The_Cheshire_Cat

I'm pretty disappointed by all this. I was really proud of my arcs and the recognition they got, and it sucks that they're just going to disappear with everything else.

I've had the actual .mission files backed up on my machine since forever, but honestly they don't really mean that much without a system to run them. It's just a bunch of text and file references.

General Z is a bit of an annoying guy to keep having spawn as a civilian, but as the new Astoria arcs reminded me, there actually are Tsoo in Dark Astoria (and always have been), so the tattoo artists at least fit the zone... even if it is a little weird to be rescuing them... especially when it likes to spawn them multiple times in that one mission... which it always does...

Anyway, I think a lot of issues with this arc really come from the fact that it was my first one, so I stuck a lot closer to the typical mission layout used by most of the original game arcs (escorts back to the door with 1-2 ambushes along the way, for example). A lot of the questionable gameplay choices are ones that I wouldn't make now having had more practice. In Tomorrownauts! I have a lot of stuff set up so you have to backtrack during missions, but I made sure that you had something interesting to do while backtracking (and when you didn't, I eventually just cut those objectives out, or made them optional). Obviously I did a little bit of playing with the standard mission formula in D Minor, but even this version of the story arc is several iterations removed from the one I originally published - the last mission used to be a different map and had the objectives set up a lot more plainly, the "still busy" text was just generic "you have to go rescue X!" stuff, etc.

One thing I was pretty bad at with my Astoria arcs was endings. Both D Minor and Signal:Noise kind of just get weird and then stop at the end instead of offering any sort of conclusion (or rather, the "conclusion" comes about one or two missions before the story arc ends). The Beating Heart of Astoria has a proper ending, but then I guess because it starts weird, I couldn't just end it by going in that direction again and had to actually write a proper story :P.

I've thought about commenting on how my arcs compare to the new official Dark Astoria content, but ultimately I think they're going for two different things. My story arcs certainly don't take place in the same Dark Astoria as the official ones, even ignoring all the obvious visual differences in the revamped version of the zone.

Personally I would have liked to have Paragon give me a job to just write the zone for them, but then I guess there are issues with hiring someone with no experience from another country to take the lead on a major content update :P

You can also just use the testing interface to automatically complete missions without having to run them - you just talk to the contact, hit complete mission, repeat until you get to the one you want to test. You don't even have to go inside.

Usually you can just set an ally to single and set them to "front". The distribution of spawn points on most maps is about 90% "middle" so specifying front or back almost always means "the very first room" or "the very last room". I used a mission beginning Ally in Captain Skylark and the Tomorrownauts of Today! and he would always spawn in the very first room, even though the map itself was pretty huge.

If you're really anal, you could fill up all the front spawn points with patrols that are triggered off some later objective (thus leaving the room empty when you arrive) to guarantee that the player won't have to fight anything before meeting the ally.

Kind of disappointed in the fog going away, though I can understand that if they're going to put all the work into revamping a zone, they'd like it if people were able to SEE it.

I like the idea someone mentioned earlier of having it go in cycles. Weather was mentioned at the player summit as well - seems like that would be a good way to handle it.

A quick update for the first time in about a year: Bubbawheat made a trailer for Signal:Noise. After watching it I've realized how little my mannequins actually look like mannequins (I forget why I did that at the time), so I've tweaked their look to be a bit more plain. There's a surprise in their new design, as well. See if you can guess what it is!

I'm confused about this; will this break existing arcs, or does it only come into play if you try to EDIT a custom character? None of my arcs are really anything I need to edit anymore, so it's not as if being prevented from changing them is a problem for me, but I'm wondering if this prevents them from being run, or causes customs to display improperly?

Quick brainstorming solution; why not just have it so that ratings given by people who haven't completed the arc are weighted into the average significantly lower than those who have? This would protect against both spite 1-starring and 5-star trading.

Snide answer: Well, that wasn't what you expected, so I think the arc still lives up to the promise made by the title.

Real answer: It's related to this issue which has been plaguing MA authors for quite a while now. Essentially, they changed the profanity/copyrighted content filter for naming without telling anyone, and whatever they did SERIOUSLY broke it. It's kind of like they just fed in a dictionary of every character or franchise ever created (even those that are just normal words used as names).

The upshot is that when you have a copyright/profanity error, it renders your arc invalid to publish. But since this was applied to arcs that had ALREADY been published, most of them have been flagged as having errors, but with no outward indication to people browsing the arc list that this is the case.

Depending on what's setting off the filter, it may or may not be fixable by the author. I recently got one of my arcs fixed and it really is set off by the stupidest things. Example: I couldn't use an ally named "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid", because it set off the filter for "D Doom". Most MA authors don't want to have to perform serious re-writes on their arcs because of something that's not their fault, but Paragon studios is taking a really long time getting this issue fixed.

I have FINALLY fixed this arc. It's been updated and runs now, with minimal changes to the text. I'm still very annoyed about this whole thing, but at least I got it working in time for anyone who might want to play it after it was featured in PC Gamer.

Also: Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today! was featured in PC Gamer. I probably should have opened with that.

I have FINALLY fixed Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today!

Important hint to anyone who is having the same issue as I did trying to fix one of your arcs: If an ambush name contains "copyright/profane" errors, it will NOT show up in the "Errors" dialogue unless you actually open the ambush objective up. It will still prevent the arc from working, though.

Yes, this would be the "ambush name" field that is never actually seen by anyone playing the arc and only exists as a reference for the author and the system to identify the specific objective.

I've discovered a few things with my Tomorrownauts arc:

-The term "Droids" is flagged by the filter, but not "Droid".
-The ally name "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid" is invalid because of "D Doom". See if you can spot why it's tripping that one. Hint: "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid".

Seriously, the only true "fix" for this issue is to just remove the filter entirely. Don't bother trying to edit the file. Just disable the check in the MA system itself. I can understand wanting a profanity filter, but right now it's causing way more problems than it's solving; turning it off until you can get the filter file itself fixed will at least solve the many frustrations people are having with the system.

Also, arc is still broken - I can change all the names so the errors go away, but when I try to run a test, it pops up with a window that says "The field Name contains profane or copyright text" repeated 8 times - but with no errors I have no way of figuring out which names are tripping it.

As awesome as it is that one of my arcs is mentioned, it kind of annoys me that it's also the one arc of mine that's broken by the copyright filter problem at the moment.

"Trust me guys, this arc is totally amazing! But you can't play it right now. The error message is very moving though. 5 stars."

I'm guessing it's probably the word "Rogue" that's tripping that one.

I once had an idea for an arc that was meant to encourage the player to run away from the main antagonist(s) rather than fight them, by making them super tough and using dialogue to make it clear that you weren't supposed to fight them.

I never made the arc because I realized that EVERYBODY would try to fight them anyway.

I'm still having issues with Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today - the group "Doomsday Droids" is complaining "invalid name, try another" when I try to edit/save it, and I get a bout a million warnings about them being an invalid group. I'm fairly certain it's the word "Droids" since it still doesn't work if I try to change the group name to "Doom Droids", but it does work if I change it to "Doomsday Robots". Which of course doesn't have the same alliteration.

It also seems to wipe out all the customized normal mobs from the group when I try to edit it, but when the name thing is fixed then at least I can fix that part on my own from backups, though oddly enough all the files in my actual CoH folder still seem to have the custom normals in them, so I think it's wiping them literally when I load it up (and then not allowing me to save because of the name), so when the filter is fixed I may not actually have to do anything.

An important note: This arc is currently BROKEN and unplayable because of the issue they're having with the overzealous profanity filter in the AE. I think it's picking up "Doomsday" as a copyrighted term. Given that about half the main enemies of the arc have that in their name, I think it'll be easier to just wait for them to fix it than to try to rewrite the entire thing with other words.

-Also since apparently my last update was quite a while ago, I suppose I should add that now every single group in the arc has custom descriptions - even the one-off Rularuu spawns. The only ones that don't are the warwolf transformations of the LT+ galaxies, since there's no way for me to customize that (the power is hard-coded to spawn the Council wolves so even if I made a custom version it wouldn't use them)... but the transformation itself is explained in the custom galaxy description. Not that anyone can actually play the arc to SEE these changes. The arc itself is pretty much "done" at this point; I can't think of anything I would want to change. It's probably my own personal favorite of all the arcs I've written since it's so rare that I'll actually feel satisfied with something I've written.

If it's any consolation, it's impossible to play, and thus rate, an arc that's currently affected by this, so nobody should be getting any downvotes because of it.

I do like the idea of creating a list of affected arcs, just so that if someone is trying to run one and it refuses to work, they can check here to see if it's because of the filter (and thus not bother to inform the author; they already know).

My arc "Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today!" seems to be suffering from this; the main villain group is called "Doomsday Droids", named after the main villain, Baron Von Doomsday, who's an entirely original creation with an intentionally cliched name. The many errors it's giving me don't actually indicate the word that's setting it off but I'm guessing it's something related to "Doom", "Doomsday", or maybe even "Droids".

Honestly I don't think there should be a "copyright" filter at all. There's a "report for content" button right there on the AE rating/comments window, if someone violates copyrights, people can report them for it. There's no need to be overly aggressive about it because if the lawyers do come barking again (though remember that you guys WON that case), you can argue that you've already got a system in place for dealing with copyright violation and you do take it seriously.