DKellis

Okay, thanks.

I may need to jiggle the descriptions a bit.

If I use the "Random" boss-type for a critter group that spans a wide range of levels (Circle of Thorns and Arachnos, in this case), is there any way I can have a variable which notes which gender the critter is? I'll probably be using it in the boss's custom description, and I was thinking about the problems of using "he" for, say, a CoT Succubus or an Arachnos Tarantula Queen.

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When playing on Heroic solo or with a small group, AVs scale down to EBs and EBs scale down to Lieutenants (why they don't scale to normal Boss instead is a mystery).

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In my experience, an EB on Heroic solo scales to a normal Boss.

Whether they're supposed to (instead of scaling to Lt) I have no idea.

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I would disagree with this. The AV/EB message should be in the Description as well as possibly in the contact's message. You don't see the contact's message until you start the TF or are part way through it. Even at level 1 AVs will be a problem and many will want to just avoid the mission.

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The problem with this is they may or may not be there, because of the settings. If you're soloing on Heroic, then even an EB becomes a regular boss.

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It does still apply. If you're soloing on Heroic, you expect Bosses to be Lts. Seeing a Boss-rank (downgraded EB) or Elite Boss-rank (downgraded AV) when you're capable of soloing mainly Lts (low-levels, for example) is a nasty surprise.

For example, if I see that a mission has an AV, I know that I'll be facing at minimum an EB, and I cannot rely on controls (soft or hard) to mitigate damage due to the anti-mez triangles. That dictates the sort of inspiration loadout I might carry.

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As I said, it really depends how long that "then" is. I do think that attacks with follow-up DoTs (like Fire's) don't apply the first tick of the DoT at the same time they apply the attack itself.

Yes, there's not that MUCH time to react, but you can do something about it.

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It does put you at the mercy of the server tick.

And it doesn't apply to the DoTs which are basically one big chunk of damage split up into smaller bits that all hit you in less than a second (Sonic Blast's Scream, for example). It's not tick... tick... tick... or even tick-tick-tick, but tiktiktiktiktik.

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(I swear there was a name for this, where the community in general benefits most from a resource if everyone uses it sparingly, but there's a net gain for each individual when they take up more of the resource, so everyone ends up taking up as much as they can and nobody wins. No idea what the name was, though.)

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Tragedy of the commons. I think.

EDIT: I should add that I'm reserving judgement on whether it is applicable here, but I wanted to answer the question.

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I think this phenomenon is also sometimes referred to as "the prisoner's dilemma", though that may be something different. If so, they're still similar.

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The Prisoner's Dilemma is actually pretty different. The Tragedy of the Commons involves a shared and limited resource, while the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't. The closest thing it has to "shared" is the test-giver, who is kind of like an infinite Good Thing/Bad Thing dispenser.

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(I swear there was a name for this, where the community in general benefits most from a resource if everyone uses it sparingly, but there's a net gain for each individual when they take up more of the resource, so everyone ends up taking up as much as they can and nobody wins. No idea what the name was, though.)

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Tragedy of the commons. I think.

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Ah, thanks, that was it. (Google is sadly unhelpful where all you have to go on is "that thing with the cows and the shared pasture".)

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A thing I was actually hoping for was some sort of review collection or something. For example, say Venture rated something at five stars, and Talen rated the same thing at one. Why those ratings? What did they like and dislike?

Or if Venture and Talen both rate something at five stars (or four, or three, or one, whatever). They could be doing so for different reasons.

So I was hoping to be able to sort of triangulate on whether I'd like a certain arc or not, given that nobody shares exactly my tastes, but several people have displayed signs of being close to some specific parts of it.

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(I swear there was a name for this, where the community in general benefits most from a resource if everyone uses it sparingly, but there's a net gain for each individual when they take up more of the resource, so everyone ends up taking up as much as they can and nobody wins. No idea what the name was, though.)

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Tragedy of the commons. I think.

EDIT: I should add that I'm reserving judgement on whether it is applicable here, but I wanted to answer the question.

I saw the whole flux-unfriendly thing in action; someone (I expect he'll be along soon enough to provide details) was alternating between one-star and five-star ratings on the HoF arc just to show how easy it was to de-HoF it. I forget what he left it as.

It does strike me as bizarre that one can lose HoF status, but I don't know if one can lose the associated slot along with it. That would be a nightmare to sort out, I would think.

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I'm not sure how much faster it could be. Quit, change difficulty, restart. The only part that's slow is getting to the Notoriety contact (which hopefully the devs are listening and we'll get them in the MA buildings).

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Well, logging off means waiting thirty seconds. Quitting outright means waiting anywhere from a minute to five minutes for the updater to connect to the servers, and then about a minute or two before I get to see the login screen.

So as I said, I was hoping for something faster. Doesn't look like it exists, though.

EDIT: Unless you mean quit the arc, in which case I was talking about stuff like surprise EBs at the end of a five-mission arc.

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Quit and restart. It's working on the same pattern TFs and Ouroborous missions are.

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I was afraid of that. I was hoping for something, well, faster.

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The thing is, 'defeat all' is a very clear and obvious time sink that begs askance of how well-resourced you are as a character. For villains it's especially weird - why not just drop nerve gas on the place? Why not just firebomb it?

It's a game mechanic concern that makes defeat alls happen. If players want to run around killing huge gangs of guys, okay, let them and I'm fine with that, but forcing them to do so isn't cool. At best, players will be ambivalent because you're encouraging them to do something they would have done otherwise. Cleaning up individual mobs is the kind of thing I expect of the PPD or Longbow troops - not of me as an individual.

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From what I can remember, the... well, not the best, but probably the least annoying reason I've seen for a Defeat All requirement boils down to "show these villains/heroes that you can beat the pulp out of them without breaking a sweat". Basically you have to defeat everything on the map to cow the group in question into not making any more trouble for you.

How well this justification works varies.

What's the quickest way to change the mission difficulty in an Architect story arc?

What I mean is that for regular missions, if I go in and encounter something I can't handle, I can go out, change the difficulty, pick another mission to reset the original, and then go back in.

But in MA mode, I don't have another mission to reset to.

It would help a lot with these Surprise EBs and AVs people seem to like putting in their missions.

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And if you're an arrogant blowhard like me it lets you pass your opinion and people will come to you to ask you to tell them what you think.

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Honesty compels me to admit that this is pretty much my entire reason for wanting one.

Now I'm tempted to start an arc review thread of my own.

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If this were anyplace else, most people wouldn't consider that a "rant" at all.

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If.

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In a similar vein, I notice the MA can differentiate a character's sex. What is the code that would allow the mission to use the proper pronouns? $sex? $gender?

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$heshe
$himher
$hisher
$sirmam

They also work capitalized (eg $HeShe). Unfortunately I think that's all they have so far, at least for MA.

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To anyone who's thinking about following those links to Tvtropes just be warned, TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. Do what I do and set a timer before entering. Bonus points for getting a friend to knock you unconscious if you don't exit after 2 minutes of the timer going off.

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I officially hate that site... but not as much as I like it. How many hours was that? (Just one more link, I swear!)

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As someone who edits quite often there, I have to wonder whether all these CoH/V players who're really familiar with TVTropes are editing there under different names. I recognize maybe three or four people from these forums over there.

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2. Quality assurance/testing (No matter how polished an arc is, there's always a possible typo here and there that you missed the other bazillion times you went through it).

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I have encountered errors introduced in my arc that were not on the local copy, but were present in the published version.

I have no idea why.

So does anyone have any idea at all what is going on here?

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I'm also toying with the idea of a better VEAT storyline, but the most likely candidate for my third slot will be a humorous villain arc. (My current projects are 4643 and 4829, in case anyone wants revenge. )

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I think I remember asking you about a better VEAT storyline in VU2k8 once, and was really interested in your ideas. So yeah, I'll be hoping to see something come from that.

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Do you have any custom groups or critters with the same name as something already in the game? That can cause problems sometimes.

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Not that I can think of. Then again, it's entirely possible that I've overlooked something incredibly obvious. How do I check if there's an error in the custom critters, if none of them seem to have any problems highlighted, and all save-without-changes go through?

My custom critter names, alphabetically:
Anger
Caller
Forbidden
Forsaken
Hunter
Jealousy
Melancholia
Seeker
Sparker

Contact is "Terrance Davis", two other characters named "Annabelle Davis" and "Poe". The main possible problem I can see is that these are very common words, and I could honestly have overlooked something.

Which doesn't really explain why the arc managed to go through without errors in the first place, or why republishing fixes it, albeit temporarily.

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By any chance did one of your text blocks end up longer then the allowed amount when you went back in? I had a situation today where I had some text blocks pop the seam because I pressed enter (counting as 1 character) during initial entry, but after publishing and going back in they had converted to "<br>" (counting as 4 characters). This produced some odd validity results...

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I specifically checked for this one even before I published it for the first time, so no. I encountered that problem in Test anyway, so I knew not to repeat that mistake (and always leave a buffer for the character limits).

I remember another thread about this somewhere, but I forgot which I14 subforum it was in.

I've been hit by what seems to be a bug where a published arc listed in the My Published Arcs page will have that big "Invalid Arc" sign and huge letters telling me that something in the arc is no longer acceptable. But when I go in to edit, I see no errors.

In fact, I can even Save And Test the arc, and everything goes well. (While in Save And Test, the arc still has the Invalid Arc warning, even after refreshing the My Published Arcs page.) Republishing without changes may remove that Invalid Arc warning (or it may not), but it comes back anyway, due to... something. I don't know what.

This does not seem to be happening to solely to me; I've seen reports of this in various threads and posts, as well as in global channels.

The questions foremost in my mind are: what is happening here, and do the devs know about this?

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It's a shame they didn't do that to the entire MA building. The place is as laggy as an old school Hami Raid on Freedom server at least. :P

Ah, well...my video card was gaining weight anyways!

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Can't really do that without complaints anyway. Having the entire MA building be a No Power Zone would mean that every toggle would drop upon exiting a MA mission. When that was actually happening on Test, it did generate a fair number of complaints. (Not heated ones, but complaints nonetheless.)

And No Power Zones for the entire building means that people will not be able to toggle up before entering the mission. From the difficulty of some MA arcs, this is likely to be debt-ridden.