Demonic_Gerbil

Are the old ones still available? I've been avoiding beta to try not to spoil the 'new' stuff for myself, but I have an arc that uses the old ones (the lower level set) and I'd like to know so I can prepare myself for having to rework the whole thing again.

Oh man, I hope so. My Sonic/Sonic would like to rock the Bard title again.

Just two comments:

1) High level Family aren't worth a lot of XP.

2) Just make a custom group for the 'other' mobsters if you don't like the level range inflicted by using Mooks. (Alternately, you can set up a lot of "Battles" between two groups of Family, and just have the rival gangs be different sections of the Family.)

I think the "than" should be a "that" otherwise the sentence makes no sense.

Otherwise, it was a nice little mission that I stealthed on through. Hope I didn't miss anything cool by doing that.

Mission 2:

You know what I like!

...Blue Spectrum? Ahahah awesome touch.

Mission 3:

Oh does this Astro have a sirius *** whoopin comin'. (Did you see what I did there with that spelling pun)

...wow he went down like a chump. You could maybe stand to beef Astro, the Fallen Starfighter up a little.

Mission 4:

Wonderfully chaotic.

Mission 5:

Oh crap Xanatos, you got the crap kicked out of you in here D:

This guy must be serious business. Good thing I've got this gem thing to even the odds a little.

Man. That gem did make this easy. Galacton crumpled like a tissue under my assault.

"Finally, knowing full well that you have saved the world, Starfighter Johnson grants himself the luxury of passing out."

Hahah great.

Lots of fun, Xanatos!

This, right here. Specifically I'm a fan of this thread.

Otherwise, you might like my arc (assuming the devs haven't broken it since my last repair job in december) "The Strife of the Grave" #3409. There is an EB to fight, but he doesn't spawn until the mission is already completed, so he's just there as an optional thing. And obviously *I* think it's a good arc, so it sounds like it just might meet your criteria.

The economics don't really favor one-shots, though. AE arcs cost the same from the store whether they're used for one-shots or 5-really-long-maps-in-a-row. Maybe if arcs were cheaper in the store (I keep waiting on them to go on sale at a nice discount to get some) ... as it is, way back when AE was new, I made a one-mission arc, mostly to see how my (still poorly IO'd) spines/dark would stand up to what I then thought was a silly number of ambushes - 3 whole ambushes! - while beating on an EB).

It's still around, with its original number (1043) if you want to see how you feel about it. (Oh ho did you see my slick little advertising bit there? How I slipped that plug in so 'cleverly'?)

Anyway, if arcs were cheaper/easier to come by, you'd probably see more short arcs around. And then you'd have even more people complaining they can't find just the arc they're looking for in the search interface "Because it's clogged with stupid short arcs!"

I too vaguely remember something like that. Used to have several (4-ish maybe?) sites that were dedicate to sharing AE stuff in one way or another. None of them ever got enough action going on that I bothered to re-find them after forgetting to backup my bookmarks before going to a new computer.

It might be instructive to help new people get into the AE stuff to come up with a well documented tutorial arc that they can download and use to learn the basics of making an AE mission with a variety of (interesting) objectives. Kind of like that 15 minute tutorial arc that's in AE already, but letting people get a maintained .storyarc file that they can open in the AE interface.

Not that there's a lot of new AE authors... sigh

Edit: I'm just going to add in that it would be nice if we could share some of those resources in-game instead of having to send files to each other. "Oh you like that enemy, let me have the AE system send it to you via in-game mail."

I still pine away for some of the carnie costume pieces.

And here I want *more* people to play the game, so it makes more money, gets a bigger development team, and continues being great for years.

Funny where some people's priorities are: somehow bemoaning that people quit the game because they don't agree with design decisions invite being told to get out of dodge by the Megajoule police.

The people that stop giving their money to the devs?

It was the fire blast nuke IIRC. Not a big deal for my scrapper, but it totally nailed the defender I was teamed with, and wasn't expecting it at all

Used too many server resources probably, you evil exploiter.

When contacts were bugged and you could buy insps via the phone for a while, I did that a few times in RWZ so I could plow through Borea missions on squishies.

If I have the time I'll run them, but I'm at a pretty busy spot this week. Do you have threads posted for them on the forum somewhere?

I used to get something like that with the crates the Rikti guard in those one Borea missions. Nothing else would do it. It eventually fixed itself after a few months and a few patches: I'd assumed it was just a texture that loaded into my card's memory funny.

Spoilerificness ahead, so stop reading here unless you want spoilers.

Mission 1:

...you *really* like to use those "........."s don't you? Also instead of capitalization, why not use different colors to indicate stress or emphasis on a word? I suggest red text as it stands out.

Also check your spelling. Merely is spelled merely, not "mearly"

"[NPC] Car: calling OnStar........"

Okay so I lol'd.

Later...:

"So, they spoke of a place called Adharma, and something about a captive. We will need to ask Satyam about this."

Who's Satyam? The contact is Jhana... In fact did he ever tell me his name? I missed it if so

Mission Rescue the Captive:

Why did I have to walk back to the mission entrance after murdering everything? I'd already walked the hostage back out.

Mission The Lab:

Okay so this is kind of pointlessly long. And if I'm trying to investigate the lab, why am I breaking everything in it? And why did the mission complete when I killed Titan but hadn't found 2 of the bodies? If they're important enough to put in the objective list but not important enough to be required for completion they should say something like "Find bodies (optional)" so people know not to stress to much about it.

And after the long slog through all those objectives, an EB or two, and lots of enemies I... have to walk back out? Why do I have to walk back out? That's stupid.

Mission 5:

Nova on a EB. Really? You just hate people playing Squishies don't you? In fact the boss-rank enemies all seemed to be rockin' mez protect toggles, because the Emp/Ice I duo'd this with never seemed to be able to hold them with her multiple Holds being spammed.

"[NPC] Unknown: I will no let you succeed!"

I almost hope that one's not a typo and intentional.

You have defeated Unknown
You gain 8,316 influence.
Silvertech gains 69 prestige.
One or more architect tickets were not rewarded because you have reached your inventory cap.
You have defeated Unknown!
[NPC] Unknown: ...and so........ it ends.
You have defeated Unknown
[NPC] Unknown: ...and so........ it ends.

Woo, a rezzing EB. Only not "woo" because rezes give no XP on the second kill. Take his rez off.

Conclusion:

"Congratulations, traveller. With Unknown defeated, it is unsure if we will ever know the true nature of their twisted experimentation. All we know is that for now, it is over."

That is so weak, I can't even describe it in any term other than "Homeopathic Kool-Aid."

In general:

There was something interesting buried inside of this! I'm not sure what it was though. I'm rescuing someone, I think, but I don't know who, from some randomly assembled assortments of bad guys in odd costumes with no theme that I could tell, because they're conducting unknown experiments on someone for some reason.

Anything interesting that gets said in a mission should get echo'd in the chatting with the contact. Don't be so vague! It's okay to come out and be blatant that I'm going to X to stop Y because Z will happen otherwise. I know how it goes, in the process of revising one of my arcs, I'm constantly telling myself to stop having the contact obfuscate things and just go BLARG and come out with what's going on.

I duo'd this, as mentioned up there, at +2/x4, and while the enemies never really challenged my spines/dark, it was a bit frustrating for the Emp/Ice I was teamed with. Her Ice holds didn't hold anything she wanted to hold, she got nailed by a EB slamming his Nuke, and otherwise didn't really seem to have much to do other than throwing a Fortitude my way every couple of minutes.

Enemies:

I went into this with an overpowered character and didn't really struggle as much as you probably intended. Enemies in general had way too many powers, enemies had too many defenses up, and giving a rez to your final boss is a bit... anti-climatic. Especially now that enemies post-rez give no XP.

How I feel about things:

I got through with the lab map and when I saw the "Walk back to the exit" bit I turned around to my teammate and said "I was going to be nice and give him a 5-star, but that makes me want to 1-star this straight to the bottom of the list." In the end I didn't give it a rating at all to be nice, but the length of the last two missions was more than a tiny bit annoying. Putting a kill all on the Baphomet/ARCH-A map is just rude. It's a long, boring slog to get to the end of it. Putting a million required EBs/AVs (whatever they were) all along the Ruladak map is also rude. That's a cool map, don't get me wrong, but we missed Unseen somehow and had to go back and search for him after taking out Unknown. At least he was marked on the map then.

Now for some bullet points.

• The writing needs more exposition when talking to the contact. More words. Better words too if you can get some. I went through all of this and didn't understand why I should care, at all, about what was going on. There wasn't a single hook that I saw for me to grab on, aside from smashing cars in the first mission, which is always fun.
• Enemies need their power selections looked at. Tighten that down a few notches. Chop off some Mez-protect toggles (and mezzes) to make it more squishy-friendly, or squishies won't be able to comfortably solo it.
• Some other people are likely to bust your chops over your custom enemies not having descriptions. Look at putting them in! It probably would have helped with my general "I don't know what's going on" to know why I was punching someone named something like "I dare you."
• Randomly: Running into a Confuse was a nice touch. I used to like old Posi's TF solely because of Cortex and his Confuse that he would throw.
• Simplify your objectives: Outside of the bash stuff to cause mayhem in the first mission, lots of objectives seemed a little out of place on the rest of the maps. Figure out what's essential for completion, and make everything else optional.
• Mark optional objectives as just that in the Nav Bar text.
• Better Nav Bar text. Don't let it just say "Unknown." Have it say "Defeat Unknown" so the player knows they've got to beat someone's face in, or break a car, or whatever, instead of wondering "I wonder if Car means I click on a car?" or, well, you can see how an objective labeled "Unknown" might be a smidge confusing.
• Don't make me walk to the mission exit if there's not a bunch of ambushes after me. Don't make me walk a rescue out if there's not a bunch of ambushes after me. (In general: Don't make me have to go back and search for an objective - unless you're deliberately doing that for some cool reason, like taking an empty map and populating it with a bunch of spawns that I have to fight back through or something. I like always feeling like I'm going "forward!" into more trouble, not going backward away from the bags of Inf.)
• An ellipsis consists of three periods, four if it ends a sentence. Please conserve the world's period supply and stop using more than that.
• Spelling and capitalization! It's a little thing, and also one that's so easy to miss. Proofing your own work for spelling and grammar errors is hard, I always try to get a second set of eyes to help with it. But when there's no spelling errors, it helps to keep the player engaged with what's going on.

Okay, I think that's everything I had for notes. I don't want you to think I'm ripping into you or anything; I'm just trying to be honest and give you the feedback that I think would help someone like me (whoever that is, out there) enjoy your arc, and maybe make it a generally awesome arc that all the AE players out there would like to play.

Good luck with any future changes you make, and if you do make some, be sure to post about them here so people can have a heads up and know to give your arc another whirl.

Nonsense. I advocate for the governance of all rewards in CoH. Why should one exploitative manner of gaining disproportionate rewards over time be allowed while others aren't? Stop all farming, govern all rewards with strict timers (I would advocate account-wide timers to prevent people alting to exploit).

Edit: Except task forces. I don't want to govern XP from that in order to foster more task force playing among the CoH population. Perhaps we should implement some kind of Task Force reward limiter where you can only gain so much XP from each Task Force within a certain amount of time to cut back on the number of ITFs being run and increase the number of other Task and Strike Forces being run.