ICF_Zombra

OK, check this out: you know how there's this perception on the forums that "many plays, 4 stars" are the best arcs to go for? That's there for a reason: because the player base is coming to understand what ratings really mean. The same thing will/would happen with other types of information that become available.

No one is going to look at a report that says that 1 person played through my arc and died a billion times and assume that that's it, that arc is definitely too hard. One person doing ANYTHING is not going to be good information for anyone - just like, right now, an arc with a single rating of 5 stars, or 0 stars, or any number of stars, is not considered highly reliable information.

If thirty people play through my arc and die a billion times each, that may give players some actual good information. More importantly, it will give me some good information and will inform my decisions to edit existing arcs and build better new ones.

More information = good.

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So really, showing the number of deaths is meaningless.

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Strongly disagree. I would love to see a faceplant ratio. Yes, outlying cases could skew that number (as with EVERY numerical tracking system), but I for one would find it highly informational.

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Honestly, who cares how many times people die?

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Me, for one.

It would be nice if we were allowed to publish anonymously instead of attaching our global name to our work.

Establishing greater minimum activity levels before allowing a rating is not an idea I support, for two reasons:
1) First impressions count, and it's no crime to rate something based on them. If the initial contact dialogue is offensive gibberish, I see no problem giving the arc a low rating without even setting foot in the mission. I agree that it's a little preemptive for my tastes, but my tastes are not and should not be the absolute law of how others may express their opinions.
2) The impact on ratings griefing would be minimal. If someone is going to go to the trouble of searching for your arcs, starting them, quitting them, and 0-starring them, they're going to go to the trouble of searching for your arcs, starting them, entering the mission, killing one mob, quitting them, and 0-starring them. No matter how much effort you force griefers to expend (5 minutes? 10 minutes? 3 mobs? 8 mobs?), they will still do it.

The combination of 1 & 2 is what kills the idea for me. The more effort you force from griefers to low-rate something, the more you kill the honest expression of people who honestly hate the beginning of an arc and want to rate it accordingly.

In your case, P_P, the best advice I can really give is to seriously consider changing your global name in-game. As long as your infamous forum identity has enemies willing to grief you in-game, anything with that name attached to it in-game is going to get griefed. No matter what new rating system the devs come up with. I know you don't want to, and I agree you shouldn't have to, but realistically it would be a very good way to protect yourself. Please think about it.

Again, a lot of this could be avoided if we could publish anonymously, and I'd think it would be an easy thing to add to MA. Maybe campaigning for that would help solve this specific problem.

I also wholly agree with the poster above who suggested that you report each and every instance of harassment.

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(I've started turning off XP every other mission, and deleting all drops from those, just so it won't look like I'm leveling too quickly.)

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Wow. You must be a super stud of power levelling if you really think that that's necessary.

Either that or you're overreacting.

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Farming is just one part of an overall strategy to get that build. Efficient use of the market to rob roleplayers is the other part.

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Right - because, just like farmers are always exploiters, roleplayers are always bad at math and economics, right?

That is a sad story, STL_Heroes. That type of behavior is one reason I dislike the farming culture. It is a good example of a definite negative impact that that culture has on other cultures in game.

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Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play. A short arc that takes 15 minutes is going to get eight times as much play as a long arc that takes 2 hours, and that's just with people playing arcs randomly.

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Wait, that makes no sense. If all arcs are selected at random, short arcs will get picked no more often than long arcs. The only difference is how quickly they get finished and another arc randomly chosen.

Assuming all arcs are played to completion, people who choose randomly will statistically participate in just as many short arcs as long ones.

Assume that there are two types of arcs - Type A (that take 15 minutes to complete) and Type B (that take 2 hours to complete). Let's further assume that there are an equal number of Type A and Type B arcs. Assume 80 people selecting them randomly.

After 15 minutes, 40 people will have played a Type A (to completion) and 40 will have played (some of) a Type B.

Then the 40 who finished a Type A will (statistically speaking) evenly split between selecting a Type A and selecting a Type B.

So at the end of 30 minutes, 60 people will have played a Type A and 60 will have played a Type B (4 who started 30 minutes ago, and 2 who started 15 minutes ago).

Then the 20 who just finished their Type As will again split evenly between picking a Type A and a Type B -

So after 45 minutes, we'll have 70 who've played a Type A and 70 who've played a Type B (40 who started 45 minutes ago, 20 who started 30 minutes ago, and 10 who started 15 minutes ago).

And so forth.

Sorry, couldn't just let that slip past my mathematical fascism

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Yes but my perspective has a 1000 years of jurisprudence and cultural norms behind it.

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You really don't. This isn't a court of law or anything like it. This is you paying to "go over to someone else's house" to play with their toys. Their rules, whether you agree with them or not. Specifics are not given to avoid exactly the kind of "rules lawyering" you're thriving on.

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and you would be wrong. Just like letting some one spend the night at your house. Once money is exchanged, different rules apply. You must go through eviction proceedings before you can remove them, if you have accepted their money.

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I work in a hotel. You couldn't be more wrong.

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Hotels have specific laws pertaining to them. Private homes do not. Try again.

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Do video games?

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maybe Ghost Widow and Wretch could still be alive and not deformed.

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Meat Wife and Happy Dude ?

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Hahahaha.

*scrambles to reserve those names*

Also: burning forest map.

I'm subscribing to all these threads in the hopes that I'll be notified when they reappear so I can fix my genius villain arc :'(

There are so many things I could say to that. Good luck.

Good luck, Tripp. I give up on this guy.

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As I said above I play this as a game to relax. I don't see myself as deputy dev. While I will certainly abide by rules and even the requests of the developers they actually need to make them. Asking me to guess and threatening me if I guess wrong is really not a relaxing scene for me.

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So your expectation is that they make a list of every possible behavior, and combination of behaviors, in the game, and every bug in the game, and every bug that may exist in the future, and color code them all for you? Highlighting the ones that are live right now that will break the game so exploiters can easily find them? Can you really not understand why that's not reasonable?

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That is just idiocy. I play this game to escape from responsibility not take on more.

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Cool. If you can't accept a reasonable amount of responsibility for your own actions, you have two options. Quit the game or play in terror. The devs aren't going to go over it pixel by pixel with you. Deal.

It makes sense that shorts get more playthroughs.

I do want people to play my arcs, but I am more concerned with making my arcs the best they can be. My stories are ambitious, so I end up using a lot of space.

I myself generally play shorter arcs when leading a team. I've got people waiting for me, I need to pick something fast, and if it turns out to be poorly written I don't want to have to quit and start over somewhere else.

I do find that longer arcs tend to be better vetted and better written. People with ambitious stories seem to be more perfectionistic about the final product.

So I tend to look for longer arcs when soloing. Unlike most people in the thread, I don't care about finishing in one sitting. Often, when I'm soloing a long arc, a friend will come online and we'll finish the arc together.

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I love you, TonalRegression. Great post.

So what you're saying is: the game is not perfect. The devs are fallible. Rewards are not absolutely balanced.

Guess what, that's what they're saying too!

So they are sharing some of their responsibility with you. You have the power to cheese an imperfect system, or not cheese it.

If you choose to cheese it, and they find out, they may punish you.

If you can't figure out what is cheesing and what isn't - if you absolutely refuse to take any responsibility here - if you can't look at examples from the past and try to figure out what kinds of behavior are and are not acceptable - then, in short, too bad.

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Code Freeze or not, they had the tools to say this should not be done.

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This one, specific thing? Sure. Every possible exploit in the game? No.

You're not going to get a complete rulebook of dos and don'ts, not least because the devs themselves don't know them all yet.

Not to mention the fact that the devs themselves have a stated policy of not telling the playerbase about known but unfixed exploits, for what should be obvious reasons - but in case it's not obvious, I'll spell it out: because many players would then immediately start using those exploits, creating tons more police work for the devs and GMs. Again: the devs are not omniscient, nor omnipresent, nor infallible. They can't snap their fingers and send all the bad guys to jail in the blink of an eye. They have to limit the damage of exploits with finite resources. Broadcasting existing exploits would be really stupid.

Positron has stated the rules as explicitly as circumstances allow: don't cheese the system. Again, if you refuse to accept that as not specific enough, too bad. Quit the game, or keep playing and live in TERROR.

Or you can do what reasonable people do, take a little responsibility, and play the game without looking for loopholes. Do that, and you'll be fine. I promise.

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2. Comm officers still can appear as a group, so that undercuts that putting them in one was an exploit. As to how much xp should they have ? Your guess is as good as anyone elses. There certainly is no rhyme or reason on how xp is assigned, take a look at sappers

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Let me explain something else that should be obvious. Just because it is POSSIBLE within the system to perform a certain kind of behavior, does not mean that that behavior is INTENDED. Comm Officers, for example, were STILL never intended to appear in a custom group with just them. You seem to be suggesting that if the devs didn't intend that, they would shut down MA entirely until they could redo the code to specifically forbid a single, specific mob type from appearing in a custom group by itself.

The thing is, even if that wasn't a ridiculous waste of their finite resources, they don't necessarily WANT to forbid all behavior that they didn't specifically intend - after all, MA is supposed to let us be creative, and even do things that they never thought of. So they simply slashed Comm xp so that it's no longer worth it to farm them. The important point is that we're not supposed to do things they never thought of that throw risk/reward out the window. Unintended behavior can't really be considered an 'exploit' if it isn't unreasonably profitable. Unintended behavior that is unreasonably profitable is an exploit.

There are two key words here - 'intention' and 'reasonable'. Everybody seems to want a hard list of exactly what behaviors are intended and what aren't, and what behaviors are reasonable and what aren't. They all want a new system that they can look for loopholes in so they can find the best new way to cheese that system and still be self-righteous about it. The correct answer is: quit trying to cheese the system. There are no hard and fast rules here on purpose because the devs aren't omniscient. The letter of the law, the only hard rule there is, is that the devs can do whatever they want. They can and will use their human judgment on a case by case basis and make human decisions about what behavior is or is not reasonable. Their intent is to slap people who purposely cheese the system for huge profits. They are asking that we as players use a little judgment ourselves, and they reserve the right to punish us if we go overboard. I don't see why so many find this so hard to understand.


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3. Freaks more dangerous than council ?? To who ?

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I don't know, man - I could be wrong. I always heard that Council were the whipping boys of radio missions because they are so damn easy, and Freaks scare me a little because of their hard hitting attacks, self heals, and mez powers. What do the Council have that are really dangerous? War Wolves?

First - that wasn't my definition - I was just pointing out that you were ignoring what you were quoting.

Second - Comm Officers, put by themselves in a custom group, absolutely were an exploit. They were never intended to appear in vast quantities with no actual fighting Rikti to help them survive - certainly not with the huge xp bonus they were assigned for a time.

Third - Freaks are worth more xp than Council because they are more dangerous than Council troops in their level range. They are intended to give rewards commensurate with the increased risk involved in fighting them.

I don't speak with red name authority, but these are pretty clear common sense answers.

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Well, the only definition that counts for exploits is what the devs consider it to be. They've stated that an exploit is when you use an unforeseen or unintended game mechanic to give yourself a statistical advantage that you wouldn't have in normal gameplay.

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so by that definition, freakshow are an exploit. they give better xp. An exploit is where you get a statistical advantage over other people playing the same content. If you kill that council boss and get 800xp and I find a way to get 1600xp.

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Right, because Freaks giving higher xp certainly wasn't intended.

Or wait, were you only using the parts of the definition that were convenient to your argument? My mistake, carry on.

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so..since Radios are one mob type..Radios are exploits? >_>

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There is a difference between "one mob type" and "one enemy group".

Fitness. I actually suggest Hurdle, Health, Stamina, which is what I have on my Tanker, Power Cat (along with CJ which Xanta already has). It feels very SOLID to not run too fast, but have those extremely powerful jumps. And Health and Stamina are very appropriate for her, too.

Weird post. Not quite sure what you're after here. Could respond less monosyllabically if your questions and concerns were a bit more monosyllabic.

I find it interesting, though, to see such a rambling and incoherent post on the subject of trying to make sense of the relationship between MA author and audience - because that relationship itself is so incoherent.

With the ability for people to walk straight into our work and be submerged in it, to directly experience it in its totality, it's natural for us as authors to expect some kind of reciprocal communication - to be able to read their minds as they wander around inside ours. But we have to remember that we are not the observer in this relationship - we are the observed. We want to know what the eye of the beholder sees, but we are not beholders ourselves; we are the beheld.

Some have made it their work to create meaningful responses to an author's work that can then be observed by that author (and others), in the form of reviews. But we cannot expect that every audience member will take this responsibility upon themselves, or even most. It is presumptuous to expect it from anyone.

I've had the exact same problem with people running my arcs.

Personally, I want my stuff to be razor sharp with perfect spelling and grammar. I would love getting this kind of feedback.

But I don't expect everyone to have the same standards.

When I do see a perfectionistic arc, I usually enjoy playing it and it makes me hold the author in higher esteem. I might go so far as to send corrections, but I don't think I've ever had to.

When I see an arc with sloppy spelling and grammar, I generally take it in stride. If the 'feel' of the arc is still fun, I still play it, enjoy it, and rate it highly. I accept the fact that some people aren't perfectly educated but still want to tell a good story.

I will rate a fun arc with bad spelling higher than a tedious arc with impeccable text.

Of course, an arc with perfect text will also be constructed with care in many other ways, so a well crafted arc description to me is an indicator of an arc worth trying. I tend to skim past arcs with poor English in the descriptions.

I know that some of my personal friends are grammar nazis and want their stuff to be perfect, too - so when going through their arcs I keep a Notepad window open to compile corrections, same as I do when testing my own arcs.

If anyone plays either of my published arcs (@Zombra), please feel free to do the same and PM me the results. A note saying "Your English usage is utterly above reproach" is acceptable as well