Mind Forever Burning

Wow. I... I can't believe it. I really feel like I'm losing a friend. Of all the developers and community reps, you're the one that I always felt like I could rely on to be honestly forthcoming, to be upbeat, and to do whatever it took to make the game a great place to be.

The game is going to lose some of its shiny for me now, I think. I'm sad.

But of course those are all selfish reactions. I wish you nothing but the best wherever you go next. It's been great having you here.

"Don't be a stranger," says the guy whose forum name means "stay away."

First: I love the MA.

Now, with that out of the way, I wanted to rant^H^H^H^Haddress this quote from Positron:

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even the most Pollyanna dev on the team never expected the feature to take off this fast, with this amount of awesome buzz behind it.

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I have to say... that kind of explains it. I mean, people in closed beta were talking about the need for better searching/sorting capabilities from the day I joined, but aside from publishing arcs according to global rather than character name (which I almost regard as exploit closure), none of the many enhancements we recommended were implemented. I had hopes that some of it would make it in after open beta, but nope, the search/sort and rating system we have now is basically what was first given to us.

Players told you it was going to be inadequate given the volume of content the playerbase would generate... and now I think you probably just didn't let yourselves believe it. But events are proving them right. The rating system may not be the worst measuring stick ever, but combined with a lack of categorization and a fairly fixed display order, diving into the MA is like walking into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, with nary an egg to drop on the floor to mark our way.

I'm guessing you had discussions like, "We can go with this for now and improve it if the system scales beyond what we expected." Well, it has already done so, and the need for better information coping mechanisms is pressing. Don't let us drown in your success.

OK rant over, back to playing with the Architect.

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If you're going to use this sort of quid pro quo system as an entrance fee, then I really think you should have some sort of double-blind on it.

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That's a good idea. And in fact, I was thinking of placing myself only as a coordinator in this and not doing any judging at all (and therefore getting none of the quid-pro-quo arc plays out of it, but that's OK, I'll take one for the team).

So I could be the gatekeeper of the entrants, and help coordinate with the Scoop staff and Ex on the promotion of the event, while leaving the actual judging/critiquing to the panel of judges.

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MA is basically a massive story contest.

If you did a themed contest - re-write the Positron TF, or do a single mission of Trolls - that makes sense.

But a general story arc contest is basically redundant.

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If the MA review system worked to everyone's satisfaction, I would agree with you. But it doesn't; I'm not speaking just of my own opinions here, but those I've read on these very forums (phrases like "5-star bandits", "1-star bandits", and "rating system is basically worthless" get bandied about all the time).

That's really the main reason to do this: a significant part of the playerbase is not happy with the current rating system. If you're in the camp that the current rating system is fine, more power to you; I'm trying to offer options, in a way that will hopefully be fun and constructive for all involved.

Oh, and every entrant would still get a full review by the judges in a dedicated forum thread. I would probably ask Ex to sticky it for the duration of the contest.

Hey folks,

I raised the idea of a story arc contest in beta and it was generally well received conceptually. However, one thing that was a sticking point: I had envisioned an entry fee (in inf) to prevent floods of entries from people who weren't really serious about creating good content. The fee was regarded as onerous by many commenters.

Having seen the MA live, I think my concerns were valid: there is a lot of cruft in the system, and anyone with anything halfway decent has to fight to get it noticed. However, I think I totally missed the ball in one regard; inf isn't the right gatekeeper. If my own experience is any indicator, people wanting to have their stories noticed couldn't give a fig about inf, which makes it not only a poor choice for a contest prize, it's also no incentive to become a judge. And finding good judges has been a problem; my call for judges garnered exactly no responses.

So here's my revised plan: both the entrance fee and the judges' compensation is measured in arc plays. In order to enter, all you have to do is play one arc by one of the judges. PM the judge of your choice the title of your entry as well as some detail of the arc you played to confirm you played it, and you get in. Note that rating the judge's arc isn't an enforceable requirement, but the rules would ask (via the honor system) that entrants give what they feel are fair ratings to the arc they played.

This makes it very compelling to be a judge, because you'll likely get a lot of plays from prospective entrants.

We also need to address the contest prize; inf doesn't seem like a great award anymore. So my v2 reward is that all of the top three finalists get dedicated review space by the judges in the City Scoop, with a lengthier review of the grand winner a week later by the combined judging team. In addition, the winner would be formally recommended for DC examination to the devs, either by PM or by the dedicated recommendation thread mentioned in Moderator08's thread. (Though I haven't been able to find the latter; was it ever set up? Regardless, PM would probably work.)

Thoughts on this rev? If this goes forward, I will need judges. I will also want to move on this relatively soon, as my schedule will become overwhelmingly busy in early June.

Criteria for judging:

- You have to have good writing and critiquing skills. The whole point of the contest is to provide quality feedback to aspiring authors.
- You have to have enough time over the next three to four weeks to critique 15-20 story arcs. That's quite a few arcs.
- Preferably you'll have play time slots available for US West Coast evening play, so that we can run some entry arcs as a team, but that's not a hard requirement.

EDIT: Can't really recommend DC status, just that it be played/considered - reworded.

EDIT2: Reposted criteria for judges from my earlier thread.

[ QUOTE ][*]And finally there will be a forum thread called ‘Dev’s Choice: For Your Consideration’ where players can post arcs they think should be considered for Dev’s Choice. The two guidelines being, you can’t promote your own arc (that’ll likely happen in some other forum somewhere else) and you can’t disagree with anyone else’s suggestion (again, that’ll happen in some other thread).

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Was this ever set up? I haven't seen it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right forum?

Some maps are weird. I'd recommend testing it by filling the map with objectives named after their location, i.e. if the map says 6 boss points (3 back, 3 front) you put in 3 bosses named "front" and 3 named "back", with their locations set appropriately. Then you can run through the mission and see where the spawn points really are.

Presumably the code to make the glowy's skeleton spawn on a trigger was never coded, or something along those lines... I think it's been suggested plenty of times as a reasonable MAv2 enhancement.

EDIT: It occurs to me the answer above basically amounts to "because that's just how it works", but I don't think there's really a better answer.

A red name commented on this during (I think) closed beta. The tier 9 powers that are typically used in last-ditch situations by critters, including temp godmodes and nukes, have to be specially coded by the AI to be used at low health. Some existing critters already in-game prior to i14 required those powers, so they'd been given special treatment already; for example, Nova and Unstoppable.

But if a powerset hasn't been used by critters prior to i14 the power can end up getting used oddly and/or badly. Critters tend to open with Inferno, for example, then stand there helpless without endurance (assuming, that is, that there's anything left to attack it). Some of the godmode powers don't get used at all.

I thought that pohsyb was going to address this in the now-near-mythical AI update that he and Arcanaville were planning out during closed beta, but if that update ever happened, it passed me by. As far as I can tell AI still has the same issues it did in closed beta. It's a little frustrating at times, but on the other hand I understand the problem; you can't make an infinitely complex AI or the combat server would grind to a halt during large battles.

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(by the way, you cannot get one-shot by anything in game, there's code to prevent that, no matter how big the hit you're always left at 1 HP).

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I haven't tried this, but I think fire/nin would be able to oneshot you via DOT, no?

My recommendation would be to try to find a map with only 2 "back" spawn points that happen to be in the same room. I don't know for sure that one exists, but that'd be your best shot, I think.

One thing you can do is create a test arc, with exactly the number of bosses in it as there are "back" spawn points, then run through on a character with stealth to see where they all are. Yes, this is tedious, but it's worth it if you can manage to create the effect you want.

I wish the maps just had little dots on them telling you where the spawn points were up-front.

Have you tried making the boss a non-required objective? That might do it. (I agree this is a bug, just thinking this might be a workaround.)

Here's some rules of thumb for teaming and XP:

- Teams defeat enemies faster, but earn less XP per defeat.

- Soloists tend to have best XP/time performance against +1s or +2s; beyond that the to-hit rules and damage scaling make them take too long, even with XP bonuses for higher levels. Conversely at even-con or below the lowered XP overcompensates for the additional speed at which foes can be defeated.

- Given the above, the team overall operates at highest efficiency when everyone on the team is near the "sweet spot". Highly efficient superteams or the like can routinely handle +3s or even +4s, so the rule of thumb has some flex, but generally keeping everyone close to the sweet spot is best.

- When you have a wide disparity in level ranges, the highest level members of the team contribute more than their fair share to the enemy defeat rate, but may earn the worst XP rates due to "sweet spot" distance. If the enemies are high enough level to be in the highest member's sweet spot range, then the lower level members of the team contribute almost nothing, but still earn great XP, while the highest level teammate is basically defeating everything on their own but still splitting the rewards.

I had a discussion with Arcanaville regarding the above effects, where she claimed the problem was inherently unsolvable. I disagree, and even created a formula that I believe would correctly distribute XP according to "effort" (though it relied on having datamined evidence of what "effort" means giving level differences); the problem is that said formula made teaming so punitive for lower-level characters that I feared it would discourage teaming entirely.

Generally when I form teams, I choose teammates that are either my level, one level below me, or able to SK up to someone at my level. That makes the level disparity no more than 1 level between highest and lowest member. I can then run my own missions at the 3-5 difficulty level so that nothing is more than +3 to the lowest member of the team.

When I've been in your situation - a high level disparity with me as the highest level teammate, and the enemies even-con or blue to me - the XP has been terrible, far below what I could do solo. So I tend to avoid those situations unless I just happen not to care, for example if I'm helping newbies learn the game, or am playing on a 50 for badges or merits or whatnot.

I think airhead tried to explain it, but let me give it a shot. It's a bit subtle.

The basic idea is that there is a fixed number of spawn points on every map. Those spawn points are filled with regular spawns, but only when nothing else is occupying them. So as you add details, you're not increasing the total number of spawns on the map, what you're doing is replacing generic spawns with your details.

So if you have a map where every spawn point is also capable of holding a customizable detail, say a patrol, then you can put in that number of details (again, in this example, patrols). Then you set those patrols to only spawn when an objective is completed. When the player enters the map, there's nothing there, because all spawn points are "occupied" by the patrols even though they haven't yet spawned.

You can do the same trick with boss details, which allows you to leave the spawn standing still and also gives you control over animations. As airhead said, you don't have to make the "boss" a real boss - you can make them a minion or lieutenant for the purposes of filling the map.

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A slight work-around for a lazy melee NPC AI is to have the player jump over the target so the NPC follows you and gets closer.

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Actually, I've found that you have to get the enemy to move; once the ally is in a given range of the enemy, it tends not to move, even if you change your own range to the ally. Getting the enemy to move is sometimes fairly easy, but it does make spamming immobilization a losing proposition.

AE System
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Welcome to Architect Entertainment -- Neutral
Death for Dollars! -- Neutral
Bare Knuckles of Rage (9304)
Signal to Noise -- Neutral -- 67277
*

Character/Supergroup Origins
--------
Birth of a Fossil -- Heroic
Secret Origins(Tech) The Snake Women of Epsilon V (42221) - Heroic
Noah Reborn -- Heroic (2370)
Jumping in Feet First - Heroic - 1345
*

Classic Super-Hero/Super-Villain
--------
THE BOMBER --- Heroic --- 16607
In The Shadow of Statesman --Neutral--1160
A Show to Die For! --- Heroic --- 30645

Comedy
--------
The Extadine Lab -- Heroic
MacGuffin Delivery Service (1567) -- Villainous
ParaCon -- Heroic
The new and improved Lord Recluse Strike Force -- Villainous (though I wouldn't recommend against a hero )
The Fire Bunnies - Neutral, They are only bunnies after all...
You Say It's Your Birthday! (3630) - Neutral
Trademark Infringement -- Heroic (2220)
Hail to the King Neutral (34640)
Walk On the Wild Side - Neutral - 3580
Shirley You Jest (25474) -- Neutral
The Invasion of the Bikini Clad Samurai Vampiresses from Outer Space! - Heroic - 61013
Gnomish Madness (30204) - Heroic
Doctor Nadir and the Hellion Heist (49661) - Heroic
*

Comedy/Drama
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A Super Team is Born -- Heroic
Cause of How Some Silly Stealed My Wings #1481 -- Neutral
How to Survive a Robot Uprising -- Heroic (12669)
Dr. Duplicate's Dastardly Dare -- Neutral
It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding (9059) -- Neutral
TURG FICTION: Ghost in the Machine, Act I - Heroic (althoughs romantic villains could try this too )
Rum Runners of Bloody Bay (3691) - Heroic
Have a Blap, Blap, Blappy Day Kids! (2019)
The Toypocalypse! (49280) - Heroic
*

Crime/Gangs
--------
The Bravuran Jobs -- Villainous (16809)
The Monstrous Regiment of Lesbian Hellions -- Heroic (27178)
Win the 2009 Freak-Lympics (2150) - Villainous
Ninja Crimewave! (2142) - Heroic
Whitehawks (Arc 49364) -- Heroic
The Internet is for Crime (53385) - Villains
Plastic Pistol Peril (1135) - Heroic*

Drama
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The Conciliators: Simone -- Heroic (4010)
The Fan Club -- Heroic
Matchstick Women -- Heroic -- 3369
Of Mentors and Legacy - Heroic - 1589
*

Global Domination
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Axis and Allies -- Villainous (1379)
*

Heist
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Celebrity Kidnapping -- Villainous (1388)
Easy Money -- Villainous (31490)
*

Historical (Realistic)
--------
*

Historical (CoH Lore)
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The War on Superadine - The Regulators in their 1980's drug war (Heroic) (Arc 7959)
Origins - Volume 1 (57077) -- Heroic
*

Holiday
--------
*

Horror
--------
Astoria in D Minor (41565) -- Heroic
Dark Dreams (3615)
The Amulet of J'gara (1709) -- Heroic
Project: Perilous - Into the Chthonian Pit (#3586) - Neutral (Unless you happen to be a mad cultist, in which case, go nuts!)
Small Fears -- Heroic
*

Large-Scale Crisis
--------
A Hero's Halo -- Heroic
This Is War, Part I - the Revenge of Hro'Dtohz -- Neutral
Win the Past, Own the Future - Heroic
A Warrior's Friend - Heroic
The Clockwork War -- Heroic (18672)
Flight of the Valkyries - Precursor (20272) -- Neutral
The Human Hive (#1632) - Neutral
*

Magic
--------
The Magical Miss Fitz (5079) -- Heroic
Chains of Blood (5492) -- Heroic
A Deal with Destiny -- Heroic
*

Military
--------
Redoubt Operations #1: Fires over Kalago -- Heroic
Red Storm Rising (Arc 4912) -- Heroic
Whitehawks (Arc 49364) -- Heroic
Axis and Allies -- Villainous (1379)

*
Misc. Adventure
--------
The Portal Bandits (3326) -- Heroic
*

Mystery
--------
Blowback (18575) -- Heroic
Dream Paper -- Heroic (13030)
Dream Paper 2: Restless Sleep -- Heroic (16797)
Dream Paper 3: Broken Dreams -- Heroic (13064)
*

Mythology
--------
Atlantis Attacks! -- Neutral (30898) -- Click for Promotional Poster
Anactoria's Descent Into the Underworld -- Villainous
The Seelie War -- Heroic
The Unseelie War -- Villainous
Tales of Cimerora, volume 1 : Of feathers and fur -- Heroic
The Aegis Affair - Heroic
Witches and Warriors (53006)- Heroic
The War of Fate(12220,46722)- Heroic
Rites of the Maenads (61159) - Heroic
*

Nemesis Plots
--------
Brass Reaver: Part 1 -- Neutral
*

Player-Chosen Outcome
--------
Hunting the Dark Dragon -- Heroic
Playing Gods -- Heroic (51106)
*

Sci-Fi
--------
Adventures of the Space Marines -- Neutral
Adventures of the Space Marines 2 -- Neutral
Above Mars - Part 1: The Wellington -- Neutral (13215)
The Final Nemesis
*

Un-themed Survival/AV/Time Challenges
--------
The Meatgrinder -- Neutral
*

Puzzles/Riddles
--------
Grim Riddles (#1396) - Heroic

Nope, sorry, at present clues only award on the first instance. I'd recommend you restructure the way you're presenting the information - if the bombs are the only mission completion requirement, for example, you can make it the mission complete clue rather than the collection clue.

Making one bomb "special" doesn't solve the problem, btw, since you have no control over what order people do the collections in. They might hit your special bomb first and you'd have the same situation you're in now.

The actual limit appears to be 99.2%, plus arcs take up more space on Live than they did on Test. By my count we lost 4% of arc size when Issue 14 went live, and no red name has commented on the issue. Very frustrating.

I don't think it's possible to do what you want in a direct way. Only some details can be set to "friendly"; you can't set the default spawns of the map to be friendly.

Patrols, ambushes, and one side or the other of a Battle details can be set to "friendly", IIRC. Of course, maps can't spawn infinite numbers of these details; the map overview should tell you how many of each detail type can be found on the map.

I'm guessing the closest thing to what you want would be to spawn the map's max number of battles with one side set to friendly.

This is something the MMORPG world has struggled with since day 1, really; how can you tell how much work the player really did to accomplish a task? Pen and paper games have a live GM there to act as the judge and arbiter, and that makes a world of difference, IMHO.

There are a lot of variables I would want to see go into the ticket award determination: difficulty of enemies, bonus multipliers for ambushes, non-combat details, etc, etc. All these things are reasonable factors, but it's hard to balance them out a priori. Not sure there's a good solution other than continual effort put into tweaking the formula.

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off topic: I understand your ire, KD, but CoH is still way better than WoW. If you want to get frustrated at your fellow players, go there for a week or so and you'll be begging for some CoH civility.

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Continued OT: I'm actually not mad at anyone - what I realized though is that a good proportion of people playing the game are literally immature, i.e. young teens. Once I realized that and remembered what junior high was like, I realized my assumptions about how people would use this system were all wrong. It's a different world at that age.

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Some said that too. I think it is too early to say its a large problem, but problem it is none the less.

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I will admit my opinion of the magnitude of the problem is changing. I was originally in the camp that thought it wouldn't be a big deal, but my opinion of my fellow players' maturity has unfortunately dropped since i14 landed.

The number of tickets awarded scales with opponent difficulty, like XP, rather than being flat like regular PvE drops. That can have a dramatic effect on overall ticket rates.

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Another big gotcha discovered recently:

If you edit a published mission from another computer from where it was originally published, and you didn't bring custom critter and custom group files to the new system, the edit will erase your custom critters from the mission. This is bad, m'kay? You won't necessarily notice your critters are gone until you playtest.