InfamousBrad

I can't point you to a quote, but I know the answer by experiment. "The Footsteps Initiative" was HoF and 5 stars when I saw it yesterday morning. A few minutes later, it was 4 stars, and not. An hour later, it was 5 stars, and was. Since then it hasn't been. The only way that makes sense, given that it already had 999+ ratings, was if the threshold is 4.5, and it was wobbling just barely back and forth across the round-off point.

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Brad, have you read some of the content in game?

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Yes, and I've been saying all week that I wish we could rate and feedback canonical missions the way we do AE missions. They should have them show up on the contacts. Because you're absolutely right. Other than Bonefire which I might 4-star, there isn't a single 5-star arc (by my standard) in the entire level 5-15 range of canonical missions. I've been begging them, in the name of customer retention, to go back and rewrite those contacts so that instead anybody who falls into that contact chain gets 10 levels of short stories with closure instead of 10 levels of single-mission stories and street sweeping intended to leave you cryptic clues towards the level 15+ content. That there's just plain so little content on the blue side that's any good until you get to level 15 or 20 is why none of my vacations from the red side last very long. Now, you tell me: given the tools to do what NCsoft hasn't done themselves yet, which behavior do you want to reward? Just showing up with stuff that's no fun to play? Or showing NCNC how to do it?

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How to stay at 4.5 stars...

If you get a 4, just get one 5 to fix it.
If you get a 3, just get two 5's to fix it.
If you get a 2, just get five 5's to fix it.
If you get a 1, just get seven 5's to fix it.
If you get a 0, just get nine 5's to fix it.

Oh, yeah, this is easy to do...

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... if you've actually written a 5-star arc. If 901 people who play your arc rate it 5 stars, and 99 slap a zero on it (an unlikely mix, but your example, so let's run with it), you'll still have a 4.505 rating and round up to 5, across 1000 rankings, and will make it into the Hall of Fame.

But you don't want to write a 5-star arc, do you? You want to write any old random 3 star arc and then claw your way into the Hall of Fame by trading 5-star reviews with 901 people. And if all 901 of you do it, all 901 of you will get the Hall of Fame icon ...

... and the words "Hall of Fame" will be completely and entirely worthless to anybody trying to use them to find top-quality content. So will the star rating, because 901 of the 5-star arcs will be pointless and generic.

Don't expect NCsoft NorCal to sympathize with your desire to do this either; the last thing on Earth they can risk is to have people buy the Architect Edition box tomorrow, try a dozen random "5-star" missions, and conclude that Mission Architect was a total waste of time because the supposedly-best stuff that players have written are no better than madlibs. So even if your review-trading system worked (or anybody else's), what you should expect is for NCNC to simply increase the number of ratings needed for Hall of Fame far, far beyond what you could plausibly link-trade. That would still leave the 5-star pool hopelessly polluted with mediocrity, but they can't do anything about that until they find some way to "rate the raters" the way some websites do it, and I'm not holding my breath on that.

Just accept that there is no way that NCNC is going to let that HoF icon be something you can meta-game for; they don't dare let people have it who didn't earn it honestly from their fellow players in SvS (Story versus Story) combat.

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Honestly folks...this is an MMO. How high a standard do we want here? Most people aren't going to be putting weeks tweaking their arcs. If the story is good, the mobs acceptable in challenge and the whole is engaging it should be noted by both players and Devs.

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And by that standard, anybody who picks something other than one of the standard pre-built costumes should win every costume contest they enter. And everybody who PvPs should always win. How high a standard do I want here? Melissa "War Witch" Bianco. If it's as good as anything she's written, it gets at least four stars, probably five, from me. No, I don't care how many hours of work you put into it. No, I don't care about your feelings; this isn't pre-school and I'm not your therapist and you don't get an A just for showing up. No, I especially don't care how many 5-star ratings you handed out. The story arc stands or falls on its own merits.

I'm also not interested in giving the benefit of the doubt to people who have trouble writing, and I'll tell you why. I don't rate arcs as a message to the writer. I rate them as a message to the other players that are looking for a good arc to run, because they out number the writer by about 200,000 to 1. I'm not going to lie to 200,000 people about how good your writing is just to salve 1 person's hurt feelings. I'm just not.

By the way, if you do write well, it's not "weeks." OK, my first story arc did take me 3 weeks to polish to maximum quality, but that was because I was still learning what the system could and couldn't do, what the various settings on objectives did, and so forth. My second story arc, which is currently averaging 5 stars, took me 15 hours to write, from initial inspiration through white-boarding the plot through initial construction and testing. Based on feedback from other players, I found an intermittent bug in the game and worked around it in less than an hour the next day. It only takes "weeks" the first time, if even then -- or else you can probably never do it at all.

This Green Dwarf controversy, though, is exactly why I've flat-out stopped sending feedback to anybody unless I know them personally until they find a way to anonymize it. Someone threatened me with a 1-star for giving his arc 3 instead of 5 stars on day one.

1) Make a Defendable Item objective. Set the object to Computer - White, and the name to "Computer". Leave Settings alone, go down to Text & Dialog. That's where you specify which enemy group is standing around it, and their dialog. In addition, make sure you set the Navigation Text (plural) to "computers to search." and the Navigation Text (singular) to "1 computer to search." Set Object Defended Text to "With them out of the way, you search the computer ... and find the hard disk you're looking for!" Or something like that.

No, the first group that spawns with it won't destroy it. Due to a quirk in the way defendable objects are set up, the first group to show up won't aggro on the object. When you defeat them, there will be an ambush or two, aggroed on you.

2) Make another Defendable Item objective. Set it also to Computer - White and give it the same name, same Navigation Text (plural), same Navigation Text (singular), same enemy group, same dialog. This time, go into settings and make two changes, though. Set the Quantity to 5, and uncheck the button for Required for Mission Completion (the star should not be filled in). Under Text & Dialog, the Object Defended Text says, "With them out of the way, you search the computer. It doesn't have the hard disk you're looking for."

The reason these work together is that you made the Navigation Text identical for both, so they'll be grouped together in the list of objectives on the compass.

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You can do something similar with two matching Collections, but you can't put specific NPCs with specific dialog next to them. The next best thing you could do would be to have patrols wandering through the mission (at random places) talking about needing to search any computers they find for the hard disk.

Global tells (including these) queue if you're logged out and appear to the first character you log in on that account.

I'm learning to hate this feature, by the way. I've decided that it's just not safe to leave feedback to anything below 4 stars, for fear the'll search out my arcs and 1-star them just out of hurt feelings. I'll go back to pointing out people's typos and making suggestions how to improve their arcs when Feedback goes back to being anonymous.

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One more thing though: Is it possible to test just the second (or third, or fourth, etc) mission? Without playing the ones prior to it?

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Those mission "book" icons at the top of the editor can be dragged and dropped to change what order they're in. Drag the one you want to test to the front.

Will the costume change emotes work from the command line? I do most of my costume changes from there or via macros.

What the heck do you need an 80386 processor for to do dial-in? I was running, not dialing into but running, stuff like this off of an 8 MHz 8086 over 2400 baud Hayes-compatible modems back in 1985. And I felt extravagant, back then, for having upgraded from the 4.77 MHz 8088 to the 8 MHz 8086. There was no point in upgrading to a '386 unless you were going to run a GUI, and there weren't any Intel-based GUIs worth running until '89.

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(new) Animation: Starting attack chains with certain powers from the Arachnos Soldier powerset causes the gun to not appear."

[/ QUOTE ]Also, almost all combat animations are missing for Bane Spider ranged mace energy-beam attacks.

I don't know what there is to discuss, that hasn't been discussed to death, since we don't have any new information yet. So let me throw out two questions. First, when will we get the teaser up on the main website laying out more or less how it works, what features are and aren't included in it? And secondly, do better story-arc writing tools mean that we'll be getting more official content or more frequent issues from now on?

I love all of these features, I have no complaints about any of them, they all look great, they're all things that I'm looking forward to being part of City of Heroes, and I'm delighted that we're at least tentatively scheduled to get them all no later than January. Ish.

That being said, is there any good reason why we can't have half of them, the easier half to implement, as issue 13 in September or October and the other half in December as issue 14?

For one thing, there's a perceptions game in the MMO business. When you more or less promise 3 updates a year and miss that, people who don't know the game well will just see that headline and think that the company isn't investing resources in it. Those of us who know you know that it's the opposite, that you fell prey to Fred Brooks' first law, but to everybody else, it will look bad. For another, with one highly hyped new MMO coming out in less than a month, and a major expansion to one of the big-three MMOs coming out in about a month, this game could really, really use an excuse to be on the MMO industry web pages in late September or early October. And to give one last reason, the more stuff you shove into one issue, the harder that issue is going to be to test, and the more likely you are to accidentally introduce major bugs, just from the sheer complexity of changing too many things at a time.

So seriously, you can't, say, package City Vault, Shields, Pain Domination, some of pohsyb's UI upgrades, and the 2nd wave of Cimerora missions and get it out to beta in September, and call it Issue 13: To the Pain or some such thing?

Every time something like this comes up, I take my opportunity to beg for a villain level 15-25 zone: West Libertalia. I love the blue-side Sky Raider arcs, and would even better love to be dropped into a three-way civil war in a west African tropical nation, say, Sky Raiders and Family (in support of the CIA and western business interests) versus Arachnos (backing the current local Marxist revolutionary government, as a way of interfering with US interests in the region), with some Banished Pantheon threat being behind a comic-book version of the LRA.

And so heroes don't complain that villains get something cool that they don't get, rewrite the ending of "The Mysterious General Z" so that the final mission happens in an Instanced Outdoor Mission subset of the West Libertalia zone.

Mui gracias. Um, is the villainous one red, white, and blue too? Should it be?

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As you wish!

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And then, one day, Texas_Justice realized that when Castle was saying, "As you wish," what he really meant was, "I love you."

(Sorry, couldn't help myself. ObOP: Yeah, I'm a little disappointed that we only get two issues this year, too, but with it being late July and only starting to get teasers, I'd already figured that out.)

Long overdue, and for all the reasons in the original article. I approve. I would have approved even more if you'd done so back when the "one-time" grant was made, but still, I approve.

Especially if it's true that issue 13 includes substantial new base upgrades, because my imagination doesn't stretch far enough to cover the howling if only villains, and heroes who'd bought the villain game, had access to the main content from an issue.

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If I can't get onto Virtue can I have two free server transfer tokens so I can play my favorite new character on another server then transfer him back?

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Even if they did, how would you use them? You have to log at least partway into a server to get the character list and the move function. If you're that worried, you're pretty much out the $20 for a round-trip in advance, because once the server lockout hits, you won't be able to move the character for the same reason you can't play it.

On the other hand, since this time we don't have free reactivation during double-XP weekend, I'm not too worried. But if it does turn into a problem, then I absolutely would support changing the code that makes it impossible to be booted for AFK while in an instance.

For any of the rest of you who use LiveJournal as your RSS reader, you can just subscribe to Syndicated Accounts plaync_coh and plaync_cov for those two. I didn't check to see if the third one was available.

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As for being able to alter the gameworld by completing a taskforce? Hah, no chance.

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That's not even close to what I was expecting, what I was hoping for.

Let me compare and contrast two dates: September 16th, 2004, and July 24th, 2007. When Issue 2 went live, there was a global event called the opening of the Malleus Mundi. It marked the first contact between Earth Prime and the Shadow Shard, and it set up an important plot point for both the Halloween Events and the next year's opening of Croatoa. And I still hear people talking about how fun it was, and how proud they were to be there, to have helped fight off the only ever large-scale invasion of Earth by the Minions of Rularuu. And I don't begrudge them that; being present at a major turning point in history is as much of a "veteran's benefit" as anything they've added since. But nobody who joined the game after September 16th, 2004 will ever get to do that event again. (Presumably.) Does that mean that eight times a year, to be fair to the new players, they should schedule a Rularuu invasion event? No, of course not; the opening of the Malleus Mundi and first contact with a new and malevolent universe are big, game-changing events that only happen once.

That's what I thought 2007 was going to be like. That issue 10 would open, as it did, with these all-zones events where everybody banded together, regardless of level or side, to save Earth from the Rikti Invasion. It might even continue into issue 11, probably with a lot fewer zone-invasion event days. But then, I assumed, no later than issue 12 they were going to turn it off. All they'd have to do is rewrite some of the text in the LGTF, and maybe issue a differently-named badge for it from then on. They wouldn't even have had to change the RWZ; Hro'dotz and his Lineage of War could still dig in, still keep trying to conquer the Earth, still keep trying to repair that Rikti saucer. There'd still be need for an LGTF to defeat him periodically, and it would even make sense for those LGTFs to trigger single-zone invasion events, as the again-losing Hro'dotz goes into use-it-or-lose-it mode. (Not coincidentally allowing new players to earn the Watchman accolade.) It would still make sense for new heroes and villains to be able to join Vanguard, just as Vanguard continued to exist between the 1st and 2nd Rikti Wars. But only those of us who were playing during the Second Rikti War itself would be able to say, just as only people who were playing during the Rularuu Invasion can say, that we were there.

Heck, now if they wanted to, they could even offer both versions of it via Ouroboros. I know they have the tech; they accidentally almost did this with the Calvin Scott TF when flashbacks were in closed beta. I'm not asking them to lock anybody out of badges or content. I'm just asking for the game to have more visible, important, game-changing historical markers like the original Rularuu Invasion, and being not a little sad and annoyed that this didn't turn out to be one of them, like I hoped.

I just can't get excited about this.

I feel like these invasions happen too often. I feel like they go on way, way too long. But more importantly, this long after issue 10, I feel like they happen way, way too pointlessly. Part of me really just can't believe that week-long invasions are happening eleven months after tens of thousands of us have earned the "Save the World" badge for ending the Second Rikti War.

When the Second Rikti War began, I was sure, from the clues you'd left in the text, that this was going to be a one-time event. A big-news thing that we who were around at the time could brag about to the new people. I was completely convinced that issue 11, or at the very latest issue 12, would include some minor revisions to the Rikti War Zone, to reflect the fact that Hro'dotz and his Legacy of War no longer had the full support of the Rikti people, that they were fighting on in our dimension as criminals, not invaders, and that outside of that one neighborhood, the rest of the world had seen the last of the homeworld-native Rikti, or at least of their heavy weapons and warships, for years to come. I thought, and wrote at the time in a roleplaying piece at the time, that the Second Rikti War was going to have an end.

Not that it was going to be a permanent feature of the game.

This is especially annoying to me because the art department has still not, eleven months later, made the changes necessary to make Paragon City look like America at war. There are no war headlines on the newspapers people read everywhere, and the newspapers that come out of the newspaper boxes still show a folk singer with a guitar at a peaceful concert. Paragon City has exactly one American flag. People on the street still talk about superheroes as if they were celebrities and sports stars whose stats they follow, not as if they were war heroes. In Paragon City in June of 2008, Earth has been at war with aliens from another world bent on our conquest and assimilation for eleven long months and it's had no perceptible effect on anything but one neighborhood in Rhode Island, no affect on the rest of Paragon City, on America, on the world. That it's eleven months later and still, every 8 weeks or so, the aliens can hit us just as hard as they did in the weeks after July 24th and not only is no end in sight, but you're making it look like the war is now the permanent status quo, it will go on forever?

Suddenly I feel like an idiot for grinning like a fool and quoting the St. Crispin's Day speech back on July 24th of last year, for being excited about the chance for my main character to become a war hero. For feeling like something actually special was going on, not just a zone event, not merely a software upgrade, but an actual EVENT.

Not a weather feature. Which is all it really is any more, isn't it? People asked for weather, and we've got it. It's what passes for, and is merely treated as, a couple of days of severe thunderstorm-like weather. It won't do any lasting damage, few if any people are going to get killed, it just means that when it clouds up all of a sudden you should run indoors unless you're an idiot who likes playing in the rain.

I'm sorry I'm disillusioned, but it's just not what I was expecting, let alone hoping for.

On the hero side, yeah, once you get to level 20 or so (15 in Faultline) the regular story arcs really improve in quality, and are absolutely worth doing at least once each. They teach you a lot of the backstory of the game, and some of them are moderately suspenseful. Although I should warn you: if you're not the lead sled dog, the view never changes. One of the game's design flaws is that too much of the mission text is only exposed to the team leader.

Wow. I'm really disappointed. Not by the lack of new information but that that was the ultimate softball question: "tell us why your game is special and unique, why everybody should be playing it," and you blew it. That was all you could come up with: that it's superheroes, and a generic statement about how it has lots of content? No mention of flight at level 5 or 6, superjump by level 11, teleport or superspeed by level 14? No mention of sidekicking and exemplaring? No mention of of the hundreds of unique subclasses? No mention of 91 equipment slots that you get to allocate among your powers freely? No mention of the fact that you decide why your powers work and how your character should look, not your equipment? No mention of equipment available at level 10 that you never outlevel? No mention of levelless PvP? No mention of instances that auto-adjust to your level, your team size, and your preferred difficulty setting?

Fortunately, the interview was on a website that, as far as I can tell, nobody reads. But next time, please send someone who actually understands some of the ways that CoX is better than every MMO out there, and (more importantly) who can think of them off hand when asked!

Will old Trial Accounts be reactivated, too?

Would you please consider a very short-term sale, maybe half-off, on server moves? Some of us have a lot of characters to move. I don't object to paying for moves, but $10 a move adds up when you're doing them by the dozen or more. Please?

Bug with the costume creator:

If you have costume tokens, it defaults to using those. Except that it doesn't. It says it will, but it will take the price out of your influence or infamy, not out of your costume tokens. If you don't have enough inf, it will let you click the button to make the change, but it won't make the change.

Steps to duplicate:

Take a character with little or no inf, but with at least one costume token, to the tailor. Make enough changes to be more than you have in inf. Click the button to save changes. Observe that nothing happens.

Work-around:

On the tailor screen, before you make any changes, click the "pay with inf" button once to turn it on, then click it back ("pay with token") to set it to costume token. Now it will work normally.

From this, I surmise that the flag to pay with costume tokens is not being set to match the user interface setting when you first bring up the editing window.