MrOsterman

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Now could you read my guide and comment on it?

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Okay, pardon me for paraphrasing:
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- Tell the Player the Plot Upfront
Do not string the player along with just enough info for each mission. That makes it seem random and made up on the spot. Tell the player what the plot is – but feel free to change it. “First you must find out Big Bad’s plot from his minions, than you must stop his plot, then you must defeat Big Bad.” This tells the player there is a story, it gives the early missions a purpose in the overall arc instead of just being filler.

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I read your guide and I think that telling a player in the first contact text what the entire story is going to be is a bad move. I think it ruins every ounce of suspense and engagement. It says "okay, here's the full story now go out there and do it" while all the player has to think about for the next 10 to 60 minutes is what to beat up. Not once will a player think "gee I wander what's going to happen next?"

Because if we follow your guide, we'll tell them what's going to happen next before they start.

And I think that's a bad choice in design. I'd find those missions horrifically bland and boring no matter how interesting you tried to make that intro text to have a story devoid of twists, turns and surprises would completely divest the story of anything of interest to me.

I read your guide and I took exception to part of it that I paraphrased down to the basics rather than quoting the entire block of text. I'm not sure why you're so defensive that someone disagrees with you here.

Edit to add:

And if you go back and read my critique rather than reading the first line and dismissing me, you'll see I emphasised the importance of having a big overarching theme and plot already planned out that you can then use to seed the early missions with hints and clues and forshadowing as to what the twists are going to be. That way as the player(s) near the end of the arc they can see the pieces coming together in a neat and organized way but one that they did not see upon first glace.

It's that kind of story telling that seperates movies with predictable and cliched plots from those that really stand out as engaging from start to finish. Unless I just want to watch special effects I don't get a lot out of a movie I can predict the plot of in the first 10 minutes and I look at story arcs the same way.

So better advice to a writer is to plan the entire arc from start to finish, consider how to give hints the player can pick up on, and then start to break the story up so that each twist is new, different, and while somewhat unexpected not illogical.

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"Look for clues" I don't like. Nothing screams at the player (I play without sound, so that's literally true). If you really set up the mission as being a detective story - I might by it. But for general superheroes it just feels both bland and out of place.

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So you're not a fan of Batman the Animated Series then?

I had a very long lengthy response to your guide that my crashed internet ate so you're getting the shorter version now. But I really really really really strongly disagree with your "missions have to be clear in all ways" and "Tell the player exactly what to expect from start to finish."

What that does is make the mission nothing more than a game of killing mobs and not thinking a moment about the why, or the how beyond "yes I have a good reason for doing this".

Good storytelling requires the storyteller to hold the audience in some form of suspense from start to finish. There has to be an incentive to read the next page in the book, to go into the next chapter, otherwise why continue? Even with the 18th century convention of titling chapters with "In which we discover... blah blah.." the title was vague enough to get the reader to go "wait, what? How'd that happen?" and then read on.

I would really suggest that ~great~ arcs have you guessing from start to finish but when you reach your climax and then resolution every stray detail makes sense.

A writer should lay it all out at the top, seed the story with hints and forshadowing, and then go from here.

Mr. O

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1 star is for whatever criteria the "reader" determines.

See the last paragraph of Arcana's post.

And in my case 0 stars would be lowest rating.

EDIT: As an aside, what I just posted is EXACTLY why I don't think the ratings system is a good one, and why authors needs to realize EVERYONE has different criteria for what is "crap" and what is "good" and everything in between.

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Oh pish posh.

Look, there's crap and there's, as Col. Tigh says, craaaaaaaahhhhhhpp.

You can say "it was the worst thing ever; I had all these guys doing 1 mission out of 5 for me" but that STILL puts it better then the mission where nothing makes sense, there's no story, every mob is custom and overpowered, and there are as many 'hidden' objectives can be crammed in there.

I refuse to believe that any arc that took that kind of work is worthy of being rated the same as the real crap that's out there.

You ask me we toss around 1 stars far too often, and 5's just as badly. But given the criteria for the Hall of Fame, I understand a little grade padding at the high end.

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It's a good story, which I would not mind as a novel. Putting me there to watch someone else be the hero is an issue for me personally.

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Isn't the army of EB's all in a single Mission? But the 1 star rating is what gets slapped on the entire arc, right?

And seriously, how does an arc that generates this much discussion deserve the same rating we would give a typo ridden, misbalanced, uninspired romp through some 12-year olds mental backyard?

1 star is the worst of the worst, not a developed story we didnt' care for.

Well I'll get in on this too.

I've got a 5 mission story arc listed in my profile for the specific ID:

Name: American Welcome
Length: Long (5 missions all short or med maps)
Villian Groups: Circle of Thorns, Freakshow, Crey, Custom Bosses, one AV.
Solo-ability? I ran it on Heroic solo with a 33 fire troller. You get some allies in there so that might help.

Story: It all begins with a basic mission to rescue some hostages at the school administration building. From there things just cascade downhill as one development leads to another, each clue raising a question rather then answering one. From Circle of Thorns Mercenaries to Rogue members of the Crey corporation do can you put it all togther to save the lives of several young heroes?

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Another idea to help people decide if an Arc might be worth playing is if they have a context window over the ratings that breaks down how people rated it. Like:

3 five star
4 four star
1 three star
1 one star
1 zero star

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You mean like Amazon.com? nah... never work.

YES!!! THIS!!!!

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While, after reading HA's review and processing it internally, I have a hard time turning that critique into a 1-star rating, I have to defend HA's right to give that rating. The critique was pretty specific in its complaints. And while some of those complaints may have no valid answer (who's seriously going to explain time travel in 1000 characters or less?) some of them were pretty damning (if you only have to free one EB and never fire a power again, something went wrong in your play balancing).


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Yes and No.

We all have the 'right' to rate as we please, but I would say that something should be done to avoid baseless 1 stars, and I'm sorry but from what's been described as 'problems' to me suggest that this is at the very least a 2, if not a 3 star arc and that's jsut reading the critique and not the counter points.

Geekboy at least tried to explain some kind of time travel. That amount of thought puts him way past a lot of the junk out there that's just a bunch of hellians and skulls to kill for quick xp.

He can give it whatever he wants but I'm coming around A Lot to the idea taht lowest ratings should be dropped over time (and highest as well) because one or two really bad scores can skew data without justification.

I do stat's as a hobby, and as part of being a math teacher. If I have 20 ratings all 4's and 5's and I get one 1 rating, that 1 rating pushes me down to nearly a 4.0 rating. Now based on all the other data, I should haev something like a 4.5. In other words, the 'average' is not reflective of the data set.

In statisitcs there are formulas to determine outliers. They're not that complicated and we use them all the the time to get a good read on what numbers are telling us. Rather then letting one or two anomolus data points skew our measures of center we just toss out the data that is SOOOOO far from the norm as to be unlikely to be valid.

In other words, if 20 people give a 4 or a 5 and one person gives a 1, then it's probable, statistically speaking, that the single 1 star rating is not a valid data point.

Now if we have 10 5's and 10 1's, that's a TOTALLY different ball of wax, and in taht case, the standard deviation for the data will be substantially higher and suggest that the 1's ARE indeed valid data points. Part of the trick in stat's is that you don't toss the potentially invalid data totally, you just leave them out of the average until you have more data to either confirm that there is a downward trend, or to confirm that they are invalid.

In other words, you get 10 reviews. 9 5's and 1 1. The one is likely an outlier so the average is 5 (not counting the 1). Then you get 5 more reviews all 1. Now that implies that the 1 is in deed a valid data point, so you reinclude that 1 in the average, and then you recalculate.

It's not that hard and I've only had first year stats.

Mr. O

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It is my theory the reason custom critters have powerful ranged attacks now is to help balance the risk/reward ratio of AE missions to standard game content.




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As you hinted, there is a certain reality.

Within spawned mobs for set villan groups there is a theoretical seeding of the group with a given variety that forces mobs to have a mix of ranged, of melee, etc etc. A group should ahve some ranged hitters, some melee hitters, and some inbetween. That means that hovering and blasting doesn't work. Yes you might knock out that melee there but his ranged buddy is going to eat you for lunch while you do it.

But with custom groups it would be possible to toss that and create minion/ Lt's that are all over the map with powers, loading up on range (making melee harder and immobiliation nearly useless) or loading up on melee, making every ranged power + hover = god mode.

So they compromised and forced us to have some ranged on all critters.

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I don't see any indication that the current rating system has any sympathy for decent arcs that aren't pushed to the front. Novem, I would ASK people to play it and rate it, giving you feedback in the process. That is how most of the decent arcs got started is by getting people who might actually be interested play it. Otherwise it just gets lost in all the crud.

I would be more than happy to try your arc. There are others on this forum who do try, rate, and review just from people asking.

There's also the "try mine, I'll try yours" method. This seems pretty popular for getting arcs played and rated.

You don't have to go to the most popular reviewer, either. IMO some of them are a little full of themselves anyway. Just get people to play it. Ask. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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I try to run them. Get on a few chat channels, or in Broadcast, and advertise that you're forming an AE team for a story arc. Give the level range and see what happens. You can also go through LFT and ask people there. Build a group, run it and see what happens.

When I wrote mods for Never Winter Nights, I would run my module nightly. Every night I'd get on, build a group, run the module. Make notes. Modify it. Talk to people while it was going. Then when I finally published it to the website I was still running it weekly, just to get revisions and to get it 'out there'.

The reality is that early adopters are now done. The people who made a solid arc in that first few weeks have done so and risen to the top, meaning that the 'top spots' are full. So now comes the challenge of breaking into that group. Until we get a more meaningful search tool (ie dont' show me any arcs with less then X plays or dont' show me arcs tagged as 'farm', or show me only arcs tagged as RP heavy), we just have to really get by on word of mouth.

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yep.

instead of relying on 2 or 3 missions to tell the story - put it into 1 mission.

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There's a small problem with that. It can make the mission seem a lot longer than it is advertised.

I did one that was 'medium' with not a lot of info. Figured I'd take a chance. First it was a Kill All coupled with a Destroy 5 altars. Okay, got it. But when that was done, it was 'track down boss', which wouldnt' be so bad but the map was pretty twisty turning (it was a CoH one), so I finally find boss and down her. Then pops up "destroy 5 portals", and these are of course scattered in the mission.

At that point my 45 minutes for a medium mission was looking like an hour and half and I just quit.

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Republish it. I'll give it a try and I'll give you honest feedback that's not nitpicky, pompous, or self-important. And if you put some amount of effort into writing text, filling in details, and/or some semblance of a story I'll never give you one star either.

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Well that was the poitn I was aiming for. It's not the slog of villians it's the lack of 'anything' that makes sense beyond a bunch of guys to knock out without any coherent, anything. I've even been on some farms that made some kind of sense for why we were pounding on all these Lt's.

Since 1 star is as low as we go, we should be reserving it for the truly mind bogglingly bad.

In my mind 1's and 5's should be rare things. Sadly so many people toss out 5's like candy so a good arc that is good but not overly inspired that I give a 4 to makes me look like a jerk because it's the first 4 star review.

American Welcome has 20 plays and a 4 star average. Do I think it's hall of fame material? No, but I think it's pretty dang solid and I'm very happy 'running it' for people by saying "Forming a group" and running that mission with them. It's fun and gets exposure.

Okay, I'm mostly caught up but let me say this:

No matter how bad the plot wholes are, based on HA's review I'm not sure I would agree that we're looking at a 1 star arc. 1 star arcs don't feature 'disagreeable' map choices. They feature maps that are totally out of place. They don't feature poor choices in coloring flavor text. They feature flavor text that has portions in all caps.

I've played junk. I've played arcs that had nearly no set up and were just a bunch of custom mobs kicking my butt and continuing to do so as I flogged through group after group after group.

The one thing we need to remember is that there is the truly awful out there and if we down rate the "Don't like so much" down to 1 stars, what do we do with an arc that is nearly unplayable?

I don't expect 5 stars on my epic. It's long, and probably could do with cutting out a mission, or changing one of the gather evidence missions to have 3 different things gathered each with their own clue rather than collect 5 things and get one clue at the end. I wrote it as I would expect a story arc in CoH as such, so I stand by it.

If I got 1 starred, I'd question if it was a grief because I've played far far worse then what I put out there, no matter how well someone documented their complaint. The typoes (if they're there) are minor and easily made/fixed, the story's pretty solid, if a long, and the missions flow. I compare that to the mission of never ending new objectives that was a 'medium' which took me over an hour to NOT finish....

~shrug~

People have predicted the death of games with a new release since the dawn of online gaming. Very very games actually close down shop unless they are absolute and total flops. Of course, NCSoft did have one of those (that car wars one), but hey....

When CO comes out or Marvel Universe Online, CoH will take a hit in population. I don't doubt it. But will the game end? Heck no. The worst case scenario is that they'll start to look at server merges to help keep up the population. But I have a feeling that CoH will be the WoW of hero games. It'll always be here plunking along.

Me? I'm itching to plunk down my $15 to get "going Rogue" so I can finally start to redeem my villans or let my heroes fall to darkness. I've got a great villan concept I've never really played because her concept almost 'requires' redemption with time. Two actually, both Master Minds.

And oddly either could be 'heroic' given the chance.

As of today, 20 plays, and a 4 star average!

And I should clarify that it auto levels to 30, but I ran it with a group of level 10's and we rocked it.

It does make me want to up the ante on my next work.

My first mission "American Welcome" has a set series of events from mission to mission but not so much within each mission itself. That's an awesome idea because you could manage to milk the 'middle' and 'back' of the mission map to create much of what I already do with the 'end of mission/ report to contact' portion of my arc.

I kind of did that in Beer Bad which is in beta now (just search up Beer Bad and you'll find it), but it's still a work in progress.

This is one of the problems with the kind of rating system for user made content and not at all unlike the greifing/ spaming that plauged The Movies Online for it's entire life. You'd get a movie up into the top 10 for the genre and then there'd be a rush to smack it down or people who would 1 star it out of jealousy. What really hurt them wasn't just that but that part of your 'rank' was determined by views, so you'd also have people going out of their way to write the kind of thing that got looked at just to look at, either insanely offensive (which as long as it wasn't a protected group was allowed) or ridiculus, or whatever. At least here it seems we're rated strictly on stars which feels a little more fair.

Me? I'll be happy to lead teams through my missions and get some fun feed back from them as they do. SO far no complaints except from that one farm team....

I had this problem last night when I was testing/ running American Welcome. The first Mission was 5-54 for levls and the rest are 30-54 so I went in and hand edited the group to just be 30+ minions and bosses to force all auto SK'ing up to 30 from here on out. Of course I don't have a lot of lvl 30's so maybe I should be forcing it up to 40...

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you are worrying too much...

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Probably. I'm starting to have nasty flash backs to "The Movies Online", where people went nuts trying to get interest in their movies. I'm just glad I saved some of my original compiles on my HD since I just saw that they finally closed the site last winter.

Thing there was you got rewards the more your movie got watched so there was a near cutthroat competition to get your short noticed and some seriously nasty comment wars as people would go out of their way try to bring down a popular movie out of spite.

need to take a deep breath and get back to writing.

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My "Who is Kidnapping the World's Great Philosophers" (86347) is a moral allegory, something I haven't seen anyone else try.

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Moral allegory is a dicey thing to play with. If you do it too soft, no one 'gets it', and if you do it too hard, they resent you for preaching at them. I think the reason you don't see it a lot is that people are hesitant to push those envelopes because they don't want to turn people off to future stories.

I bet when the AE craze dies down a bit, and people start to look harder at keywords and themes you'll see more of those starting to form, but at the same time, I come to CoH to get away from the stress of real problems, not be preached to about the evils of capitalism.

It's a similar problem to doing too much with all of the environmental issues. It's far too easy to turn a story into a 'industry bad, nature good' kind of thing where we're all pushed into self loathing for enjoying a morning latte on the way to work. That's the kind of thing that turns people off...

Mr. O

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SF Western? That'll never work...

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u serious?

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How about Firefly?

Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free. You can't take the sky from me.

I'll agree.

And I'd also love to have minions where I don't have to set a secondary at all, or can turn off their ranged powers/ tone them down. Something unnerving about my def taking 25% health from a shuriken from what SHOULD be a melee mob..

Okay this isn't intended to be a promotional thread but I've got a legit question ~about~ promoting.

My first arc uses all 5 missions. The problem that each missin has a twist. So if I tell people while promoting it what the scope of the missions are, it practically ruins the story.

It starts off with your contact sending you to save some hostages, but when you get there you get a clue that suggests it wasnt' about hostages. So the next mission is a shakedown on a fixer. He gives you another piece of the puzzle. Then you're off to get another piece, which takes you to a new group. Then you get the to the 'real' plot.

The thing is I feel wierd saying "the real point of the arc is in the last 2 missions which is to do BLAH" because it'll ruin the fun of the first 3 and piecing it all togther. But just describing the first mission means all I say is "go beat up some circle of thorns and learn about a bigger plot".

Anyone else having this problem with planning promotional posts and comments? I even feel like I've got too much info in the mission's description.

I've got two problems/ thoughts.

First, in my current beta Arc "Beer Bad" I've got a bunch of drunk fraternity guys as a villian group. Since none are offered in the game, I had to make my own. No problem. But later I wanted to spawn them as a 'battle' with another stock group, and so far the battles are comical at best and lame at worst. I just can't make them 'easy' enough for the stock group to be a challenge. The battle starts and then a few seconds later it's over with a bunch of bodies everywhere and some slightly winded drunk fraternity brothers (and a couple of girls from their sister sororiety). Thoughts?

The other one has to do with level ranges. I want my arcs to open to nearly every level, that means I only have so many villan groups to chose from taht span the entire game/ level range. So either I use those groups or I make my custom groups again. And there I feel like I'm cheating my players because custom mobs are generally harder than stock, and quite often I find myself giving guys the same secondary as primary just to keep them from having too many attacks or too much defense. (plus that one time I gave a blaster ninjitsu.. oh that was stupid).

Thoughts on that front? Is my best bet to keep making custome 'everything' or should I just give up and focus on a specific level range?

I prefer to see the Arcs as story telling not leveling and don't mind if they're 'too easy' as long as people have fun with the story.

Mr. O

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Last question, I promise. I've added an ally to the last mission. Is the mission failed if the ally dies? If the boss is an AV, what should the ally be? Elite Boss or just Boss?

Thanks in advance.

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I can help here.

Allies are not tied to success or failure of a mission. Rescusing an ally can be a mission objective but once that's done you're good. I think the thinking is that an Ally is someone on par with you and if they chose to stay and assist you, that's their choice.

I make most of mine Lt.'s so that they have some HP, and some 'oomph' but not enough to outshine the PC's. The biggest complain with Allies is that they can sometimes outdamage the main characters and beome the centerpiece of the story rather than a supporting characer.

An Elite Boss Ally might really overshine the heroes so I'd err with the Boss. Of course if you're a purist, you should test it a few times and see if you like the results.

Mr O

I think that there's room for them to find a way to expand the number of slots but it will always be bumped up against server space and resources. I'm pretty sure that in a few months they'll roll out some unlockable additional slots that will be earned by people who are making arcs people are playing.

The problem of course is that if they put TOO much incentive to have your arc played it will devolve into the Debacle that was "The Movies Online" where people were doing everything to get a movie watched to earn points to buy more content for the game. If you wanted to use a stagecoach in a movie, you had to post a movie that got enough hits to earn you the points to buy it.

I see that as a potential downside to this user created 'thing'.

Mr. O