Silver Gale

Is Freedom holding back the new Issue for everyone again?

[ QUOTE ]
"Parodies and derivative works are not allowed."

Further proof nobody reads the EULA: Niviene sort of made the above up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Niviene was just the messenger, I'm fairly sure it was "made up" higher than that. It's a new MA-specific rule, in order to have less gray areas left to the discretion of the GMs, and has nothing to do with the EULA.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
And besides all of that, I find stealthing immensely BORING to boot.

[/ QUOTE ]

Conversely, I find stealthing more fun than just steamrolling because it's something besides the "run around and beat everything that moves till it stops" paradigm of playing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Since having different tastes is not allowed, you two will have to fight to the death.

[ QUOTE ]
Pedantry aside, the two contexts for Blue Steel are not mutually exclusive. In the end, he is just a lowbie hero zone train with plot arcs that only involve lowbie villain groups. How much attention do Swan or Foresight (or is it Foreshadow?) get? Not every hero gets the Statesman treatment.

[/ QUOTE ]

Blue Steel is also the plot device the writers of high-level villain content use whenever something the player does during a mission would upset the status quo. Kidnapped Ms. Liberty? Blue Steel saved her. Lured Positron into a trap? Blue Steel helped him. And so on.

[ QUOTE ]
I did rather embarrassedly muck up the HTML error one (it was a 500 error, not a 404... I think).

[/ QUOTE ]

There wasn't an option for 404 or 500. None of the options I had were real HTTP codes. They were something like 414, 454, and 483. Hence the WTF reaction.

Extremely confusing and arbitrary. I didn't even bother getting all the way through.

You're given a grid of colored balls with stripes on them, one square, and your cursor becomes a figure of a guy. If you click the guy over any of the balls, you quickly figure out the stripes are actually arrows that show how far and in which direction the given ball will bounce the guy, the square is a chute, and the aim of the puzzle is to find a way for the guy to bounce across as many balls as possible before falling down the chute. Of course, by the time you figure that out, the puzzle is over and your score is based on which ball you happened to drop the guy on.

Or the one where they show you how to draw lines for the ball to follow, but there's no way to cancel a line after you've drawn it, so if you clicked wrong the first time because you still haven't figured out where lines can end and where they can't, you lose.

Then there's the one with nine tiles that you get three tries on, which I still can't figure out what it's about. Or the one with what looks like an HTTP error page, the words "I'm a little teapot" and a choice of three numbers. I mean, *what*.

Your final score might as well be drawn from a hat.

[ QUOTE ]
could you imagine what would happen if 8 villains really tried [attacking City Hall in Atlas].

Ignore the drones. Besides Ms. Liberty, on most servers there would be dozens of heroes on site in seconds.

[/ QUOTE ]

Unless there was a CC on.

[ QUOTE ]
Standard question from an IQ test: "If some greens are reds and some greens are blues, are some reds necessarily blues?" The answer is no, because you cannot say whether the greens that are reds are the same greens that are blue.

[/ QUOTE ]

Fixed your problem to match what you were talking about.

It's been a few months since the Architect launched, and there's a few things we can tell by now.

Five-star cartels are not an issue.

If we were seeing a lot of very crappy arcs inexplicably get into the Hall of Fame, we could conclude that the authors are getting their five-star ratings in underhanded ways, either through exchanging 5-star votes, paying others to rate their arc high, or other such means. But this is not what we're seeing. In fact,

There are no Hall of Fame arcs. At all.

Three months after launch, not a single player-made arc has gone into the Hall of Fame and *stayed* there. There are two possible explanations for this.

Either:

1. No player is able to make a story arc that is actually *good*

at least using the metric of player ratings. Among the 120k players, not a single one can make an arc that appeals to their fellow players. This would make the entire Architect system a colossal failure.

2. The ratings system is too skewed towards bad ratings.

You can only get a new story slot if you get into the Hall of Fame. You can only get into the Hall of Fame if the number of 5-star votes you have *vastly* outnumber the number of 0,1,2,3 and even 4 stars that you have.

In practical terms, that makes a 5-star rating the equivalent of "I would like to see another arc by this author", while all other ratings are "I do not want to see any more material from this author" with varying degrees of intensity.

The first problem is that most people don't feel that a three- or four-star rating is a condemnation. After all, nobody would object to staying in a three-star hotel or dining in a four-star restaurant. So even if they enjoy the story and would like to see more from the author, they give a rating which in practical terms is a thumbs-down, without realizing it.

The second problem is that there are always people whose main enjoyment is spoiling other people's fun. These are people who are absolutely elated to know that someone out there is not having a good time because of their actions, even if they receive no ingame benefit from it. For those people, the Architect ratings system is a neverending source of fun. In a minute or two, with just a few clicks, they can take down a 5-star rated arc to a 4-star rated one, and feel like they've taken away someone's accomplishment with very little effort on their own. And then they can do it again with the next arc. If they're really lucky, they can even see their rating knock an arc down from the Hall of Fame, which for this sort of person is pretty much heaven.

So what can be done about this?

There's been quite a lot of ideas floating around the forums on how to fix the problems with the Hall of Fame. Among them:

- Lower the barrier of entry to the Hall of Fame.
- Keep the barrier of entry the same, but set the point at which an arc is *removed* from the Hall of Fame at something much lower.
- Require people to finish an arc before they can rate it.

I'd like to discuss a much more drastic approach:

Rework the rating system entirely.

The rating window should look like this:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Would you play another arc by this author?

Yes ( ) No ( )
</pre><hr />

That's it. A simple choice. Yes or no.

If 500 people answer "yes" for a particular arc, give the author another slot.

It doesn't matter how many people say "no". If 500 people want to see a new arc by a particular author, then that author has an audience and deserves a new slot to make more arcs for their audience.

Does that mean every person who has 500 fans deserves to be in the Hall of Fame? No, because I'm proposing that we

Disassociate the "Hall of Fame" reward from the "extra arc slot" reward.

I understand that the "Hall of Fame" is supposed to be "the best of the best according to player votes". However, in practical terms, that will always be "the most widely-publicized arcs with the widest possible appeal", and I think it's a mistake to only give out extra slots to those authors. (It's a similar problem to the kind of thinking prevalent in the mainstream American entertainment industry, but that's neither here nor there.)

500 positive votes should be the minimum requirement for a new arc slot, but the Hall of Fame requirements can be much higher. For example, at least 80% "Yes" votes out of at least 1000 ratings.

I think this system would achieve what the Mission Architect set out to do: Players would have a constant stream of exactly the kind of entertainment they like, and particularly talented creators could gain recognition and fame.

[ QUOTE ][*]Gameplay application for previously RP'd details - secret identities, family relations between characters, etc. there MAY be creative though unlikely ways to shoehorn these details in ways that actually affect gameplay

[/ QUOTE ]

This would be nice, except the ingame fiction behind it would invariably be something like "A kind, sweet woman named Eroved Assenav is selflessly working on a database where heroes can enter the names of their close family, for completely non-suspicious reasons. She is also giving out candy to anyone who registers."

[ QUOTE ]
I see this place has actually managed to degenerate even further, had no clue it was even possible.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nah, it's still the same, you've just gotten resensitized during your time away.

...who are you again?

http://www.google.com/search?q=acronym+generator

1. WIIIIIINGS

[ QUOTE ]
Well what I meant is that there is no real connecting thread amongst the missions of those task forces. Lets look at the LGTF for an example.

[/ QUOTE ]

Funnily enough, the LGTF has been designed to have a very specific theme: namely, it features all the major setpieces of The Apocalypse of St. John. So it's a bad example of "TFs that follow no set theme", but a very good example of "TFs that make absolutely no internal sense because the Devs were following their own crazy logic".

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone else think the title of this issue is just lame?

Why not just "City of Heroes: Rogue" or perhaps "City of Heroes: Shades of Grey"?

I'm sure there are a lot of creative writers out there, what other titles do you think would be more appropriate?

[/ QUOTE ]

Hm... CoH: Rogue...

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
You miss the Hellion! The Hellion hits!

+-----------+
|....@h.....|
|.......&lt;...+===
+-----------+

Ascendant the Sidekick lvl:1 HP:18/20 Str:18/* Dex:15 Con:14 Int:16 Wis:10 Cha:17
</pre><hr />

...would be pretty awesome, actually.

Looks like the female Elementalist idle stance in Guild Wars.

It would fit some of my female characters very nicely, but would really look weird on others. (I have a female character in full-body powerarmor whose gender is purposefully supposed to be difficult to discern, for example.) I think I prefer the current, more neutral animations.

"needs like 4 more EBs".

[ QUOTE ]
Dr Doom versus Doomsday, who wins?

[/ QUOTE ]

Whoever wins, we're DOOOOOOMED.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
i need an epic battle with real consequences..

[/ QUOTE ]

The whole game is an epic battle between good and evil if you take the time to look at it. The whole game is "end game" in the traditional sense.

What, exactly, do you expect to see?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm guessing something like "storm the castle and the actual borders on the world map change! then someone else storms it and the borders change again! doesn't this feel like the world is dynamic and your actions have meaning? ...no? well, was worth a try".

OP, try Recluse's Victory. The whole zone changes according to who's winning! Capture a pillbox as a hero, and there's a statue of Atlas! Capture it as a villain, and it's a statue of Lord Recluse! Sure, not many people *play* there, but you'll feel like you're that much more important.

You're... not supposed to do this sort of thing.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't understand why taking a faceplant in a mission can be completely shrugged off while taking a faceplant issued from a player is serious business.

[/ QUOTE ]

There's a few reasons for that.

In PvE, if you're faceplanting on every spawn, it probably means you're Doing It Wrong. (Example: team of 12, 11, two 10s and a 9, running the 12's missions at Invincible, with only a single Empath for support.) In PvP, you will faceplant, frequently, through no fault of your own, because that's just how the game works.

Also, even if you're faceplanting repeatedly in PvE, you're still managing to kill a few guys each time and slowly, slowly progressing in the mission. In PvP, the other guy is always still there, ready to kill you again.

For a PvE player, a situation where you're getting repeteadly killed while the thing that killed you remains unmoved by your efforts is frustrating. It's like getting to the end of the ITF and finding that your team is unable to make a dent in Nictus!Romulus. The only answer is to quit and try to come to terms with the fact you've wasted 2-3 hours without achieving what you were out to achieve.

"Spoils: to victor!"

[ QUOTE ]
it doesn't matter if they read it or not.

Post all the "don't eat people" signs you want on the Savannah, lions will still do it- that's their nature.

Players will find efficient reward paths.
If developers don't want them to, it must be coded into the game.
Asking doesn't work, period. It never has, it never will.

Their release of AE was like throwing a deer into the lion cage and then having a screaming fit when it got eaten.

Gamers acting like gamers is predictable and understandable.
All the fault here lies with the devs, the alleged 'adults' who threw a huge fit when their paying customers didn't use a toy they way they wanted them to.

[/ QUOTE ]

So because you can't stop people from stealing cars unless you make cars that can be driven by only one person, making it illegal for people to steal cars and punishing them if they get caught is unfair? Because if a person sees a nice car that they don't own, they *have to* get inside and drive it. They can't help it. It's the fault of the car's owner for having such a nice car.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Do I believe any of them have played the game from 1-50 as a normal player without giving in to the urge to use the power at their disposal? Nope. It gets too tedious once you get into the 30s.

[/ QUOTE ]

Speak for yourself. I got one character to level 50 THREE TIMES and it wasn't one bit tedious. That's right, same powerset combo and even costume, for 150 levels. And NO powerleveling or farming.

Again, speak for yourself rather than making blanket statements as if they were "facts".

[/ QUOTE ]

Of course he thinks it's impossible for a Dev who has access to /setlevel 50 to not use it on every character. After all, if *he* had access to such a command, he'd use it all the time.

Congratulations on finding a way to avoid using the word "farm" in the topic title.