Egos_Shadow

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I got nothing about ally levels, though.

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In normal missions, aren't ally characters basically just your level? So I don't think you can put in a level inappropriate ally in a mission; they'd be scaled to the combat level of the player doing the mission, adjusted for difficulty.

Putting in a level 50 ally in a level meh mission seems such an obvious flaw I can't imagine they'd let it work.

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<...> that throws the doors wide open for griefing. Posi said:

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I'm willing to listen to ideas on how truly horrible content can get rated without having to endure all of it.


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This is my response, a seperate, small system for the truly horrible content, while the real ratings are reserved for people that actually play through content, thus reducing the potential for griefing. The horrible content wont get star rated (probably) but anyone that sees something rated horrible with no star rating would avoid it.

This second rating system is not based on opinion at all but whether or not something is playable, or just so downright awful it shouldn't be played, the star rating is where player's individual opinions come in - when something is NOT so bad that you playing through it is doable.

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A counter for "people who bailed without completing this arc" might actually be easier to grief than keeping an eye out for 1-star bandits. I mean, what if you keep getting interrupted by other stuff and bail out of MA arcs regularly to go play with your SG, run task forces, etc (MA arcs apparently work like Oro arcs and TFs as opposed to Story Arcs). How do you differentiate between someone who's easily distracted and someone who's griefing? Placing a lot of 1-star ratings takes deliberate action after all, being distracted by shiny things does not.

Now you're introducing essentially a "no star rating" and extra complexity beyond the normal rating system. You do, after all, want to be able to distinguish between people who bailed the arc to go do something else and people who quit because it was awful. How do you phrase the "give it a no star or not" question in a way that makes sense to the average user? People have trouble with a 1-5 scale, and we're now going to add something else?

The problem with these "no star" rating schemes is that they add more complexity without necessarily giving a corresponding benefit. Allowing people to give normal ratings when bailing out of an arc isn't perfect but it's good enough, particularly if you don't think anything which is touched by users can ever be truly perfect.

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I don't desire it. I think comments should only be seen by the mission author. When you go to write a comment, who is the target audience? The author, or other players? I'd much rather see people giving feedback to the author than to the rest of the audience.

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I can go either way for this. But a button allowing the player to e-mail the author with comments might be a nice thing.

On a related note -- we don't yet know if our names are going to be attached to our arcs, and if so, which name. (Character who entered the information, global name, forum account, name on our credit card... ) I sort of hope global names aren't public on the system, or at least can be opted out, but it's a wait-and-see kind of thing.

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I assume that they'd use your @Handle if they were going to attach any name to it. It's not like those are super secret any more, what with the ability to pop the global name of any random person you pass on Paragon's streets these days.

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However, if you drop midway through the first mission of a four mission arc, rendering your judgment based on that first mission... that doesn't change the fact that you haven't seen any of missions 2, 3 and 4.

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What if the rating system rated by mission, with the combined mission total constituting the arc rating?

Or perhaps the arc rating would only be available to those who finished the arc; if players didn't finish the arc, they could only leave ratings for the mission they started/played?

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The problem with this is... when I'm looking for an arc to play, what the heck do I care that the 3rd mission is a 5-star awestravaganza and the others are merely 3-star. That's too much information for the end user. And if you're just averaging it out, how is that different from weighting the rating by the number of missions completed?

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For the record, my philosophy's that every arc is a three until proven otherwise. Not horrid, not great. I'd hate to think I had to go into every arc expecting the worst thing on City of Heroes.

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Yeah, when I think of the normal game missions I've played... 3 for me is "average normal game arc". 5 is something truly exceptional like Viridian. 1 is something truly terrible, either not-even-bothering-to-phone-it-in bad or deliberately obnoxious. You should have to work for a 5... or a 1.

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My final concern, as others have expressed, is the ratings system and the likelihood it will become part of the metagame. It seems to me the big SGs will dominate MA by getting their members to vote for SG-created content. It will become a popularity contest, basically, and not really a means of measuring the value of player-created content.

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Well, as long as it's rated fairly, I don't see that being a problem. Of course, it probably won't be - the temptation would be too great for a large guild to farm their own arcs. And getting a leg up in the ratings by having fifty or so motivated people grind your arc to completion might be seen as kind of a bonus to joining a large guild.

Might we in future see a 'Mission Writers Guild' SG whose sole purpose is to play through and critique each others' missions to combat this? Who knows.

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The architect has good potential please see to it that its not used to make farming missions by putting some sort of limit on resetting of architect missions. Because I have a feeling that its going to be misused and exploited in this fashion.

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People reset missions because once a normal contact mission is completed, you can never get it again. With the MA, there's no reason not to complete the missions. Farm your way through the arc and then start it all over again, if farming is what you want to do. Never worry about "don't click that glowy" again!

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6. How are you dealing with inappropriate content?
We’ve worked very closely with our customer service department to develop systems for this. In the end, we implemented a number of different systems. We have language filters that check for bad words and won’t let you publish them until you remove them. We’re also allowing players to flag content for inappropriateness. We also track all users and flags for any potential vote griefing.

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how can you grief a vote?

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If there's Drama between SGs, they could all rate each others' missions low, or spam "omg this is inappropriate" flagging.

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1) "My origin, aren't I so awesome" architect missions will be the most annoying new content since "We're Vanguard, aren't we so awesome."

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Well, to be fair, I'd take someone's Mary Sue arc over a lot of the old blue side content. The fact that it's a very ego-focused story doesn't change the fact that it's at least a story.

But I think that we're going to see a lot of these, yes.

Interesting writeup.

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It would also be kind of cool if the Devs could award "bonus slots" to designers that achieve certain thresholds of popular arc, most run, selected for Dev notice, etc. If such developers are really that good at producing arcs the rest of the player base likes to see, why not give them a bit of a larger stage to dispay their talents?

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I definitely think that people who have arcs "blessed" should be encouraged to produce more arcs, even though they might still be restricted to having only 3 "published but unblessed" arcs at a time.

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If the developers feel that even 5 levels is too much of disparity in level then at the very least allow players of the same level to enter into a new pact.

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I have to agree; I'd get a lot more use out of this feature were it the case. And if nothing else, it would help out those people who had their pact broken by bugs.

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Yes, I posted in there regarding why I think the STF is worth so much more than the RSF, but my post was deleted. I assumed they didn't want any commentary regarding the specific changed. I didn't think anything in my post was particularly offensive.

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You were probably in the reply chain of posts after one of the frothing ranters. When a ranter gets modsmacked, the whole chain of replies after them vanishes into the bit bucket.

If you want to be sure of your reply staying (or sure that you, specifically, were modsmacked) always reply to the first post.

"You must cut down the greatest heroes on your server... wiiiiiiith... a herring!"

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Thus, clearly, the best way to get a purple drop is for people to demand screenshots of your activities.

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That must be why I've never gotten one. I need to start making outrageous claims so people will demand proof.

Ok you know how some restaurants have those pairs of swinging doors leading into the kitchen, one marked "Out" and the other marked "In"? Well...

<.<

>.>

this one time....I went out the "In" door.

I know I'm so bad.

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Screenshots or it didn't happen.

Thanks for the explanation.

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And it's not just dialog trees that are going to look at badges, and it’s not just crafting badges that will be looked at, so you guys can speculate away!

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This could be nice if it adds different dialog options to enemies (end of mission bosses, AVs, etc) depending on which badges a character has. "You may have defeated me last time <player>, but it is I who shall emerge victorious today!" "You have proven to be a thorn in my side, today is the day Crey rids the world of <player>!" Could be interesting if SG Badges are also looked at, throwing up your SG's name in the dialog boxes and encounters (though I don't know of many SG Badges that have enough meaning to affect anything...unless they add in SG defeat Badges...).

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Personally I think clearing one of those "kill 200 bosses" badges should net you at least the occasional "oh <bleep>, it's Character!" from that faction.

Or maybe just a "No... no!! I'll give you a badge if you go away!"

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Then again, on Christmas Eve I got an Armageddon proc and a Hecatomb proc less than an hour apart, so your mileage may vary.

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I can actually attest to this as a documented pattern in the RNG.

Purples come in bunches.

More often than not, while solo farming, I get two purples in a run than none.

Also, in my vg, i used to listen for people getting purples before starting solo farms, and more often than not, i got a purple drop or two after hearing someone say they got one.

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I remember running missions right when purple recipes got introduced, and getting a purple drop off of something that popular logic said shouldn't drop a purple (a L49 mob maybe? I don't really remember). A doubter requested a screenshot, so I duly started another mission with the same parameters, the first mob in which duly dropped a purple for me to document.

Thus, clearly, the best way to get a purple drop is for people to demand screenshots of your activities.

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Solution? Bring back the random rolls for all TFs/SFs and trials. Have merits be an OPTIONAL reward instead of the random.
That will make merits much more attractive for longer TFs, but the faster ones will now generate random rolls and help to supply the market.
Let story arcs continue to earn merits (although, please, give all teammates merits on arc completion).

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This would restore the flow of random recipes to the market while still allowing people to save for the stuff they want (if they choose) and not have to run TFs to do so.

Of course, this only works if you assume that the goal of the merit change is to have lots of recipes on the market.....

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Nothing says "fun" like "SVN branches".

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SVN branches are lots of fun. It's merging them back together afterwards that isn't...

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Although it is too bad that they didn't give the option for all power pools. It would have been nice to get tough/weave without the throw away boxing/kick.

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They've got to save something for the 72 month...

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Cause I'm confused as since I13 hit I have a harder time finding teams and unless I spend huge hours running TF's I can't get the drops that I want.

In effect most of our SG has lost interest in the game!

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You can't find a team even among your SG? Burnout happens, but I don't see the causality between this and the introduction of merits.

Traditional mission-based PL is even less efficient in terms of getting what you want than before. You'll get to 50 all right, but with no merits.

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Who told you that?

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It came up in the forums, and someone asserted they had tested it. Since it is an extraordinary claim, I present it as a rumor; it's been on my list to test, but I've barely logged on for a month, so I haven't yet.

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It'd be easy enough to test on a Widow, SR scrapper, or something with a similar high number of defense powers. At worst, all it costs you is the need to spend a respec.

So who's going to give me 6 LotG's to test this theory with?

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6 LotGs would hit the cap. You need either 5 LotGs and one other 7.5% recharge or 5 other 7.5% recharges and one LotG 7.5% recharge to test it.

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Ah! I see. There's got to be a Fire/Psi dominator or similar build out there who can verify this. CJ/Maneuvers/Vengeance for 3 LotG's, 1 Basilisk and two Kinetic Combat sets for a trio of normal 7.5%...

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Clearly, the Merit Vendor is not producing a sufficient supply of these new recipes.

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The "problem" is that the newly created difficulty in getting the right sets may be "working as intended".

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Are you saying it's balance that Shield Breaker's Chance for Damage is so much more rare than Lady Grey's? Does this balance carry thru to the effects of that IO? Does the less abundant, more expensive one do more damage?

Why design something no one can get? Didn't they just gut the entire long-term aspects of base building in order to make everything easily accessible??

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I'm just saying that Pool C recipe availability may have been higher than intended. Wether that makes sense or not is beside the point; there are a lot of things in this game that don't necessarily make sense. The fact that you may now have to do dozens of regular length TFs to get your shinies may be an intended 'feature'.

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Who told you that?

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It came up in the forums, and someone asserted they had tested it. Since it is an extraordinary claim, I present it as a rumor; it's been on my list to test, but I've barely logged on for a month, so I haven't yet.

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It'd be easy enough to test on a Widow, SR scrapper, or something with a similar high number of defense powers. At worst, all it costs you is the need to spend a respec.

So who's going to give me 6 LotG's to test this theory with?