HighTreason

First, I want to make sure it's clear that I do not support the way the AE is right now at all. I think it's ridiculous that in the arc I just finished today, 2 of the 4 missions give almost NO rewards. Not just reduced rewards, but darn near nothing at all! The enemies I made are not stupidly easy either. They all have decent melee and ranged attacks as well as some of them having things like sleeps, holds, and slows. This situation is just plain dumb.

What is just as dumb, however, is punishing the victims with low ratings for their arcs. Sure, if I had used the standard enemies, it would give standard rewards. I also would not have been able to make that arc because none of the standard enemies fit the plot. Is Shubbie intending to stifle creativity? Because if he is not, then he is being dishonest with himself about what the results of his actions are.

In you survey analogy, Flea, I'll bet most of the people who answered that way based on that criteria did so because they had never really stopped to think about their answer. People generally don't take random surveys that seriously, just as I'm sure many players of CoH don't take rating arcs that seriously. People can and will make mistakes in judgement when they have not taken everything into consideration and judge on emotion rather than rational thought.

Shubbie, however, is an exception. Judging by the fact that he keeps coming back here and defending his actions, it would seem that he has fully thought them out and still seems to believe that his behavior is acceptable. Either that or he just likes arguing on Internet forums so purposely defends indefensible positions. This makes him either a zealot or a troll, both of whom are useless to argue with, so I won't bother.

Allow me to give a relevant real-world example to illustrate my point.

In Colorado, about three years ago or so, they outlawed smoking in most indoor places. That included most bars and restaurants, but bars that had built their business specifically around smoking and made a significant amount of their money through the sale of tobacco (ie. cigar bars) were exempted.

Were I to have the opportunity to rate Colorado bars before this law went into effect, I would have taken away significant points for not allowing smoking. I don't really see the point of going to a bar if you can't smoke there. I realize a lot of people have a different opinion and that factor would either not effect or even raise their ratings for that bar. All that is perfectly well and good.

After the law went into effect, it would be stupid of me to take that into consideration in my ratings any more. It's not the bars' choice and therefore is not an appropriate factor to consider when rating them. The bars were already hurting from lack of business due to the law. The cigar bars were already taking the business of the people who hadn't just stopped using bars altogether. What would be the point of me going around kicking these bar owners while they were down by telling everybody that they suck for not allowing smoking? That would be idiotic.

What I did do is to stop patronizing those bars because I no longer enjoyed being there. When I did go out, I went to the "cigar bars" that were exempt even though I didn't enjoy them as much. I eventually even left the state (the whole country actually) for a place with more freedom afforded to its citizens. Those options are perfectly reasonable.

For those analogy impaired folks that I know lurk around these boards, let me spell it out for you: allowing smoking=giving good experience, bars=arcs, the ban=the exp nerf, the state/country = the game.

The same logic applies.

Shubbie, I can't imagine that even you completely believe what you are saying. You are using the fact that "there is no set standard for how to judge stories" to justify judging stories in an obviously absurd way.

It should be clear even with a lack of firm standards that some criteria do not count as acceptable ways to judge arcs. One example would be judging an arc based on how cool you think the Author's name is. Another would be judging an arc based on game mechanics the author has no control over.

If you actually believed your own line, you would have to maintain that it would be acceptable to knock stars because your stalker couldn't use a shield.

Rating arcs based on things the author has no control over is rude and inappropriate AT BEST. Personally, I consider it just plain griefing and were I a dev, would consider it a punishable offense.

I use the AE all the time, every time I log in. I freely admit that I am the exact opposite of a PL'er though. I have had an account for almost three years and don't have a single level 50 character. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I consider making and playing new characters to be one of the most fun parts of the game. To be honest, I don't understand PL'ers at all. Once you get to level 50, there is no pot of gold or 100 virgins there. Playing the game should be fun, not a race to the top.

I do think that there is a better way to handle AE, though. I know it would be a lot of work with all the different combinations available, but I do think there could be an algorithm written to figure out proper experience based on the powers chosen rather than cutting it across the board. I don't really have access to the data, but somebody at Paragon Studios probably has a pretty good idea what the risk vs. reward ratio should be, how much damage vs. resistance a bad guy should have for the amount of XP he gives, what the ratios of minions, lieutenants, and bosses should be in a mission etc. All they have to do is enforce it in code. Allow all boss missions, but cut down on the experience gotten from bosses in those missions to equal exactly what one would have gotten from a mission that was not all bosses. That takes away the incentive to make silly and uninteresting farm missions, but still allows options for people who are doing things like that for story purposes.

The first thing they would need to do is come up with categories for different attributes of powers (based on the type of damage the power does, its secondary effects, etc). Then they should come up with experience ratings for each of the powers for each of these categories. Then you calculate the experience based on the powers chosen and the values given in each of these categories. Higher values from the same category would trump each other. Values from different categories would be additive.

For example, If Baddy McBad has Power A and Power B and Power A has a smashing damage modifier of 5 and power B has a smashing damage modifier of 8, the value for Mr. McBad would be 8. If Power A has a smashing damage modifier of 5 and Power B has a fire damage modifier of 8, his value would be 13. This gives more experience for diversified bad guys and cuts out the possibility of making bad guys who are weak to your own strengths. If the bad guy spawns in a group with others, the calculation is done on the group rather than the individual. Some final calculation would be done with the resulting numbers to bring the experience in line with the experience expected from the challenge represented by them.

This would make it entirely possible to make an AE arc that gave experience on par with the rest of the game as long as you took the time to make sure you arc was actually as challenging as the rest of the game. It would completely eliminate the ability to make exploitative farms.

It would, however, retain the ability to make arcs that gave far less experience, and people who are just trying to make a good story and don't care about the experience given can still make them. It should give at least some warning to the developer that their arc gives less experience than is standard in the game. It should also give a similar warning in the description and an ability to filter those arcs out in search. This would eliminate people docking story-tellers two stars for 'low rewards' like some idiot above says he does.

I realize this is not as easy as the basic sketch in this post, but putting the time into doing, would really make AE one of the draws of the game as it should be. It is really an amazingly cool feature.

I would just like to point out that one of the main reasons I got into this game as much as I did when I had a trial account years ago is the super group I was in. It was actually a very poorly run super group all things considered and it didn't last long but I found it very fun for the period of time that my trial lasted and I signed up for the game to keep that fun. If these restrictions would have been in place back then, of course, I probably would never have signed up and been a player for over two years now.

I wonder how many other people you have lost because of the enormous number of restrictions on trial accounts these days. I know of at least one personally. It was just too hard for me to convince her that the game got more fun once you were actually allowed to do stuff since she was constantly hitting brick walls whenever she tried to do anything and doesn't speak English that well anyway and didn't have access to the Korean channel to talk to people.

Are these restrictions really doing what you intend? I doubt it.

I've noticed the same thing. When I randomly kill a bunch of defenseless people just for the fun of it, they don't fall down and die like I would like them to. Maybe they die too quickly to realize they're dead?

[ QUOTE ]


Pretty neat erection!

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks, I've been working on it.

indeed, a lot of times (most of the time?) the objective text is orange, so that's what I've been using. Been using Sky Blue for mission titles. That's about all the formatting I do except for flavor formatting, though, so don't know the rest.

[ QUOTE ]
Qr - so just go make sure I get it - if I have a word document with my special characters on it, and I cut n paste from that into the MA text field, then leave that field alone, when I publish it'll work?

Eco

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, it will work. Just don't try to copy FROM the game. Copying to the game works fine.

Yes, I noticed that as well, Pachelbel. While working on my Korean arc, I'm using the CoHChat application (from www.cohinfo.com) to write in Korean since it doesn't work in-game in the MA or even in the chat boxes anymore for some reason. I have to make the keystrokes for the characters and it shows up in English characters until I hit ctrl-Enter to switch it. Because of this, I can't edit anything once it's switched, so I tried to copy it out, edit it and paste it back in, but, of course, that didn't work.

I highly doubt this bug is going to be a high priority to get fixed anytime soon, though...

[ QUOTE ]
However, since AV and Hero are on the exact same level, it's just a matter of semantics.


[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, it is a matter of semantics and that's exactly what people are talking about, the semantics. If it weren't for matters of semantics, we would all just make arcs called "asdf" with text that looked like "dkssudgktpdy sksms qkqhdPdy" and be done with it. Luckily most people care enough about semantics to put in a little more effort than that (Most people who aren't farmers, that is).

And I agree, we should be able to make them labeled as Heroes even though I can't imagine a time when it would be a good idea to us an AV ally, far be it from me to want to stop someone from doing it, and of course, as was mentioned, there are villainous arcs!

[ QUOTE ]

Making an arc based on your character instead of the good of the arc is a major cause of bad arcs.

[/ QUOTE ]

I do believe most professional writers would disagree with your views. A great story is made by great characters. Period. A good plot helps, but characters can compensate. The plot can never compensate for poorly developed characters.

Interestingly enough, I have developed a site very similar to what you want. Feel free to suggest more features as well to make the most useful that it can be to MA players.

It's at www.masearch.somee.com

Well, I just created an arc entirely in Korean and it worked in every field I put it in including names and descriptions of custom critters, patrol and boss dialog, navigation text, contact dialog, and even the name of the custom group and the file name! 아사! :-)

edit: but apparently it doesn't work on the boards...

Well, I don't know who sb is, but I can give it a stab. I know that you can do this in the chat window by copying and pasting from another application. You can try this. I don't know which characters would be accepted, though.

simply have the altar be a glowie instead of a destructible object. Attach a clue to it that says that upon examining the altar, some clue was found that indicates that it was already completed or spawns a boss who tells you that before trying to kill you.

You can do practically anything with creative use of flavor text. Just think about what you want to happen and then think about which goal is closest to that happening. Just because your contact tells you to destroy an object doesn't mean there actually has to be a destructible object in the mission.

I agree. Doing the same content over and over for each alt gets boring fast. That's why MA is so awesome. We never have to do the same content over again even once. Say goodbye to PL'ing in this game, I guess.

Huh?...

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Awesome! What arc? I'm a huge Doctor Who fan

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm a bigger one!



Eco.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm a bigger Doctor Who fan than you'll ever be!

If you want the boss to always run away successfully, set him as a captive. He won't even be attackable, and when you get to him, he'll run to the door. Sure, he didn't beat you up, but he got away, which is what you were trying to stop from happenening, so you failed.

I haven't been on test since it went to live. Can you give more information on what you mean by "standardization of the sets?" What does the character creation screen look like for custom critters now specifically? I'd log in and find out but I'm at work.

Thanks

One note on the humor bit is that so many people think they are funny but are so not. Humor is THE HARDEST genre to write by far, and people treat it as if it's as easy is making some silly-looking characters and writing some silly text with little or no thought toward plot, continuity, plausibility, or anything else that makes a good story a good story (humor or not).

It's much easier for a passable drama or action story to be written by a mediocre writer or at least one who puts in minimal effort. Humor takes much more finesse.

Well, basically the way it was for me before I14, most teams I ended up on just wanted to do radio mission after radio mission without interacting with each other or doing any story content. If I wanted to take part in a story, I usually had to play solo.

After I14 was released, most teams I end up on just want to do radio mission after radio mission without interacting with each other or doing any MA or story content. If I want to take part in a story or use the MA, I usually have to play solo.

Not much has changed...