Geek_Boy

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The RPers are still giddy about it, I have seen an increasing number of others that say "I dont do MA"

If posi doesnt want the filthy farmers and people that play to advance and improve their characters in his little baby, he has done a pretty good job of it. I know I dont want to be involved in any way in someones rp fantasies.

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/this

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You guys are playing the wroooooooong arcs. Or more correctly, you're not playing the right ones.

It cracks me up when people complain about seeing fewer players than when it was first launched.

HAY GESS WUT!! THEY REACTIVATED EVERY ACCOUNT EVER FOR A WEEK THERE WHEN FARMING WAS AT IT'S PEAK!

So those people you saw who seemed to farm for about a week and were never seen again? Yeah, it's because they weren't paying customers to begin with. The patch didn't magically boot them all. It was the free week ending that booted them all.

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I'm not trying to make the argument that MA is the best way to make money in the game, here.


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I made 40 million off selling bronze level 35-39 rolls (70 tickets each) from running just a few MA arcs. Might not be the best but it's certainly not the worst. Just sayin.

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No kidding. I think people are discounting how much money you can save using the MA tickets. I haven't paid out of pocket for an uncommon or rare piece of salvage for a recipe I want to make in weeks. So for 550 tickets I can save 500,000 to over 1,000,000 Infamy and that just doesn't get old.

I've gotten my Dark/Shield Brute from around 35 to 47 since MA came out and he's up to around 35% melee defense from IO bonuses. He's played MA almost exclusively (I did each of the Mayhems, Westin Phipps, and am finishing up my Patron Arc) since it released and he's paid for almost everything himself. Now, I was doing better when the farming was going on and the recipes I wanted were dirt cheap, but I'm still doing pretty damn well buying a recipe every so often and paying literally nothing for the salvage to make it.

And Captain Amazing (or whatever it was), don't avoid content in the fear that a dev will smack you around for doing something that is perfectly legal. If Paragon Studios pulls a SWG on us, then it isn't time to go "Oh thank goodness I didn't play the game in the way I was told was perfectly legal and avoided getting banned unfairly." If that happens then it's time to cancel your subscription.

Yeah. It's hard enough to get your point across in 300 characters without having to use 12 different tags that only a small portion of players know anything about anyway.

I'm not touching that made up tag crap and will instead just hope my descriptions get the point across. I'm also hoping the I15 changes will help, too.

Anyone "afraid" of doing content is dumb.

Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

And also paranoid.

MA is doing just fine and any drop in use comes from the newness wearing off and people going back to using it for it's intended purpose instead of just farming 24/7. It's still busy all the time and I still get asked if I want to join random teams any time I'm sitting in one of the buildings.

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Somebody probably stayed up nights figuring out how to use the animation to get something for nothing.

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And then someone similar to Doc Wormwood cried foul, and thus chicken tug was ruined for all...

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Why couldn't he just let us tug our chickens in peace? Did it really affect him? What kind of person gets upset because someone else is tugging their chickens in their own home, not bothering anyone? Just because I might enjoy tugging chickens and you think I should play some other way doesn't mean you have the right to tell me how to amuse myself.

Thank God there's no monkey spanking emote.

Apparently the giant robot map only has one rescue point, which is aaaall the way at the top. So the hero who is supposed to help you with the AV in one of the arcs I'm working on (not the one in my sig I pimp constantly) will only spawn at the top while the boss will spawn randomly anywhere on the map regardless of where I tell him to go.

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It's funny. The only change so far that's cheesed me off is the removal of chicken tug.

Why? WHYYYYY??

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I [censored] you not: The animation is really long and mobs were getting "stuck" in it. So people were using it for NPC's as an exploit to keep them from being able to attack before a group could come in and wipe out a mob while they were still tugging on their chickens.

So to speak.

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I question the existence of one star "griefing." I've heard this argument before - that there are cadres of malcontents who patrol the internet deliberating downranking everything out of sadism - and it sounds ridiculous. And some of these countermeasures you're suggesting are insane... It's like you want to start a witch hunt over this stuff.


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Whether you believe it or not, it does happen. I've typed out a lot of proof before, but those who don't think it's happening just seem to want to think that those of us that have seen it with our own two eyes (including people saying "HAY I'M DOING THIS RITE NOW!!!") are believers in some giant conspiracy theory.

We're not saying aliens caused 9/11, we're showing you that an arc that hits page one that has never gotten anything but 4 or 5 star votes will suddenly get a dozen or so 1 or 0 star votes, fall to page eleventy billion, and then proceed to get 4's and 5's again. The only time it gets 1's and 0's is when it's on the front page. People are saying "HAY, WE VOTE !'a AND 0'S FOR THINGS ON THE FRONT PAGE." I don't know what else to tell you.

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RARRRGHBLURGLE!!

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As an OSU fan you make me proud to hate Michigan. I should save these posts as fodder for Hate Week when we beat your sad little Wolverines all over again.

Yes, everyone should check this one out!

I will try to make time to play it again this weekend. I really enjoyed it as it was, so if you've tweaked it that's even better.

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All in all i still firmly believe people get pissed about knives because they're almost absent blueside and only in the late late game redside so you're just not used to caltropland.

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Actualy, I think youv'e got that opposite. I don't remember any arcs with the redside, but encountered them blueside on my first 50 quite a bit. This taught me that I didn't want to fight them with all the other characters I took to 50, so I don't see them all that often period.

Of course, back then a mob of minions would drop so many caltrops that it would crash my poor client (I still had dialup at the time). Personally, I hate any and every enemy that applies slows since I love me some melee characters. Especially when playing a Brute and watching my Fury bar drop because I can't get away from the caltrops this dead group left to get to the next one fast enough.

Anything I can do to be sure more good arcs are published is just fine by me.

We've talked about this before, but I don't think your definition of Mary Sue matches up with mine and I don't entirely agree that you can't make an arc about a character or that you have any choice but to lead someone on rails in this game because it's not like it's multiple choice.

The big thing IMO is to be sure your player is the one doing things in the arc. Whether you're helping the NPC or just being pointed in the right direction, I think both make for valid stories.

If someone is having fun while they do your arc, then I say you've succeeded. If that's because you've made them laugh, shown them something they've never seen in-game before, or making them think, those are all valid.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing to create a character for an arc or make your own hero or villain a character within it, but just be aware that most stories like that floating around the MA are glorified self-insertion and you're likely to have people dismiss it out of hand. It may not be right, but the signal to noise ration makes it so that if they think for a moment that this is your character that you play, they assume it's going to be another lousy story from some roleplayer who is working out their Oedipal issues.

I also disagree that a mission that is impossible is bad out of hand (it was another poster and I'm too lazy to search back through the thread to find it). Someone obviously hasn't played @Muu's "Uncreation." That first mission, heck the whole arc, is a classic as far as I'm concerned.

A Knives-centric arc probably wouldn't even get a full play from me, but if they show up in a mission or two, that's no biggie. If it "feels" too hard, then set the map so that it's as easy as possible or add an ally with Kinetics to Speed Boost you out of all the caltrops or something.

Just bumping this to say that my arc was on the front page again this morning with 308 votes and five stars, so I'm going to track tickets, ratings, and comments based on the number of votes it had when I left for work. I'll try to have a little more concrete info for the one guy who thinks this isn't happening.

And nothing will make me happier than if a ton of people just play it and like it, so please, CoH players: Prove me wrong by playing my arc, rating it honestly, and giving me feedback (which is actually what a majority of the people have done - which is what got me all those wonderful tickets I've been buying my IO's with in the first place).

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*Is wondering if anyone else sees the 'new thing' that 1-star bandits will do, aka report all arcs as "farm maps" due to Posi's announcement*

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Since my arc just hit the front page again, I certainly hope that's what they start doing. At least then we can get a GM or customer service rep to see it obviously isn't a farm and make it immune instead of having a ton of crap ratings put on there for no reason.

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See the "Dev's Choice: Becoming the Chosen One" thread sticky'd at the top of the forum. There's no specific process, but there are things you can do to improve your chances.

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What he said. Following the advice in there is really kind of just good form anyway. I made a ton of changes to an arc I thought was already in good shape when I read that because it addressed a lot of things I hadn't thought about. Sure, they're mostly common sense, but still.

You're ridiculous. There. I said it.

Yeah, I think removing the possibility of zero starring arcs would go a long way towards ending these problems, since even a one star isn't nearly as devastating since you're getting something for their time. If they could also retroactively remove the zero stars arcs have already gotten, I think you'd be amazed how many arcs "magically" become five star again.

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with an estimated 150,000 subscribers, if even say, 0.05% of them were griefers, that's still 75 of them, more than enough to wreck any arc's rating given that a vote of 1 requires 9 5-stars to counteract, and a 0 requires 11.

It only requires 10 griefers 0-voting an arc to require 110 5-star votes to bring it back to 5 stars, which is vastly more votes than most arcs ever see, and thanks to being pounded instantly back into obscurity the moment they see any sort of actual chance at exposure, the more than many will likely ever see without a large network of allies spreading word of mouth, and aggressive promotion. The way HoF works, each 0 vote effectively cancels out the votes of a dozen other people, giving anyone who wants to sabotage an arc's voting absolutely tremendous power to do so, should they be so inclined.

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I was doing the math for an epic post and then you made it simple. Yeah.

Thank you. Like I said, how many duck-like characteristics does it have to have before it's a duck?

Sorry to drag you in, Muu. I know your 0 and 1 stars have been for other reasons too ("this isn't funny I want serious arcs rarrr my games are my life" and such).

If you watch your tickets really closely, that can help too. Or at least it can help you see how many people have rated you what.

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no

I don't see why people think we need proof when groups are admitting to doing it, but let me put it as bluntly as possible.

My arc is on the first page with 200+ votes and the tickets are coming in at a rate that shows every. single. vote. is 4 or 5 star (mostly 5, in fact). It is a mathematical certainty based on tickets divided by votes. Suddenly, I'm at 4 stars with just a few votes. Every one of them would have had to have been 0 stars because I got zero tickets for them. No comments saying "I don't like this." No "ur arc sukks." No nothin'. Having never received a zero star before it was the highest rated arc that wasn't dev choice on the front page (and trust me, just like every other arc that's been there, it didn't last long), it suddenly dropped due to a handful of votes.

These votes were all done within maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

Ever single person I know who has had their arc on the front page in that same position has had the exact same thing happen. You're clipping along with an occasional 3 star based on dividing tickets earned by new votes when WAMMO you've suddenly got 5-10 0 star votes in rapid succession.

Is there a group that waits for your arc to be the first one under the dev choices to play it that hates everything? Do they only play in largish teams that vote in blocks together? Does their team leader say "I didn't like this, so vote one or I'll kick you from the team" or something?

It's happened to Muu's Footsteps Initiative, for instance. We talk all the time. We're buds or whatever. His arc was doing great on the way to being Hall of Fame and then suddenly there were a slew of 1 and 0 star votes, all at the same time. He had enough ratings to recover from it and eventually it got there, only to get a block of 1 and 0 star votes, all at the same time. It keeps happening over and over again for him because people vote it 4 or 5 because they enjoy it and then as soon as it hits 5 stars again it gets a slew of ones and zeroes.

Coincidence is one thing, but c'mon. When it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, smells like a duck, and openly says, "Hey, I'm a duck," it's probably a duck.

I don't think anyone's out to get me or anything. Hell, since I dropped from the first page I'm back to getting 4 and 5 star ratings almost exclusively again. The tickets I get for free from publishing a decent arc mean more to me than the rating anyway, so that's fine with me. I mean, I wish more people were playing it since that means mroe tickets, but whatever.

It isn't even a large number of people doing it. One zero star vote takes multiple fives to make up for. It only takes a small group of people saying "Hey, my bud's Naruto fanfic is on the last page and these meanies are getting all the votes. I'm going to vote them down to get his arc closer to the front," to mess the whole thing up.

The best part? All of the arcs I know of that have had this happen only get ones or zeroes when they have five stars and are on the front page. Since I dropped off the front page I've gotten all fours and fives again (maybe a three or two). Whenever Footsteps falls off from Hall of Fame status, he starts rolling in tickets again because it isn't on the front page, so people aren't voting it down just because.

If I was getting constant feedback saying people hated my arc and were rating it down because of that, then I'd just think they have a different idea of fun than I do and call it a day. The fact is, even the "negative" feedback I've gotten has come along with at worst a three star rating. Even then, it usually came down to me thinking my arc is clever and insanely fun and them wishing it gave more XP. Since I don't care about the XP, we just don't see eye to eye. And that's just fine.

Nobody has a right to complain if people are rating them down because they don't like it, but that isn't the only factor at work here. Thinking it is simply means you're ignoring the experiences of those with highly rated arcs and the statements of those who openly admit to the behavior.

What's your highest rated arc? You ever been on the first page with hundreds of votes? Know anyone who has? If not, then you have no idea what you're talking about. When you have x number of plays and y number of tickets, it isn't hard to figure out the average rating. When "someone voted on arcname" and you get no tickets, it isn't hard to figure out what's going on. When groups are openly admitting to 1 or 0 starring arcs just to get them off the front page without ever having played them, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

My guess is that you don't have anything with more than a few dozen votes, so you haven't seen it. But hey, since I didn't write everything down as I saw it happening with my own arc (just did the math in my head, said wtf and went on my way since there's nothing I can do about it) I guess it's just maaaaaaagic.