Mind Forever Burning

Even without advanced farming techniques the Cap SF is easily completable in an hour - provided that the team is all level 20+. The only times I've seen the Cap SF take anywhere near as long as a "play it all" Eden trial is if the team is in the 17ish range, fighting +3s.

Argh. "MindForeverBurning" is 18 characters... the forum handle limit is 16.

I am a sad panda.

Ally ambushes don't currently work, FWIW. Only one critter will leave the ambush spawn point; everything else stays put.

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That aside PLing is really REALLY not affecting anyone.

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I am by no means anti-farm or anti-PL (I have done both at different times), but this argument has always struck me as patently ridiculous. This is an MMO; every action taken by players affects other players. It's like saying that by coming to work, shutting my door, and never talking to anyone I'm not affecting the workplace - I am affecting the workplace simply by introducing a closed door and a silent coworker. The effects are subtle but non-negligible.

I just had something bizarre happen while editing a published arc.

I was transitioning from one name to another for a custom critter (which is somewhat painful to do in the editor alone, but that's a separate issue). Anyway, for a short time I had my critter in the relevant group twice, once under the old name and once under the new. This part was expected.

The extra entry came from the mission in memory - I had already renamed it on disk - but of course it re-added everything from the mission file as I edited. Again expected. But here's the weird part.

I had to manually remove the extra critter entry from the relevant group file. In that file, all the costume parts for the critter were listed twice - once under their normal costume part names, and once under part names that were prefixed with "Diff".

It was weird. Anyone know what all that extra costume information was about? I double checked and thankfully none of the critters I actually want to use have it, but it would essentially double the size of any critter - so from 6% to about 12% of file size.

6% is the normal size for a custom critter - I've never seen a critter take up significantly less than that.

Did you make any other changes to custom critters that are used in that arc? The act of editing an arc tells the system "Go incorporate any changes to custom critters or groups that happened outside the editor".

I haven't looked at what happens when you customize powers for a critter - it seems like that would increase the space requirements, but 3% per critter seems like an awful lot.

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IMO one change that probably needs to be made is that side kicked characters earn no XP if they are outside the range of their mentor's ability to aid them.

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Um, that already happens (outside of the AE, anyway). There's a little hysteresis built into the system, but SK'd characters outside SK range earn XP as if they were not SK'd.

I was there for that too. Just to be clear, I wasn't really expecting a "thank you", just an "oh, I guess you were right" after all the "you're wrong" I got from BaBs. But either way, it's water under the bridge now.

In one of my undergrad classes, the average on our tests was in the 25% range. My 35% score earned me a B.

Ah, I wondered if that was what you meant. Still, you can't generate things like purples that way, nor can you get the "usual" distribution of salvage (which includes random uncommon and random rare) without spending extra to buy stuff outright.

I'll admit there was childishness on my side of the fence during that incident, and BaBs was probably just overworked (this was just before NCSoft bought the City Of property). I mentioned it only because it was part of the history of my forum global.

Wait, what? As far as I know you can't choose regular drops from non-DC/HoF AE missions. Am I missing something?

Your post was deleted, huh? No other word from red names on the content?

Disappointing.

How did you gain access to that 6B? Or are you counting 3B of your own inf and 3B of prestige buyers' inf?

Since I've probably posted here more than any other forum, I thought I'd let you all know: I'm planning to change my forum name to match my in-game global, Mind Forever Burning, sometime this week.

If anyone cares, I was originally Protea, which was my in-game global from the initial introduction of the feature when it was assigned based on the first character you logged in. I never really liked that name, but I didn't have one I liked enough to justify using my one-time-only change token. As i14 drew near I realized I wanted to write under the name of my favorite badger, Mind Forever Burning, so I changed my in-game global to that. Meanwhile I had, in a fit of pique, renamed my forum handle to KeepDistance to remind myself never to try to make friends with red names (this was after BaBs discounted my video evidence of problems with drawn weapons and rooting - problems he eventually fixed, but without ever acknowledging my role in bringing them to his attention).

Anyway, I doubt there will be any name changes from here out, so I'll at least be the same person to everyone.

... except for my alt accounts. Mwa ha ha.

I took the opportunity of a 4-day weekend to do a cleanup pass on the first three arcs. I found and fixed a few continuity mistakes (leftovers from previous revisions that I hadn't caught), smoothed over some dialog and clue text, and replaced one map. I was happy enough with the result that I marked all three arcs as "final"; barring any surprise flaws, I'm going to avoid major rewrites from here out.

"Power Progression" and "The Plumber" are currently at 5-star ratings but with very few votes; "Signal to Noise" has the most plays and is at a 4-star rating. If I have any time going forward I'll try to work on a promo video, though it seems labor intensive enough that I doubt I'd finish one by summer's end.

Finally, I've decided to change my forum handle to match my in-game global (which I had, in turn, changed at i14 release to reflect my favorite nom de plume): Mind Forever Burning. I probably should have listed my authoring name in the OP.

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Levels: 1-50 (I suggest 32 or higher though; map has enemies up to 52)

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As of issue 15, you can now set the level ranges of missions - so you can make the arc 32-50 if you choose. Players can still enter the mission (they'll be SK'd up to 32) but at least it gives them guidance on the recommended range for the arc.

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There's all kinds of monkey business going on with AE these days.

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If you'd like to find out what all the monkey business is leading up to, give the arcs in my sig a try... The first mission of "The Plumber" is exactly the situation you described.

The OP is a little vague, but let me mention a rule of thumb I've started to use: When giving a clue of significance, make sure there's a one-line summary of the contents delivered either through NPC chatter or objective-complete text. Then players get a general sense of what's going on and can read the clue for deeper investigation.

It's not always easy to pull off completely satisfactorily, but most of the time it works pretty well.

qr

I think some people are thinking of ratings as being like "grades" given for papers. Getting a low grade from a teacher without accompanying feedback or reasoning doesn't accomplish the goals of the teaching environment, and is frustrating to encounter as a student.

But these ratings aren't like that. Their primary purpose isn't to benefit the author; their primary purpose is to benefit other players. If, while giving a rating, a player wants to leave comments for an author, only then are they assuming a task in any way analogous to that of a teacher (though it's really peer review) - up to that point, IMHO there is no reviewer relationship between player and author, only between player and general audience.

I think it's more accurate to say that there are some authors who believe that if a story has received only 4- and 5-star votes from a large audience, then any 1- or 2-star rating must be a grief.

I don't think that's true. Tastes vary, and an interesting thing about fiction in any medium is that there seems to be an element of the "fatal pet peeve" - something that most people will gloss over will bother someone to such an extent that they stop enjoying the work entirely. So it may be that you get lots of good ratings from a large group, and then you happen to hit a smaller group whose pet peeve goes off.

Surely this isn't happening with all rescue details? Is it specific to this map?

Well, I was one of the people who enjoyed (and instituted) follow-up discussions, but I can see that it got a little out of hand.

It *is* annoying, but it's hardly the most critical issue with the AE IMHO.

Next time this happens to you, just ask in local for a wakie. If there's anyone around at all someone will most likely give you one.