Mind Forever Burning

To emphasize this point: Early on in MA's release I found a map that was obviously meant to be an in-joke for an SG. It featured characters named after what I believe were the SG members and it was basically a challenge map with nothing but AV fights. There was no story to speak of.

But the fights were remarkably well-balanced. You had allies to help you and the fights escalated in difficulty as you went through, with a really brutal finale against an SS/Regen AV with a *mumble*/pain ally and one other. I managed to solo it on Relentless with a character that wasn't built for AV soloing.

I gave it 5 stars based on how much fun I had completing it.

I also have spare -kbs on Virtue redside. However, I'm notoriously hard to find in game without pre-arranged notice. If you don't get a hold of RagMan send me a PM and maybe we can arrange a swap.

awesome

They should have pulled it in beta, or not at all. Failing that they should have warned us that the change was coming and told us what the plans were for restoring it, if any.

The devs get an F from me on this one.

You get more DPS equivalent out of it if you put it in fast recharging attacks - that's just how the math works out. You could slot it in KO Blow if you really want to max out its enhancements with the other Hecatomb set members, which might be defensible, but personally I'd put it in Jab or whatever.

Well, you could probably recreate him as a custom critter now. Doesn't help with the missing robots, though.

Nope, he's been mysteriously missing since closed beta.

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It is not about the nerfing of the rewards; in fact if the devs would ever listen in beta most this would have been avoided you know the 500 post telling them that this was going to happen.

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I'm sympathetic to the OP, but I think this is skewed. I was in closed beta, and I can tell you my own impression was that the beta testers were concerned with stories foremost and only looking for exploits "on the side".

Honestly, I think we the beta testers dropped the ball on this to a large extent. We should have been more proactive in searching out reward rate outliers and warning the devs about them.

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But you honestly won't convince anyone here that you didn't know you'd get in trouble.

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Please don't claim to speak for the entire forum (or even thread).

BTW, I'm not objecting to your review per se, I'm just trying to understand it.

Comparing this arc to something like Escalation (which has been getting great reviews all around, but which also seems to use the Stop The Bad Guy From Doing Bad Stuff plot) - what do you see as the critical difference? Is it the personal relationship between Escalation and the player?

JABOSTH is the trope I have the most trouble understanding in practice as it applies within the MA. It seems like many, many of the canon arcs suffer from this problem, and while I have something of a spidey sense about it, I don't know that I can quantify what it really means.

See the "List of Ways to Promote Your Arc" thread at the top of this forum - there are a few people who posted there advertising their expertise. You could also try the Fan Artwork forum.

Actually, I don't use the MA to farm, but I agree with the OP - the MA wasn't ready for release. Or, perhaps more accurately, Paragon Studios wasn't ready for the MA's release. They vastly underestimated the extent to which it would be used, and therefore also the resources they would require to manage abuse.

My own opinion is that people who create vastly inflated reward rate maps should be recruited by Paragon to help them rebalance the game. It desperately needs some help now that the mission designers are no longer explicitly tasked with keeping reward rates within the narrow band of existing PvE. Every ridiculous farm map has a game reward imbalance at its core - identifying and fixing them helps improve the game.

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2) Dr. Aeon's bio on the City of Heroes web site implies he was originally known as "Carl Egon", who reportedly possessed the ability to summon aid through trans-dimensional portals (presumably said aid being other dimensions' versions of himself). However, when heroes encounter him in the STF, his summons battle-cry implies that he is summoning versions of himself across time instead (a view of his powers supported by his own name, and also by his relationship to Professor Echo). What's the real story?

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Covered in-game: Marshall Brass, "The Aeon Conspiracy" and "Echo Down the Aeons," level 15-20 villains. Capsule summary: Carl Egon did built a remote-control portal to hell and used it to assassinate the previous governor of Cap au Diable. This was over-the-top even by Etoile Islands standards, so he "stood trial" and "was executed" on TV, then given a new name and face and installed as Governor Aeon. His real identity is a closely guarded Arachnos secret. He no longer has the particular hardware that he used to tap into hell (see Golden Roller), but is busy with other goofy ideas in the meantime (see about half of the villain arcs from level 15 to 50, and the Statesman Task Force). When you see him in the STF, he's summoning alternate-universe versions of himself through Arachnos' dimensional portal in Grandville.

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I've read all that. I think you're confused about Echo Down the Aeons; that arc reveals that Dr. Aeon is Carl Egon, but I've scoured the information and I don't see anything there about how Egon assassinated the previous governor (the summon-aid-through-portal thing is from the CoH official website info). The tapping-into-hell thing was revealed to be the PTS power source, and Aeon found it accidentally.

As for the STF, I don't see anything to indicate the clones are summoned through the dimensional portal in Grandville. ParagonWiki even refers to them as "temporal clones".

I admit I was confused by the battle cry; I thought he gave it when summoning clones, but it looks like he uses it when turning on his personal force field instead.

So, I'm still not convinced one way or the other. He's clearly mucking about with time, and Professor Echo at least can time travel, but it's unclear what the deal with his clones is.

I think the unique maps contain some destroyed looking office buildings if you don't mind Hellion-themed graffiti.

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I'll try again now you've added friendly ambushes...

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Wait, do friendly ambushes work now? For the longest time only one critter from the ambush would actually move from its spawn location.

So... I'm honestly curious here... taking on a rising villain group with a specific plot to take down City Hall counts as JABOSTH? It seems like a pretty common genre plotline. If the villain group had a distinct motive and/or theme behind them (other than wielding fire) would that fix that problem?

Also, was the arc labeled as being intended for a specific level range of player?

Basically what I'm wondering is if the arc's key weakness is a lowbie-sounding plot with mobs designed to challenge high-level players. If the difficulty were rebalanced it seems like it might be a reasonable arc.

I was going to chime in and say exactly that.

Also, I'm not sure where the 1 in 5,000 number comes from - my guess is it's based on empirical data from players, because as far as I know Positron never stated the rate publicly. Regardless, it's suspect to me because it doesn't mention 5,000 of what. Assuming the recipe is Pool A (which makes sense, since calling it "Ultra Rare" invites comparison with "Rare" and "Uncommon"), bosses should drop them more often than minions.

Based on market data, I've always held that purples drop about once per 6 rare Pool As, and all the data I've seen posted on the forums seemed to support a rate somewhere around there.

You guys do know that Moderator 08 has deleted some posts in this thread, right? You're not going totally unnoticed.

I'm starting to think that comic-book genre universes are governed by Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem: they can be "complete" (i.e. contain all major sub-genres, like military, magic, science/futuristic) or consistent, but not both. CoX is angling to be inclusive in the sub-genres represented, hence, it's going to be inconsistent.

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I think most creators who grant permission for their characters to be used could reasonably expect credit for their work (noted in the character's description), as well as the right to withdraw their permission at any time.

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While I agree with the first part of this sentence, I strongly disagree with the second part. Once you agree to let someone use your characters and they invest a lot of energy in creating their arc, it seems too cruel to me to simply withdraw permission.

On the other hand, I think it would be foolish to give someone permission to use your characters if you had no control at all in how they were used. (Imagine Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as lovers ... fan-fiction writers imagine it all the time.)


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I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect to retain control over content you submit to the MA. For one thing, I believe it's explicitly stated in the user agreement that NCSoft gets the rights to content created in the system (I vaguely recall this is a hedge against copyright issues, by forcing the user to assume the onus of copyright ownership to begin with). For another, there's nothing stopping anyone from copying everything about the characters from their visible info.

Back on topic, I'd like to note that I've created custom critters to represent the following canon characters, either because they have no combat entities already or to avoid level range limitations:

Dr. Aeon
Hopkins
Dark Watcher

... and one or two others I'll keep close to the chest for now since mentioning them would spoil some upcoming arcs.

I'll try to post those to a public location for people to access later today.

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It might help that in issue 15 you can flag your mission as "Work in Progress" (default), "Looking for Feedback", and "Final".

Though to be honest, I never consider any arc to truly be final. Unless it's locked like a Dev Choice there is always possibility for change.

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Ooh, I hadn't heard about that. That sounds great.

As far as the last two terms - I can see calling something "Looking for Feedback" if you've got a good chance of doing significant rewrites based on said feedback. If all you plan on doing is tweaking I think it's fine to call something "Final" even if it isn't, quite.

So the suggestion would solve your problem as well, then. Right?

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Update:

Well, I was on Test with this arc and was able to duplicate the bug again. Sent up a petition, and got a GM 30 mins later to check the map out with me (was idling in the mish at work). Here's what we found:

1. The boss never spawned (so it wasn't like he spawned and was off map somewhere).
2. QA seems to think it's the map I'm using (Vaults of Mu), but they don't have anything conclusive as of yet.
3. They also suggested I try to trim back my spawns "just a little" to see if it makes a difference. (Harkens back to LJ's spawn count theory.)

I'll be tweaking the mish on Test tomorrow from work based on their recommendation to see if it's duplicable or not. (Will prolly drop the patrol completely and see if that does anything.)

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I've run into maps that lie about how many spawn points they actually have of a given type. However, in that case the non-spawning detail was 100% reproducible.

By the way, I'm accumulating a list of maps with spawn point bugs, but I've been deliberately not reporting them out of fear the maps will just get pulled.

Arcanaville and I actually already discussed this in a different thread, although she never answered to my satisfaction why she didn't think it was a good idea.

The context for it was the formula used by IMDB for calculating rankings, which is essentially the same one you give above with different constants.

As an aside, Arcanaville did come down firmly on the side of not throwing out the outliers. The argument for doing so is that the outliers are likely to be statistically invalid, but that's not a claim we can make in this case; there may be a real minority population for whom those outlier votes are representative, and we shouldn't deprive them of their "voice" in the ranking. Fortunately, dealing with outliers is a separate issue from the ranking algorithm.

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I would really like to see it auto SK eveyrone to the mission holder level rather than playing that game.

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I've been thinking about this quite a bit. The level-disparity XP distribution formula in this game is totally borked; there's no two ways about it. For about a year I was toying with ways to rebalance the formula based on the "two scrapper" thought experiment**, despite Arcanaville telling me in PM it was hopeless.

Then about two weeks ago I suddenly realized the whole problem goes away if you just make the whole team the same level (or at least close to it). So my current favorite suggestion is to SK the whole team up to the highest level character minus one (i.e. follow the normal "SK" rules but apply to the whole team, automatically).

The only trouble is you suddenly lose the opportunity to fight higher level critters than +3 (sometimes, +4), which some people do enjoy. So in tandem with this suggestion I would also recommend expanding the difficulty slider an additional 4 slots, up to "+4 base level".

You do lose the ability to RSK down to a lower level character, though, which may be a problem. Possibly there is some way to solve that by having the SK rules only take effect after RSKs are done, but it could get complicated.

** The "two scrapper" thought experiment is this: put two scrappers on opposite ends of a large map and let them defeat enemies as fast as they can. Presuming they can handle double-size spawns, the ideal balance solution is that neither of them should be able to tell from the time-averaged XP that the other scrapper is even there: the XP gets created and divided in such a way that each scrapper gets their "natural" XP rate overall. If you actually run this experiment, you'll find that the lower level scrapper always gets more than their fair share of the XP, and the higher level one is screwed - they'd be better off truly soloing. (The ideal solution should be determined prior to the team size bonus multiplier, and then the bonus applied afterward.)