Mind Forever Burning

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An Ally always needs hostile gurads, you cannot even give him no guards, not even when freeing him is not a mission goal, as it seems.

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You can give an Ally no guards - set the guard spawn size to "single".

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I'm not even sure that's a good idea in the first place. Remember, we're here to play a game more than read a story. If I really can't save someone, then they should be a body bag when I enter.

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Doesn't it seem less dramatic to have them be defeated entirely off-screen? It's almost like dropping a bridge on them.

Some of the other active threads reminded me of a problem I've been struggling with. In a story I'm developing, it's important for an ally to be defeated, and for the player to witness it.

At first I was going to try to make the ally paper-thin and the enemies very hard, but I quickly abandoned that idea since players can almost always find a way to win fights in clever ways. Even worse, if someone did find a way to save the ally against all odds, forcing the story to continue as if they had failed seems like it would be a frustrating slap in the face.

I think I could probably make it work by staging a Battle detail if Battles could contain named bosses instead of generic spawns - but they can't, so that's no good.

The best I can come up with right now is to have a Captive detail where the captive animation indicates they're in the middle of being defeated. The captive can then gasp out the clue with their last breath as the players take out the captor group. It's a little less interactive than I'd like, though.

Any other ideas?

The third mission in my arc is subtitled "Keep it together, $name!" - which is a reference to a part of an LRSF cutscene that has now been edited out. (Manticore used to say it to Sister Psyche while literally shooting himself in the foot with an arrow. It was pure Narm.)

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Like seriously....there are OTHER Lieutenants out there that can be used with ease, to gain XP and what not.

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To the best of my knowledge, those other things have lieutenant-level HP and do lieutenant-level damage. That's the difference.

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It would be interesting to see how many people would call it an exploit if a mission has very effective rewards - and nothing else. No comm officers. No units that can't or don't fight back. Nothing specifically wrong with the mission - just really good xp/rewards with possibly a lame story. I wonder how many people would "report" such an ebil mission.

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That wouldn't be an exploit, but it would still be a mission whose only purpose was to support farming, and my understanding is that such missions should be reported. The fact that the GMs removed a whole slew of arcs with "farm" in the title a week or so ago supports that presumption, but I don't have a redname quote on hand for it. Maybe someone else does.

I wish the devs would just create a separate tab for farm arcs and be done with it. There's obviously a demand.

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We've added a TON more datamining hooks exclusively for Mission Architect as well, so we can easily see spikes in aberrant behavior. Spikes point us to exploits, which points us to log files, which reveal the identities of exploiters. So if you find a really big exploit in the system, I'd encourage you to PM me or another Dev and try to get your Bug Hunter badge, as the alternative is not pretty.

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How does it say to deal with missions you think are expoits...through a PM to a dev, NOT that report for content button. Leave that for real issues like language, sexual content, trademark, etc. A farm is not an exploit. Exploits should be reported via PM to a Dev.


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I'm pretty sure Positron meant you should PM the exploit before even publishing the mission.

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Stuffing a custom group full of Rikti Comm Officers would not be a problem if RCOs didn't give elevated rewards based on their normal PvE surroundings, which you can strip out in the MA.

Anyone who thinks the devs aren't going to change this is kidding themselves. It has nothing to do with farming per se, it's a reward rate imbalance. The same arguments being made in defense of this out-of-balance MA mission were also made about the KHTF, and the Eden trial, and the Nictus Insurrection arc, etc, etc. They were bunk arguments then and they're bunk arguments now. The mission itself is fine (if monotonous), running it over and over is fine, but getting the reported reward rates from it is not fine, and I guarantee the devs will fix it when they have time.

I had this problem in one of my arcs. I had to re-order the details to get it to work, which unfortunately you can't do through the UI (at least not directly). The easiest way to do it is to open the storyarc file in a text editor and use copy/paste on the detail blocks.

If your mission is published already, though, you can't really do this if you want to keep your ratings. So you'd have to delete the details and re-create them in the order you need them to be. It's very frustrating, I know, but that's the only solution I know of at the moment.

My point is that there's a tangible reward for being a [censored]. Saying the reward doesn't exist if you're not a [censored] doesn't make sense. It does exist, you're just choosing not to take the bait.

I think we're splitting hairs.

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Part of the problem, IMHO, is the prime real estate of the first page of search results. If you're #1 on the 2nd page, there's an incentive to rating-grief someone on the first page so you get bumped forward.

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This is incentive only if you're an [censored].

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It's an incentive if you want to be on the first page, period. Whether or not you bow to the pressure depends on your moral judgment, but the incentive is there to view people in front of you as ratings-PvP opponents.

This kind of thing is why I really wanted the search results to be randomized within the star-delimited ratings bands.

I'm not sure there's a specific anti-HoF voting bloc, because if there was, they'd have used all their voting "bullets" by now (you can only vote once per account, after all). I think it's that anyone who's close to the front of the list becomes the rating PvP-opponent of anyone in front of them.

Part of the problem, IMHO, is the prime real estate of the first page of search results. If you're #1 on the 2nd page, there's an incentive to rating-grief someone on the first page so you get bumped forward.

Nope, no combat powers at all. Otherwise you could just make an army of non-kill-stealing buffbots.

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there's been some plagiarism going around.

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There has? How could you even tell? There are thousands of arcs up right now - some duplication of ideas is inevitable.

Also, Crey AI experiment stories have been done in canon. This sounds suspiciously similar to the Doctor's Ally badge story. That's not saying you can't do the story, but you should take the existing work into account somehow.

I'd rather do it on Live to get the badge there. Did you set a time?

My suggestion: Join the MA Arc Finder channel. No one that channel is interested in farming.

I'm interested as long as you run the arc from the RWZ so I can bring a villain.

You also might want to mention that there's a badge for completing a test mission with a full team... that's one reason I'm interested.

Those were taken out due, I think, to spawn placement issues. They need to be "massaged" before they can be used in MA missions. I believe the intent is to do that rework prior to i15 sometime, according to Positron's quote at the time, but I don't have it handy as proof.

Synapse told me in a PM that they are considering the option of adding merit rewards at some future date. No firm promises though. In addition to the datamining aspect I think they wanted to make sure they understood how merits and tickets balance out against each other before making that change. (That last bit is me hypothesizing, all Synapse said was they were considering it.)

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Being able to click buttons behind expanding menus is a nasty bug in itself. I've had a number of occasions where I also managed to somehow click a button inside a collapsed menu and screwed up the settings of a detail.

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Yeah, that one's been in since closed beta. Loathesome.

[ QUOTE ][*]New advanced objective: boss ambush. A named boss comes to attack you. Bonus: Boss is not necessarily surrounded by enemies of the same faction.

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Actually, I would go a step farther and say that any place a group is defined for an objective, you have the choice to make that group contain a named boss. That includes ambushes, hostages/escort/ally guards, battles, defendable and destructible objects, maybe more (did I miss any?)

Can't define it for boss groups themselves, obviously, otherwise infinite recursion - but you get the idea.

Edit:

[ QUOTE ][*]New objective enhancement: an option for Patrols to decide if they should Walk or Run.

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Or fly! Fly please, please, pretty please! (Mission error if not all critters in group can fly.)

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Well after a lot of hair pulling and testing and failed attempts to get anything useful from support, I have solved the issue on my own. It seems the file size indicator is dead wrong, because anything over 97.75% results in you being unable to publish. I have reported this as a bug, but be warned that 100% is false, keep it to about 97%.

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There's definitely something wonky. I had my story at 99.4% and was unable to publish. I then ran a double-space removal script over the storyarc file, getting it down to 99.2%, and could publish.

Later I went back and added some extra words here and there... and lo and behold, my story is now 99.5% and still publishable.

I think there is some field in there somewhere that is "silently" overflowing, and that's what's preventing you from publishing. I have no good ideas on how to find said field if you're in this situation, though. This caused me about two days of grief.

This should probably go in the forum dedicated to arc promotion - MA Stories and Lore, farther down.