BlueRaptor

I am afraid none of the players can tell you whether it is a bug, glitch, or WAI, but I remember destructible objects did not work if they have noone around them, and that it has been like that for years.

I am pretty sure Escorts do not betray any more once they reached their location.
Because I ran into that when trying something like that...

I think that once the Escort objective (and at least some other objectives too) is 'completed', it is not looked at again.

First: No matter what you make your recue-ee, there are no more options than:
-run to the nearest door, which may or may not work depending on the map you use,
-follow,
-do nothing, which will have allies stand there exactly until you return to them, then they find standing there is not fun and follow you anyway.
You can set a rescue animation that usually works, but when the animation finishes, they will do the above.
You can have click-able objects fade away after clicking, but not people. (someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

Second: Set the enemy group of the map to "Empty".

I don't think they ever will.
Looking at the way things went over the last few years, villains are not allowed to have anything that heroes don't. As I already said, it seems to me that instead, everything cool that villains have got included into hero content.

Can anybody think of a bigger Rogue Isles storyline that is not also part of hero content now?
I remember tagging along with some newer hero content, they took me to [spoiler warning:] the PTS revealing the demon underneath, the shaper cult with the Behemoth, the Arachnoids story, Thorn Tree vines, pretty much any mayor red side plot.

(While I am rather sure pure villains never get to see a lot of hero plotlines, like -correct me where I'm wrong - the Clockwork King, the trolls and Outcast, Faultline plot, the Croatoa story, Shadow Shard / Rularuu, the Praetoria stuff via Portal Corp, Tsoo, Warriors, ...
Not that I need any of that as a viallain, just saying there is imo lots of hero-only stuff, but hardly any villain-only stuff.)

I don't think they'll abandon red side, but getting the hero arcs too, being allowed to save the world too, is all 'villain content' I see in the future.
I's what they did in the past few years, and apparently it worked well for them.

I tried that, and it actually works as a 'fail mission' trick. (On some maps as least, where the boss isn't too stupid to find an exit.)
Thanks for the good tip.

I didn't manage to come up with a way to make it work with an option to fail yet though. (Since the boss has to be 'required', you'd have to defeat him in order to complete the mission. Whatever triggers the boss has to be 'required' too. You always have to trigger the boss to spawn, thus always fail the mission.)
Maybe I work something up that assures the boss will be seen and defeated by allies that spawn before the boss if you choose to go the right way.

I agree with the OP that redside lacks unique content.

Recently I find the devs try hard to put as much of the things red side has into blue side as well. Like Putting all cool maps into blue side missions and TFs, signature villains as Ally, Coralax into the Hollows, ...

All of my friends that play the game made a hero first, as default, and tried a villain when they felt like experiencing something new.
But with putting everything cool from redside into blueside too, you've pretty much seen it all already. You can play a 'villain AT' without going there, saw all the cool mission maps, fought alongside and against all the signature villains, learned all the lore and secret plots, and played all the co-op missions already.
So all that is left are the contact arcs, that are often good indeed once you make it past the awesome choice of Snakes or Snakes but hold little new as well; having to do all the bank missions if you want the accolade; and the parts of zones that were too boring to also be a mission map.

Lack of exclusive content that makes redside interesting? Yes.

(And yes, the real incentive to be a villain, getting power and wealth without working hard for it, is not there. Maybe villains should get more inf for completing arcs and robbing banks? After all heroes get bonus inf for saving people in the streets.)

*sighs*

Apparently, once an Escort has betrayed, its defeat does not make it fail anymore.
I even managed to get stuck in a mission that could neither be completed nor failed by defeating a betrayed required escort.

I guess most people try to avoid escorts altogether, but does anybody have some recent experience on this that might help?

Ah, I see.

I got to test some and saw that if the escort is not Single (and not having Empty as enemy group), it does not complete when rescued already, but only when led to the exit as intended.

Back to constructing workarounds and trying to mask the resulting wonkiness then!

I was trying to use an Escort in a mission that you have to lead to the mission exit, but he completes already when rescued, not when led there.

When I set him to Single, he thus auto-completes immediately when spawned.

Does everybody experience this? Is it part of their current bugged status, or is there a chance to make it work?


(I was trying to make a mission where you can opt to 'fail' for an alternate ending with a required escort. To complete you lead the escort out, and to fail you click a glowie that makes the escort betray, and you have to defeat him - and thus fail because he is not rescued. Ally set to Required, Single, Fight Aggressively, he spawns on the other side of map when triggered, regular tech map)

I may test some more later, but right now, after days of trying to get that choose-to-fail-and-then-have-to-fight idea to work with a defendable object and thinking I finally found a way in the escort, I am pretty frustrated.

I am all for such a pack.
I can do without having to beat up dinosaurs for the sake of the supposed cool of it. Again.

I just tried it some more, and found something very interesting about opening a mission to edit it.
While general server load may of course have SOME influence, what really made the difference was the number of times I opened that mission.

I open that same mission that took me two minutes before, and it is open in some 12 seconds. WOW. Fast.
I exit without saving and try again to be sure: 23-ish seconds.
I exit without saving and try again: 30-ish seconds.
After some more times: 55-seconds.

Logging out of the game seems to reset that, it was back to 14 seconds, and repeated opening again made it take longer and longer.

Is that just me?

Does anyone else experience a really slow responding of the Mission Architect after the release of the latest issue(s)?

I mean, slower than before.

Like, these days adding a mission detail often results in several seconds freeze for me, and opening a mission arc with 4 missions and around 80% file size now takes me pretty exactly two minutes, while I remember times around 30 seconds for even bigger arcs with more details before.

More than for new maps, I always hope they do not "fix" something in the game mechanics again that potentially ruins countless of existing story arcs.

I get the impression more often than not things are changed in AE because someone looks at them and finds, "Oh Noes! You can make way too hard (TM) or too weak (TM) enemies with it!", or "Oh Noes! You can make missions objectives that make little sense or may fail!", or, heaven forbid, "Oh Noes! You can make an arc that is not our idea of balanced approved fun!"... *

But you can never assure that every mission by every player makes perfect plot objective sense, is perfectly balanced for everyone, and is great "fun", especially not in everyone's eyes.

So I'd prefer the devs stop trying that, and leaving those options so people can make interesting out-of-the-box missions. Because that is what I find fun.


* or watching someone farm, and thinking, "I'll teach you! Revenge!" and wreck something that was used to make the farm to show them evil farmers, yeah, take that, then walk away smugly, leaving everyone that used the now forbidden feature in their stories to mourn over the ruins of their work.

Yes, that is problem exists since Escorts came in I think.

It seems to boil down to the point that if you have an Escort to Object X, the system treats the Escort as being spawned by Object X.

This would explain the observed:

> Since you can never have an Ambush and anything else spawn of the same objective completion, you cannot have an Ambush spawn from Object X, since that already has the Escort spawning from it.

> Since in the eyes of the system Object X spawns the Escort, Object X needs to be there before the Escort. So trying to make Object X pop up only once you found the Escort creates a circular dependency.

I don't see what the drop rate has to do with my statement.
PvP recipes were introduced in I14 as something that only drops when defeating players to give PvP a reward. Only later was the option to buy them from the newly made merits added.
Whatever the drop rate, they were not introduced as (and are not) something you have to buy from merits in order to PvP properly, as the original posts suggests.

Sure, they did not make PvP a worthwhile farming ground, nor made it suck less, but that was not the topic.

I notice that today too. And yes, I too block google-analytics.
I noticed earlier already that the NCsoft Launcher, too, tries to connect to google-analytics.

Which leaves me with three questions to Cryptic, since I don't like passing data around like that, especially when my name and credit card data are involved:
1. Why?
2. What of my data is transferred to google?
3. Can you please stop that?

Thank you.