Mind Forever Burning

The AV Dr. Aeon only spawns at 52, and he's got some hellacious EB-clone backup. I tried without success to create an ally team that would make it possible for the average competent soloist to defeat him.

My solution was to create my own AV Dr. Aeon, who obeys the normal spawn rules. It's actually not that hard to recreate his costume; everything on him is standard as far as I know. That way he spawned even-con to the player instead of at 52, and didn't have access to his ridiculous suite of reinforcements.

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Allies set to Melee with melee power sets will often try to attack enemies from outside their melee range. I'm not sure if this was an issue before i14 or not, but if it was, I've never noticed. With all the arcs that include allies with melee attacks, it's definitely a more apparent bug now.

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That's what I was getting at with the 3rd bullet in the OP.

OK, rethinking this. How about a commitment of 3 story arcs per week, and I try to find a bigger pool of judges?

The idea is to give 25 entrants 3 separate critiques apiece.

There's only one souvenir file, which is shared across all characters that play through that installation (even other accounts). Obviously, this is flawed...

I can't quite account for the souvenirs disappearing, though - unless you switched computers maybe?

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No plot, little if any dialogue, just go kill.

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Strangely enough, I hit one of those today that I actually quite liked. I mean, yes, it would be better with a story, but the map had both AVs and allies in such combinations that the fights were difficult, grueling, and totally doable (even solo).

I think the guy had based everyone on the map on his SG mates, given the names, so maybe he felt there was no need to do a story and only his SG mates would really need to "get it".

Anyway, end threadjack.

RewardText is what you set to put text in the chat window when a goal is accomplished. I forget what it's labeled in the UI; it might depend on the goal type.

I found this by opening my .storyarc file in Wordpad and searching for "RewardText".

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IMHO, one arc a day for three or four weeks is an awfully big commitment.

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That's true, but I don't really see a way to avoid it, other than limiting the number of entries to the point where the contest becomes too exclusionary for my taste.

If there really are no judges that can make that kind of commitment I may have to rethink this.

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There are some highly-rated arcs, including some of the Dev's Choice ones, that are an absolute misery for lower-level characters or teams. The custom groups may be all right for 50s to face, but become seriously overpowered against characters in their 20s and 30s. Thinking about how arcs will play across multiple levels is an aspect of design that I think should be rewarded.

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Personally, I think it's impossible to design a mission series that will play reasonably well across all levels of character. Low level characters are just inherently less powerful than higher level characters even with the auto-sk/auto-exemplar system. IMHO, the author should design the missions for a particular level range and state as much in the mission description.

Of course, properly designating the level range at which a mission arc will be appropriate is one kind of feedback the critiques can generate.

Well, being able to team isn't a hard requirement, but I did want to run some arcs as teams to get a variation in spawn size/combat mechanics evaluation. If a good percentage of the judges can run arcs as teams we can have a few that are soloists.

I'm looking for 2-4 people to help judge in a story arc writing contest I plan to organize within the next few weeks.

Criteria:

- 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 20-25 story arcs. That's quite a few arcs - about one a day if we pace it out.
- 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.

The way I plan to organize this, the judges will receive payment for participating, the size of which will depend on the number of entries. It probably won't be a huge incentive, but will help compensate for the work put into the project.

Once I have a judging team we can finalize the contest parameters and I'll put together an advert for it.

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Publish one mission of the Arc, get people to run it since it's listed as "short", get the reviews/rates, then add in the later missions by editing.

By doing longer arcs, you have less of a shot of getting casuals to run/rate the thing, since they show up under "long/very long".

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That's essentially bait-and-switch though. You're not really offering what you claim to be. IMHO, authors who do this without warning deserve to be downrated.

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Like it matters really. As you add missions the length field will auto update to reflect it.

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I don't understand your point.

Publishing incomplete works is annoying if you don't make it clear the work is incomplete. If there's a good reason to do it that way, fine, just don't sucker people into playing something half finished. It's like the writer had all the story elements laid out but all the enemies were Council instead of the custom mobs they were supposed to be. Or as if all the battle elements were in place but all the text said was "C" in every field.

They really should have put a grabby-bar icon underneath the story book icon in the MA editor. This is just about everyone's first question when they start using the system.

This came up early in closed beta but was never really addressed. They added a visual indication when you're actually dragging but no visual indicator that you can drag.

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Publish one mission of the Arc, get people to run it since it's listed as "short", get the reviews/rates, then add in the later missions by editing.

By doing longer arcs, you have less of a shot of getting casuals to run/rate the thing, since they show up under "long/very long".

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That's essentially bait-and-switch though. You're not really offering what you claim to be. IMHO, authors who do this without warning deserve to be downrated.

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And how are you going to tell who is doing what? Are you going to keep a personal list of how many missions each arc has so that they can be downgraded when they add more stuff in?

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All I'm saying is, if the story's not finished, say so in the mission description, don't sucker me into evaluating a story by making it seem complete when it isn't. Otherwise my play experience is full of nothing but half-finished stuff.

So yeah, if a story's not done yet I'm going to rate it poorly and cause fewer people down the line to give valid feedback on that mission. Do it enough and I might get a bad taste in my mouth regarding that author and avoid their content in the future even if it's now finished.

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Publish one mission of the Arc, get people to run it since it's listed as "short", get the reviews/rates, then add in the later missions by editing.

By doing longer arcs, you have less of a shot of getting casuals to run/rate the thing, since they show up under "long/very long".

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That's essentially bait-and-switch though. You're not really offering what you claim to be. IMHO, authors who do this without warning deserve to be downrated.

It's a little confusing. Edits made to published arcs are saved only to the server, not locally.

Similarly, changes made to the local .storyarc file (say, with a text editor, or offline MA editor tool like Leandro's) are not automatically reflected in the published arc when you begin to edit. If you edit the published arc and do a "save as", you will overwrite any edits you made by such methods. This can be frustrating since there are some edits (like reordering details) that can't be done in the UI.

However, the same is not true of critter and group files. If you make changes to those files, and the story arc refers to them, then when you edit the published arc the local changes are automatically absorbed into the runtime model for the story. I believe this is so you can use custom critters and groups across multiple story arcs and not have to make individual edits to each one as you tweak them.

I'm using Subversion to track all my changes to make sure that anything unintentionally changed by these complex rules can be changed back if I need to. There's a thread on that listed in the MA guides thread.

When you "edit" a published mission, the usual options (the icons in the upper left, to do save, save as, save and test, etc) have different meanings. I forget which icon it is, but one of those icons means "save and republish".

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...the rules also indicate no parody missions whatsoever, so I don't think the GMs are going to have a sense of humor at all.

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I'm pretty sure what that means is no parodies of copyrighted material. So, no "The Wind Done Gone" for us.

Parodies of in-game behavior or of general real life issues/behaviors seem like they're fair game.

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I've seen a plethora of arcs already that fall into genre categories that on the whole I think are wastes of time. I'll describe them here without naming names.

1. Badge farms

"Normal" badges can't be farmed in MA missions, but there are badges specifically for doing things in the MA. Unsurprisingly, everyone and their mother has created a mission filled with the kinds of things you have to do to earn those MA-only badges. (I'm halfway tempted to write a short story arc where you go into those missions and LOLPvP badge-hunters straight to the hospital.)

2. Ticket farms

I've actually played a few of these out of curiosity, and other than the fact that there is absolutely no story attached and they generally take place on one of the popular maps, it's unclear to me why they are any better for generating tickets than any story arc with, you know, an actual story. I'm sure Darth will be along to laugh at me and say I'm doing it wrong, but that's his prerogative.

3. AV Gauntlet

This mission is just a string of AV encounters, usually in one of the larger cave complexes. Like farms, there's usually no story here, and the end result is that even AV soloists get bored. I understand the temptation to create the thing everyone will want to be able to brag about beating - but trust me, a serial AV encounter string isn't going to be that. Arcanaville's Scrapper Challenge has no AVs at all, and it's way harder than any of the other Gauntlet arcs I've tried.

While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that Arcanaville put some effort into making the Scrapper Challenge as player-friendly as possible given the extreme challenge involved. The mission has introductory text telling you what's going on, with a dash of humor; the map is pretty small, so you don't have to fight through a bunch of dreck to get to the interesting bits; and the critters are set up to be not just big bags of HP, but challenging combinations of opposing powersets to keep players on their toes. The Scrapper Challenge has a limited audience for sure, but within that niche it's by far the best implementation I've seen of the genre.

If you're going to go for the so-hard-your-children's-children-will-still-be-crying mission, you'd better hold yourself up to some pretty high standards for gameplay novelty.

4. Single-mission tests

I don't quite get why, but a lot of people seem to be publishing single missions out of longer arcs as individual arcs. I know there are sometimes reasons that you have to split up a story because it won't all fit, but this isn't that - this is literally just one mission. The end clue implies that there's another mission afterwards, but there isn't. No pointer to another arc. Nothing.

Is it because they want to generate tickets while they playtest? Is there some confusion on the part of the author on how the system is supposed to work? Maybe they plan to get critiques from SG mates or whatnot on individual missions during the playtesting process?

Whatever it is I find it frustrating, particularly since some of these stories are actually pretty good, and I'd want to play the whole thing if it were available. Authors, please, if you're doing this for whatever reason, I urge you to clearly label these missions.

Wacky.

FYI, this morning's patch did not address this issue for me.

If you mean transferring story arcs from Test to Live, there's a stickied thread at the top of this very forum talking about how to do that.

If you mean transferring between SG members outside of the game, you can use the same file-copying tricks and just put the files on an FTP server or send them through (out-of-game) email or whatnot.

I think it's possible to spawn up to the maximum number of ambushes from the same event, but it's a hack, and would probably break immersion.

The trick is this: Spawn multiple independent ally objectives with their guard size set to "single". Then trigger the ambushes off the completion of the ally objectives. The ambushes should all trigger immediately since the ally objectives auto-complete.

Caveat: I haven't actually tried this.

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I think we've determined that the problem is size, yes? I'm not sure what this would prove.

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I think we're in the process of determining that. One or two data points is generally not considered sufficient "proof." A few more would help.

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Well, I just edited my arc to get rid of the last remaining &nbsp reference (which was in a file name - wasn't sure if it was safe to get rid of). That lowered the file size by a surprising .15%, getting me down to 99.32%.

Still couldn't publish. So then I went through and replaced all my two-space sentence separators by one space (I'm old school and was trained to put two spaces between all sentences when I learned to type). That got it down to 99.17%.

And viola - now the arc is publishable. Looks like the publish point is somewhere in the 99.2% range.

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Object defense / destroy may work differently, though -- those key off Glowy Placement Spots, and then spawn some guards around it.

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As far as I know those don't key off glowy placement spots. My understanding is that every spot that can hold critters gets filled by a static spawn or by a detail, so changing details doesn't directly affect the number of critters that get placed.

You can set details to be Hard, though, which generally makes that spawn bigger. So if you populate an entire map with Hard Patrol details, that's more critters than having no details at all, even though it's the same number of spawns.

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This was an arc that was publishable on Test, it is on Test still. This file I tried to take over to live is the backup I saved on Wednesday morning and yet it got saved in a way that made it unpublishable on Live.

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Is its size above 98%? If so, try slashing it like I had to. See if that does it.

This isn't to say that such a thing is acceptable, of course. But it will tell us more about what the problem is.

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I think we've determined that the problem is size, yes? I'm not sure what this would prove.

To Lazarus, I'm 99.47% certain (pun intended) that I eliminated all &nbsp spam from the file that doesn't need to be there. I can check again but I really doubt that's the issue.

I asked Ex to sticky this thread though I can no longer update the OP on it. (Also, it is specifically for bugs, not missing features, which some of the things you list above would be.)