Mind Forever Burning

All Rikti comm officers gave lieutenant XP but had minion stats. As far as I could tell the level 42 versions weren't any different in this regard. In fact, I believe the meow farms that used them were actually sub-optimal for PLing because everyone was SK'd up to being even-con with them. The hard core farm maps use level 52 enemies and SK lowbies up to 45.

I'm with Eva, I hope this feature never gets implemented. Cutscenes don't belong in an MMO, IMHO.

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Since my desire to create the arc stemmed from wanting to set-up Malta, Knives, and Nemesis ... in Oranbega...

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Good grief... I'm honestly surprised anyone would set out to do that.

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Indigo would be my first choice, but she does not exist as a lvl 41+ Boss or less (having them show in mission 3 is not vital, but amuses me, so I prefer to have it be something I can use as an ally). I am thinking a Longbow Warden/Officer of some kind, and that would let me alter the Portal Tech goofiness in the first mission as well.

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It didn't sound to me like you use a large number of custom critters, so you may have file size to play with. If that's true, you could re-create Indigo as a custom critter. She doesn't seem like she'd be that tricky.

I also have a suggestion for the "just a bunch of stuff that happened" problem - it seems like the core problem is there's no particular reason for the Council Empire to be making their move now. If there were a particular source of power they'd found, or that they needed from our dimension, it could add some sense of drama and urgency to the story.

By the way, here's my current strategy: Make the combat challenging, but also use some of the farm-map tricks for upping the reward rates at the same time (by presenting a higher-than-normal mix of lieutenants and bosses). Not coincidentally to my points in this thread, that generally involves setting said lieutenants and bosses to "standard".

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there's no real incentive not to just make the critters as easy as you possibly can

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There is a strong incentive for me, and on some level, I think it's the same incentive that drives the developers themselves when designing critters: The satisfaction of creating a well tuned encounter.

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Are you sure that's strong enough to counter the disincentive from people who gave you low ratings based on the critters being too hard?

Making the combat harder than the combat in regular PvE is going to subtly push people to run PvE instead of your arc. Since PvE and the "standard" setting are presumably being normalized against each other**, making everything "standard" basically says "as hard as regular PvE", and anything above "standard" basically says "punitively diminished returns relative to difficulty".

I'm speaking from experience here; I deliberately designed challenging encounters for the first version of "The Ghost in the Machine". In closed beta, people gave me feedback like "Wow, that was difficult and challenging, but not overpowered - great job!" Live, I got feedback like "I died four times on mission 3; 1 star".

** While this isn't explicitly happening now - particularly when you consider the full level range of custom critters vs. their PvE counterparts - it's the only reasonable approach I can see the devs taking, long term.

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I'd just put in a slight variant of the succeed text, reflecting that the escort didn't make it to the door on their own.... but then something else happened to 'rescue' them after all.

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I think Eva just wants to remove the text entirely to save space (well, not entirely, but replace it with just one letter, e.g. "X").

All that matters is the ratio of items to inf. On the creation side, that ratio is fixed (aside from changes made to the game, like merits or the KHTF nerf) - so no inflationary pressure. On the destruction side, it might be true that items get destroyed faster than inf, in which case we should increase WW fees to compensate. But it's hard to say.

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The thing is, with better difficulty tools the players will very likely find the balance point for us in terms of difficulty vs play.

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The problem is that there's no real incentive not to just make the critters as easy as you possibly can, given the powersets you choose - i.e. simply always pick "standard" for everything. As an author I might like to run on higher difficulty settings when I play by myself, but I know that there are players out there who will downrate my content if I make it too hard. The reverse does not seem to be true.

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It's just one huge seething, festering mass of Epic Fail.

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Well, it looks like you're going to despise the arc-set I'm writing. No hope for it now though; the story must be told.

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I thought the menders were around to actually prevent people from mucking with the past, and the "flashback" was you helping them fix your own history, under the assumption that this unseen, letter writing, force was the one doing the mucking...

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I think that perception is pretty quickly discarded if you re-read the Twilight's Son portion of the intro. You're clearly sent on a mission to change something, and when nothing happens, TS says, "Huh, that didn't work".

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They don't? I thought that was the point of the whole arc. You do end up with a newspaper clipping that says "Assassin unknown".

You are told early on in the tutorial that Ourboros' "interventions" don't actually change history. It has to be this way since they can't go back and edit the history plaques or Ghost Widow's patron arc to remove references to the Red Widow.

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Hm. I just re-read the Ouroboros intro and I see what you're talking about. I think the reason I didn't pick up on this was that I got the impression the only reason the Mender interventions didn't have any effect was that the mysterious note-writer was going through and reversing all the effects the Menders were trying to cause. So it's not that the present can't be changed by time travel interventions, it's that those interventions are being deliberately countered. (I wasn't familiar enough with canon to know about the Red Widow, so that conundrum just went right by me.)

If the Mender interventions really are completely ineffective, why bother with the whole setup at all? Do you regard the whole arc-set surrounding Issue 11 to be one big shaggy dog story?

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If you could legally consider that a copyright violation, then you could also consider most fantasy novels a copyright violation of Tolkien. But you can't now can you?

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If you wrote a fantasy story about an evil ring that had to be destroyed in a volcano, and named it "The Lord of the Rings", I'm betting that would get squashed. Which is basically what we're talking about.

To the OP: You could name the story "Little Wooden Boat".

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There are also a few Arachnos troops not doing very well, including a "Bane Spider Coward" hostage to rescue from other Arachnos. I'd make a comment about how this shouldn't be possible given what we know about the Bane Spiders but frankly since the VEAT rollout their lore has been such a mess it's hard to say what's supposed to be true about them now.

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Can you elaborate on this? What do (did) we know about Bane Spiders that would make this scene impossible?

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She also says she was there the night Marchand was killed and remember seeing the assassin, that no one knows what happened to him or her afterwards. I'm not sure what to make of this. Historically Marchand was killed by the Red Widow, which is written on history plaques so presumably isn't much of a secret. This might be a reference to the Ouroboros mission but those missions don't actually change history.

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They don't? I thought that was the point of the whole arc. You do end up with a newspaper clipping that says "Assassin unknown".

I at least find it plausible that this arc is supposed to take place after you've personally done the Tesseract arc, which makes it internally consistent, though it might be nice to state that expectation more explicitly.

I wonder if the ending was supposed to be a lead-in to Warburg? That's where the heavy weaponry is actually stashed, and one of the things you can get there is, in fact, a nuke.

PS. I have no horse in this race - all I know about this arc is what you've described. I'm just curious.

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Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.

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No**, but the inverse may be true - that critter difficulty is adjusted up or down (at design time) to match expectations for reward rates based on the averages for other groups.

For the MA, it seems like the devs have to make the "floor" for custom critters match the expectations for reward rates of regular PvE critters. Making the custom critters harder from there but not adjusting reward rates seems skewed to me.

I once wrote a long diatribe on how to reformulate the game based on balancing complexity and reward rates rather than "risk" and "reward", to which you responded saying "I think it's as simple as saying the game should reward according to skill" (I'm paraphrasing, but I think that was the gist). In the current situation, you can create custom groups that require skill to fight, but the game won't reward the effort. Or you can create custom groups that are deliberately as easy as you can make them, and the reward rate is the same.

That to me is a problem.

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Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.

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It's interesting you chose that example, because for a long time radio missions did significantly divert players away from story arcs. Positron complained about that effect specifically on the forums. IIRC, the response was to generally up the defeat rewards, and possibly up the story arc completion bonus, while leaving mission bonuses untouched.

PvP zone missions were even worse for a while. I remember getting a brute to level 50 in something like 140 hours using PvP missions almost exclusively (I didn't really care about doing "content" because his only purpose was to tank on LRSF runs), solo. At that time the average to get to 50 was around 200 hours for a good soloist doing other things, so the disparity was pretty significant. Then the devs decided that wasn't good for the game and took PvP zone missions mostly back down to normal with a boost every 30 minutes, and as far as I can tell, people then stopped running them.

Overall, I think the devs are faced with a problem they must solve one way or another - either by somehow normalizing critter difficulty, or by scaling rewards based on difficulty. Neither approach is easy. The latter is possible given massive amounts of data to mine, but we don't have that much data yet, I don't think, and maybe never will.

** Actually, though, I think there have been instances of critter XP being tweaked to match difficulty. I'm specifically thinking of Devouring Earth XP being adjusted at some point to account for their lieutenants dropping buffs. Your point stands, though, in that this is an exceptional and rare case rather than the norm (no pun intended).

Seconded.

Some quibbles...

For purples, I always leave out the single-aspect IO when slotting 5 of 6. Slotting the other 5 gives you near-ED capped enhancement on it anyway; the single-aspect IO is always overkill when slotting that many purples.

This is especially true of Gravitational Anchor. The hold proc in that set is pure win (though it does admittedly work better in AoE immob powers than in Chilblain). But even for other purple sets, the damage you get out of a damage proc is better than the percentage you get out of over-enhancing the damage.

The only exception would be Fortunata Hypnosis, where the placate is pretty much a wasted slot. Anything else is better than that proc, IMHO.

For Positron's Blast - I seem to recall this set is very, very light on Accuracy, something like 45-50% fully slotted. I wouldn't recommend skipping an Acc/Anything with Posi's Blast, even on an archer.

Try saving off a copy of your arc, then deleting missions from it one by one until it becomes publishable. Once you've identified the offending mission, you can do the same thing only with details - delete them one by one until the mission's publishable.

Hopefully that will help you narrow down what's going wrong. If you do figure it out, please post the details here, so that others may be able to save frustration later on.

I think those tags might be what's shown in the actual story arc file text, so if you open that file in a text editor and search for "DeathSpeech" and "Attacker2Speech" you might get a better idea of what's going wrong.

If you get specific details please post them here - that might save someone else some headache down the road.

Anyone know of a good carnie mission villainside, or am I stuck with a newspaper mission?

*smacks forehead*

I've apparently been mentally filtering that option out since the MA was introduced. I wonder if I could use it to save a little space on non-combat customs. Hm.

Huh? How did that work? As long as I've been using the MA the only way to "assign powers" that I knew of was through the custom character creator.

As far as I know you have to buy the booster packs, just like for your characters.

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Farmers have told me that ANY ally, just by its mere existance in the mission would lower rewards. Is this true?

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No, they have to inflict damage. It works like kill-stealing in open zones works, not like XP leeching on teams works.

Honestly I think it would have been better to use team XP division for allies, since then you could create defenderbots that matched story plots without worrying about the mechanic being considered an exploit.

I tend to use the next-mission briefing to reiterate what just happened in the debriefing. In addition to helping solve the team-reading problems, players sometimes click through screens too fast, so the reiteration helps make sure they don't inadvertently miss plot points.

I hate to say it, but this is starting to sound like something you just can't express in the MA the way you want. Unless the fight between the escort and the player is entirely optional to the plot it's going to be hard to represent this.

I'm sort of disappointed that the devs chose to implement the "betray on arrival" feature at all. It just seems of such marginal utility compared to, say, letting you lead an escort to a glowy instead of the door.