Sente_

One of my arcs, The Missing Geneticist (2542), is in this low level range, levels 12-19.

Most of it is standard villains, with some custom villains towards the end. It had a recent refresh of the custom ones for new costumes, power adjustment post I17 and and some name changes.

My suggestion is basically about encouraging people to try out more and different MA arcs. Today there is a button to get a random mission. I would like to add a "leap of faith" option:

* Will give a random arc, with the probability slanted towards arcs with low number of ratings, or no ratings at all of course

* Ratings are not shown

* Will give an extra reward if the arc is completed and rated, possibly a partial reward if only rated. Arcs with more missions would give slightly better rewards for actually completed missions.

* The extra reward will only be given if the arc is chosen this way and extra XP should be an option for the reward here.

It is not a perfect system - people can always ask others to search for the same arc and see what the ratings are. But I think in the end that approach may be too time consuming in order to get an arc with decent ratings and get extra rewards.

To primarily care about the story in the arcs does not exclude caring about XP - people also want progression.
It is not just black or white here; there will be people all over the spectrum. For those that play MA as intended the XP is already a bit lower than regular content and team mechanics are more restricted, meaning that a casual "team up and do some of each others missions" becomes a bit more cumbersome.

Regardless of the numbers used for these proposed changes it will bring an uncertainty to players - an arc could potentially have mobs that cause XP reduction unless it is all made of standard mobs.

For people who create story focused arcs challenge or difficulty may not necessarily be their main goal; just because some include relatively "easy" mobs does not automatically make it a farm arc.

For arcs aimed at lower levels you also have to turn down the difficulty setting of custom mobs or they will become too difficult. I have an arc aimed at teen levels where one of the factions involved is a custom group. Even with the setting set to standard/standard for minions and LTs and no insane powerset combos I received comments that this faction was a bit too difficult for some people's taste.

Playing an MA arc is in a way a leap of faith; it can be crap or it can be great or somewhere in between. What I see here now is something that seems too complex without bringing incentives for those that want to use MA as intended. I think it will rather discourage people to try new arcs unless they have lots of ratings with an high average.

One of the great things with CoX is that many of the gameplay mechanics mostly play well together to encourage people to team up and play with each other.
Compare that to many other MMOs where they may want to people to team up and play together but where many of the game mechanics get in the way. Teaming is not worth the effort for short casual session and people end up soloing.

My concern here is that in an effort to curb excessive farming the developers may end up adding too many small roadblocks so that casual players simply will not find it worth the effort to play MA arcs as intended.

Most created and played has to be dominator. I have not kept track of all the different ATs I have deleted (which are a bunch), but the ones I have today are:

Dominator: 6 (lvl range 50-50)
Controller: 3 (lvl range 10-50)
Scrapper: 3 (lvl range 6-50)
Corruptor: 3 (lvl range 17-40)
Arachnos Widow: 2 (lvl range 24-50)
Mastermind: 2 (lvl range 15-34)
Stalker: 2 (lvl range 26-32)
Brute: 2 (lvl range 10-28)
Blaster: 2 (lvl range 12-15)
Arachnos Soldier: 1 (lvl 31)
Tanker: 1 (lvl 25)
Defender: 1 (lvl 18)
Warshade: 1 (lvl 14)

Depending on the map you could try to split it up into two separate objectives, assuming that the area where both can spawn is pretty much next to each other - e.g. a battle and an escort.

It may not work out depending on when in the story this should happen, since it is perhaps a bit more likely to find a map with such locations if it is either front or back for both.

1) I think this would be a bit tricky to handle since we also can have custom power selections. Also, the actual difficulty would depend on the whole mob group and how they interact, not necessarily a single mob.

2) Same here, a powerset selection for a single mob may provide a certain difficulty, but the combination of all mobs in a group may provide a different experience. Also, what may be difficult would also to some extent depend on the archetypes that are fighting.

I neither think it is possible nor desireable to find some combination that would be completely equal for everyone in terms of challenge vs reward. Too much effort involved for little gain.

3) In what way do you think the reward system is a failure?

The arcs will still be there. I know at least one person with expired account whose arc is still available.

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Thats right.... and when its finally working how they want it, the 4 people still using it will be buzzing.

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I did a quick check - 6315 story arcs published now in July so far. Of those there were 2517 that had received a rating.

So I would hazard to say that 4+ people might be using MA.

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I've not experienced many MMOs, but thought that CoX should have looked at it's NC stablemate Tabula Rasa for some of its mission ideas. I found some of the variety quite refreshing there. e.g. a talk-to where you're transporting delicate equipment (evidence?) that gets destroyed if you take too much damage - throw in a decent ambush or 2 and that could be quite fun.

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Another NCSoft game to look at is Guild Wars. They have some really nice mission ideas among their different types of missions.

All the cooperative missions (i.e. missions in the PvE main story) also have various levels of success - there is a minimum requirement, a "master" requirement and for some of them also an "intermediate" requirement. Doing the master part gives better reward, but can be more challenging.

And there are of course titles (i.e. badges) tied to completing a number of the more challenging options.

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I hate this whole anti farming stance the devs take...
We pay our subs, we should be able to play as we see fit.

Do they dislike players having level 50's or something??

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They dislike having the risk vs reward balance thrown out the window, which were exploited in some MA farming missions. That is a different thing.


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I mean what other game to you know that activley spends man hours preventing it's customers doing something that they enjoy.

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Most MMOs out there I would say, if we talk about risk vs reward exploits.

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Remember (and I'm as critical as any of you when I feel it justified) that Issues are FREE updates and as such we should be grateful for them - and if you look at 2009 in the round, despite the problems with MA and lack of substance in I15, by the time the end of year comes we'll have had 3 free updates, and a very big paid expansion with lots of content. That's not actually bad for an MMO with a relatively low monthly sub.

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I pay 130 Euro per year for playing this game in subscriptions, I would certainly not consider these updates free updates. If they were actually free, none of the money I pay would actually go to new development and only cover operational costs.

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I read it as allowing you to swap sets and AT's during the creation phase of your character, nothing more. Instead of having to go back several pages.

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I read it as being able to change your AT powers whilst levelling your character.

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I think it is nothing more than that you will perhaps get a tabbed interface in the costume creator instead of a step-by-step interface. No need to do things in a specific order anymore.

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(It also mentions the demon summoning Desdemona, and the pistol using Maelstrom, which kinda hints that the new power sets will be in GR )

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That only says that dual pistols and demon summoning will be available no later than GR - not necessarily in GR.

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This is not about frequency of play or creativity issues. MA is excluded from dxp because it is still easily possible to utterly break the intended risk vs. reward standard with user-created content.

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Of course the suggestions do not make sense, that was part of the point I was making.
MA, regardless of whether it is played as some of us do, with story focus, or is used for farming, or something else is still part of the game play available. It does not matter whether it is popular or not, if the content is good or not.

Excessive MA farming is certainly not a good thing (IMHO) and I think it is great if Paragon Studios can do more to deal with it. But that really has nothing to do with DXP.
What is acceptable for normal XP should be acceptable for DXP really, bad or good. The problem is not with DXP weekend itself, but rather that actions to curb excessive farming is perhaps not good enough. It is a separate issue.

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MA isn't a success. All the farming and PL just makes it look that way. If it was a success it'll be played for the creativity.

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I did not argue whether MA was a success or not. I just do not see a point of excluding it from DXP, since that is a part of the gameplay available, regardless of how and how much it is used.

Perhaps we should exclude less played zones also from DXP? Or perhaps the regular missions that could be considered less creative?
In the name of Proper Content we certainly must ensure that people earn the XP the Right Way For DXP.

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MA included... that's daft!!!

More free lvl 50's...

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Only for those that use MA to play that way.
For us others who cannot stand either boring farming MA missions or "real" missions with the same boring qualities (e.g. defeat all missions on large maps with almost identical enemies all the time) it is nice to have MA as an option also.

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May I also point out a gfx update doesn't necessarily mean you need more power, a gfx overhaul might leave you needing LESS power in fact, since the engine might run much smoother than the old beast we have and it still might look better.

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Quite true. This is what is expected with the graphical update of Anarchy Online, to take a different example of an even older engine.

The old AO engine does not take advantage of GPU processing at all, as I understand it. There has been much progression in gfx libaries, drivers and graphics card capabilities - but engines need to be written to use them also.