anachrodragon

I don't know... If you're not going to take over the world, maybe at least invade a fictional country and establish yourself as the ruler. I mean that's sort of what Recluse did, and it worked well for him...

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Last but not least, people really need to learn how to give constructive feedback. Effective critiquing is an art, but it's not one that's difficult to learn.

~Elizabeth

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People also need to learn how to take constructive feedback without flying off the handle or getting defensive.

It's a two way street.

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Both of these are very true. All I had wanted was people to give me solid feedback, whether good or bad. I see my arc through my eyes. What makes sense to me (since I know the story by heart) might be totally confusing to someone else.

You NEED other people's feedback in order to make your arc better for others. I've never understood why some people can't take criticism.

BUT on the flip side those that choose to give feedback need to be give it as maturely and responsibly as possible.



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Let us know when you make changes. Londer and I would be happy to run it again and try them out.

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I got another idea btw.

right now the mission list is DC,5,4,3,2,1

make this DC,POTD,5,4,3,2,1

Where POTD = Pick of the Day
40 random 5 star, 40 random 4 star, 20 random 3 star
chosen (random) once per day and stuck in before the "Page 1 5 Stars" and sorted randomly too, staying there like that till the next day.

Would take a lot of incitement to upvote friends/downvote enemies away.

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Yeah they really need to do something about the way missions are listed. I think it's a pet peeve of mine, but it annoys me that the Dev's Choice stuff is thrown in my face when I open the MA interface. I mean, what if I don't care about DC? (hint: I don't)

I really wished they had something customizable with categories. Say for example I'm playing lowbies, and I'm interested in arcs for level range 1-20. I wish I could set my personal front page to display lowbie arcs. Or if I wanted humor themed arcs, or horror themed arcs, or high level challenge arcs, or arcs by people on a particular server... You get the idea. Or you know, if I really want to see Dev's Choice, then I could set that, but right now it just strikes me as annoyingly presumptuous that the Devs think I want to see the arcs that they like first and foremost.

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Ehm.... Some people give Missions that brags about being a farming mission an 0 before goin inside (along with Reporting it).


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Shouldn't the farmers want a low rating? They are using the mission for FARMING. They get far more xp and tickets by doing the mission than they do from the mission itself.

The last thing they should want is to get a high rating that exposes their farm mission to a curious public. The more people doing that mission outside of their circle of 'field hands' the greater chance there is that some busybody is going to report their farm.

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You misquoted that. It was said by Crystalblue, not by me.

I disagree with the practice of zero starring farming arcs (or any arc really). If something is against the rules then people can report it and move on. There's no need to ratings "grief" over it.

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My arc is now tagged 'Very short and silly'. Combined with 'Rikti Monkeys', I *think* it says everything that needs to be said about the arc without saying, 'Hey, you're going to be fighting some monkeys in this one and probably won't get a lot in the way of merits.'.


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No, actually it doesn't. A lot of people just can't comprehend that people would deliberately create and play missions for reasons other than rewards. Unless your description clearly states "very little in the way of tickets and xp" expect some low ratings.

If you don't care about ratings call it whatever you want, I doubt a mission that gives almost no rewards would have any complaints against it taken seriously by a GM.

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Pretty much this. It was rather stupid of him to report it as a content violation, but you should still specifically state in your description that it offers no tickets and little XP.

You can't really fault people for having an expectation of rewards. The devs have created that expectation in how they've structured the game. You need to reset that expectation if you want your low-rewards arc to be well received.

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Only stupid griefers brag about doing it. So if even if they get banned, it doesn't make much of a dent in the jerk population.

They need to go a step further, do some datamining, and ban anyone who habitually 1 or 0 stars arcs they haven't even started.

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Ehm.... Some people give Missions that brags about being a farming mission an 0 before goin inside (along with Reporting it).

In general Farm-busting is already worrying enough to do as is, since people - in some cases - need to go inside the illegal mission to be sure. Let's not get the wrong people autobanned.

In general we need a cataloguing system, not a rating system.

Rating systems can only end up as fail.

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I don't want to get into the farming debate, but really theres no need to be vindictive about ratings for these. If you've seen firsthand that it's exploitive, I'd just report it and move on.

I mean I'm not above giving out a one-star if I happen across something that's truly no-effort terrible, but I wouldn't anoint myself the "farm police" and seek out farming missions with the intention of downrating them.

But yeah, I do agree with you. We need more cataloging, categorization, and a better search. They seem to be making some effort toward this (at least the search) so I'll be curious to see if that helps a bit with the visibility situation, and if people feel any less of a need to downvote arcs.

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It would have been nice if this is what happened to mine. I could have handled it.

BUT, I received ZERO feedback on what was wrong with my arc. And I will repeat ZERO feedback. All I got were 2 star ratings and not ONE SINGLE person gave me any indication as to what was wrong with it.

How is someone suppose to improved their arc if no one leaves feedback?????

So I just unpublished it and gave up.

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Londer and I duoed your arc tonight on our scrappers. Thanks for republishing it.

Now for the feedback:

First, I should mention that I played my 50 Kat/DA scrapper, and he played his 50 Kat/Regen scrapper. The difficulty seemed decent--probably a bit on the easy side for our scraptastic duo, but I could see it being tougher for other ATs.

The flow was good, and the missions had a good momentum to them. I never felt like it got tedious or bogged down in needless objectives, which has been the case with some other arcs I've played. So well done there!

Now for a few specifics:

Mission 1
Information seemed a bit vague. Who is this company? What do they do? What do we expect of them, and why do we care about them? Who are these security guards with letters in their names? I'd probably add some more specifics to the descriptive text and include more detailed "info" descriptions for the custom mobs.

End mission text "That was a bit harder than expected" - be careful about attributing thoughts or feelings to other peoples characters. For our scrappers it wasn't hard at all

Mission 2
Custom mobs are nicely done - could use descriptive "info" text though. The were cool enough that I wanted to know more about them though, which is why I looked for more description

Was a bit confused as to what qualifies as "security." Are you presuming that the player has stealth powers, or are they supposed to fight through the elementals? In any case we fought through them.

I liked the end mission popup text a lot more in this one

Mission 3
Boss dialog - The phrasing makes it almost sound like Blood Witch is in on the plot. Caught us off guard and was a bit confusing. Also, Pratt is supposed to be spilling their plans after we defeat him, but there wasn't anything in his dialog to indicate that. We forgot to check the clue (doh) so we were a bit confused when we saw the contact's next dialog.

I also think you want to avoid making it sound like the player is subordinate to the contact in any way (use of "lackey", "be my backup" etc..). The player wants to feel that they're the star of the story.

Also an ally with storm powers immediately inspired fear in two scrappers. She proved to be fine though, and hung back at range with her hurricane. But then she got stuck in the floor somehow. (I know that's simply a bug though, not that you can fix it)

Mission 4
Entry text redundant, already covered by mission objectives

Two scrappers dispatched the EB easily, so there were no issues there.

Last bit of overall feedback: some language is a bit awkward. I think you could tighten up some of the mission text and clue text. Perhaps read it aloud to yourself to decide if you like how it sounds.

I gave it three stars, but Londer and I both agreed that it could easily be four stars with some polish.

It was a fun romp on our scrappers. Thanks for making it!

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I hope you're wrong here. I have given out 1-star ratings, 2-star ratings, 3, 4 and 5. Given that each account holder can only rate an arc once, regardless of how many alts they play, I refuse to believe we have more spiteful griefers playing CoX than players who give out 1-star ratings just thinking that they deserve them.

At least, I sure hope we don't.

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I wish he was wrong.

The fact is that most people who have seen their arcs hit with 0 or 1 star votes (assuming of course we're talking about working missions with something attempting proper english, etc) have only seen them when they have hit the first page or two of search by ratings. Even our one Hall of Fame arc gains and loses the status over and over because as soon as he gets it, there are a flood of 0's and 1's coming in. As soon as the arc gets lost in the glut of 4 star arcs? They stop.

It's been seen by too many people on too many arcs with too many people saying "Hey, I downvote stuff on the front page because I want to be on the front page and they're taking up the space I should be filling with my Naruto fanfic" to pretend it doesn't happen.

I might have exaggerated slightly on the Naruto fanfic. There's probably also some Sephiroth loves my CoH character stuff, too.

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Honestly, I think part of this is due to the fact that visibility of arcs is so tied to the star rating system right now. I'm hoping that with the addition of keywords and better searching that some of this might diminish a bit.

I mean can you imagine if product visibility on Amazon.com was based solely on customer review ratings instead of robust search and browse features? You'd probably only ever be able to find anime, uranium ore, and a particular wolf t-shirt. Classic books would be impossible to find because too many school kids who get them as assigned reading hate them and give them low ratings.

Edit: removed comma, too many commas

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Problem is many think that 5 should only be reserved for near godhood perfect arcs. With most stuff averaging a 3. If the person REALLY feels it wasn't good then 1 in that instance to them is perfectly valid. Remember, 1 is NOT the lowest rating in this system. (And yet another flaw of why the system needs to die in FIRE btw).

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Seriously. If the system worked, we'd have arcs in the hall of fame. By rating GOOD arcs with a 5 instead of GODLIKE arcs, we actually increase the number of GOOD arcs to choose from. As it stands, we have crap to choose from and no HoF.

Thumbs up, thumbs down, with a weight on the thumbs up (it takes 3 down votes to counter one up) is the best way to combat griefing. Sure it won't be perfect either but at least it will act as a filter because I have to believe that there are more reasonable players out there than griefers. Over time, the good stuff will float to the top even with the griefing 24/7.

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^^^
No, under that system - with the '5 star cartels' - it just means the mediocre and what remains of the explotive farms will float to, and STAY at the top; and with just a 'thumbs up' to go by; yoiu'll sift through more pages than you do now.

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The ratings and the interface are two separate issues. Yes the ratings system is terrible, but the current interface is equally terrible.

Why is the front page dominated by Dev's Choice and 5-star arcs to begin with? It does absolutely nothing to help you find arcs you might be interested in. Instead they should really have some sort of categorization you can browse through, and better yet if you could customize your own front page. Then if say, you really liked lowbie arcs, or team oriented arcs, or AV arcs, or humor arcs, or whatever, then you could see those first when you click on MA.

There is also a nice little arc called something like the "15 Minute Tutorial" that gives some good tips.

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some of them were pretty damning (if you only have to free one EB and never fire a power again, something went wrong in your play balancing).


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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.

Complaining about something you've been warned about is like... I don't know, maybe taking something that says "contents may explode under pressure", banging a brick against it until it explodes, and then yelling about how unreasonable it is that this thing had the audacity to explode.

Anyway, I like Geeks arc but I'm by no means saying that it's the best thing ever. And I do support people's right to like whatever they like and rate accordingly. It just seems that this wasn't so much a critique as a highly rationalized troll attempt.

If anything it exemplifies exactly why the rating system is broken. It should be replaced with a straight "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" vote IMHO... and that would erase a lot of the subjectivism over what qualifies as one star versus other star ratings. It's simple, if you dislike it for whatever reason, just vote "thumbs down", don't quibble over whether one star or two stars or three stars is fair.

Talen, I like your review style, so I'm going to throw my first (and only) arc on the pile for your harsh dismemberment (or consideration).

The Liquefactionist Manifesto
Arc ID: 190129

I made this arc for two reasons:

1) I wanted something to help level my and my friends lowbies
2) I had a conversation with my friends about most mission text (not just MA but cannon stuff too) being boring, and how we wished it could be more provocative or at least even foul and distastful.

So yeah, it's designed for lowbie villains, and I know it's probably got a fault in the sense of assuming some naiveté, but at least it should get you some XP. Also, I really tried hard not to make it too time consuming, so the majority of the maps are small. At least there's that, even if it turns out that you hate it...

I haven't played very many single mission arcs, but one I enjoyed was:

The Cult of Madness
Arc ID: 4348

It was nicely done with pretty good atmosphere and a cool looking custom group.

Also avoid custom mobs with a lot of mez abilities. I ran an arc last weekend that was advertised as lowbie friendly, but you had to defeat three chain-mezzing bosses in it. I had to keep running back to buy breakfrees and lucks after dying repeatedly. Wasn't fun at all.

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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...

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I absolutely agree here. We need some kind of browse structure and categorization. When I click on the MA interface, I honestly don't want to see a list of Devs Choice, etc... I'd much rather see a list of categories I can browse through to find what I want.

Why don't you roll a lowbie defender or controller for testing purposes? Then you can try to tune your arc accordingly to accommodate those guys.

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TLDR version

WAHHH SOMEONE DIDNT LIKE MY ARC. WHATS WORSE HE HAD A WHOLE LOT OF REASONS

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It would have been nice if this is what happened to mine. I could have handled it.

BUT, I received ZERO feedback on what was wrong with my arc. And I will repeat ZERO feedback. All I got were 2 star ratings and not ONE SINGLE person gave me any indication as to what was wrong with it.

How is someone suppose to improved their arc if no one leaves feedback?????

So I just unpublished it and gave up.

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Republish it. I'll give it a try and I'll give you honest feedback that's not nitpicky, pompous, or self-important. And if you put some amount of effort into writing text, filling in details, and/or some semblance of a story I'll never give you one star either.

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"Arc had too many commas"

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I wonder if he has considered writing Amazon.com reviews. I hear there's a lot of so-called literature out there that uses an excess of commas.

(Note: Not a single comma in the above sentences.)

I thought I'd add that I personally have a ton of defenders and controllers, and Empathy may very well be my least favorite set. YMMV of course, but I love doing support on my Radiation, Kinetics, and Dark defenders so much more. Also, when I'm playing one of my dps characters, I'm always on the verge of squealing with happiness when a Force Field or Sonic joins the team. Really *any* well played defender is a great asset to a team, and I'd encourage you to try several, as they play very differently.

First, welcome to the game!

Now I should warn you that looking for "healing" specifically can be considered a bit shortsighted in this game, because buff/debuff/control powers are often much more powerful.

That being said, if you're looking for buff, debuff, control, and yes healing, you should take a look at Defenders and Controllers. Defenders have a support oriented primary, with a damage secondary. Controllers have a crowd control primary with a support secondary. Regardless of what you choose, you should know that playing any AT in this game will be a bit more active (and yes frantic) than *just healing*

I'd suggest heading to the Defender or Controller forums and checking out what kind of various support options are available. I guarantee it's a lot more varied than most other MMOs.

(Note, the above is for heroes. Villains tend to be primarily dps oriented with a few sort of spot-heal or spot-support powers. There's really no villain that's primary support but there are a lot with a little support so that meshes together pretty well on a team. Look at Corruptors and Masterminds if you want a bit of secondary support. Also the villain epic archetypes (VEATs) have support abilities, but you'll need to unlock them by getting a villain to 50 first.)

Hey everyone! I think Londer's had a pretty good birthday if I do say so myself, and it ain't quite over yet.

I know he appreciates the well wishes, and also there was a Rikti happy birthday song from the big bug that was pretty classic.

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hahaha


Well it's a good surprise then!

By the way, why aren't you out getting birthday gifts?

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Oh he's gotten lots of gifts. And who knows... maybe he'll get more later tonight.

Under the current ratings system, it's very likely that the highest quality maps are all 4-star and nothing will ever stay in the Hall of Fame.

The 5-star maps are simply those that have been inflated by a handful of friends, and haven't been downrated yet. They typically have just a few ratings. Also, there are a few 5-star maps that are actually unplayable, and cannot be rated down for that reason.

I'd be really surprised if this was the devs intention of how things should look in the MA.

The biggest problem right now has to be the discoverability of content. It's a shame that the ratings system is one of the only means by which of categorizing content on the MA.

I mean, lets look at Amazon.com (or any similar website) for example. There is a five star rating system for products, however there are also many other ways of discovering content on that site. There are categories which can be browsed, there is a robust search feature, there are user-made "lists", there are recommendations based on similar products. Reviews are a big part of the content on that site, but for example there are one-star reviews on say "The Grapes of Wrath" and it has really no effect on the book's placement on the site.

One of the problems with the MA is that ratings are too important, and they're really the only way of increasing (or decreasing) the visibility of an arc. Honestly, I'd prefer to see some sort of categorization when I open up the MA, rather than a list of Dev's Choice and some inflated 5-star arcs.

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The ability to zero star something has to go...

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This. This is the first thing that needs to happen. If the scale is 1-5 then 0 needs to not count.