Rodion

[ QUOTE ]
You should check out the bronze rolls for the 30-34 range then.. I've gotten countless Kharma's and Steadfast -kb's from those. Its not a sure thing, but hey you might get something else you need from those rolls as well. I've built most of my Crushing Impact sets this way.

[/ QUOTE ]

I will second this. I've made tens of millions selling recipes from Bronze rolls. This is one of the best deals in the game. It's actually driving down the price of Crushing Impact way down, especially at level 50.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Is Rad/ not that well liked with /kin or something

[/ QUOTE ]
Well Rad/ isn't all that popular in general from what I've seen. Kinetics usually gets paired with high damage blast sets with fast activations, and Rad/ isn't one of them. Then there's the fact that the secondary effect is worthless in most situations. There's not a great deal of synergy between the sets.

It's a nice combo for a team-focused build, but it's rare to see anyone running one of those red-side.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I have a level 50 Rad/Kin concept character and I share the same assessment. The -Def secondary effect in Rad is almost totally worthless, especially these days with all the sets that give +Acc bonuses.

Rad's main problems are that it doesn't do a lot of damage, and it only has one decent mitigation power (Cosmic Burst). Electron Haze is sort of a mitigation power, but it's REALLY slow to activate and is a cone. The three Area powers (Irradiate, Electron Haze and Neutron Bomb) don't work well together because you have a PBAoE, a burst and a cone with knockback, so you can't get the same effect you can from Fire Blast's Fire Ball, Rain of Fire and Fire Breath.

It took me three years to level my rad/kin to 50. I finished it out of dogged persistence; it never got to be a lot of fun. Nothing in Rad works really well, everything is just sort of weak. I would rate it as the worst blast set by far. It does have some cool sounding effects, but that's the strongest recommendation I can give.

Given how destructive Shivans seem to be, you'd think a Rad/Kin would be great. But it just doesn't happen with players. Do Shivans have some -Dmg Resist component in one of their attacks?

My advice to the OP: work on something that's more fun, unless you're deadset on the EATs. But I didn't find them all that much fun either. They're very much an acquired taste.

[ QUOTE ]
I can see both points here.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, I can too.

The complainer is completely within his rights to whine about a mission that's a total waste of time. But he obviously lacks a sense of humor, or doesn't appreciate the depths of irony and pathos that monkey poo jokes engender.

And the author is completely within his rights to write a mission that's a total waste of time. But he obviously lacks insight into the psyches of 98% of the people who play this game.

Your arc should wear the title "Total Waste of Time" with pride. Everyone will five-star you for brutal honesty!

[ QUOTE ]
I like to have control over the things i am responsible for. I never choose a random map for a mission in an arc I'm designing, as I can't be sure that my objectives will spawn where I intend them to.

What are random maps good for?

Eco.

[/ QUOTE ]

In a well-designed and implemented system, random maps would be of equal quality to to hand-designed maps. That is, all the spawn and collection points would be well positioned, there would be an equal number of each type of spawn points in all front, middle and back areas. If this were true, then there wouldn't really be any advantage to using fixed maps and you could always use random maps.

However, you are making an unwarranted assumption about using a specific map. Since there are usually multiple spawn points of each type in each area, you are not necessarily guaranteed any particular spawning pattern. Just because in your tests it happened to fall out in some way that suited you doesn't mean that it will for everyone running the mission.

In I15 the spawn points will be displayed on the maps, so that will give us more information to work with. However, as we've seen time and again, each patch involve changes to the maps. Most of these will be bug fixes and additions (new spawn points in areas that are under-represented now) that we want. But this will change the way your mission spawns, and can "break" it.

Like most things, however, one man's bug is another man's bug-fix. Given the nature of software, it is wisest not to make missions that depend on details that you have no control over.

Many people (myself included) are trying to make missions that perform in ways the system is not intended to. We're trying to achieve dramatic effects by staging and sequencing. When things don't work out or change we curse the incompetence of the devs, but we're trying to build something they haven't designed for. But in many cases the fault is our own for trying to shoehorn something into a system that isn't meant to handle it. If you can't figure out a way to make it work, you need to change what you're doing and implement something the system can handle.

For future development the devs should consider that in dramatic missions positioning is often the wrong model. What we really care about is the timing and ordering of the spawns, not their locations. For example, I don't care where the ally is in a mission. I just care that the team encounters the ally first. Similarly, I don't really care where the boss is, just that the team gets to him last.

There appears to be a bug in the system that may set your vote to zero stars under some conditions if you exit without selecting any stars.

On some occasions I notice that upon completion of an arc it says "You have rated this arc 0 stars!" even though I have never played it before and have not made a rating. Normally it doesn't say anything unless I click one of the stars. I don't know what conditions lead up to this, as I cannot reproduce it at will.

The question is: if I click finish or just exit, does that register a rating of zero stars? From my experimentation it's not clear whether it's actually casting a zero rating.

If it is registering a zero rating in this case, it could be the source of some unexplained "griefing." It may not really be griefing, but a bug that occurs occasionally.

I've also noticed a significant reduction in the computed arc size, but haven't had any increases or problems with size.

One went from 99% (Live) to 94% (Training Room), but the raw file sizes are 115123 (live) and 115220 (Training Room). Yes, the size of the file on disk increased, but the reported size of the arc in MA went down significantly. This also includes the replacement of extraneous   with real spaces in the new file.

This must mean they changed some internal metric or now store something differently so it's more efficient spacewise on the server.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
That is why I ask if I can work on it locally.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just tested and it's a "No" unless I missed an option. At best, you could copy/paste long test fields. Thus, we officially need some form of "Upload Changes" button amongst the "Republish and Play" button sets.

[/ QUOTE ]

If only Copy and Paste actually worked. Half the time when I paste something it scatters the pasted text among the text already there, or it blows away most of the text in the edit field, or (if there's a large amount of text to paste) it does nothing. Add to that the difficulty you have positioning the cursor at the end of the text or the end of a line, the weird infinite loop you sometimes get when the MA window opens and you have a large segment of text in the description, the unreliability of selecting a passage and then setting its color with the right-click context menu, I would say this is one of most frustrating editors I have used in over 30 years of computer use. I also wish CTRL+C and CTRL+V woudn't fire the powers I have bound to C and V (and, yeah, I've mapped those keys to nop in my bind file, but I shouldn't have to do that).

Just as there's an option to save the text of a published mission into a local file, there should be a way to read a local file into the MA editor for a published mission. They are completely reciprocal actions.

The critter files appear to be always local, no matter whether you're editing a published or local story. This makes it really hard to grok where everything is, what happens when you republish, what's changing, what's the same, etc.

The only thing that's stopping us from republishing a mission from a local text file is that you don't know the arc number. Editing from the server guarantees you have a valid arc number that you can update. Reading a local file into the MA editor while editing a published mission can't do anything you would do manually, so it seems there's no technical reason not to do it.

A daily limit is too limiting and inherently unfair. A better gauge is to determine what an "excessive" reward rate is, and apply a diminishing returns decrease once you start exceeding that rate (much like ED on enhancements, or the diminishing returns on task force rewards).

For example, let's say that the "excessive" reward rate for tickets is T, and is measured in tickets per minute. The system would keep a 'rolling average' on these rewards over, say, the last 10, 30 or 60 minutes (the devs would need to figure out what's best). When your reward rate exceeds T all your defeat ticket rewards would be halved. When it exceeds T x 1.5 (or 1.25, or whatever) the rewards would be divided by 4, and so on for additional .5 (or .25) increments of T.

This reduction would not apply to the ticket reward at the end of the mission (the setting of T would be calculated based on this assumption).

This same logic can be applied to experience and influence rewards, producing target rates for earning experience E and Influence I. These limits could be adopted over the entire game and would allow even finer-tuning of the leveling rate. This would provide a general solution to the farming/PLing problem.

The diminishing returns idea is much more acceptable than the hard cap, and is consistent with the rest of the game's limits on rewards. The devs probably considered it, but since it requires a lot of changes, it wouldn't have been possible to put into a patch between issues.

As long as the values of T, E, and I are chosen for large but reasonable values, no one can justifiably complain about it. Especially considering that the most egregious abuses of fast leveling occur in farm missions where characters are SKed to 46s and stand around and do nothing except collect experience.

The easiest way to figure these values is to ask "How many hours is it reasonable for a character to reach level 50?" Whatever number that is, pick the value of E that would get you there, assuming that all you did was defeat enemies. Then choose T according to the value that corresponds to this value of E.

These values would need to be tuned for each level to give the desired rate of progression over the life of a character. Five levels of experience per hour is fine for level 1-10, but not so fine for level 45.

I think we can all agree that there should be some minimum number of hours to go from level 1 to level 50. If your experience rate decreases due to diminishing returns you may still level faster than that number of hours, but you won't be able to do it in half that time.

Then the devs could actually define that number of hours. If you're leveling faster than that you're exploiting the system. And the system would then have the mechanism to prevent it once and for all.

Then we could all stop arguing about farming....

[ QUOTE ]
Meh, not a big fan of the idea that following "rules" will make an arc "great". Cookie cutter rules produce cookie cutter arcs. But will agree that guide has a modicum of common sense that bears consideration.

[/ QUOTE ]

You have to know what the rules are to judge whether breaking them in a particular case is valid. The original poster said he breaks the rules himself, so he's obviously not advocating cookie cutter missions.

For example, one of my pet peeves is Defeat All missions. I hate them. They are a lazy way to construct missions. But sometimes they do make sense story-wise. They're acceptable on tiny or small map that has regular walls where the mobs don't get stuck all the time. Like the bank maps: most of them are very small and you pass by every spawn in the mission to get to the vault. So, a defeat all on that map is fine.

But generally, there's no reason to have a defeat all mission. You should have one or more real objectives, with one positioned in the back. That way a player who wants to defeat all (to maximize tickets or XP) will be able to hit most everything before ending the mission. Players that don't care can bypass some mobs as desired.

Writing missions is like any creative writing endeavor. A good writer has a grasp of what has worked well before (that is, "knows the rules"), and uses that knowledge to put a twist on that to make something that satisfies the same needs in a novel way.

[ QUOTE ]
I lost my job in feb and still think 14.99 is a good price to pay for this game. Its a cheap addiction And for what we get its a very good deal.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, $15 is the price of 1.5 to 3 movies in the theater new release depending on where you live and what showing you see. For the same money you can see two to five On-Demand cable movies. So that's between three and ten hours of similar type of entertainment

$15 is what you typically pay for an movie on DVD that's been out for a couple of years. You're only going to watch once or twice a year, tops. Pretty expensive compared to CoH.

Cable TV is $50-$150 bucks a month, depending on where you live, what you get, etc.

If it's your cup of tea, the game is great value for the money. It it's not, it ain't. Really just that simple.

If $60 a year is going to affect the OP financially, then the OP shouldn't be paying $10 a month on a game either.

[ QUOTE ]
This topic is more towards the "Lowbie" part rather than the solo part, but I'll gladly take any advice on both.

I'm looking for advice on how to tell how Solo / Lowbie Friendly your arc is.
I did it a couple times, although there's always the build that just can't solo it as a lowbie. I got complaints from 2 people out of a good bunch. One controller and one defender.

I thought just putting it up like "85% lowbie friendly" would help define how well it works.
Especially when using some custom enemies.

Any advice?

[/ QUOTE ]

There will always be low-level defender and controller builds that have an extremely difficult time soloing any content, even Hellions. The main problem is that they don't do enough damage, so they wind up dead before the mobs do.

In addition, the skill and experience level of the player makes a big difference. Someone who knows when to use inspirations, how to pull, when to run, which mobs to take out in what order, etc., will be able to run much tougher missions than a newbie can. And someone with a vet attacks (Sands of Mu, Nemesis Staff) will be able to do a lot more damage than someone who doesn't. So if you're testing a mission's lowbie-friendliness, don't use any of your vet powers.

If your arc has any of the following things, it is not lowbie-friendly:
<ul type="square">Elite Bosses and AVs.
Mobs with holds and stuns (basically any controller power sets).
Mobs with high-damage single attacks (War Mace, Super Strength, etc.).
Mobs with mez resistance (melee defense sets on extreme).
Mobs with damage resistance debuffs (Dark Miasma, Radiation Emission, etc.).
Ambushes.
Destructible objects (these usually have an automatic ambush associated with them).[/list]Again, this does not mean that no lowbie can complete missions containing these. It just means that novice players with low-level characters will be extremely challenged by them.

[ QUOTE ]
On the other hand, I'm not sure that people take the time to READ the description of the mission before they enter - and that act alone would stop many low ratings. I had one guy who high-rated my arc and asked me to try his. But when I read his discription he told everyone upfront that they would need a team to complete ... so I passed it by. Enteriing an arc that truly advertises itself as tough, parody, fantasy, sci-fi ... if you do NOT like that genre ... should clue people in to take a pass at playing your arc. But some folks can't take the hint ... and then low rate you ... because they didn't "enjoy" your mission. And that sucks.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a very salient point. The mission description should be the main criteria by which your mission should be judged. If your mission delivers what the description promises, you should get an automatic three stars from every honest person playing it.

If it was well executed (well written, very engaging, smart twist, etc.) you should get 4 or 5; poorly executed (really hackneyed farmfest, poorly written, unintelligible, tedious, too wasteful of the player's time, etc.) 2 or 1 stars.

Because descriptions can be so subjective, it would be very nice for the system to provide some kind of automatic difficulty rating. I.e., if the arc contains an AV or multiple ambushes, the arc would have a higher difficulty than one that has nothing higher than lieutenants. A suggested level range and team size would also be nice. These wouldn't hold fast for every team, playing style and player experience level, but having some consistent automatic estimate would at least give everyone a common reference point.

Finally, having some predefined keywords associated with the arc would be very nice. That is, enshrining something like the SFMA and other tags in the system, along with genre types.

[ QUOTE ]
I was thinking of adding in a custom boss with the /Nin power set to my upcoming arc because I wanted them to use stealth, but I recall that early on, people were saying the set was quacked because a foe with it got the +crit on every attack they made, stealthed or not.

Has that been fixed? Is it safe?

[/ QUOTE ]

I have tried it several times and the /Ninja LTs no longer seem to be able to one-shot scrappers. The same seems to be be true with bosses.

I'd suggest making your boss and trying several different characters against it in test mode.

[ QUOTE ]
However, it is entirely possible to identify really poorly done arcs or farm arcs very quickly; one needn't go completely through the mission in every case to know when they've hit something that is just bad.

For myself, normally I just quit such missions without rating, though there have been two or three that I one-starred for inappropriate content issues. Again, those were easily identified very early.

I do sympathize with ratings griefing (I've gotten one or two myself), it just seems that there's not much that can be done in many cases. It's not so much a technology issue, it's a people issue. There's no way a program can gage the intent of the rater.

[/ QUOTE ]

By requiring the voter to spend some minimum amount of time in the first mission (say, five minutes) the devs could eliminate most griefing and ticket padding as well.

Yes, it means we would have to wait five minutes to poke someone in the eye and give them a zero rating. But seriously, if we're not willing to give someone even the common courtesy of actually looking at some minimal part the mission, how much can our rating be worth?

[ QUOTE ]
Good ideas, Rodion, and I'll agree with all but:

[ QUOTE ]
If you can't find IOs for sale on the market and you already have a 50, consider going for the crafting accolade. Once you memorize a recipe, you craft it at half the cost and you don't need a recipe. This winds up making IOs cheaper than SOs in most cases (especially if you have the salvage). If your characters are in the same supergroup you can place the crafted IOs in storage and retrieve them with any of your alts.

[/ QUOTE ]

I just ran my main toon (with Field Crafter) to RWZ to compare prices -- level 50 damage and healing SO's are two of the most expensive at 60,000 inf each.

[/ QUOTE ]

You got me there -- but you can't really compare SOs to level 50 IOs, which are WAY better than SOs (they give a 42.4% bonus, while a level 50 SO provides 33.3% for a level 50 character). You really should compare SO costs to crafting a level 30 (34.8%) IO.

Also, my conceit for character building is posited on switching to uncommon and rare IO sets starting in the low 30s, so I would use very few common IOs after level 35 or so (only for things like Stamina, Hasten, Health, Flight, etc). If you've got 3 level 25 or 30 IOs in Stamina, you never need to replace them with 50s. You might want to change one of them to a 40 or 50 when you get the chance, but 3 25s provide 92% bonus and 3 30s provide 95.7% (according to Mids), while 3 50s give 99%. It's just not worth the huge crafting cost for the marginal increase on most characters. But by the time you can use level 50s you're not worried about a measly half million to craft an IO anymore.

Over the lifetime of an SO, a level 30 IO is better and never wears out. If you're slotting three of any enhancement, a level 30 is the best deal because ED comes down really hard on level 50 IOs. A 50 IO is best if you only have one or two slots available; if you've got three in the same enhancement it's overkill for most characters.

The closest I can come to doing this is to add a custom group containing a single boss for the group guarding the captive. Then set the group difficulty to Easy (not Single). It's spawning two of the same boss for me on Tenacious (challenge level 2). That's probably not what you want.

If you have two different bosses in that custom group it'll probably put one of each if you're soloing, but if you're on a larger team it'll likely spawn the same number of bosses guarding the captive as it would minions.

Again, probably not what you want.

It would be really cool if the contact was in a separate area that you could select the appearance of (the same way you select the contact or the map for a mission). It wouldn't need to be a big area, just enough to give you the flavor of the arc and keep up the suspension of disbelief.

It would probably require a separate zone or instance. But only for the initial load; if you exit to it between missions it would probably be a WHOLE lot faster than exiting to the AE building when it has dozens of people standing around. This could be one way of drastically decreasing the lag around the AE buildings while adding a great story-based feature at the same time.

What would be really cool is if that instance was like a base, in that you could completely control its appearance. The only requirement on it would be to have an exit point (like the base exit to go back to AE), and something to click to start the mission.

[ QUOTE ]
I buy SOs for my MA only characters with tickets, but common salvage is more rewarding. The above approach can make it more like a little sub-game than just a money grind.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think buying SOs with tickets is a terrible waste. SOs essentially last only five levels, while IOs last forever. Because so many people are going for badges, you can usually get crafted IOs on the market for the price of trainers at level 10-15.

If you can't find cheap IOs, you can generally get common recipes on the market for quite reasonable prices, and then get your salvage with tickets.

If you stage your IO crafting to increase your powers' accuracy as your base to-hit declines, you can actually wind up saving influence by using IOs instead of SOs. You don't need to swap out all your IOs like you do with DOs and SOs -- you can keep the lower level ones until you have the funds to replace them.

For example, when you hit level 12 put a level 15 accuracy IO in each of your attack powers and three or four level 15 damage IOs. When you hit level 17, replace one of your damage IOs with a level 20 accuracy IO, and replace the remaining level 15 damage IOs with level 20 damage IOs as funds become available. At level 22 replace the level 15 accuracy IO with a level 25, and upgrade the damage IOs when feasible. Over the life of an SO, a level 25 IO provides the same average bonus, while a level 30 IO is better for all but one or two levels (as I recall).

Another bonus for doing it this way is that you never get stuck with all your SOs going red when you level in the middle of a mission.

By the time you reach level 30-35 you should start using your tickets for bronze rolls. Then replace your level 25 IOs with level 30-35 uncommon recipe sets that you get from those bronze rolls, or recipes you buy on the market with the influence you earned from selling the bronze recipes you can't use.

For most characters, level 30-35 uncommon sets need never be replaced. Because of ED the damage (or mez effect) is essentially capped at 95% anyway, and the accuracy bonus is usually 57% to 62% for most attack powers, which is generally more than enough to peg your hit chance at 95% even when running on invincible.

If you can't find IOs for sale on the market and you already have a 50, consider going for the crafting accolade. Once you memorize a recipe, you craft it at half the cost and you don't need a recipe. This winds up making IOs cheaper than SOs in most cases (especially if you have the salvage). If your characters are in the same supergroup you can place the crafted IOs in storage and retrieve them with any of your alts.

There is no one best thing. It depends on what your character needs, what your level is, what you currently have, whether you want rare recipe sets, etc.

For example, if you have a level 30-50 character that's outfitted with SOs or common IOs, and you want to use uncommon IOs for most of your powers, the Bronze reward roll is really quite fabulous. With a few thousand tickets you can make your character quite powerful. For 75 tickets a level 50 Bronze roll gives you a shot at uncommons like Crushing Impact and Doctored Wounds that can sell for millions, and many rares. Since these drop at a frequency relative to their use in the game, it is likely that you will be able to use many of these recipes on your character, and that other players will be interested in buying the ones you don't use. Of course, you'll still get many that people don't want (pets, stuns, sleeps, Detonation, Cleaving Blow, etc.), but in my experience you get pretty decent stuff. For a few thousand tickets I've gotten 7 Crushing Impacts and 3 Steadfast Pro: KB protection, plus oodles of other recipes I used or sold. In my experience, the Bronze roll is the most cost effective use of tickets, but then I don't insist on having rares and ultra-rares in every power.

If everyone did what you planned to do (get rare salvage and sell it on the market), the supply of said salvage would increase and its price will drop, and it will soon be uneconomical.

All market-based schemes are dependent on supply and demand, and when either changes the viability of these schemes changes. Large-scale get-rich-quick schemes always wind up changing the direction of the market, in the game and in real life. When everyone was playing MA exclusively the price of high-tier common salvage went through the roof because no one was farming it anymore. Then it dropped again when the latest wave of fear spread and people started playing regular content.

If all you're interested in is getting lots of influence through the market, there is no one answer: you have to see what's in high demand and then supply it. But the act of supplying it in any quantity will reduce demand and lower the price. Meanwhile others will be doing the same. So your tactics will have to change or cycle over time.

[ QUOTE ]
I suppose you could fault the devs though for not allowing us a way to scale down an arc far enough so that "any squishie can play this", if that's what you want to create.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nah, but they do need to automatically compute a relative difficulty level and recommended number of players to complete an arc. The presence of EBs and AVs, ambushes, mobs that are hard or extreme, problematic power sets, etc., should be incorporated into a general difficulty level and a recommended minimum team size.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a ballpark estimate that people will get used to over time. Yeah, some character will be able to solo AVs and everything you can throw at them. The estimate should be made for the missions as designed, ignoring any modifications made for team size and challenge level. Players will know this adjust accordingly.

Then we need to be able to search for missions based on this difficulty and minimum team size. This, along with predefined keywords of some sort, will really help people zero in on missions they will have fun playing.

You know how the Red Cap Rascals run? A "silly running" travel power could combine a number of animations, like backflips, cartwheels, jumping, bouncing off walls, etc.

And the best thing is the title of the developer who designs it: The Minister of Silly Walks.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The devs should look into a method for determining individual xp values for each custom mob, based on its power selections. For example, an extreme/extreme Mind Control/Willpower boss is an extremely nasty customer and should be worth a lot of experience, but a standard/standard Radiation/Empathy boss is worth much less.

[/ QUOTE ]
Even that is not really accurate. You could have a minion who is pretty harmless alone, but can amplify the power of the right group. Put him in one group and he is much weaker, put him in another group and he is much stronger.

[/ QUOTE ]

On top of all that, there's also the fact that different ATs are threatened by different things. What's difficult for one AT and/or power set is an easy walk in the park for another.

All of my friends who have generally nasty melee characters sort of cringe at the idea of Cimeroran missions, while my "squishy" Storm Defender finds them to be really no trouble at all.

On the other hand, it's quite the reverse situation vs. Rikti. Mezzed, mezzed, mezzed, mezzed... oh, the mission's done. "Hey, glad I could help, guys!"

[/ QUOTE ]

As a point of fact, the devs already award different XP for certain mobs: the XP for Family mobs in the 40s were reduced because they are so easy to farm, and there's the recent comm officer XP change.

My concern is that the MA's potential will be never be realized because there's no way to know what the actual difficulty of a particular mission is, and you have no idea whether you will be compensated for that difficulty. If people perceive that MA missions are more trouble than they're worth, it will die.

The devs need to eliminate the cheats and exploits that give easy XP, but they also need to justly reward difficult missions.

Yes, it's true that different characters and different team compositions do or don't have problems with particular mobs, but you can still calculate a mean difficulty and a mean XP value for them.

Should tankers get less XP because they can solo dozens of Freakshow bosses at once? The devs long ago decided that everyone is compensated equally regardless of build, so that's a red herring.

And it's not just the AT involved. If you know what you're doing and prepare properly (build your character right -- get some kind of KB resistance and at least one or two mez powers, bring Break Frees, and convert other inspirations to them as needed), you can breeze through Rikti just as easily as any other enemy faction.

The key point is to identify the greatest threat and neutralize it first. If you're a squishy and you're fighting Rikti, you know you have to have interrupt the comm officers to stop a portal from forming, and you have to mez the mezzers before they mez you.

All the standard factions are relatively easy once you know what they do and how to neutralize them. The devs designed them to have weaknesses that we can learn and exploit.

Custom mobs in the MA don't work that way: we haven't seen them and don't automatically know all their strengths and weaknesses, and their power level can vary widely. This is a serious problem that has to be dealt with somehow.

The devs could force custom mobs to follow the same standards as standard mobs. That would mean disallowing any kind of mez resistance for minions and LTs, capping damage, etc. Which would result in the sameness that everyone was hoping we could escape from.

[ QUOTE ]
In the MA, the custom critters are amazingly tough. Well, even a standard/standard minion is using a player damage scale. The risk is much greater against custom critters but there is no adjustment to the reward. So the risk versus reward isn't balanced.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is highly variable. It's possible to make custom mobs that are amazingly weak (a standard/standard minion with radiation/regen or something like that).

The underlying problem is that conceit that all minions are worth the same number of xp, all LTs are worth the same, etc. Though they try hard to make this so, it isn't true in the standard mobs, so it certainly won't be true with the custom mobs.

The devs should look into a method for determining individual xp values for each custom mob, based on its power selections. For example, an extreme/extreme Mind Control/Willpower boss is an extremely nasty customer and should be worth a lot of experience, but a standard/standard Radiation/Empathy boss is worth much less.

Has anyone looked into whether mobs are worth more or less based on these settings currently?

[ QUOTE ]
try this option. it is by no means perfect but do not enter an arc that has only unique maps in the description. all the outdoor maps are labeled as unique in the mission description pages.(afaik)

[/ QUOTE ]

This doesn't work at all. Many interesting missions try to give you something different. Unique maps are different. Ergo, many interesting missions will give you unique maps.

The real problem is trying to do story-based arcs on teams, especially PUGs. If you're really interested in the story, you're going to have to take time to read things. This isn't going to happen unless you're on a team that's really focused on the story.

If you really want to do story-based arcs your best bet is to put "SFMA solo" in the search parameters so you can find soloable arcs. Then run with a tank, a scrapper or a high-level character that can solo easily.

As for the red herring about us all being farmers: it's patently false. While it's true that we all like getting experience and loot, that's where the similarity ends.

A farmer is perfectly happy running the same map over and over for all 50 levels. In fact, a farmer prefers this, as it provides no surprises and no variability, which could slow down loot collection or level advancement. This is why MA is so perfect: you can level from 1 to 50 without ever leaving the building.

Occasionally non-farmers will push hard to reach a particular level in anticipation of a coveted power. Everyone "farms" in this sense for experience, or goes and knocks off a bunch of Red Caps in the hopes of finding a needed piece of arcane salvage.

But non-farmers tire of this quickly. They run different missions, switch characters, work on the base, chat with friends, seek and destroy some GMs, collect a few badges, write an MA arc, craft some IOs, play on the market, etc. It's not all about the grind to level 50 or amassing 10,000 tickets in 10 minutes.

The problem with the farming style of play is that it leads to burnout and dropped subscriptions. The devs know this, and don't want it to become the standard mode of play for the CoX community, because it means the death of the game. And that's bad for the farmers too, because they won't have anyone to hawk their wares to if all the regular players go away.

It's too easy to scam the rating system right now. You can rate an arc without ever entering a single mission. This allows you to torpedo another person's arc or give your pals unearned tickets in seconds.

If the system required that you complete a mission or spend at least two, three or maybe five minutes in it before you can vote on it, the potential for abuse would be drastically reduced.

And, yes, I know about the autocomplete mission problem -- it's a bug they should fix. And maybe mission completion shouldn't even figure into it. If a mission only takes two minutes to complete something is fishy.