, often by the time I take a few steps).

YMMV, of course.

This is a known issue, I believe.

The hard boots end up being caused by CoH sucking up massive resources, sufficiently so that you can't get the machine's attention long enough to force-quit.

If you're lucky enough to have a remote-access terminal window open into your machine, you can usually kill the process. Otherwise, hard-boot it is.

I wouldn't term Carey and Hamilton erotica, although they certainly include elements of it in their stories. I'd classify them both as mainstream fiction. I haven't read the others, so can't comment, but I was referring specifically to fiction that was shelved in the Erotica section.

My point remains, though: Don't expect the masses to love your serious work.

For Cerulean_Shadow and others who feel similarly:

I'll point out that in the real world of writing, tons of excellent, serious fiction gets passed over in favor of erotica. Lots and lots of erotica. And supermarket romances.

Low-brow appeal to the masses will always get more attention.

I think The Footsteps Initiative has now hit HoF a few times and been griefed back out.

It's truly a pity. I haven't laughed that hard in ages.

[ QUOTE ]
What is it that makes a farming mission what it is? What is different in design from a normal mission?

[/ QUOTE ]

Classically, in CoH, farming missions have had large numbers of high-density spawns, with enemies of relatively low difficulty given their reward level. Most farmers have AoE-oriented toons, so mobs that group up nicely rather than spreading out are preferred, although this is not consistently true -- Freakshow missions are frequently farmed, for instance, despite being a mix of melee and ranged. Farming a mission usually refers to repeating it over and over again, rather than allowing it to complete normally.

However, with the advent of MA, we've gotten things like "boss farms" -- missions full of nothing other than bosses, intended to maximize the reward-per-unit-time metric that farmers tend to look at. Farm missions are not necessarily simple, and indeed, serious farming is a skill and requires toons that are optimized for it.

You can, in MA, absolutely design an interesting mission with a good story that nonetheless has high rewards for the time spent.

Amusingly, people are increasingly trying to dress up their Meow farms in story trappings. I wonder if anyone reads a word of it.

I also agree with Shadowstepper.

When we talk about the balance of risks and rewards in MA, we need to discount the things that we already know are fixed on Test -- specifically, Comm Officers and lack of ranged attacks on melee sets. Nerfing the Comm Officers back down to minion XP will pretty much eliminate the super-fast leveling. There will still be people who design highly-efficient maps, no doubt, but these maps are unlikely to significantly exceed the commonly-farmed dev-created missions, in terms of their time-to-XP ratio. When that firehose runs dry, both XP and tickets will normalize to some extent, and the extremes we've seen recently will go away.

I love not spending a lot of time running. I love the fact that the devs are not wasting my time with non-fun stuff, not sucking my time up into something that is useless, like travel, just because they hope to increase the length of time I subscribe. Maximize my fun-to-time ratio and you are much more likely to keep getting my money, because I'm evaluating a money-to-fun ratio when choosing my entertainment.

I also love not worrying much about team composition. I love being able to play with anyone without worrying about their level. I love the fact that my SG can pick a level to play content at without worrying about whether there are enough SKs or exemps available.

Now, I know that for a while, we're all going to deal with the headache of pick-up teams of level 50 noobs, but you know, we've always had a problem with those anyway; it's not the end of the world to deal with two weeks' worth of mass-powerleveled population. It will work itself out, just like the Winter Lords mass-powerlevel of I3 worked itself out in short order. I suspect, though, that we've also got tons of veterans who have used the temporary XP firehose to try out some new ATs and powersets, and who will probably keep subscribing at least in part because they've got some new toys to play with. (I'd bet that there are an awful lot of people out there who might be using Comm Officer farms to get a bunch of toons past the first 20 levels which they've played umpteen times.)

And I rather like what the MA store has done for the broader accessibility of IOs. For the first time, as an occasional player, I've been able to afford the IOs I want (non-purple, of course), with only a handful of exceptions, and to get a very nice build without having to grind and grind and grind hopelessly. It's tremendously satisfying, and it means that NCsoft is going to get more of my money.

I think it's more a matter of, "Have a target audience in mind, design for that, make sure that the mission does in fact work well for your intended audience, and then clearly label your arc so it's clear what the target audience is."

Personally, I design my story-oriented arcs to be soloable by just about any AT and powerset combo. Anything text-heavy will probably be better appreciated solo. Also, the greater the challenge, the less the time available to read enemy descriptions, go through the clues, see dialogue, etc. So I try to keep it fairly simple.

We have options in other places to allow retrieved mobs to stand, run to the door, wander aimlessly, etc.

Weirdly, this option doesn't seem to exist for normal rescues, though (i.e., not allies), and there really ought to be one.

I find it rather frustrating for captives to simply stand there; there are almost always story reasons why they shouldn't do so. At the very least, the default behavior should be to run away, not just stand there. But it would be preferable to be able to choose.

There's significant variance in the coloring in the dev text, too.

I presume the devs want to make money, and the serious authors certainly seem to be exhibiting willingness to pay for more arc space.

Yes, there's tons of crap out there. There are also bunches of authors that I wish would write more -- but they're at their arc cap already, even if they've been Dev's Choice'd.

Also, not all of us want to write long multi-mission stories. Speaking personally, I'd much rather do a single, highly intricate mission, with lots of custom enemies, than write a long multi-mission arc.

The three arcs I've published to date have been mini-attempts to try out the tool. As I build up some more intricate stuff, I'm reluctant to pull what I've published to date, because I don't want to lose the stars, and frankly, I think the experiments hold up pretty well on their own, even though I have no delusions that they're the most brilliant thing ever.

Today, I'm largely subscribed because of the MA tool. (I recently reactivated.) I'm now out of arc slots. There's a fairly good chance that frustration with that is not going to drive me to buy another account for more slots. Instead, I'll simply drop my subscription again, having reached the end of my ability to do what I want to do, which is to create content. Effectively, the devs can either have a lot more of my money as I buy arc slots, or they can have none of my money. I doubt I'm the only player who feels that way.

The stability on my Mac, with the latest patch, is bordering on the near-unplayable, which ought to be treated seriously as a customer retention issue.

Do you know what the workaround is? I use /reloadgfx, but even that isn't helping enough now.

I have no stability problems on my PC, just the Mac.

This one strikes me as weird, since I can't think of how lower-level Rularuu would be exploitative. They've got nasty powers than can readily murder lowbies, but it's just as easy to make custom enemies that are deadly, so I doubt that safety would be a reason.

Is this spam actually serious anywhere other than Freedom (and maybe Virtue)?

I was hanging out in Atlas Park on Pinnacle earlier today. Freedom and Virtue were mobbed, but the AE building in AP on Pinnacle was mostly unpopulated, and I was able to work on a story arc in peace and quiet without hearing anyone broadcasting for farm invites, although there was normal team-gathering going on.

I play from my Macbook Air (base configuration, no upgrades). At 1024x768, the default graphics settings seem fine. I find that it heats up as I play for extended periods of time, though, which can get a bit uncomfortable.

I also travel a lot, and I definitely wouldn't recommend taking a Mini. It's not really built to be toted around.

If you're price-sensitive, you are likely better off getting a PC laptop.

People run paper missions (and now AE) because, ironically, they're the most team-friendly.

If you're like most supergroups, you've got a bunch of toons at different levels. You want to minimize running between zones, especially deadly ones with snipers. You want to avoid being told to go hunt in hazard zones the lower-levels can't enter. You want to spend the maximum time killing and the minimum time waiting for people to do stuff. You want sidekick and exemplar friendliness so everyone can play together easily.

You don't really get to see story as a team member, unless it's your arc. The game's method of handling text, clues, etc. simply doesn't make that readily possible. So to the overwhelming majority of people, story arc vs. not, makes little difference.

The people who are running story arcs (whether dev or MA) are generally doing so solo, or in a situation where they're routinely sharing (like a couple or family playing together).

I run arcs -- once (or only as many times as is necessary, i.e., to get Ouro and whatnot), and solo. I very much enjoy teaming, though, but for me, team play is a different experience, one driven by gameplay and not story.

Many people are also too lazy or impatient to be smart about what they bid.

If the last 5 bids were at 100k, lots of people just put in 100k, blindly, even if they know that normally this sells for 500.
Put in a bid at 500 and wait. There's a good chance that someone will put it on the market at the normal price.
Or try 1k, 10k, 20k, etc. on up.
Patience will get you what you want at a more reasonable price. If you have to have it NOW, you will pay a lot more.

I keep long-running bids on very expensive things that I want, and I try lowball offers on the off-chance that someone's done a low listing. I picked up a rare recipe today for 25k whose historical prices were all in the 1m+ range.

This is particularly true with some salvage items, costume parts, etc. -- things that lowbies get as drops, that they don't have the Inf to post for full price at auction because they can't pay the listing fee without transferring Inf to the toon.

Write an engaging, interesting, detailed arc description. Construct clear, grammatical sentences that are correctly spelled and punctuated. People who are looking for story quality look for people who can write, and they use your arc description as one of the ways of telling whether or not it's worth bothering with. A description is basically an advertisement, so use it well.

Cramming a decent arc desc into a limited number of characters is an art unto itself.

Make sure, when you edit the published mission, that after you republish, you do a second edit and do a save-as-local-file.

Otherwise it will change ONLY your published mission and not your local copy.

This is important if you later end up unpublishing your mission, which would cause you to lose your changes entirely unless they were saved locally.