Alari_Azure

Dunno if anyone has mentioned him yet, but the most recent loss was someone that was on my global list ever since I started playing. @Chowder on Liberty.

I just came in to see if anyone else was having issues while opening the contacts list. Mine started after the small patch the other day. After the Halloween event, I first started having a problem with crashing during the Ritki raids, which had not been an issue for a very long time before that. I updated my graphics driver, again (there was another a few weeks ago), and that seemed to help. But, since the raids are over and there was some kind of mini-update the other day (after I logged off), I cannot open my contacts list (especially tips) without crashing. I have had problems with WW and a few other things which open separate windows being sluggish as well. All seem to be possibly text related or that need to open a separate window, if that makes sense. Today, I tried 3 times to log in a toon and as soon as I went to the contact list, it immediately froze up. This is really getting frustrating.

All of my graphics settings are on the lowest levels, set for performance. I can't even think about using ultra-mode because it puts me in slo-mo.

I was on Liberty and got mapserved. Now, I can't log back on, either.

I love Red Skelton.

Maybe it's your difficulty setting that's spawning more minions instead of Lts? I've noticed that some of my toons tend to get more minions to spawn, while others get more Lts. The toons that are higher diff setting might be getting more Lts. It also might have something to do with player levels, I dunno.

Maybe you have chat bubbles turned off in your options? Worth a shot. Other than that, I can't think of any other reason that it would not work.

I've had the same problem on my magic toons. It's annoying that those particular ones are missing. The end mods are really expensive, even as regular invention enhancements, because the prices at WW are out of reach for lowbies that are poverty stricken. It's a bit of a pain to have to hoof it all over SC to get them. I hope they'll be adding those to the ticket vendors in the near future, too.

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Bronze>Gold (if you have the time to wade thru the chaff)
Bronze >>>> Silver
Avoid the 30 lvl since it overlaps and has a LOT of chaff. 35-40 seems to be a nice sweet spot.
Don't be afraid to delete recipies that are junk
Keep rolling until your recipes are filled with GOOD items.

Try that and see what you think.

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To a high level toon, the 'junk' that you might just want to delete could be a bonanza for a lowbie to sell to a vendor. Rather than delete, share the wealth. The lowbies will love you long time.

I have no idea what to set for classifications, either. Two of my arcs might fit the 'origin' tag, but only if you consider the introduction of a new custom enemy group to fall into that category. I won't tag it that way because I'd be afraid most people might get the impression that it's a story related to the origin of one of my PCs and just ignore it for that reason.

I can't tell people it's team focused, since I can't run missions in teams, so I have no real way of telling. If I say it's 'solo friendly' or 'easy', someone on a squishy will probably freak out if they face-plant or can't defeat some of the enemies that might be a little tough on some builds. If I mark it as a 'challenge' some high level maxed out super-uber people will complain that it was 'way too easy', since all the customs are set on standard. The level range is 1-54 because they are all custom critters. I really don't want to set it to any particular range because if someone wants more challenge they can easily adjust their own difficulty settings to make it as hard as they like. I'm not a big fan of missions that try to slam anyone that plays it into the dirt. So, I'm kind of between a rock & a hard place with that one, too. As far as I can tell, there aren't a lot of mid-range choices as far as trying to pinpoint difficulty goes.

Yes, it is my MA arc mission. I said so in the first sentence.

I think the animation is set the same as the other captives. They are all set either as 'thank you' or 'talk' and the others give their final dialogue as well as the animation. I just can't figure out why this one in particular is not working as it should. The others seem to work just fine.

One of my mission arcs (Meet the Demon Spawn) has an issue that seems to happen regularly. I ran it two or three times yesterday and got the same result each time. I have 3 missions in the arc that have captives to be released. In the first two of them, the captives perform as intended. They do their final animation, then run for the exit. In the last mission there's only one captive and as soon as I defeat the last (custom) enemy guarding him, he just fades away with no final animation or dialogue.

One time, I was fighting those last guarding enemies on a stairway near the captive. When the last enemy was defeated, he floated away while disappearing like the Ancient Ancestors of the Tsoo and the captive faded away, as well.

Has anyone else had anything like this happen in their missions? I can't understand why this one is not working while the others are fine.

I've been getting the mission popups as well. They seem to be random, although the most common is the 'you cannot enter'. The first time I saw it, I was really confused. Especially when I just portaled in without a hitch.

I'm wondering if all the new chat bug issues are related to them trying to fix the description bugs in AE and character descriptions. Maybe there's some type of code that's borked because of the change.

Of course, the chat bugs have been plentiful over the past 6 months or so, anyway.

What the

I always get a kick out of the sound when an axer pulls out their weapon. It sounds like a rifle being cocked.

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I need some help here.

In my latest AE arc, I have a timed mission in which you need to rescue 5 people from an office building before it collapses.

The editor reports no errors anywhere in my arc. Yet, every time I test this mission, it fails a few seconds after I rescue the first person. I save them, they thank me and run off, then about 5-10 seconds later I'm booted out and told Mission Failed!

I have no clue what is causing this. Is it a bug I'm unaware of?

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I'm not certain if this is related, but I've noticed quite a few arcs that when entering, you are given the "You cannot enter" pop-up note just before you are zoning in.

All of these combined, I'm inclined to think its a bug. /bug it or petition it... they may know of something causing the issue.

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I had that same thing happen to me while running my arc yesterday. Every time I went to enter a mission I got that. On the last mission I got a different popup but I couldn't read it fast enough before the zoning screen popped up. I also had a released captive that just disappeared as soon as I defeated the last enemy that was guarding him. No final animation, no 'thank you' line, just poof, gone.

That was one of the things I was looking at today. Maps. I've been wanting to see if the maps were fixed as far as front, middle, and back goes. I was looking at office maps in my missions. The way they're listed is still way off. They're rarely in the correct floor order. I really wish they'd fix that. You have to really look at the map, then, test it to be sure it's in the right order. It drives me crazy.

I'm glad to hear that the X & Os are reversed (well, not really). That makes much more sense after seeing the way they were marked on the maps. They weren't where I figured they'd be. It's nice to have the spawn points on the floor-plan, though. At least, after you decipher the inherent flaws in the map layouts.

If you want to unpublish, make sure you go into edit mode on the live arc and do a 'save as local story and stop working on the published arc' before you unpublish. I learned the hard way that unpublishing wipes out the file from the server and doesn't save a copy on your local.

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My SG mostly abandoned me tonight so, left with nothing else to do, I ran Meet the Demon Spawn (151099).

It was a fun little romp for my 25th level mercenary Master Mind (the only real solo character I have ) with some intense fights in a couple of places. I enjoyed it a lot. The story was simple and the execution logical and fairly tight. I could easily see this being in the Hollows as dev content.

I only have 2 suggestions...

1) Have the captives use the Talk animation when freed. That way they'll stand still for 3-4 seconds while they say their thanks before they run to the door. I was having to scroll the chat box back to see what they said because it traveled across the screen too fast.

2) Mission 1's send-off dialog had some awkward wording. In particular "I'm afraid these guys are gonna to be..." and "their hidin' out is in an office...". I can see the second one being slang but the first just seems to have an extraneous "to" for no apparent reason. If that's just the way Flux should talk then ignore me.

BTW - I really liked your use of colored text, especially in the nav bar. I didn't even know you could do that.

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Thanks for playing it! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

1) I might have enough space left to do that. I really hate the fact that hostages just run off like their pants are on fire. lol

2) That must have been something that happened when I switched the contact to Flux and rewrote it in slang. I'll definitely have to fix that. Good catch! I've read that text so many times that I guess it just kept slipping by me.

I'm hoping to do a major rewrite on it when I15 hits. Hopefully, that will give me more space to add some background story and maybe a little more detailed content, like more clues and dialogue. It's a wee bit on the sparse side as it is because I had to skimp a little to fit 4 missions.

I do appreciate the feedback. It's always helpful to have someone else look at it to find the things that can make it better.

Thank you, again.

Hmmm... made to order AE missions. I suppose it might be doable by the folks that still have open slots available and don't mind investing all that effort into creating something like this. I can't see myself putting in all the time & effort into creating an arc, according to someone else's specific standards, for someone that says it might only get one play by a 6-8 man team. I'm not sure it would be worth all that effort if it wasn't even my own story.

It would certainly make it much easier if we could move objectives around in the MA like we can move missions around. I tend to write on the fly and add objectives as I go along. If I have to be concerned about where those things will fall in the nav/clue list when I'm done, because some people might down-rate my arc if they don't follow the proper order, then I will probably have to reenter them all in the proper order after I finally finish writing it. God forbid I should have to add another objective, in the beginning or even the middle, after someone makes a suggestion to me after it's been published.

It seems pretty odd to me that someone would say that their 'whole SG' quit because AE made it impossible to find teams for doing regular missions. Why the hell weren't they just forming their own teams within the SG to run regular missions and completely ignore the AE, if it bugged them all that much? That makes little to no sense at all. I think there's a lot more to it than people leaving over AE. Sounds more like it was a mass exodus to another game, instead. Maybe they all booked over to 'the game which shall remain nameless' to kill time waiting for the new 'hero' replacement to be released.

I think it's as simple as looking at MA arcs like any training program. If you consider the Heroes/Villains as members of an 'army' of some sort (or like firefighters, police officers, etc.), it's very simple. When you're in the army, in basic training or involved in 'war games' of any kind, you still earn your regular pay for what you're doing. It's all part of the job. Training to sharpen your skills is just as important as actually doing the job that you're training to do.

With so many maps in the MA with no clear definition of front, middle & back, it's extremely difficult to lay things out the way we want them to work. As far as the order of clues showing up in the list is concerned, they show up in the exact order that they were entered into the MA, no matter what order the player finds them in. If a player decides to stealth through a mission and misses triggers along the way, the clues still show up in the order that they were placed in the MA. If the player finds the last item first or the first item last, it doesn't make a bit of difference in the way they display. Trying to make them show up in a 'logical' order is fairly impossible on most if not all maps.

If we're going to be so obsessive about the order that we think they should be displayed in the list, to the point of it affecting our rating of a mission, then I don't think the MA is the problem. Some things are completely out of the author's control and we just have to live with them as they are.