Sister_Twelve

Well, honestly, unless you, as a player, pick arcs that have no custom mobs at all, of which there are some, I admit, but most MA authors include customs because they want people to experience their own creations, not just show off what they can do with already existing CoH creations, these are your choices:

- Fight things that are about as hard as what you fight outside MA for no experience.
- Fight things that are harder than what you fight outside MA for less experience.

Or

- Fight things that are much, much harder and will one-shot 90% of the ATs in the game right now for the same experience you get outside of MA.

That is pretty much the reality of custom mobs. As an MA author, you are now constantly walking a fine line between what powers you can conceivably take away in order to allow the player to live long enough to read your story or just accept the fact that in order to do so, you will have to nerf your customs down to giving no reward.

What makes more sense? To fight easier opposition for more experience? Or to wade through things that, through no fault of the writer, will turn you into street pizza and then, to add insult to injury, get almost nothing when you manage to win?

In this case, I don't blame the vast majority of casual players for going elsewhere.

But one final thing, if they have any intention of repairing this, they need to do it NOW... while there is some residual audience leftover from earlier in the year. Because if they debate about it and have meetings and drag the process out for a couple of months before committing to some incremental solution, they might as well not do anything at all.

There will be nothing left to salvage and MA will be Perez Park.

Perhaps not dead, but definitely in the death spiral that means it will go the way of hazard zones like Perez Park and Boomtown. Or PvP zones. Once the developers decided to turn this into a 'niche' mechanism via the massive reward nerf, they pretty much consigned it to the death spiral.

It takes a lot of time and effort to construct a well-designed, well-written arc. The creator in this case does it for no other reward than that of seeing their arc played. If that doesn't happen, then even the most stubborn of us will begin to regard the time put into doing it as time wasted.

And I am not crying DOOOM or declaring the death of the game. The system will stay in place and it will continue to limp along as it is doing now. The same arcs that are now being played because they are the arcs that people see have good reviews and a lot of plays will continue to be played by the same, gradually diminishing pool of players and reviewers.

But unless the devs decide to fix the real problem - the inferiority of AE when compared to the rest of the game as far as rewards go, the situation will never improve no matter how many contests Dr. Aeon runs or how many events we decide to create in this forum.

It's unfortunate, but as someone who has had a total of 7 plays over two arcs in 3 months, (both of them 5 stars atm), I can tell you that spending 30-40 hours on something that is going to be experienced by 1.75 people a month is not a good use of my limited leisure time.

It's sad because I still believe this is one of the best MMO tools ever conceived. It's just unfortunate that they decided to cripple it because of the same abuse that occurs in their own content at a slightly less rapid pace.

It's doubtful that any player has played all of the arcs entered into the contest. There were undoubtedly a few players who never advertised the name of their arc on the boards. Since we have no list of the arcs that were entered, there would be no way for anyone aside from those running the contest to know the names of those arcs.

I think the major problem that's feeding doubt right now is that:

a.) I never received an auto-reply to the initial email indicating that my entry had been received.
b.) The number of plays never changed. There were only 2. One from the first player who replied in my thread. The other from Tangler.
c.) A player wrote a few days ago that Dr. Aeon had commented to him in-game verifying that his arc had been played. This created a perception, at least in my mind, that Dr. Aeon was verifying to everyone that their arcs were being played.

Because of these factors, my first impulse when the contest ended and I never received a notification that my arc was played was that I somehow did not enter correctly and the email for my entry never reached Dr. Aeon.

Since obviously Dr. Aeon would have no reason to personally single me out and refuse to allow me to participate, I still pretty much believe that until I hear otherwise.

Well, assuming this is true and I have no reason to believe it isn't, they wasted a heck of a lot of time and resources first developing, then pushing back the deadline for the release of Mission Architect then. Basically they are wasting one of the best features introduced into an MMO by ensuring that those who use it will be a gradually shrinking niche crowd.

It takes two sides for Mission: Architect to succeed. It takes creators who are willing to work for no reward other than to see their work get played and rated. Basically, there is no other reward for them. Their work fuels the system. And if they see their work sit for weeks or months without plays because no one uses MA because the rewards are 'qualitatively different,' what will happen?

Easy enough, they will find something else to do with their time because, there is essentially NO reward for them doing it other than spending a bunch of time creating something that no one ever sees.

And if there are no creators writing stories anymore, what happens then? The niche audience shrinks even further because there's no point in bothering if there's never anything new there and if you're going to re-do content, you might as well re-do the content that gives the superior 'qualitatively different' reward.

It's still downloading. There's only one account there and it looks like that serial code from today's purchase was applied to the already existing account.

No, not really. I actually haven't even logged into the game today and when I do, I'm not sure if I really want to take the time to wait around for someone to finally respond to a petition.

My lack of involvement in the thread today can probably be read more as a lack of desire to interact with the ones who label any complaint, no matter how reasonable or how unreasonable, as whining or being a drama queen.

There are better things to do with my time than that.

Okay. If you say so.