Mind Forever Burning

You can also see exactly what tohit is required on each roll using combat logs. There's a separate channel for tohit rolls; you can set up a separate tab, add that channel to it, and then see exactly what the tohit rolls are for enemies against you, and your attacks against enemies. I do this on all my def-based toons for my own sanity.

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Tickets divided by ratings, mostly.

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Can you be more specific? As I understand it, the number next to your rating isn't entirely reliable. Also, this doesn't distinguish a 0 star rating from a 2 star rating, since neither of them give any tickets at all - right?

My theory goes something like this:

- Arc is published with some field close to the character limit
- Post-publication validation code runs, adding extra characters. Since the arc is already published it's still playable.
- MA server restarts, and all validation code is re-run as the server spins up. Field overrun is detected, and arc becomes unplayable.

Why republishing would even be possible in this scenario is something I haven't worked out, but the basic idea is that it's another case of validation code not running when it should, in combination with HTML expansion happening when it shouldn't.

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I'm wondering if it's related to the fact that there seems to have been (another?) reduction in text limits.

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I'm not convinced there has been another reduction - when would such a reduction have occurred? There don't seem to have been any relevant patches.

That's why I'm wondering if the problem is related to MA server resets.

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This question keeps eating at me. When the devs created the game, they presumably intended the leveling speed to be something of a challenge that players would enjoy solving. The combination of stone tank + kinetics defender is an obvious example - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the result is that the pair can, in general, level faster than either alone. Kinetics has been nerfed along the way, but it's still a great set, and it is uniquely positioned to offset all stone armor's weaknesses.

Up until the MA exploits were pretty obvious to identify. Extreme power set slotting and creative teaming combos were never (AFAIK) called exploits; when they were identified as being overpowered, the devs would change things to re-balance the game, but players were never punished for identifying or using those powersets or team combos (again AFAIK). Exploits were generally objects that gave XP that shouldn't have, or gave XP over and over when they should've only given it once; or they allowed people to do things the rules normally prohibited (like trading items between factions, or bypassing base permissions to steal things).

But in the MA the line between leveraging your characters' valid strengths and exploiting unintended behaviors is pretty blurry. I'm almost at the point of saying that instead of punishing people who create imbalanced maps or scenarios, the devs should reward it, and take steps to ensure that they can deal quickly with the information that surfaces. Bug Hunter is a step in this direction, but it's a reward that only appeals to a subset of the playerbase (arguably, the subset least equipped to aggressively discover loopholes) and it has other limitations besides.

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Pacting wasn't intended to be used for this purpose. Everybody knows that, and if you claim to not know that I'm going to flatly call you a lair. Pacting was so two people could always enjoy the same content together more or less.

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That's why the feature was introduced, but it was immediately obvious to everyone involved that it could and would be used to get offline characters to high levels. As far as I know the devs are OK with this because the online character is only earning at 1/2 their normal speed, so there is no reward rate disparity involved.

I don't think pacting to 50 is an exploit, or abusive. That's an honest answer.

Now I'm really tempted to set up real story arcs filled with critters tailor made for fire farming. I wonder if I could get people to play the arcs for both fun and profit.

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I totally believe that there are people who downrate the highly visible arcs. What I don't get is how people are determining that they're receiving 0 or 1 ratings. If you're online, I think you can compare "A rated your arc B" messages to received (or not) tickets, but that only distinguishes 0-2 from 3, 4, or 5. And if you're not online, how can you tell at all?

Turg, if instead of republishing, you do a "save as" locally, are there any differences between what's stored that way and what you originally published?

Did we ever resolve the issue you were having where you could publish from some machines but not others? I have a vague suspicion they're related, and that what's happening in both instances is post-publication HTML expansion. The other player who had a mission mysteriously start being non-playable had the   problem, and it sounded like that problem had mysteriously started appearing in between patches.

Actually, I wonder if what's happening is that the MA server is being restarted.

That's an even better example, because until you just told me it would never have occurred to me that an elec/WP character could soft-cap E/N defense. There's no way the devs could build in the knowledge of such a combination into the reward system, and even if they did, it would effectively penalize whatever elec/WP out there that didn't soft-cap that defense type.

From my limited look at it, it seems to be fixed, and there was something in the patch notes about correcting the damage buff duration. (There were other problems with /nin than just the damage, but I haven't been tracking the issue very closely.)

I'm not sure the devs are concerned about a specific team being able to achieve high, or even extremely high, reward rates, even on tailored maps. They are definitely concerned with maps, and especially tailored maps, where anyone can achieve absurdly high reward rates. So taking the MM group through extremely hard boss maps should be fine, since most teams would get eaten alive by them; datamined reward rates for those maps should reveal they're in line with the rest of the game. Hopefully.

The SS/fire+fire/kin duo farming difficult foes who all happen to do fire damage is the real brain twister. That combo lampshades the real weakness of the reward system: it can't really take into account the real effort involved in any given combat because it's pre-determined. I suppose a really finely tuned system would recognize the "rock paper scissors" effects in the game, and reward rock less for beating scissors and more for beating paper, but that's a bit much to ask.

This kind of thing has always existed in the game in "accidental" synergies between primary and secondary, and between teammates on a team, but the effect is boosted greatly when you get to customize your foes as well.

I'm not sure the devs can do better than leave that one alone.

There is some delay between clicking "publish" and getting the notification that the story arc was published... maybe that's the issue?

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Anyway, yes you might be being targeted, but then again you may just be the victim of ignorance/apathy. And you know what they say about ascribing malice to things that could more easily or likely be explained by apathy or laziness.

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I think the apathy/laziness part is that voting griefers never look past the first page or two for top-rated arcs to downrate.

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1) MA - 100% cool!

2) Dev handling of problems with it - 100% overreacted to.

I figure there's probably one other important percentage to go here:

3) Player Base Upset about #2 - .5%

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This post seems remarkably myopic. There are plenty of legitimate grips about the MA that have nothing to do with farming, and my reading of the OP was that it was those legitimate gripes the thread was supposed to be about. The fact that most of the posters jumped back into the farming/exploit debate doesn't make those complaints less legitimate.

Just google tower defense. It's a game setup based on something from... I want to say Warcraft III, but it might have been II.

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Do you really want to use your one and only get-out-of-jail-free card on getting them to accept (e.g.) steam-powered robots that can pass for human beings?

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One last comment and then I'll give this thread back to the reviews: as I understand it the Nemesis automaton faction is something of a joke, with office workers as the butt - the idea being that robots don't have to be passable if all they're impersonating is office workers. IIRC the arc in which they first appear is full of Office Space references ("Where's my TPS report?" etc).

The one and only arc I'd recommend so far for Devs Choice:

Grim Riddles by @Mantid

Great adaptation of a genre archetype, the "mad puzzler" (here known as Grim Grin). Thoroughly enjoyed it.

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#1: Before issue 14 was released, there were MANY known bugs which were completely ignored despite, literally, hundreds of posts about them in the forums. These included map issues, the known ninjitsu bug, the ability for blasters to snipe from a distance and kill minions with no ranged attacks, etc. The Devs posted a "We're almost ready for launch!" thread in the forums and it was followed by -SEVEN- pages of testers saying "guys, this isn't ready." It was still launched with the issues above known.

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To be fair, the same thing happened with nearly every beta I've followed. I'm particularly thinking of i9, which turned out pretty much OK, as far as I can recall. If the devs held back every issue that had DOOM associated with it, we'd still be waiting for i1.

I was one of those people who was cautiously optimistic about the ratings system in beta... but then it went live, and I quickly realized it's not working. It's deeply flawed. So, PP, you have my sympathies, and I too hope they rework the system for i15.

The main problem I see with this arc (from reading it, not playing it, mind you) is that the person supposedly doing this experiment (i.e. the contact, Magenta Rogue) seems to be omniscient already. Otherwise how does he know exactly how to place the player in this grand tapestry before the events that cue it have happened yet? (I'm assuming your Fridge Brilliance is that Magenta Rogue is a time traveler himself, which would explain this part.) But if that's true there's no reason to do an experiment in the first place; Magenta already knows what's going on. If the experiment is supposed to be a ruse, it seems like an unnecessarily elaborate one.

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I'm still utterly disgusted by the way the devs have handled post i-14 stuff.
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WAKE UP! The house is on fire!

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I think in large part what happened was that dealing with the xp loophole exploits took so much dev time that they pretty much didn't have any time for anything else. I'm hoping that isn't so critical now so they can look at some of the other critical issues that have been building up in the meantime.

You can delete details, which will remove all the relevant references to critters (or groups). Once the references to critters or groups are gone from an arc, the arc stops putting them in the file and taking space.

To remove critters from groups, you have to edit the group, rather than the mission (although there is an "edit group" button in certain places in the mission editor, which will take you to the group editor).

Neither of these actually deletes the critter from your file system. To do that, you have to delete the critter from the list of critters in the "My Custom Creations" main list. However, I believe that this will only work if you've already removed all references to that critter from groups and missions.

I'm not particularly happy with how that all works, by the way; it seems tedious. Sometimes I resort to editing all the filesystem elements by hand rather than doing it through the UI.

Yeah, I sort of wish the devs could take a mulligan on i14. The MA has a lot of promise but I feel like it was still one major rewrite away from being ready for public consumption.

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Either Nemesis' "real" technology is so advanced that it doesn't even look like technology (in which case why hasn't he won already?), or it's really Magic (it isn't, we know from the canon that Nemesis has little knowledge of magic), or it's just bad writing.

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Or... it's really as straightforward as it looks? I feel like I'm missing something.

Also, I feel compelled to point out that the whole comic book genre is filled with little pockets of internal logic, whose borders with other pockets of internal logic tend to produce mind-bendingly convoluted non-logic. I'm not sure it's possible to make an MMO that's genre loyal and entirely consistent. The whole magic vs. technology thing is already kind of a contrivance.

EDIT: This is all a threadjack, but I feel like we're getting to the heart of a real question here. How much logical consistency can we reasonably demand of a game that intentionally incorporates so many disparate "reasons" for super-powered-ness?