EarthWyrm

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Six minutes for two replies. Nice!

I shall give all of the details of the arc. (as i did not want this message to seem liek an advertisement for the mission itself, i kept details vague)

-Single mission story arc
-map type outdoors (city, one of the maps that you must unlock with tickets)

Custom enemy group (the group's name was "Easy Kills" if you must know though in numbers they would not be)

Mission objective: Kill the bosses (the bosses to kill were 5 Nemisis Faction and two of the custom enemy group (so seven bosses to kill to complete the mission))

I will not give the mission #

the message said that a GM banned the mission. I want to know why!

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Based on your description, it was probably banned because a GM believed it was a farm map, which is not an allowed use of the Architect. If you believe your mission was not a farm map, submit a petition asking (politely) for an explanation of the decision. It will probably be immediately escalated to a senior GM, who can explain the issue and work with you to resolve it.

The ban decision is likely reversible if you're willing to work with them and be very clear about your intent in creating the mission, provided that your intent is within the bounds of what they consider 'acceptable use'.

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Talk to them and explain what you're trying to do and why it's not actually a farming mission.

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A GM hasn't actually contacted me yet -- this was just a player complaint that got tagged on my mission. It doesn't give the name of the person who complained, either, so there's nobody to explain it to.

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If you've gotten a complaint that included the word "farm," and your arc hasn't been banninated, it's likely that a GM already looked at it and agrees with your assessment.

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Plus, players can't see the complaints. Only you and the moderators can.

One of my missions (the freak out) got dinged for "Content Violation (Describe Below)", whatever that means, and "Obvious farming mission with lots of buffers", which makes no sense since there isn't a single ally in the thing and everything in there can kill you hard.

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Talk to them and explain what you're trying to do and why it's not actually a farming mission. They're erring on the side of caution in banning farming missions; I had one of mine (you can guess which from the titles below) banned for a short time tonight because I included some text that I meant to be funny, but that made it sound like I was encouraging people to farm it.

It's an entertaining mission, but the mix of mobs, to me at least, makes it far from a farm. I just described it badly, in an attempt to get people to play it. I was able to work with the GMs quickly and efficiently to sort it out.

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I have to agree. I haven't even posted any arcs yet, but sending a tell on feedback really creeped me...

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I'd forgotten it was going to do that. The first feedback I sent was to pohsyb on his wedding arc, in which I mentioned that it replayed well (played it on test) but that the second mission does a really good job demonstrating why smoke grenade and other -perception powers need to be more limited.

He was online, so I immediately got this back:

:P

It was kind of a stomach-lurching moment, and I re-read to make sure I hadn't come across as obnoxious. I hope I didn't.

I don't think it's people being afraid to put their names on anything. I mean, it's not even our real names. I think that in general, people don't want to risk dealing with bruised egos and authors arguing that someone's *opinion* is wrong.

The worst thing about the rating system, IMO, is that there are SO MANY Dev's Choice and 5-star arcs when you open the interface that people get irrationally wounded when anyone gives them a low rating, even if it's deserved. Because the system makes it look like there's a ton of good stuff, by putting the "best" material first. I really wish those missions weren't the default view.

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I keep waiting for Castle to snap and post something that gets modded.

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Castle hasn't really flipped out in a long time. Sometimes I wonder if NCSoft pumps Paxilon Hydrochlorate into the CoH offices, and that simultaneously explains Castle's posting behavior, and BaBs.

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About ten seconds after I scrolled past this, I got it.

Bravo. Embedded Serenity references ftw

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Just when is soon?
Today? Tomorrow? Next month?

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Given that the most recent thing in the community digest (that's still "access denied") is release notes for I14 dated March 17?

I'd say today.

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I just wanted to get some clarification on something, which I think has been mentioned once before but I just want to nail it down.

There isn't any ability to make cutscenes with this tool, right?

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no cutscenes

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Wait... really?

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Yup. The method used to create them is so clunky that (at least a few months ago) they said there was no way they'd saddle players with it.

Me, I'm just as glad. There's virtually nothing you can do in a cut-scene that you can't do just as well in a scene that actually involves the players. I find cut-scenes to be almost uniformly a crutch for lazy story-telling.

This isn't an attack on you, or anyone else who wants to use them. I've obviously not seen your work to know if you'd create something that I'd view as an exception. I don't hate *every* cut-scene in CoX, either, but some of them are just immersion-breaking in the extent to which they provide OOC knowledge.

Plus, I don't want to get stuck in a freaking cut scene of Dr. Aeon and Lord Recluse /em boombox -ing for ten or fifteen minutes, and have to use the task manager to close the program since we can't manually exit cut-scenes in the game as it stands.

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...do I know you? Lol. I feel like I'm being stalked now.

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You've probably seen me on the wall, in my brute guise. I'm just assuming it's you I ran across - can't imagine that many AR/Kin types soloing groups at odd hours on Virtue, and I notice folks I see more than once or twice.

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I think ive seen you do this before.

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If you play on Virtue, probably. I do it a fair deal, it's something to do on insomniac nights.

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What I appreciate is that you know how to share the wall - how to find a rhythm that two different people can fall into on different parts of the wall that doesn't hose re-spawns for both parties. Not everyone who hangs out on the wall is able to figure that one out.

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Hmm...Interesting response as I never had a moral compass waiver after doing a KHTF and waiting 3 hours to do another or popping on another toon doing them back to back etc...Yet this was called exploitation... Hmm.

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Your continued unwillingness to comprehend the difference between an Exploit (using the system to gain rewards in a way that was never intended) and exploiting the system (utilizing the system in the manner it was generally intended, but isolating the single most efficient manner of doing so and utilizing that to the exclusion of most or all other behaviors) is remarkable. There's nothing morally wrong with using the system as intended in what some would argue is the most efficient manner. It's exploiting the system, but it's not like the devs didn't know Katie could and would be exploited when they introduced Pool C drops. If you ran it as often as you could to get as many rewards as you could, you were by definition exploiting the system - using it to get the best possible rewards, but working within its established parameters. There's no judgment involved in that statement, either. Nobody's saying, "If you ran lots of Katies, you were a bad person, Darth!"

A better metric than an internal "moral compass" to identify whether something is a true Exploit would be, "Is this the kind of thing that I'd tell my SG not to spread around?" For example, the team-dropping trick to get merit awards repeatedly for a single task that was present when the system went live, or whatever trick existed to let people get 20 LotGs for the price of one. Clearly, those reflected the system not working as intended, so using them was an Exploit with a capitol-E.

As to your next comment, it plays directly into this one. Using the MA to get tickets = intended. We don't know how quickly tickets can be earned, what the exchange rate will be, or anything else, so talking about "farming for tickets" is nonsensical. We know next to nothing about the system.

On the other hand, using the architect to repeatedly earn 2 merits per kill for a GM that can be spawned in a predictable way and killed rapidly with an optimized team = an idea to make the system give rewards faster than it should. We know how merits work, after all.

Note that I'm not saying this is what people who are asking for GMs want to do. Many of them would be great from a storytelling perspective to be able to include. I'm just pointing it out as emblematic of a difference that you keep pretending doesn't exist, between true Exploits, and ways to exploit the system as designed to get the best reward over time.

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Okay, while I've gone through all the pages so far, I might've missed a few things, so forgive me if it's all been covered before... I remember it being asked, but I don't see an answer for it: will Giant Monsters be available?

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We may get some monsters (maybe downgraded GMs like Adamastor), but there is no way we will get access to anything that can be farmed for merits.

QR

So I looked thru the thread and couldn't find an answer to this - are we able to make continuation missions? Ones where, when you complete a mission, the next is automatically selected without having to return to the contact?

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, I've been reading as much as I can and don't remember this in particular.

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Here's another test case.

Someone writes a five issue arc. He puts a ton of content into it, and builds everything extremely well. His biggest failing is he writes too much -- his mission acceptance text is three screens, his clues are all huge, but for the person who actually reads it, it turns out to be beautiful and poignant.

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As someone who's written for the "beautiful and poignant" crowd in other RPG settings, I can say categorically and experientially that while that subset of people will love what you do, the people who log in to beat stuff up will hate your guts in the most vocal possible manner and one-star you into oblivion.

Asking people who don't like it enough to finish it to be given less weight in determining ratings is both unrealistic (people do remember authors who write things that don't fit their playstyles, and avoid them) and holds MA users to a different set of standards than those applied to the dev team. If they have to be brilliant to get kudos, we should expect the same. We're being given better tools than they started out with, aren't we?

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to make HoF with the MA, you're going to have to balance good storytelling with pander^H^H^H appealing to the action junkies. I look forward to the challenge. I may never succeed, but the fun is in the attempt, and the act of creation itself.

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So, apropos of nothing... who else has spent the weekend making costumes and saving them against Closed Beta Acceptance/Open Beta/Launch?

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That's so funny. I had this thread open in the background while I was doing costumes for one big-boss and 2 each of minions, lt's, and bosses for an enemy group I will be using in my first arc. Then I scrolled down and saw your posting.

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We've added a TON more datamining hooks exclusively for Mission Architect as well, so we can easily see spikes in aberrant behavior. Spikes point us to exploits, which points us to log files, which reveal the identities of exploiters. So if you find a really big exploit in the system, I'd encourage you to PM me or another Dev and try to get your Bug Hunter badge, as the alternative is not pretty.

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I really realy really don't like the wording here. I wonder just what is considered an expliot. You called running KHTF once every three hours an expliot so I wondering what "exactly" is meant here by expliot?

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If your personal moral compass flip flops or even wavers a little while doing something in the game that is obvious to you is not intended behavior, it's probably an exploit.

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This is a pretty silly statement since the list of "not intended behavior" over the years has included 6-slotting Damage enhancements, soloing AVs, being able to do about 50% of the things Repeat Offenders do (along with alot of other folks), stacking Vengeance, PvP targeting macros, Whirlwind removing grounding, being able to click glowies while Phased, and a smattering of other things that really aren't things that would cause my "moral compass to flip flop" in a million years. Some of these have been changed, others have been ignored for issues upon issues before being changed, and still others are shrugged off as part of life.

That's a pretty crappy way to explain "if you find a really big exploit".

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Or said in a nicer way: Posi, you REALLY need to be clearer on this. Personally I had not known that someone n the dev team actually called KHTF once every three hours an exploit.

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I'd be very interested in DK providing a quote from a redname to that effect. He's somewhat prone to hyperbole on topics about which he feels passionately, and as can be seen by his postcount in the 13 months since his reg date, often says things in an off-the-cuff manner.

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The devs list of what is and isn't exploits really does vary over time.

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There's not a good way to list out every possible exploit, because if they could tell us what the exploits are, they would fix them. The general rule of, "If you think it's too good to be true, it probably is," which he gave a variant of, is not a bad one to follow.

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Not getting into it again, but you still have to defeat <x> number for them. There's no difference between beating 1000 monkies on Monkey Island or defeating 1000 monkies in a MA map, you've still beaten 1000 monkies.

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Except that 1000 of them are "real" monkies, and 1000 of them are "virtual" monkeys. It makes no difference to the player, it's true, but a badge is given to a character for actually doing something. If they only did it online, they didn't really do it.*,**


* = You can insert some joke about Pocket D exploits and RL virginity here if you like.


** = If a mission is promoted to full reward status and doesn't provide badge progress for kills, I'd be a little surprised. If a mission is so well-received that it makes it into canon and doesn't provide badge progress for kills, I'd be shocked, since canon-level promotion implies that it's now part of the game world's "objective" reality.

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*wonders how many more free trailers for the game she has to make to qualify for permanent closed beta access*

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i wonder what makes you think you are entitled to something more than the rest of the playerbase

your videos are pretty good, but they do little to show the features of the new issues in action

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Until you do something better, kindly stuff it.

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Thank you. My first inclination in responding was to use a variant on "stuff" for my response to that comment, only with, you know, some of the letters rearranged. And the redundancy trimmed.

D_R has been nothing but awesome for this game. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

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[ QUOTE ][*] Failing a mission that is the final (or only) mission of a story arc, task force, strike force or trial may result in reduced rewards. Failing tasks that have 2 or less missions will award 0 merits. Failing tasks that have 3-4 missions will award 50% merits. Failing a task that has 5 or more missions will result in normal merits.[/LIST]
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Theres one high level Hero side arc where they give you 5 minutes to disarm or destroy 3 or 4 items. Is that gonna lower the number of merits in in arc for giving a virtually impossible task?

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Is the task the last mission in the arc?
Does the arc have 5 or more missions?

(Hint: No, and yes. Draw your own conclusions based on that )

Arc name: Politics, Cimerora Style
Contact Sister Airlia
Merits Awarded 3 (+0)

Because a 3 merit award is just a joke for this arc, I have to assume they flat-out don't have data to modify it since it only went in with I13.

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Mako's Creek?!



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James Van Der Beek's little rowboat gets upended during the opening credits ... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The creek turns red, while Paula Cole continues to sing.

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/em programs TiVo

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As far as side-switching goes, this is what I got out of Posi's post as well.

If anything, I'd give it LESS of a chance of happening now, since they gave the badge back, but I don't think the chance of it happening has changed at all.

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I didn't see anything in his post that confirmed that the reason for the badge being removed was because of side-switching. Rather, the badge existed in the first place because of alternate naming for potential side-switching. The rationale for its removal does not seem predicated on side-switching - nowhere did he say, "So that we could have side-switching, we took it out." Absent that, your conclusion above doesn't make much sense.

QR

Thank you, Posi.

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They are not, however, in the mission complete pool or available from merits.

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You can earn them from merits, I recieved a Apoc Chance for dmg (lethal IIRC) from the 46-50 Random Trial Reward.

Nothing like a cool 100mil to beef up my NW

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Everything about that is off-base.

You can't get it from merits at all.

It's not lethal damage.

No one would have bought the chance for damage from you for 100M.

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I was fully going to call him on the last one as well. Then I went and looked at Apocalypse prices on the BM, and when I looked, a crafted version of that proc actually had gone for 100M+.

I was stunned by the prices realized on that set in the wake of 2xp weekend. Stunned.

Other than that, yeah - agreed entirely.

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silence on the crafting issue that was offered as a "benefit" of the base salvage debacle and then having said benefit yanked out from under us with not a word or warning plain sucks. And we are Still waiting on a actual answer as to why this change occurred and not the mythical "Some people were too stupid to understand base vs. invention slavage" popup screen thingy issues.


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No...see, "waiting" implies that you cease your actions and allow what you're waiting for to happen (a response).

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The word "waiting" implies no such thing. "Waiting" simply means that the incident you are interested in still has not occurred, but that you are anticipating that it will. What you're looking for to make your somewhat long-winded point is the adverb "patiently".

If you want to criticize people for not being patient, go right ahead. I won't disagree with that, because I myself can sense my patience wearing thin. But don't tell people who are upset that they're not waiting for something that hasn't happened, when by definition, because it hasn't happened, they're doing exactly that.

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That does not jive. The other half of the badge is called VILLAIN. Thus the phrase "Once you weere considered a villian..."

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I view that as completely irrelevant. We're not talking about the other half of the badge. We're talking about Reformed. You are trying to argue something different than what you were arguing before. Such shifting of goalposts may work in high school debates, but in the real world people call you on it.

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heres the text from the Arc

http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Gaussian

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So the parts where things are "about to get much worse between your organizations" and you were "confronted by Longbow" don't reasonably lead you to conclude that Longbow thought you were on the wrong side? If you're on the wrong side from a hero's perspective, aren't you being considered a villain, and don't Longbow consider themselves heroes?

If you refuse to consider it from Longbow's perspective - and it's defeating THEM that gets the badge - then there's no useful dialogue to be had.

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Can you in a weird way make it look like it fits if you ignore the villain side of the badge, and ignore the title itself, and then squint real hard.

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You go ahead with your making up explanations out of whole cloth and then accuse me of doing something wrong by doing the same. See how far that gets you.