Serpine

Yeah, I had some failure text in the first arc I wrote having the contact complaining that now to get the information (that you were supposed to get) he was going to have to call in a bunch of favors and probably end up in jail... Oh well.

[ QUOTE ]
Based on what others have said regarding "paying for 5-star reviews" and friends providing high-rankings regardless of the mission quality

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe if we had a voting system that didn't favor low-voters over high, people wouldn't feel a need to resort to these methods as much (and how many of the 1000+ votes you need these methods could really generate is pretty questionable anyway). In the HoF race it takes *7* 5s to cancel out a single 1 vote, and *9* to cancel a 0 vote. Most real world voting systems wouldn't function with a design in which it only takes 10-12.5% of the voters to totally shut down the process if they so choose. This is especially true in a community like the internet which has so many people who like spoiling things for fun that we had to develop special terms for them.

I'm pretty tired of the conventional mobs after 5 years, so I tend to gravitate towards custom mobs in missions I choose to play. That being said, for the conventionals:
* Arachnos, Clockwork, Crey, Lost, Snakes = Good.
* Circle of Thorn, Gold Brickers, Red Caps, Rikti, Tsoo = Bad.

[ QUOTE ]
I also want to bring up the fact that I've written comments on an arc and accidently clicked finished before submitting comments.

[/ QUOTE ]

I do this all the time. I just reopen the arc and then immediately quit from it so I can send the feedback in: It even remembers the comment text if I've already typed it.

Its sometimes a problematic feature though if the level locks down do to a fringe element. For instance, if you have a rescue that involves you saving a standard critter, the level of that critter impacts the mission level range even if they are set to non-combatant. If they don't fight at all in the mission, they shouldn't be relevant.

Not sure...
Maybe you could use Golden Roller as the contact (so its not who gives you the mission, just the taxi that gets you there). Then inside the mission have rescues (with few if any guards) set to front that actually give you the mission text and then just stand around afterwards...

I'm fond of the Clockwork. The King functions pretty much as a delusional and spoiled child, which means he could have the potential to become more stable and more mature, if he had the right prompting. He has an interesting protective connection to an up and coming hero, which could provide that and some closure to his "heroes made me like this" issue. And there are entire realities that have been consumed by him, even when allegedly sane, so odds are he will eventually mess up whatever he tries, making him tragic. Plus he has that cool b-movie monster vibe and his minions rule.

Okay I think I've got a good one:

A kill all mission. Dot the map with the maximum number allowable of unguarded EB/AV Allies (so they are hard not to pick up) with Force Field set to Extreme. The player will spend the majority of the mission just waiting patiently for Detention Field to fade from the enemies.

For added fun, make it timed.

[ QUOTE ]
That's more of a realistically teaseable goal.

[/ QUOTE ]

Its not even that, as a goal would imply some sort of endpoint. I really thought the HoF was supposed to work the same as DC: Once an arc qualifies it is permanently flagged, copied to the arc server, and removed from further editing. This whole bouncing thing is very disturbing.

Those are brilliantly messed up.

The closest I could think of would be to have a boss that spawns an ambush of masterminds from every damage bar. And of course make that boss a minion, so he is very easy to one shot (thus triggering all the ambushes at once). But that is more abusive then sadistic...

In my Easter arc I created some small robotic rabbits and made them a shade of brown that looked "chocolate" to me. When I was started actually testing the mission, I soon realised that the map I picked used a very similar shade of brown both for dirt outside and the interior walls of a building. So I kept getting startled by these bunnies popping out of seemingly nowhere because they blended in so well it became natural camo.

What sort of cool unexpected things like that have happened to others? Some map / custom / timing synergy that just produced a totally unintended, but good, effect that you wish you could have claimed credit for.

[ QUOTE ]
Hall of Fame being loseable is ludicrous!

[/ QUOTE ]

This is bizarre to even contemplate. If your slot counts fluctuate like this you could easily end up with more arcs then you are allowed to have, requiring you to unpublish multiple ones to put up a single new one...

[ QUOTE ]
Yeah! This!
...
Yeah!

[/ QUOTE ]

See, you saying that just now totally had me busting up again. Its amazing the odd things that tweak the humor impulse.

I'd would really like to see a flag option to leave feedback as anonymous if you want to, but still let you elect to attach your name. That way if you want the possibility to engage in conversation with the designer (to help refine the arc) you can, or if you suspect its going to turn out badly you can avoid it.

I was in a mission about gnomes where almost every piece of text (intro, mission accept, completion, etc) was just the word "Yeah!". For some reason after a while this struck me as incredibly funny, and the evil custom garden gnomes looked really cool, so I stuck it out to the end.

Somehow I resisted sending "Yeah!" as feedback.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't really want you up in my grill playing twenty questions about why I gave you the score I did.

[/ QUOTE ]

I had a really nice, friendly chat with somebody who gave me scathing feedback (and 1 star) on one my arcs yesterday. Some of it turned out to be an apparent bug (for whatever reason it showed 1-54 as the level range to him rather then the 20-20 it normally shows, so he was surprised by the exemp-down).

I made a couple of modifications based on the feedback and discussion and was pretty happy with how it all went down. I'd imagine that's how it should go ideally in these situations?

I apologize if there is already a thread for this (I didn't spot one), but I'm trying to get a feel for what sort of things in standard missions we can't currently simulate with the Architect system (or if maybe there are settings for these that I'm missing). Currently the ones I'm aware of are:

- - - - -

* Escort to object/person (i.e. bring a technician to a computer, bring a medic to a wounded guy).

* Locked door requiring completion of other objective to unlock (i.e. numerous find the key on enemy or in desk missions).

* Exit countdown (i.e. completing an objective triggers a bomb or flood and you must leave map within 60 seconds to complete )

* Ally survival as an end of mission condition (currently it appears once rescued it never matters if they live)

- - - - -

So, am I missing something as far as these go? Are their any other major ones?

Heh, just trying to help others avoid frustation and loss. And keep from experiencing myself again.

A couple more I think:

1) As I mentioned in another thread, if you get an AE Soevenir without opening the Soevenir window (or possibly just the badge window in general) first that session, it will wipe out all previous text in the Souvenir file.

2) Escort rescues seem to always say the unaware text at the same time as the aware text (I've walked right up to them with stalkers to test this).

By any chance did one of your text blocks end up longer then the allowed amount when you went back in? I had a situation today where I had some text blocks pop the seam because I pressed enter (counting as 1 character) during initial entry, but after publishing and going back in they had converted to "<br>" (counting as 4 characters). This produced some odd validity results...

***UPDATE***
I just confirmed it doesn't even matter if the character is new and has opened the AE souvenir window before. If you go into any character and get a souvenir without first opening the window during that session it will flush all the info. Even if you have done it for that character previously many times before and its the only one you ever use.

Worse then I originally thought.

!!!!!!I figured it out!!!!!!

If you take a character you haven't done architect missions with before, and get a souvenir *without opening the souvenir window on that character* it will flush the existing file. Probably until you first open the souvenir window it doesn't know to read things into current memory, and it writes without reading when you get a new souvenir.

So make sure to open the souvenir window before headhunting.

Hmm... Okay, I tried using a different character, got a souvenir, did the mission. Everything looked fine. Then I switched back to the original character this happened on: She now had lost her latest two souvenirs and only had the one from the second character. Huh?

I had all my AE souvenirs vanish. I suspect it was when I finally got around to doing the initial intro mission in Mercy (I hadn't done it yet, and wanted to clear off the contact). Anybody else experienced something like that?

At least a few I really liked the souvenir, but hated the mission, so I'm not getting those back.

[ QUOTE ]
Leveling Pact:
This feature will initially launch with the low-level limit on initiating Pacts

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm glad to hear that it may be raised later. Until it is it will linger in my "feature I'll never use" bucket rather then "greatest feature ever" bucket. The bulk of the small army of duo characters my wife and I have are mostly in the 10-20 range, and have unreplacable badges (anniversary and the like) so rerolling isn't an option.