Sente_

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who think anything about I16 this early are doing so from a position of ignorance: we don't know enough to even begin to consider speculating.

[/ QUOTE ]

When has ignorance stopped speculation or having opinion on matters? :P

It is fertile ground for speculation and opinions at this point, because no-one can be proven that they are completely wrong.

Never played or never rated?
If you mean not rated there are roughly 2600 arcs that are older.

I keep a generic Villains group around which I transfer custom mobs I want to remove, as Imoba described.

I have had some interesting effects when some "garbage records" of a mob remained in the custom villain group even after "removal" - caused the costume and stats for a removed EB to be used for an existing minion - so suddendly the mission was swarming with tiny EBs instead of tiny minions...

[ QUOTE ]
They better because as they stand now, I suspect they were written (not programming written but storytelling written) by one of the new guys as their first piece of big work as there's a lot of things wrong with regards the story in terms of pacing, details given, the clues are kind of lackluster

[/ QUOTE ]

Not War Witch and not a junior developer, although somewhat new to CoX since it seems he started with Issue 13:

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/68412

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008...veloper-diary/

http://www.warcry.com/news/view/8618...-Bruce-Harlick

But since this is the "closed" beta where everyone gets to test Issue 15 it may still be at a stage where it could be expected to be a bit rough.

A few quick comments afer taking a quick look, there are a few things I think you may need to rethink here.

Durations for holds etc are a bit shorter with dominators than controllers, so you would want to 3-slot hold into a single target hold power. AoE hold would be fine with 2 hold, but then also 2 acc and 2 rech.

You seem to have a bit too many endurance reduction and not so much accuracy. Not enough accuracy is going to be painful. ST hold would be ok with 1 acc, many other you may consider 2 acc.

I would not bother with much of the toggle powers that consume endurance before you get stamina.

You would likely want to consider taking Hasten.

Depending on playstyle Medicine pool might be considered (heal yourself and ally). My personal favourite for travel power with dominator is Super Jump, which pool has some useful powers also.

There used to be some pretty good guides giving some general principles plus some specific comments about specific powersets. Not sure if they are still around, but can be worth looking for.

[ QUOTE ]
There used to be loads of farming. Things have grown more quiet nowadays farmwise. If only because the Dev's made it clear that they will not tolerate farming.

[/ QUOTE ]

More quiet yes, but I am not so sure it has decreased that much. I get invites for AE mission teams pretty much every time I log in (sometimes even if the toon has "no farming" in the search text) and in the majority of the cases it is for farming missions.

If people want to do that fine with me, but there is obviously a difference in taste and I find farm missions incredibly boring.
At least some people have the courtesy to explicitly mention either "farm" or "story" when they ask.

[ QUOTE ]
Actually it seams only the french have found that little niche exploit. I have never encountered it on any english servers

[/ QUOTE ]

I have encountered English farm mission with bubble allies before, I thought they had removed that exploit though.

[ QUOTE ]
what about a mission creator?

[/ QUOTE ]

And that creator vs generator argument again. While the Mission Architect tools do not have everything you want, it would still be a creator, not a generator.

A mission generator is what they have in Anarchy Online - adjust a few settings, press the button and mission generated.

In Issue 15 you will be able to see on the map where the different spawn points are and give you a better idea of maps that may work without going through too much trial & error.

That seems only to be for indoor maps though, so might not be in place for the Zig map.

[ QUOTE ]
Not at all - and if I could then publishing it here would only lead to it's downfall as farms/griefers move just outside the limits it checks.

[/ QUOTE ]

And the challenge here for the developers would be to figure out a good algorithm. They probably made a first stab at it, but that also needs to be validated against real data to verify that it is working as intended. Verification would be a manual procedure and they would only see how many false positives they would get - not if they caught all of the culprits.


[ QUOTE ]
But presumably if a false positive is thrown up the misidentified party can contact the GMs and have the situation addressed. It's unlikely, IMO, that those griefing or creating farms would appeal the decision since they would be in the wrong - the GM would look at the case and dismiss it.

So I imagine that most GM involvement would be for misidentifications, so the key is to not produce too many false positives.

[/ QUOTE ]

There is a flaw in that reasoning and that is that people would have a logical or reasonable behaviour. That would only work I think if there would be trouble for crying wolf too often.

[ QUOTE ]
And, in this case, as you can't have a system that will never produce a misidentification then it is far better to have a few false positives than false negatives.

[/ QUOTE ]

There will always be false negatives, unless one can define in good detail exactly what is a culprit arc here.

I think they will need time before they would dare to turn on some automatic detection. More likely they have something running, but do manual checks on these first before actually taking any action.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I am glad that they want to encourage non-farm type gameplay.

[/ QUOTE ]

Too late. The auction house has seen to that. As soon as you introduce tradable items and an ingame currency, you have farming. Like judgement day, it's inevitable.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, but avoiding farming completely is a quite different thing from encouraging non-farming. Mission Architect is a nice feature in that it can potentially be used extensively at any level and it does not have to be about farming/grinding at that point.

Consignment houses and inventions have certainly brought in more farming elements to the game, but they are not all about farming either.

I am glad that they want to encourage non-farm type gameplay. They should have seen it happening before Mission Architect was released though. But it seems they did not - people make mistakes. I rather see that they do something to change that than keep supporting mistakes they have done.

To be entirely consistent that should also mean revisiting old badges, but I guess they might consider that a bit too risky to poke into at this point.

Never been a fan of grind-friendly badges/accomplishments, hopefully they will have this mindset considering future badges also that are not MA.

Personally I think creating story arcs is the most fun solo activity in this game. There will certainly be comments and ratings that may put you in a bad mood, but I rather have some comments and so-and-so rating than nothing at all.

A 3-star rating from someone who did not understand or bother to understand the story is something I would much prefer to not have the arc rated or played, or getting 0-2 rating without any comment.

Any activity where you put out what you have done for public review and where people may comment or rate anonymously will without a doubt get both good and bad feedback.

I don't care so much about the ratings and if I consider what I have done myself good enough that I think others may enjoy it, I'd keep it published.

That being said, the 3 story arc limit is an issue in that case. I really hope they would consider offering more arc slots in some way other than Dev Choice and HoF. I would be happy to buy a few more slots similar to character slots, if they were to offer that.

[ QUOTE ]
Besides, english IS the majority of the language on this game, not to mention the entire world, followed closely by spanish and chinese (correct me if i'm wrong on that)


[/ QUOTE ]

As for native languages Mandarin should be in top (the various Chinese dialects vary enough that one could argue there is no single spoken Chinese language).
I think English and Hindi are next and roughly equal and Spanish slightly behind those.

English may be the most spoken second language though.

[ QUOTE ]
I didn't say inf is hard to come by, some people belive it is.
I think you misunderstood my post.

[/ QUOTE ]

What I meant here is that without setting some level of ambition or goal it is not so meaningful to talk about whether it is hard or not.

Happy to just be slotted with regular DOs at level 20? Inf is probably not going to be an issue. Want to be all IOed with some sets at level 20? That is going to be a bit tougher.

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe i'm reading all this wrong, or maybe daily means something else in the US, but for me, daily means daily, like every day!?

That can't be right can it? maint patch from 1-3pm every day?

[/ QUOTE ]

It is a reserved time for them to do that, if they need to. The idea is that people should really assume the worst (it would happen every day) and it not, it would be a bonus.

Personally I do not have a problem with this time, since I am at work anyway. I am quite sure when they decided on maintenance windows for MA they looked at times where the global playerbase would be affected the least.

For what goals would inf be hard to come by? I don't transfer inf between any of my characters and I do not find cash flow a big problem nowadays and I do not farm - but that depends on your level of ambition.

Without setting the goals for what you need the cash for you may not get a useful result.

Why don't you use /demo_record initially to save the gameplay and then use some other software to make video files of the parts you want, assuming that is the plan?

demo_record files will be much more compact that any video capture.

If you want to speed up things, start teaming. You will get xp much faster almost regardless of what you do and it is generally more fun also.

CPR - City of Paragon and Rogue isles

CoW - City of Whatever

Co - City of ...

XYZZY

VaH - Villains and Heroes

VHO - Villains Heroes Online


But frankly, PS need to take the initiative here to change the brand a bit. Although they do seem to favour the H-side of things in terms of naming.

[ QUOTE ]
Here's a thought - the MA is only available, like Ourobouros, to lvl 25s plus. You need to do the tutorial before you can touch the system.

[/ QUOTE ]

Personally I think level 25 is a bit high in terms of level restriction, I think level 12-15 would be better if a restriction would be set.

In early teen levels leveling is still reasonably fast, there has been time to experience 1-2 mayhem/safeguards and visited at least 2-3 zones. DOs has been introduced, inventions has been introduced.

Enough time for people to pick up much of the basics, but not so much time that they might feel they have to struggle too long to get there if they are interested in MA. Besides, with Ouroborous already at 25 it would be better to put it at a different level range anyway.

[ QUOTE ]
Yes, it removes early level heroes/villains from enjoying different content to the starting stuff. Heck, you never know, it might encourage developers to make some more new content for those levels to alleviate the boredom?

[/ QUOTE ]

I liked that joke

[ QUOTE ]
My own thoughts are along the lines of the floowing options either individually or combined in some way:

Make the MA an Unlockable product that can only be achieved by having at least one level 50 (a la HEATs & VEATS, preferably one of each.)


[/ QUOTE ]

Why? It is a prominent feature of the game, so if people would need to spend 100s of hours to get there they might not bother with the game at all. I think that MA being available to everyone is a big strength.


[ QUOTE ]
Reduce all rewards (XP, inf & tickets) from MA missions by initially 25% and a further 25% if that fails to solve the problem.


[/ QUOTE ]

So instead of getting to 50 in 6 hours, they will get to 50 in 8-10 hours. Someone playing at more normal progression speed would have 10s of hours added if they want to play MA missions.
MA provides more variation in the missions they take on at all levels.
There are many people who like the CoX setting, but do not play it or play it regularly because it has been too much of the same to progress in the game. The main penatly here would be for those playing the game normally, not the ones that are farming xp.



[/ QUOTE ]Remove all existing rewards, give a single Mission Bonus reward and a TF rewards for completion of each component of an arc.

[/ QUOTE ]

See above.


[ QUOTE ]
Deliver XP according to character level regardless of mission level (as per Rikti/Zombie invasions. Don't think I've ever seen anyone "farm one of them even when the go on over 30 minutes and the world isn't full of people dinging very 26.2 seconds.) In other words if you are level 5, you get the xp you'd normally get for defeating a level 5 enemy. I think as things stand the XP is higher but I could be mistaken.


[/ QUOTE ]

But Rikti invasion etc have the relative levels fixed and thus not really a difficulty settings. If the difficulty settings are still in place it is a penalty for the normal players. Less severe than the previous ones, but still something I think hurt the normal players more than the farmers.

[ QUOTE ]
Automatically give every mob on 4man team spawns and higher a Lt & Boss by default that cannot be removed (I appreciate this is clunky but it is an option.)


[/ QUOTE ]

A bit clunky yes, not quite sure how much gain that would give to alleviate any problems.

[ QUOTE ]
Limit the number of times a specific player can play a specific mission on an account wide basis.

[/ QUOTE ]

Perhaps not a strict limit, but rather one of dimishing returns and cooldown for that limit.


[ QUOTE ]
Allow players to earn redeemable tokens in the main story arcs that allow them timed access to the MA. For example each mission you complete in the game proper gives you roughly 5-10 minutes time in the MA. So to get an hour playing (not designing or testing) MA arcs you'd have to do roughly 6 long missions or 12 short ones.

[/ QUOTE ]

The problem here is that you would be forcing a certain player behaviour. What if someone is sick and tired of playing most of the regular content because they already has done that a number of times? What if they find the regular content a bit boring but a lot of the MA stuff fun?
I think you could end up with people grinding newspaper missions for hours just so they could have some fun playing in MA.
How is that so much better than people grinding farm missions so that they can have some fun with their now powerful characters?

I think one first has to more properly identify the problems here. The problem is not that a character can go from level 1 to 50 in 6 hours. The problems are really effects of that activity in relation to the current game design, not the activity itself.

Looking at things people complain about here I think problems seen are rather things like:

1. Inflated prices on items in Consignment House

2. Too much uninteresting spam in broadcast channels in a few zones, annoys people (e.g. Atlas Park)

3. Teaming with players who have a limited understanding of their archetype and powerset abilities

4. More difficult to find teams to play more interesting content.

5. Wrong impression given to new players due to the farming.


And at all times I think the requirement should be to avoid penalties to players who play the game more or less as intended.

I think a dimishing returns approach could possibly work here, given that the limits are set high enough not to be disruptive for "normal" play, but still low enough to reduce effects on the economy.

Perhaps looking at introducing more content after the tutorial at various later stages which are optional but rewarding and which helps with the "learn to play" part.

Ideally I think a major redesign of the whole leveling and power allocation would be beneficial, but would not be realistic to do.

[ QUOTE ]
2) The main point. Surely any game that allows you to reach the level cap without any real learning curve is ultimately flawed?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not necessarily, that depends on what the level cap means, if there are levels at all. If you take Guild Wars as an example, reaching level cap pretty much means that you have gone through the newbie part in the PvE content. For PvP, you can start at max level immediately.

Now a vast majority of the content in Guild Wars is also for max level, which is of course different from the design of many level-based MMOs, CoX included.

I certainly agree that players should go through a learning curve. But at what point?

I would hazard a guess that most people who have not been conditioned to level-based MMO game mechanics over the years would like to feel pretty powerful in a superhero/supervillain game quite soon after starting to play it.

I think the deisgn flaw is rather that the time that would normally have been necessary for learning enough powers is too long and that they game is not necessarily helping people learning their powers.

[ QUOTE ]
For example - I teamed with some 50s on Wednesday and was surprised that the tank wasn't charging into mobs taunting and drawing aggro as most of the team were trollers and blasties. So I politely said "why aren't you taunting them?", his reply was......what’s taunting?

[/ QUOTE ]

Frankly, this mainly means that the person perhaps have not played MMOs before where taunting is used or have rarely teamed in MMOs that do have that where he might have picked up info about the mechanic.

So you have hopefully now given him something more to think about when playing his character, which is a good thing.

[ QUOTE ]
After that, I would imagine the only logical thing to do would be to remove XP and Inf from MA missions, or at the very least reduce the reward rate to no higher than 10-20% of normal.

[/ QUOTE ]

People can use knives to kill others, so the only logical thing would be to get rid of them completly, or possibly only allow knives to put butter on slices of bread.

If you play MA missions which are not geared towards farming xp, the rewards are already a bit lower than regular missions, since it does not use the patrol xp bonus and there are no xp bonuses for completing an arc.
There is no need to reduce it for legitimate/intended usage, which would certainly kill or reduce the fun of the game for those who like MA but are not interested in farming.