Eva Destruction

The first few times I heard about kickball, I confused it with Repelball, which was two teams "kicking" stuff around a map.

Probably because the way they did it was easier to implement. It gives you a buff that goes away when its duration expires, like any other buff. Adding a buff that can be canceled in another way would have probably required more work.

I do think the duration should be extended, to where it's long enough that you can switch targets for your next attack and still get the added crit chance, but short enough that you can only apply it to the next attack. I'm thinking 2.75 seconds. Or they can shorten the animation of Eagle's Claw, I wouldn't complain if that happened either.

Yeah, I thought so too. I didn't team much in the beginning, so I mostly heard it in between missions.

Oh, well in that case....

Fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it.

So if someone plays your arc, do you get the tickets and comments or does the person who stole your global get them?

Edit: I was going to start the arc in your sig to see if you'd at least get the comments, but it won't start. It might have run afoul of the filter. There is another arc published under the global @TechbotALPHA (Crown of Iron, Heart of Steel Part1), so it worked for that one at least.

I actually have a as-of-yet unrealized character concept based on that idea; a foreign investigator of the occult who relocates to Paragon City because he's read enough Lovecraft to know that all the really weird stuff happens in New England.

No, it wouldn't work.

The history basically goes like this: When AE was first introduced, there were badges for achieving Hall of Fame, and badges for getting X number of plays. Members of a certain popular badge site which shall remain nameless decided to help each other get these badges. There was a tag they added to their arc descriptions, so they'd know which arcs they should be 5-starring. Some even went above and beyond, sending copy/paste "I 5-starred yours, please 5-star mine" messages to other authors. I speak from personal experience here; my husband and I got the exact same "feedback" on our arcs, from a well-known badge hunter.

Then the badges were removed. Problem solved.

Again, your new-guyness is showing. It's been done. Over and over again. Suggestions have been made. They've all been ignored by anyone who could actually do anything about it. Now, I understand where you're coming from, because I was once coming from the same place; maybe if I hit this wall with my head hard enough, it might break. But after having been at it for two years, and having made nary a crack, most of us have a splitting headache and are pretty much ready to say "you know what? We ain't breaking down this wall."

These are not the same people. Frankly, I don't want the people who love grinding some trial with a tissue paper-thin premise that they didn't even bother to read because oh look new shiny playing my arcs. They're not my target audience, and with the "I don't care about the story, I don't read it anyway" attitude a lot of them have I doubt they're any serious author's target audience. Now of course the "I want rewards" and the "I like the story" playstyles aren't mutually exclusive, as I was once wont to point out in obnoxiously colored capital letters, but you know what? I have a Scrapper I have leveled to 35 using exclusively AE. Said Scrapper has 500 million inf, as well as some rather expensive IOs slotted. All from bronze rolls. I hit the inf cap for the first time by running AE story arcs, and rolling the tickets. AE arcs give rewards. Maybe not the super shiny brand new reward du jour, but what does really, except for two trials with a tissue paper-thin premise?

I can't speak for everyone here, but what's my target audience, as far as the "casual player" goes? For one, the guy who's sick of all things Praetorian. Or the guy who is two bars from level 45, and doesn't want to open up another contact. Or the guy who hits level 30 for the 30th time and realizes he's done all the level 30-35 arcs 30 times and wants to play something new. Or the guy who wants something fun to do when he gets the day off work and none of his friends are online. Or the guy who is disappointed with the direction the dev-created arcs are taking and wants an alternative. These hypothetical guys, they're awesome, because they're not obsessed with getting the new shinies first, or being the most uber on their server, they just want to do something fun, and make some character progress while they're at it. These are they guys we need to "convert," and you do that by making it fun. As for the "I don't care what I do as long as I get the best rewards" guys? They. Want. Farms.

I feel the need to quote this more and more often these days, as lately it seems like the dev team doesn't really think things through as well as they should and needs players to tell them what should be obvious.

Yeah, but her missions suck, so I don't blame anyone for forgetting about her.

The Midnighters themselves do make a good enemy group for "you need info about some magic stuff but we don't want to send you to steal yet another book from the CoT" missions. Of course in heroic missions you'll have to rescue one of them from the CoT to get the info you need....

Ok....I don't generally judge people by their join date, but in this case it is relevant. It means that, unless this is a second account, you missed the ratings griefing and "5-star cartels" that directly resulted from badges being awarded for having other people positively rate your arc. Those badges were removed for a reason. They didn't incetivize creating quality content that people genuinely wanted to play, they incentivized convincing people to pretend they liked whatever crap you put up there. Did a few people actually make an effort to create something others would enjoy, listen to feedback, and make tweaks to try to actually earn those badges? Yes. Did other people make binds along the lines of "Great arc! 5 stars! Try out mine, ID #XXXXX, if you'd like to return the favor?" Hell yeah. Badgers want badges, and many of them don't care how they get them.

You can't. That's why those badges were removed.

Because "good players" don't need a reward for doing the right thing. If you tie a reward to it, you first need someone to do the wrong thing in order to reward someone for doing the right thing. There really aren't that many people creating copyright infringing arcs. What if I went through the system deliberately searching for them, and reported as many as I could find? Sucks to be the guy who wants his reward next week, I guess. But from the perspective of "we want this stuff reported so we can get rid of it," I did the devs a huge favor.

"We" can't. We've tried. If by "we" you mean "the devs," stop breaking things would be a good start. Put the fixes and changes in the patch notes would be another thing. Ongoing attention, even if it's something so minor as a dev's choice every few weeks, would be a third.

New architects would get more plays on new arcs if the system wasn't a bloated mess of farms, "tests," abandoned arcs and utter dross. If I'm looking for something to play, I can click "most recent" and "0 ratings" and start from the bottom and maybe, MAYBE around page 20 or so I'll find something that looks playable. Or I can come here and see that oh, Policewoman created a new arc, I'll try that one out. Or that Some Guy I've Never Heard Of created a new arc that he cares about enough try to stand out from the dross.

And as long as anyone with an active account can publish pretty much anything they want, that's not going to change. Farms are only the most controversial of the dross. There are a lot of arcs clogging up the search right now that are just simply crap.
If it's fun, they will come. There are arcs out there with plays in the double digits that give out downright crappy rewards. I've had over a hundred people tell me (indirectly, through ratings) they enjoyed having Malta and Arachnos thrown at them. Rewards aren't the be-all and end-all of gaming for some people.
The iTrials are already losing their shiny, and more and more people are getting off the hamster wheel. AE is awesome that way, you can work on your arc any time. If you play a few arcs and do some testing, you can work on them any where. Even while you're waiting for an iTrial.

First, we have to direct the Devs' attention to AE. The people who love the feature and want it to succeed can't bring the casual users over. They've tried.

The content filter has only been a minor problem up until a few weeks ago. I couldn't use "Gunslingers" in an arc title, which is somewhat /e headdesk worthy, but on the list of AE's problems, it's so far down there it barely registers. The tide of vitriol and rage is mostly, in my opinion, because this latest but is yet another straw on the proverbial pile, and it's taking way too long to be fixed for some people's tastes.

Emphatic NO. And again, NO. Mention "badge" and "incentive" in the same sentence and that changes to OH HELL NO. There should be no more badges tied to anything in the AE system. They will only be farmed. The devs tried to use badges to try to lure players into stuff they otherwise might not have wanted to do, and what happened? People who didn't want to do that stuff went out of their way to get their badges as fast as possible and never touched it again. NO BADGES.

Never mind that incentive isn't really necessary. Reporting a problematic arc is very very easy. We have plenty of conscientious players in this game, the trick is to get them using the system so those arcs will be found, because if they are found you can bet they will be reported.

And my last point: trademark infringement is way way down on the list of problems plaguing AE. I have played literally hundreds of arcs in the last two years, and scrolled past probably thousands that I wasn't interested in playing. I have run into a grand total of three arcs that I have felt the need to report for copyright infringement.

They already do. Or rather, did.

Yeah, I'm pretty much in agreement with this. Dev's Choice is far from a showcase of the "best of the best." Instead, it just ensures that a bunch of the devs' favorites from i14 closed Beta (all of which are horribly outdated and none of which can stand up to what players started to create once they figured out the system) and a few of Aeon's favorites (which, when you go through them with a critical eye...they all have a gimmick, don't they? And a lot of them are fluff. Well-written fluff with well-executed gimmicks in some cases, but it does go to show where Aeon's priorities lie, and only furthers the argument that no one dev should be exclusively picking dev's choices) get to hog the first few pages from now until the servers go down for the last time.

It will also eliminate 1-star griefing entirely.
"New shiny" arcs are often inferior to arcs that have sat around for a while and accumulated feedback.

Anything that lets the players choose which arcs will give out rewards will only result in more thinly veiled farms being made Hall of Fame/Player's Choice/whatever you want to call it. Reward incentives must be removed from the equation entirely. Tickets are enough, for anyone who knows what to do with them. Add anything more, and people will only farm more.

If you need more in-game rewards to create arcs you probably shouldn't be creating arcs.

But enough people have enough friends to get their crap arcs 5-starred. And everybody has the ability to create an "I 5-starred yours, now 5-star mine" bind.

Minimal rewards keep people (more or less) honest.

I think you keep missing the point here, with all your talk of rewards. Yes, some players are highly motivated by rewards. Some players are only motivated by rewards. THESE ARE NOT THE PLAYERS WE WANT IN AE. They will never use the AE for its intended purpose, because they don't care. They will only use it for maximum rewards.

Yes, it must be easy to find, play, and rate quality arcs, but anyone who doesn't already have a reason for doing so should just go back to farming iTrials, since that's ultimately what they really want to do.

TL;DR: Better rewards are not the solution to anything. Since most of your post focuses on improving rewards, I really have nothing more to respond to.

AE is only "content on demand" in the same sense that paper missions are "content on demand," that is, you don't have to go through a convoluted contact system to access them. Which still has nothing to do with the turnstile, since "on demand" would imply that if I wanted to do a Lambda at 10 am, then I'd be doing a Lambda by 10:15.

Yeah, and you know what? Many of us have tried to be productive. What do I get for it? No new Dev's Choices to play through for shards (I've suggested several), no addition of fairly simple mechanics that have been around in some cases since before I started playing (I've suggested many), bugs left alone for months (I've reported them), the playerbase at large still thinking the AE is good for nothing but farms (I've made posts in the general forums directing people to some resources that could help them find non-farms), and now two unplayable arcs. So....I can be productive and accomplish nothing, or spew bile and vitriol and accomplish....probably nothing but maybe, just maybe, there's a chance someone will read it and realize that us few remaining AE people are maybe getting just a little bit ticked off that they keep breaking our stuff.

4) Neuron. If you're going to accuse people of badmouthing the devs, at least be accurate.

If you want to discuss the entire game, go to the CoH/CoV general forum. This is the AE forum. The state of the rest of the game is irrelevant to this discussion.

WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH AE???? For that matter, what the hell does it have to do with content?

Money. Mouth. And so on and so forth. Six months is more than enough time to add a few critters, like high-level DE, Super Stunners, IDF, etc etc. Over a year without a DC that didn't suggest Aeon views the AE as his own private playground. When each update is notable for the lack of any AE support, and what changes are made don't even merit a freaking patch note (such as the fix to the back/middle blinky bug that had been around for so long authors were treating it as a feature) I tend to take a "I'll believe it when I see it" view.

a) calling people out is against forum rules

b) yes.

c) I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Half the people posting in this thread could have given the same answer. When the answer is immediately obvious to active members of the community, it just goes to show that the devs may very well be communicating with the wrong people. No, I don't mean the people who don't use AE because of its problems, real or perceived; I mean the people who "would use AE if I could do blank and blank and blank," with "blank" being some pie-in-the-sky request like using the base editor to create custom maps or replicating heavily scripted encounters such as the ones in trials. They'll never use AE, even if by some miracle of game development they got all those things, and even if they did use AE, I don't particularly want them to.

It would also open the door to a lot more noobs, who can't be removed through petitioning. Is that an elitist attitude? Hell yeah. But as far as elitist attitudes go, it's a pretty inclusive one, I think. For just $15 a month anyone can join the club. The point is they have committed themselves in some manner. They're not just signing up to screw around and lol in broadcast. When you pay money for something, most people feel compelled to get their money's worth, which in an MMO generally involves learning how to play and not making an *** of yourself. F2P is open to any idiot with an internet connection, there is no commitment, there is no need to make a good impression, and there is no accountability.

Which brings me to the other reason F2P wouldn't work out in this game, depending on how it's implemented. What are they going to gate behind microtransactions for F2P players? Is it content? How many SGs would invite an F2P player who can't go on task forces with them? Is it inventions or powers? I can see F2P players being excluded from teams for that reason. Levels? Again, you now have an SG member who can't join you on high-level content. Do you really want to exemp down all the time to play with this person? Cosmetic items such as costumes and power customization? That will eliminate a huge draw of this game, making F2P unappealing to people who want to create their own unique characters, resulting in an influx of F2Pers with names like xXxninjascrapperxXx, again enforcing the divide between F2Pers and paying subscribers.

This thread has shown that certain graphics are a common cause of problems. Those things should be fixed regardless. Such as Static Field for example; it's also used by an enemy critter, and you need to know where it is so you can avoid it. Or Barrier. Some people might rely on the visual cue to know they have had it cast on them. Or that stupid temp power on the LGTF; it's an auto power, and does it even do anything? Why does it need to flash? These powers have been mentioned as problematic multiple times, so they obviously affect quite a number of people. For everything else, there would be client-side effects suppression. Yes, this would put the onus on the people who have problems with the less common triggers. But as you said, they can't catch everything.

Yes, I have read, and I understand what is being said by the devs. I understand it as "Here's a post to shut you up, we might get around to you eventually. Or not. Whatever." I think it's telling that the first few posts in this thread were from a guy whose job it is to make sure we play nice on the forums, not from someone who is actually involved in fixing things.

Arguably?

Probably the next trial so we have something else to grind, lag in, crash out of. Or maybe the totally unnecessary super-sekrit participation system. Or another gimmicky arc with all the depth of a puddle for a level range that is already oversaturated with content.

I'm not going to waste any more of my bandwidth on those live chats, after that first one where they acknowledged the existence of the forum's most prolific spammer and actually chose "will we be able to make Incarnate trials in AE" as their AE question to answer.

I'm sorry....I laughed at this. Seriously, I almost spit coffee all over my keyboard. This might mark the first time in my life that I have ever been told I'm not loud enough.

Except the LotR character is named Aragorn. That aside, words contained in other words shouldn't be filtered at all. What's next, we can't say "assassin"?

Which goes back to my original point...how many Thor clones have you guys seen running around lately? And of those, how many had names that wouldn't have been caught by a name filter?

Totally serious. My seatbelt is securely fastened on the new shiny bandwagon, so if this results in the lack of supply of stuff I want, the only solution is to go to the forums and complain.

Remember kids, complaining on the forums will solve all your market woes.

This is stupid advice. I'm too busy doing level 50 stuff at 50. Other people should stop doing level 50 stuff at 50 and go generate some Circuit Boards for me to buy. Why should I stop doing level 50 stuff at 50 just because I want some lower level salvage?