MrCaptainMan

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Dude, if you're going to drop that much text on a player, just go ahead and write it up as a story and post it in the Fan Fiction section. And I say that as a writer and a mission creator.

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I too am a writer and a mission creator. I'm also a reader and a mission player. I'd be quite happy to read that much text in the form of mission clue drops, if I felt the writing appealed to me. Luckily for me, there are others who feel the same, and about the Echo, from the feedback I've received so far.

I think the MA is a wonderful addition to the game. it allows such a massive variety of missions and arcs. There really is something for everyone!

Eco.

Tickets were the last thing on my mind when I made it, believe me. Its not a farm but its ticket total is quite nice as well i think. It's ID is 1688. There's a link in my sig to the feedback thread.

Eco

Nope, this isn't a rant about some poor schmuck's badly-designed arc - this is me throwing MY possibly 'badly-designed arc' arc to the wolves lol

My arc has 18 chained boss fights as the objectives in the last mission. the reason for this rather excessive amount of fighting is rooted in the storyline and the narrative required in the final mission.

The text delivered to the Player in the last mission is very long, split up into those 18 clue drops. The clues HAVE to drop in a certain order, or it doesn't work.

In order to minimise the irritation, I used a cargo ship map, so its pretty linear, and spent a long time tweaking the spawn points so that 1-6 spawn in the first room, 7-12 in the middle ones, and the final ones in the last room. Unfortunately, sometimes the crossover bosses swap. My briefings and chat messages are full of hints to help the player avoid as much unneccessary backtracking as possible. The actual bosses themselves are all fairly easy, and there is an actual narrative reason for them being there, and for them spawning one at a time. I also took some care to make them individual with dialogue etc, sto help the player not get bored.

Every other mission is designed to be playable as fast as possible, too. No defeat alls, small maps, clues placed in obvious points, no EBs or difficult powerset combos in the customs, etc. Th whole arc can be played through in two hours, easily.

So far ive got 19 plays, 4 stars, I try to warn players about the flaws in the last mission, and I've had mainly good feedback.

Saying all that, at the end of the day, its still 18 chained boss fights in a single mission lol. 18 boss fights does seem a bit much, even to me.

People have mentioned the 'phew, lotta bosses to wade thru there!' issue, though so far without any Ragequits or anything. Nobody has said 'theres too much story' in the feedback, however. If we could double the character limits for each clue, there'd only be 9 boss fights lol. etc.

I'd also lkike to point out that the original block of text earmarked for mission 5 was three times larger. It's already been self edited to a shadow of its former self (and must improved in the process, actually - I DO like to edit stuff down).

I can't alter anything in the last mission, I'm not looking for editing advice (I might change a few small things in earlier missions to even out one missions level range for example though). But I would be interested in hearing any comments on this sort of thing. Is it an instant 'nope, not doing that'? Is this sort of thing something best left for Challenge Arcs?

Does anyone else have 'aargh, how'm I gonna fit this in?' issues?

Eco.

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My friend just told me. It's the word naked. I'm pissed, that is so [censored] stupid.

"Invisible to the naked eye" Is obviously a euphemism for hot orgies! Am I right!?

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I had exactly the same thing, coupled with (ooh, is 'coupled with' going to be filtered?) a clue referencing a hero called "The Naked Ape, real name Mark Boulcott. Posessed the magical ability to transform into an 800lb diamondback gorrila when he removed his clothes", and they were both marked as errors.

I think filtering the word 'naked' is absolutely, utterly, laughably, pathetic. My derision at the buffon who okayed this is immense.

Incidentally, with regard to error reporting, I foiund that if you edit and see no errors reported, you need to click each page of each mission in your arc to get the errors to show in the particular page in question.

Eco.

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I've also brought it up in our SG's chat last night, and I'll continue to mention it. If we're gonna work viral, let's work viral.

EDIT: Also JUST started a thread about it on my SG's boards. We have well over 200 members, so that should get the word out a little more.

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Great stuff.

Eco.

QR - Holy moley, I created a monster!

Eco.

QR - Also, if your arc is story focused (IE it has a plot of some sort), add 'SFMA' to your arcs description and itll show up in the search for people looking for the SFMA tag. This stands for Story Focused Mission Arc, and I heartily support it.

Eco.

Poop is pretty stupid, but it is at least a sort of rude word. 'Naked' isn't profanity, though.

the line in my arc that weas 'obscene' was 'I can see sth with my naked eye'

And i als had a superhero called The Naked Ape.

Pathetic is really the most apt word for this, imo. Its ridiculous. Whoever dicided to put that in should be ashamed.

Eco.

'Naked' is filtered. Honestly.

What a crock.

Eco.

I tried to edit my published arc to add some extra advice to the briefing asdn was suddenly told that the line 'I can see sth with my naked eyes' was obscene. Sigh.

So i changed ther line to 'with just my eyes' and republished.

I get a popup ' Unable to publish arc.: The field ClueDescription contains profane or copyright text'

I have tried again mutliple times. I've deleted the entire field, copied to word and rewriytten, the copied back. Nothing.

What a crock. Who do i call?

Eco.

Qr - so give us 300k then. As many arcs as you like as long as they all come under 300k.

Eco

qr - is this working as intended? If so, it's RUBBISH. The souvenirs are one if the things I love about CoH.

):

Eco

Qr - I'm personally quite happy with SFMA. It has a few advantages over the [TAGStory] IMO - it's shorter, it's already got 6 pages worth of arcs up using it, it's already getting talked about IN-GAME, and...I invented it!

LOL but feel free to use a tag of your own as well if you like.

Eco

Yeah, if space allows, this is a good idea - that way, people will see the acronym associated with its meaning on a few or a lot of arcs, and the ones with only space for the SFMA alone will be understandable.

Eco.

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One obvious problem is that if I looked at a mission with the description tag "SFMA", these letters mean nothing to me. Well, they could mean some stuff, but it'll all be guesswork. I keep trying to associate it with something about Science Fiction, possible due to the SFWA.

I'd probably get into the habit of tagging stuff "story", though. I know this is likely to get mixed up with the "non-story" search results, but it's clearer.

At this rate, I could get out of actually writing a description for the arc, and just have all 300 characters taken up by tags.

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Once a day I explain in Help what it means, and ask enyone who says 'ooh, thats a good idea' to spread the word amongst their SG etc. This helps. At ione stage KHTF didnt mean anything either.

Eco.

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For the same reason they put "This is not a farm" in their description. They're hoping to slip it past the radar. By the time they finally get it into their heads that IT DOESN'T WORK, the tag will be meaningless.

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I don't think it'll be quite that bad. A few bad eggs will get in, obviously, but I doubt that 20,000 arcs are gonna get tagged SFMA.

I'm doing fine playing the SFMA arcs that are already up. Haven't hit a dud yet (beyond the previously mentioned Greedy aberration lol).

Eco

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Story vs SFMA? Just use them both for now if there is room.


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Yep, totally.

Eco.

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And sure, any system is abusable; I just think the suggested method is less capable and more abusable than a hard-written flag from the Developers. I'd rather see everyone's energy go into THAT rather than encourage a workaround designed by twits like us.

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I agree that a hardwired tag system put in by the devs would be great. Until that happens, ther'es not miuch harm I can see in doing this. even if the SFMA tag gets misused by farmers etc, it wont be used by all the farmers, so there'll be less crud than comes up under a clean search lol.

I'm not sure what you mean by putting effort into the devs system. I agree with it. What else can I do?


Eco.

QR - Go ahead and suggest a suitable tag for other types of arcs, that's a good idea.

Could I suggest that you post it in its own thread?

It would get more people seeing it then, if it was in its own thread called 'PCMA - Pure Challenge Mission Arc acronym for easy search' or whatever.

I'm glad to see this SFMA taking off somewhat. I intend to run some of the SFMA-tagged arcs tonight.

On a slightly more ruefully depressing note, I see that the creator of Greedy has a rather more loose definition of 'story focussed' than some, as he's tagged his arc with SFMA even though it is by his own admission a badge-farm lol.

Eco.

qr - I would say that there are arcs in the MA that don't fall under the definition of story focussed. Test missions fir certain custom mobs, badge-farms, pure 'challenge' missions, simple boss fight setups, these would be examples of things I personally wouldn't mind missing if I was searching specifically for arcs with narrative.

Tags for those types of arc are fine as far as I'm concerned.

Qr - fair enough, turg, and a dev-implemented tagging system would get a 'yay!' from me, but until they put one in I for one will use this. I've already got your arc in my queue cos it's recommended by a friend, but there's already plenty if SFMA arcs in the system, so I'll be playing and rating them since it is one way if filtering out some of the chaff.

The more people who sign up for it, the more known it'll be.


Eco

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Good idea. Added to my own arcs, and advertised on the EU forums!

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Excellent. Thanks for spreading the word.

Eco

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I think Story as a tag works better

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You can still search for 'story' if you like. This isn't mandatory LOL.

Eco

Qr - as for using whole words, such as 'storytelling' or 'story', I experimented with them in search and found that arcs with those words in the title or in the description eg 'what's the story? Someones stolen my glowies'! Get m back for me (badge mission)' would crop up. Plus, some people in the MA Arc Finder channel rightly pointed out that some folks descriptions were long enough already that space was an issue.


Eco

Qr - getting the SFMA tag recognized by the larger playerbase and avoiding any miss-assumption of voting cartel is why I will occasionally explain thetag in Help and broadcast (not going to spam mecikessly though). It's been discussedon the MA arc finder channel too.

Eco