Mind Forever Burning

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There were a LOT of defender allies in the mission, and I still got two levels from that one mission. I think, like what happens with confused enemies, you don't get full experience when an allie helps you inflict damage. But these guys didn't have attacks. They just followed you around, so all the damage was from me.

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It's not possible to design custom critters with no attacks; that was one of the things modified early on in the MA. However, there does seem to be a loophole where you can set allies to "non-combat" and still have their PBAoE buff toggles affect you. I thought that had been considered a bug and was fixed prior to i14 live, but I encountered a mission that seemed to indicate that either the fix didn't take, or was re-introduced.

I was actually considering using such allies to help mitigate what was otherwise a too-difficult mission for some players, but I resisted because I suspect the devs will change that when they get the time to do so. I'm actually a little surprised the tactic doesn't exist in more farm missions than it does; it seems to indicate farmers do in fact want at least some challenge to go up against and not just a cakewalk. (Or they just haven't figured out the trick yet in sufficient numbers.)

Wait, you wrote 10 arcs before you realized there was a 3-arc limit?

Dude, I'm trying to be sympathetic, but I don't know how the devs could have made the limit any clearer. And requesting more arc slots is like the #1 request (or possibly #2, behind increasing the 100k limit per arc), so I have to say, starting a new thread on the topic is unlikely to be very useful.

I think the gripe about having broken missions clogging the search results is valid.

My own mission is broken, and will remain listed but unplayable until I have a chance to to do a significant rewrite (as it used not just one but both of the maps that got yanked last patch). I'd prefer to pull it down until I can fix it, but the way the system works, there's no way to do that without killing the accumulated plays and ratings.

Probably want to specify redside or blue.

You can't set the levels for custom critters (yet). (Custom groups inherit the level ranges of their contents.)

What you can do is add a singular (even optional) critter to the mission to force the mission as a whole to spawn in a given level range. For example, if you add a Hellion boss, that forces the mission to cap at 14* no matter what the general enemy type for the map is.

Similarly, adding a Hellion hostage also forces the level range of the map. This is non-intuitive since the Hellion doesn't actually fight or take damage and RP-wise could conceivably just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that's how it works.

* Assuming Hellions cap at 14, I forget what the number is.

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In all honesty, I'd avoid any custom enemy group that lacks minions, LTs, or bosses. Doing so is likely to get your arc flagged for review as a farm, and possibly removed by the GMs that review it.

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We need to educate the playerbase then, because custom all-lieutenant or all-boss groups are not an exploit. The devs had plenty of warning about that construct in closed beta and the general agreement was that the ability to create such groups was a way to give mission designers more flexibility.

The only reason that there's an issue with these groups is that they arguably give disproportionate reward rates. I say "arguably" because those critters are actually harder to fight than normal (unlike, say, the RCO meow farm groups). Synapse and/or Positron may want to revisit the xp and drop rates for lieutenants and bosses now that we have data on what happens when you fight nothing but those ranks, but I hope to $deity that they never lose their sanity enough to yank the feature entirely.

PS. I like GlaziusF's idea for how to balance the map.

I've been testing this over the last few days. On an all-lieutenant outdoor map (the Ghost Falcon store-unlock map), I just about reach the ticket cap solo at the end of clearing the whole thing. Dual-boxing, I reach it in about 2/3s of the map. This makes no sense to me; I get that the number of critters on the map doubled, but there are also two teammates to split the rewards.

On an all-boss map, I reach the ticket cap solo in about 1/2 of a demon farm map. Dual boxing I hit it in 6-8 spawns.

Something definitely seems wonky about the way tickets scale with team size. I don't quite have enough data to say what is going wrong though.

I'm fine with running all-lt or all-boss maps if the description makes it clear what I'm in for... but I like challenges. Some people might not like it, particularly if the lts are customs and hit harder than normal lts.

I'd say the demon farm map is generic enough to be a plausible route to a bank. It's also relatively linear, so if the story involves heading straight to the bank for whatever reason, it'd make sense to take that kind of route.

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People on your ignore list can't play or rate your arcs.

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That's an excellent suggestion, and although it doesn't eliminate the problem, it seems like it could go a long way towards reducing the severity.

If a player became known for 0-star griefing, lots of people would just put them on ignore and avoid the risk. The reverse-grief - i.e. putting valid raters on ignore just to spite them - seems like it would only hurt the intended griefers.

Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I like it.

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I hate the fact that everytime I try to save changes it's not saving it to the one that's published so I have to re-publish again making a clone of the mission.

Arghh... friggin confusing MA...

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I just realized that both dug and myself answered your initial question but not your core issue.

Once you publish your story, it's copied up to the server. The serverside copy no longer references your local files. At that point, editing your local version is pointless - there's no way to propagate the edits to the published version (other than manually recreating them).

You need to edit the published mission instead. If you want to retain a local copy for record keeping purposes (which I always do), you should make your edits, re-publish, then wait until editing again shows that the changes have propagated all the way to the server (which takes a few minutes in some cases). At that point you can do a "save locally" operation to save off a copy of your edits.

Going the other direction - editing locally and trying to push the changes up to the published copy - just doesn't work (other than manual re-creation, as I mentioned). In cases where you absolutely have to hand-edit the file, such as re-ordering details, you have to un-publish (losing all your accumulated ratings) and then publish again from the local copy. If you do that you have to make sure you also copied down any edits you had made to the published copy, since as I said they're not automatically mirrored.

I agree it's confusing. I would have preferred they use the normal web publishing workflow, where you do your work in a sandbox and then push your results to the server, overwriting what's already there.

You just have to be careful with the custom groups and critters. Those are referenced in mission details via indices into a global list at the end of the file. If you copy a single mission out of an arc you need to fix any references and copy the customs into the new file.

Hm. I wonder if it would be possible to set up a vidiotmap-like mod to add waypoints for every spawn position using the technique I outlined above. Food for thought.

I have a specific map I have set up with bosses, hostages, wall glowies, and floor glowies. I have three instances of each type, labeled "Front XXX", "Middle XXX", and "Back XXX" (where XXX is the detail type). When I want to explore a map's properties, I load that map into the mission, set the number of each detail to be the maximum the map will support at that position, and then ghost the mission with my stalker to see where everything ends up.

It's tedious to set up, but incredibly enlightening. The definition of front, middle, and back is pretty non-obvious on some maps.

That doesn't narrow the level range of the mission, it expands the level range at which the group is available. This can create situations where a level 20 character will see completely different enemies than a level 40 character, and can be very confusing to manage.

As an example, I created a mission once with a custom group containing some 33-45 critters and some 35-45 critters. When I ran the mission as a 50 I saw the mix I expected. When I ran it as a 25, the mission spawned at 33, and only the 33-45 critters showed up - which made for very monotonous combat and wasn't at all what I had intended. I had to add a boss battle with an explicit 35-45 critter to get the mission itself to spawn at a minimum level of 35 and avoid the issue.

I don't think this is what the OP is going for, though I guess it's worth mentioning.

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Make sure of course they have similar names (I added a space to the none required ones at the end) and BAM, you got multiple items but only 1 that is the real one!

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I think the preferred way to do this is to set both the Plural and Singular Nav Text on both collection types to be the same string. No need to mess around with appended spaces or the like, and the actual detail names can be completely different.

I actually had cause to re-create Dark Watcher as a custom character for one of my stories, so if you want I can share the costume.

You can't duplicate him exactly, as far as I can tell, because his belt and hat are unique, and you can't turn up the collars on trench coats. I got pretty dang close, though.

From the Paragon Wiki article I gather DW is actually Illusion/FF (or possibly Mind/FF), which struck me as strange. Not only does his name include "dark" but the IO set named after him is an accuracy debuff set, so I was really expecting him to be dark-something or other. *shrug* I guess Lady Gray, who is demonstrably dark, got a defense debuff set, so maybe it's all arbitrary anyway.

I've never had any problems rearranging missions. That's really odd. The next time this happens can you try to gather specifics?

What I have had happen - and this has been driving me bonkers lately - is that mouse clicks can activate pop-ups or button clicks in hidden (collapsed) details. So for example clicking on the "Front/Middle/Back" pop-up on detail B causes detail A's group to be set to "standard" instead of "custom". And sometimes these changes don't generate errors so you don't know anything changed until you go to test the arc, or examine the storyarc file manually.

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There's no way to use standard critter sins (i.e. Clockwork or Mechmen) on custom critters is there?

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No, and it's unlikely ever to happen because animations are skeleton-dependent. Try to picture a Sprocket wielding dual blades - it's just not going to look good.

What we have been requesting, and what I think is reasonable, is to be able to re-label and re-describe stock critters for our missions. So a Sprocket would have all its normal powers but would be called a NanoWidget or whatever. But of course that doesn't solve your level problems.

It's possible to balance a story arc around a lower target level than the missions are actually fixed at. Frankly, the psychic clockwork aren't that dangerous to midlevel characters, so you could reasonably balance the final mission around level 30ish players, IMHO. The glaring exception to this is AVs. The purple triangle power scales so dramatically between 25 and 50 that even con AVs are probably three times harder at 50 than at 25. However, you can balance against single AV fights by adding custom allies if need be.

The only problem I see with that is the first mission still causes your players to have to exemplar down to play. I'm not sure I have a suggestion to get around that.

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The appeal to authority isn't necessary, though. I think his point makes sense.

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I have to disagree. While I follow all the logic in the article, most of the language used is inflammatory, and there's a glaring lack of data or hard evidence. Overall, I think the article is poorly researched, and the quotations by this particular authority are used in a crass attempt to disguise the lack of effort. So the credentials of said authority become important, because if you remove them, the article basically consists of an overly-dramatic cocktail of forum posts.

And saying there's drama on the forums is sort of like saying there's water in the ocean.

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My point, as obfuscated by lack of information as it was, was that there's no point discussing this here.

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After your followup, I still have no idea what your point was. Are you saying there's no benefit to be had from discussing anything, because everything is relative and no one has the same views? I feel like you're trying to turn the thread into a sophomoric essay for some hybrid journalism/philosophy class.

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It will be put back when it is fixed.

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As far as I know, no red name has commented on the removal of this map, so it's currently only a presumption that the map will reappear at some point.

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The Devs said in the Beta that the maps they pulled then would be returned as soon as they got them working correctly. They didn't say it would be fast.

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Yes, but there's a huge difference between pulling maps in beta and pulling maps after they've already gone live. The difference is so big that I would've expected a red name to at least comment that the removal was intentional. The continued silence almost made it seem like there was an exploit involved, which is the only deliberate reason changes don't get mentioned in patch notes.

Can you tell I'm miffed about this? Because I am. I'm glad Arcanaville got a comment from a red name, because none of the PMs I've sent have gotten any response, and about half of them haven't even been read (I generally attach read receipts to my dev PMs).

I don't think there's any reason talking about alcohol use would get a T-for-teen rating revoked. If the story was all about how cool it is to get wasted, that would probably get a thumbs down from someone.

The possessed scientist map was bugged last year to give repeatable drops. pohsyb fixed it in issue 12.5. Perhaps it's possible that i13 or i14 re-introduced that bug? The hallmark was that you would always get a set sequence of drops from the map, of a given type (salvage vs. insp etc) but of varying specifics (nevermelting ice one run, spell scroll the next, but always a salvage at that position).