Mind Forever Burning

As far as I know no red-name has commented on the missing maps. They're all too busy trying to spin Posi's statement about punishing egregious exploiters.

I also believe that the burning forest map was not pulled for farming reasons. I believe it was pulled because it could spawn impossible glowy positions. There's no particularly farmable quality to the Crey clone lab map, but I know for a fact it could spawn glowies in walls.

They also used to have a mag 1000ish mez protection. Not sure if that got fixed.

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I got it to work by accident just now. I switched to a more powerful character for testing, and none of the enemies lived long enough to disturb my "deceased" allies, but that's not something I can count on. I might be able to put in enough to fill the first room with just ally spawns, but I don't know if that would be reliable. When you get different numbers of people on the team, don't extra spawn points get populated? And I suspect there is some randomness to how it allocates who goes where within the "front" category.

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Extra people on the team don't create extra spawn points, they just cause the spawns to get bigger.

My advice would be to try to separate your groups by floor. If there are never any enemies on the same floor of a map with the slumping allies, you shouldn't have their animations disturbed.

I believe Passive critters can no longer offer buffs to their allies. I seem to recall that change was made a while ago. If you want buffs, you have to make the ally able to attack as well.

It is possible to create an ally that will attack only occasionally, though this seems to be due to less-than-optimal AI and is likely to change if pohsyb and Castle can figure out better algorithms.

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Meanwhile my story is ruined with no advance warning, no way to prepare, and no way of knowing whether I should rewrite the last mission or wait this inanity out.

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QFT

You've created a custom critter with two separate drawn weapons to manage... I'm not entirely surprised to find the critter gets confused.

I am actually surprised the MA editor let you build such a critter to begin with. I thought only one drawn weapon set was allowed on a critter, total.

My guess is that arc 3 was using something that got removed. Opening and re-publishing causes the arc to use whatever object is "next in the list" for the type of removed feature in question - i.e. the next map in line, or the next animation in line, or whatever.

This kind of thing is why I use Subversion - so I can track exactly what changes with each patch.

DC and HoF arcs are broken by the patch?

Sheesh...

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Good point. What are the creators supposed to do? Petition to have their HoF/Dev Choice fixed for them by a GM?

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Those are supposed to be protected from invalidation by patches. I'm not really sure how they can guarantee this, but that's what pohsyb said in beta.

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Aside from the maps. I still want to know what happened to Anti-Matter. Cause I could have swore I saw him in the unlockables and spent tickets on him.

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I know one of Anti-Matter and Neuron has been missing since day 1... you're sure you're not thinking of Neuron, and Anti-Matter has always been missing?

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I've been thinking of packing it in for now also. The technical limits of the system don't bother me too much, but the information management makes it very frustrating to create or play, for various reasons.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me is the removal of maps; if I can't count on the maps I use being there after publication, I'm disinclined to put much work into the story. The prospect of putting hours into finding the correct spawn placements and map organization only to have it yanked next patch is too frustrating.

It's maddening because I have a story I really, really want to write, and which I think would be really enjoyable for folks to play. But I simply don't have time to do rewrites every single patch, as has been the case since the MA went live.

I'd really like a red name comment on the maps thing. If they have a plan for dealing with this issue going forward it would go a long way to giving me confidence the system will ultimately be workable, limitations and all.

I think you accidentally used one of the Arch-Mages. Those are special somehow - I think they are actually EBs in disguise.

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Still making tweaks. Should be finalized soon.

However, since the ban hammer and report happy people are so abundant i'll just unpublish the arc while i'm offline and only publish it when I want to farm.

Genius!

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Yeah, that will totally prevent the dev datamines from uncovering your outlier reward rates.

Genius!

I honestly can't tell what either of you are talking about.

That's funny... I lose them.

My one MA arc used both of these mission missions. Sorry devs, if there's a problematic spawn point in a map, remove the spawn point. Don't remove the map.

I am unbelievably mad about this. I'm about ready to give up on the MA entirely.

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I take it back: maps should just not be removed, ever. Even with forewarning.

Some stories are built on specific spawn location behaviors. Removing maps basically destroys those stories. If there are spawn issues (one map I know had glowies-spawning-in-walls issues) remove the problematic spawn location, not the whole map. Yes, maybe that's more work for you devs. But you know what? I don't care. Suck it up.

Otherwise you're doing the MA equivalent of making energy blast build a cottage.

FFS

*headdesk headdesk headdesk*

That's two of my maps gone in the same patch.

I suppose it was inevitable that someone bring this up.

I do read the Training Room patch notes. There was nothing there indicating that my arc would be invalidated (yet again). I have no Rikti Comm officers, or Batzul fire imps. I knew about the custom critter power changes but I've set all of mine to "standard" for now anyway, precisely because I didn't want to have to rebalance my arc every patch.

So what you're saying is that I should revalidate my arcs on Test every patch regardless of what the notes say? That's like loading up all my tanks on Test every patch to make sure Gauntlet is still working. I simply don't find that an enjoyable use of my time.

I stand by my original point: the devs need to protect arcs from breaking with no warning when patches arrive, or they risk undermining the whole point of the MA. If they do break arcs for whatever reason they need to clearly state what is breaking and how to fix it. I really don't feel like spending hours debugging broken storyarc files trying to figure out what suddenly stopped working. That kind of thing is OK to ask of players in beta, but not on live.

The Tyrant map was specifically removed due to glowies spawning in the lava, making the mission non-completable. Not sure about the Hess map you mention. The only other lava-containing mission I recall offhand is the Bat'zul map, and I don't think that was ever in the MA to begin with (perhaps for similar reasons, I dunno).

You cannot continue to break arcs with patches without explicitly outlining what is breaking and how to fix it. That's going to cause mission authors to basically give up.

That means no:

- Removal of maps without warning
- Removal of critters without warning
- Increase in space requirements without explanation
- Reduction in maximum text limits without explanation

You need to have arc validation as part of your QA process. Arcs become unplayable == patch not accepted.

I have one published arc, which took me four solid days of work to write. Since then it has taken me another 4-6 days of solid work re-fixing it after nearly every patch that touched the MA. I will grant you that most of that work happened in beta, but two of the most time-consuming incidents happened on live.

OK, done ranting now.

I am pretty sure you get tickets when people rate your arc: 20 tickets for 4 stars, 25 tickets for 5 stars. Whether or not they finish the arc doesn't seem to matter.

Admittedly I don't have a huge pool of data, but that's my understanding.

So it's hard to tell whether someone finished when they rated (though you can use badge progress as a hint), and when they rate, how they rated, unless they give you a 4 or 5.

I'd actually really like to see anonymized statistics on what people are giving as ratings for my arcs. I realize it might be hard to truly anonymize it in the presence of named feedback, but I think I would find it very useful.

I don't think the OP was worried about idea theft, but rather about having a favorite name taken by the time they were ready to use it.

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The organized one-starring of the arcs of players who had complained about farming was particularly jarring.

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When did this happen?

Warnings against exploits are always vague. They have to be, since an exploit is, almost by definition, something the devs didn't think of when they were creating the system. What would you consider acceptable language for Positron to use here? I mean, could you actually demonstrate what you want Positron to spell out? (Not trying to troll, I'm honestly curious.)