Mind Forever Burning

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The risk vs reward is now tipped to more risk less reward...

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This did nothing to the risk/reward balance up to the point where you stop getting tickets on a given mission, and as I mentioned above, it's still quite a bit higher than you can get in regular PvE.

I'm so glad I didn't fix my arc last week only to have it broken again this week.

Any more maps missing? I sent pohsyb a PM regarding last week's patch, and he's read it, but no reply yet.

In case anyone is wondering what it takes to get 1500 tickets, that's about half of the Demon farm map spawned with all bosses and maxed on ally rescue details (run on relentless/invincible). I'm not sure whether the 1500 limit includes the bonus or not, so it might be 1/4 of that map instead of half.

What this forces people to do is use smaller maps for their all-boss, max-ally-detail farms. It doesn't significantly change the reward rate, IMHO, other than by forcing people to reload the map 2-4x as often as they used to have to. It's still a better reward rate than regular PvE by a pretty wide margin.

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FYI...it's not 1500 per mission, it's 1500 per arc. And THAT IS low.

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You've done testing to prove this? Because the patch notes say otherwise.

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Farm missions are designed to be easy, the enemies die fast, do little damage, and lack control/debuff powers. Challenge missions have almost the exact opposite criteria. I am not sure how they could be confused.

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They can be confused because they use some of the same tricks. The things that make hard critters harder, also make ridiculously easy critters give more rewards.

My concern is that they are preparing to do exactly that, or at least considering it. I really don't want that to happen.

To Dug: it sounded like these weren't actually Freaks. Or maybe by "custom group" the OP meant a custom group with stock critters in it?

Whether or not this is a simple case of having the arc filtered out... I too am concerned that the mechanics that make difficult missions possible will be eliminated.

I ran a few boss farm type maps on several of my characters over the last few days. And while the reward rate was better than what you get fighting minions, I also died. Quite a few times. And this is on characters who are used to tromping through TFs solo with no danger whatsoever.

It's possible that boss rewards need to be adjusted somewhat, but I really, really hope that all-boss and all-lieutenant spawns aren't eliminated, and that we retain the ability to fix enemy levels at 53 and 54.

Also, some arcs cannot be completed, due either to bugs or to overly difficult encounters. You can't in fairness tell someone they can't rate an arc they played 99% of only to have a glowy spawn in a wall on the last mission.

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I'm guessing this is an ally? Someone else was saying the same thing - the allies spawned even-con no matter what the level/difficulty of the mission overall.

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This is awesome stuff, and one of the main reasons I was excited about the MA when I first heard it was coming.

I don't have time to run or participate in this kind of campaign myself, but I'd love to hear what others are doing along these lines. I don't suppose your SG/group has a blog that talks about how the campaign is evolving? I'd be really interested to read more.

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And there is a point that is larger than my silly little story. The procedure set forth by Positron apparently requires the writer to put one of his slots at hazard if they seek review of complained-about arcs by the announced procedure for having them reviewed. This seems unfair, at least to authors who are not creating exploit missions but trying in good faith to create the sort of material that Positron seems to want.

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This part seems worth pursuing even if the arc in question never gets the all-clear. You're right, it does seem to be punishing the well-intentioned.

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I've written a short letter to the devs asking them to rethink their decision. I'd encourage other folks with concerns to do the same. However, I have some small problem. Who exactly should I sent it to? Do we know which dev-person is point on this issue?

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I would send it to Niviene. This is a customer service kind of issue, not a developer issue.

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An arc of mine ("Monstrous Regiment of Lesbian Hellions, 27178) showed up banned last night. The notice said that it had been banned by a GM, for "inappropriate content."

...

It was my understanding that complaints automatically banned arcs after a certain number had been received, and that republication cleared the ban and flagged it for human review.

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My read of the situation is that people complained, the arc got auto-banned, you edited and republished, and the GM that reviewed the arc after republication decided the complaints were valid and manually banned the arc.

Not sure what you need to do at this point, but if the GMs think the arc is inappropriate, you may just have to pull it permanently (and work with them to clear the arc slot).

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If that's the case, then would adding the non-custom characters to the custom group allow you to create a boss encounter using lieutenants and minions?

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I believe so, yes. So that might be a workaround. You don't even need to recreate the whole faction, just put the thing you want to be the boss objective in it, and then set its companion spawn to use the original, non-custom faction.

Are you absolutely, absolutely sure you could do this before? I have a pretty clear memory of setting up a boss encounter with Crey and that only the boss characters from Crey were listed. That would've been last weekend, prior to the patch.

When you're setting up boss encounters with custom groups, you should have all characters listed, AV down to minion - but I thought that was still working as of yesterday.

There have been no red name comments on the removal, but my guess is it's because glowies could spawn inside walls in the big final room.

I spent Tuesday pondering driving down to Paragon Studios to complain about this. It basically killed my arc in its current form; I'll need to do a lot more playtesting to find another map with the right placement characteristics and story fit, and I simply don't have time to do that.

Huh. Well, all I can say is I have heard nothing about intentional AI changes, and I've been watching for them pretty carefully.

I'm pretty sure you can invite new teammates to AE missions without reforming. What you can't do AFAICT is back out of a chosen AE mission to pick a different one, without completing it.

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There are solid design reasons for mking it like this.

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There are? What are they? I've never heard a red name comment on this one way or the other.

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... figuring out how to spawn chained objectives relatively near each other on a large map.

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I don't think that's possible, unfortunately; outdoor maps don't have any notion of front/middle/back like inside maps do. (I mean, the concept is there, but every spawn point is labeled both "front" and "back" so they're all equivalent.)

The recipes available to be received are based on the band you pick, but the actual level of the recipe is your own security level. It's always been this way.

I doubt this was an AI change - my guess would be the powers available in your critter's secondary changed, and the AI handles the new set of powers less smoothly than it did the old set. You might need to play around with the critter to get it back to something you like.

A PM is probably going to be more effective. I think he'd be interested in your case because it's a very demonstrable bug of a class I'd expect them to want to quash ASAP.

There have been vague rumors that side switching might be coming down the pipes at some point. Not for i15 though or they would've mentioned it by now.

In addition to the people you mentioned, Positron is head MA guy. Synapse is rewards guy (so tickets, etc).

As for the MA file format and validation, I would guess that's pohsyb based on what happened in beta, but he's been pretty quiet on the forums post-live.