Mind Forever Burning

Ah, I missed that note. Thanks for the head's up. Still mighty, mighty annoyed that this happened. IMHO, pulling a map is like pulling a power. You just don't do it if it's possible to avoid.

As far as I can tell these are normal sized spawns, they just happen to be all bosses.

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Designers, stop trying to challenge me.

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Maybe the designers are trying to challenge someone else, who actually wants to be challenged?

I think there is a huge liability in the way the system is currently set up. There's no way to specify that your arc is to be played by level 40+ characters and not level 10s other than putting text in the description and crossing your fingers. And the Fortunata settings aren't sufficient to differentiate them; a mission that's playable at challenge level 1 for a level 10 character is probably going to be a cakewalk for a level 40 character on challenge level 5.

The devs actually designed level 40+ critters independently of the level 10 critters in a given faction for exactly this reason. MA mission designers don't have that leeway.

There's also another problem in that the rewards don't scale with the intended challenge. Critters designed for level 10 characters give the same rewards that critters designed for level 40+ characters give. In that environment, there's basically no rewards-balance reason to ever use anything other than "standard" for all your customs. Doing so means that players playing your arcs are essentially paying a reward-rate penalty to enjoy your story, which definitely sits badly with me.

I have a few thoughts about how to address this, but I'm not sure how feasible any of them are. I'm beginning to think the MA was just released too early.

I think that's because he is only a contact and not a combatant in regular PvE.

I'd recommend creating your own character for him. What powersets do you think he would possess? I'm thinking Dark Blast plus some kind of debuff set, but as far as I know it's never said in canon what his abilities are, so that's just a guess.

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In addition, they have gone on record stating that voting-cartel type behavior will not be tolerated, and being able to rate one's own arc, possibly multiple times, could easily qualify as such.


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As far as I know, all that any redname has stated is that people have been complaining about them. Positron didn't specifically call that behavior out as exploitative in his "abusing MA" post, nor did any of the followup seem to be intended to address it, aside from restructuring badges so that said cartels wouldn't have as much reason to exist.

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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 problem seems to be that the critter and cvg files get reloaded if they exist on the machine, even if they no longer match those in the storyarc file.

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This is correct. I have experienced this to my frustration several times. I have seen this result in a custom critter being loaded twice - once as defined in a misson, and once as defined in my critter folder.

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The thing is, that's the behavior you want if you're sharing a custom critter among multiple story arcs. Otherwise you'd have to hand-edit the story arc file on one or more of the arcs sharing the custom critter. Likewise, if you edit a critter outside of any particular story arc, you want story arcs to show the changes you made.

It's a little weird, but I don't have a suggestion for alternate behavior that wouldn't be worse than what we have now.

Another shot in the dark: are you editing the files from the same account and the same character?

This suggests another test: try copying the entire City Of folder - not just the Mission Architect files, but everything - from one computer to the other. Maybe there's some character or account specific information that's getting attached to the mission; we know some of that is stored locally.

I saw that note, but I confess I don't understand it. Why would the number of tickets granted on mission bonus ever have been greater than the number gained during the mission? I thought the former number was derived from the latter to begin with.

EDIT: Hm, unless the note is talking about joining a mission partway through? In that case it doesn't seem to relate to the OP's issue.

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Turg, is there any possibility that the two CoH installations have a difference in Client Versions?

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If the client reports a version older than the game servers, it shouldn't connect.

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The only way I can think of that this might happen is if Turg was accidentally running the Test client on one of the systems... but that seems so unlikely I almost didn't mention it.

Gotcha. Sorry I jumped to conclusions.

Interesting, I'll have to give that arc a spin and see if I can reproduce your results.

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I always give grammar feedback if I feel the arc will benefit from it, and I try to be as specific as possible (though sometimes it's difficult with the character limit on the feedback field).

But I don't always downrate for grammar issues. I used to be more of a perfectionist, being used to printed materials, but I reset my expectations after some experiences with typos and such getting into the MA due mainly to its weirdly laggy editing behavior.

Only if the grammar/spelling issues are enormously distracting do I actively downrate. I do up-rate for well-formed turns of phrase or clever voicing, but it's possible to earn a 5 from me without those in play.

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Absolutely, positively sure. What I did was wipe out all the MA folders from both locations, excepting the USB flash; then recopy from the flash source to the two locations. Verified in both laptop and desktop that the actual file size was X for the storyarcs and the various folders. I also ran a file compare on Leandro's suggestion to see what'd it show, and FC showed zero discrepancies on either side. However, with both editors up and editing the file, one would show 98%, the other 102%. The only real difference I saw was in "file size on disk", which showed a 4% difference. The two sets of facts seem pretty direct in this case.

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Well, I'm baffled then. Arcanaville's testing in beta indicated that the progress bar was measuring the sizes of objects in memory rather than how much space they take on disk (the size of all-black costume parts seems to show this pretty clearly). But the only explanation for what you're seeing seems to be that the size is the size on disk, or at least directly related to it.

Does every story arc exhibit this same behavior on these two systems, or is it something particular to this story arc? If the latter, can you try removing missions and/or details to see if there's a specific construct that shows a difference?

Of course you might be sick of looking at the issue, in which case no worries, I'm just really curious now.

Wait, I think I mis-read what you wrote. How large was the map?

Not a bug. There's always been a ticket cap; the last patch lowered the cap to 1500 per player per mission. You were apparently at 1394 for the map prior to getting the completion bonus, so were only eligible for the remaining 106 tickets.

I seem to remember there is a known problem where the system will eat your souvenirs, something to do with opening the clue/souvenir window when first logging in. Anyone else remember the details?

Back to the original question...

Turg, are you absolutely, positively sure that everything is the same on both systems? I ask because when you edit story arc files, the system will "absorb" any changes made to custom critters or groups. So if you copied the story arc file to another system, but forgot to copy one of the critter group files, you could end up with two different sizes after the story arc "absorbs" the difference.

One thing I'm curious about is the idea of re-saving the story arc file on the machine that shows the increase, and then using a diff tool to see if there are any differences between that and the original. That would detect not only the case I mention above, but any weirdness involving the ever-popular   spam and the like.

Put another way, one thing the devs could have done was to make "standard" custom critters force a level 25 cap on the mission, "hard" force a level 40 cap, and only "extreme" go up to level 54. Then they could balance the meanings of "standard", "hard", and "extreme" against the level ranges of characters they'd be fighting.

Or, they could have made critters scale automatically to "standard" when the mission was 25 or lower, "hard" when 26-40, and "extreme" when 41+. In a sense this is what the dev-designed PvE critters do, albeit it's via creating different critter versions rather than having auto-scaling.

The problem is that the critters have no notion of what "level" (or even level range) they are supposed to be operating in. Standard critters are far stronger than players at low level, and become manageable to easy at high level. Not only do players accumulate powers, they accumulate slots to enhance those powers, so they become much more effective.

It seems odd to me that the devs didn't start with the notion of having a standard scaling of low level to mid level to high level, affecting both power availability and power effectiveness, and allow authors to make tradeoffs to balance offense and defense as deviations from the default.

The way things are structured now, the devs have put themselves in the position of making worst case assumptions about mission authors. That is, the weakest an author can make a critter has to be comparable to the PvE critters designed to fight level 50 player characters, and scale up from there. That's pretty crippling if you're trying to design critters to be fought by level 5 characters.

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Basically any larger outdoor map is now wasting a players time and shouldn't be used. Be it for storytelling or what have you. You're punishing your players by putting kill alls on larger maps now.

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You were always punishing your players by putting kill alls on larger maps. There's no reason a farm ever needed to be a kill all.

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Its been about a week since the "nerf" and since that time, once again servers are back to normal population. Before...I had fun and it was fun to see all the players jumping online.

What kind of vibe is the community getting since the nerf ingame?

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My mood ring is showing kind of a blue-green plaid with a hint of orange trim. But I lost the little card that came with it, so I don't know what that means.

I'm thinking it's probably "Doom", but that's just a guess.

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Geveo wins the thread!

I prefer option 1 as well for essentially the reasons already stated: it "feels" like the player has a more active role. It'll depend some on delivery, of course.

Are you running XP 64 or Vista 64 on your home machine by any chance? That affects the size of pointers, which is significant for in-memory structured data. (File size is unaffected, but I'm not convinced the MA sizing is strictly related to file size.)

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It's like player created arcs aren't worth as much as the games reg arcs ...

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Except they are. All you have to do is reset maps more often than you used to have to, and it's only necessary in extreme cases. You still get the flexibility of tickets and the reward rates from high-boss-density combat. The one thing AE arcs don't give you at all is chances at purples, and that was true from day one.

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Yep...AE is headed toward the ghost-town status that the Arena currently enjoys.

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Only in the same sense that when I walk across 5th Avenue in Manhattan I'm headed toward Los Angeles. There are many people who use the AE for other things than maxing reward rates.