Sente_

This includes players that just run a trial, gold sellers etc. As I understand it, that is a high percentage in the MMO realm.

All the regular critters have specific smaller level ranges for a reason - you cannot do a "one size fits all" here.

As Eva said, it would be nice to be able to set level ranges for individual custom critters. Or be able to set multiple power selections for a critter, each with a separate level range.

Separate level ranges for critters themselves would be more consistent with the regular critters though. If the costume parts could be set up to be shared between critters it would also save some space.

Tip missions are part of Issue 18, at least as a way to deliver new missions. So you could get those anywhere. But presumably you will need GR to actually get the ones that will affect your morality.

You can edit an existing arc also, so you can keep the old arc ID (and any ratings received).

One tip here, at lower levels do not attempt missions with level 1-54 that use custom mobs. If you look at normal mobs you will see that there is no single mob that has a comparable range - they all have smaller ranges. A villain group as a whole may cover the whole range, but you would not fight exactly the same mobs at level 5 as at level 50 - completely different mobs.

Arc authors need to do the same considerations, but may not always do that and then you end up with a situation like you described.

A far too common problem unfortunately. There are almost 21000 unrated arcs, some almost as old as MA itself. I have one that is over 10 months old myself.

I quite liked the arc, good story and nicely paced. The last mission was a bump up in difficulty due to the LTs. For the psychic barriers, I think adding the word "all" in the objective will give a hint of what that is all about, without being too explicit in the description.

I thought also that there could perhaps be a few more variations of the cultists also.

But overall a very good arc I think.

It is not about workarounds; it is about designing the game so that people who legitimately want to make good arcs can do so while at the same time trying to avoid opening up for exploitation of the system.

The default setting for powers is "standard" and that is somewhat close to normal mobs in terms of how powerful they are - the XP is worse though. This varies though with levels, as Eva said. Lower levels can still be tough.

In order to make custom mobs vastly overpowered to regular mobs the arc designer has made a decision to make them harder and/or not limit the possible level range that is set for the arc. And harder is both the powers selected for each mob as well as the combination of powers from multiple mobs.
He/she can also decide to make a balanced and suitable power usage for the level range the arc is aiming at. Also, custom groups can be made with a new combination of standard characters, or a mix of standard characters and custom characters - there are lots of options.
But it will require testing for sure to get a good mix, preferably with different team/character/difficulty combinations.

Many arcs, especially in the beginning of MA, were created with the author just playing around with the system and perhaps creating as powerful mobs as he/she could. Many of these arcs are still around, cluttering the system.

I avoid certain arcs with custom mobs myself, but I do not avoid all of them. A few rules of thumb I use:

* Avoid arcs with custom mobs which have a level range of 1-54 or similar (I tend to avoid 5-50 etc also)

* Avoid arcs with custom mobs if there are warnings for extreme mobs (bosses, elite bosses, arch-villains)

* Only look at arcs that have status "Looking for feedback" or "Final".

* If the description of the arc is just a short sentence like "can u beat the mighty Konrad" or something like that I also tend to avoid it.

Compare NCSoft Q1 report for 2010 with the Q1 report for 2010. They earned about twice as much in Korean Won a year ago from CoX.

That level of income was fairly close as I recall to what they reported back in those days when they still included subscriber numbers for CoX in the reports, which was somewhere in 110K-120K range at that time.

One approach would be to give the stars a weight based on time also. E.g. stars given in the last 3 months gives full value, starts from 3-6 months have a slightly lower weight for each star etc.

That kind of data might not have been tracked though; i.e. at what time was each rating given.

Or perhaps include a thumbs up/down rating in addition to the star sum, or perhaps just an optional thums up - "I would recommend this arc". People could give thumbs up if they liked it and then set as many or few stars as they wanted.