The_Cheshire_Cat

I don't play AE arcs much anymore, but generally I use the whole star range. I'm a pretty harsh critic though and don't hand out 5's very often; hell I don't even think all of my OWN arcs are 5 stars.

I get that people want "visibility", but honestly I don't think I've ever once played an arc just because it was on the front page (except if it was Dev's Choice). Usually if I play an arc it's either because someone posted it here, or because I ran a search for specific criteria which narrows down the options considerably.

I've got a pretty loose relationship with canon so it doesn't bother me too much. Plus it seems like I'm a lot more interesting in Dark Astoria than the devs are, so I feel pretty safe about not having anything I've written being countered by official canon any time soon (PS: Devs, if you feel like hiring someone to write some story arcs for DA, I'll take the job!)

My issue is more lack of ideas (or rather, good ideas. Nobody is going to want to play my urban hip-hopera about the skulls vs. the hellions), and once I have an idea it's hard to get motivated to actually put in the effort knowing how few people are actually going to play it. I work pretty hard on my arcs, and my last arc, written over a year ago, is only at 99 plays despite showing up in the first 5 pages. If a 5 star arc written by a dev's choice author (which is about as visible as you can get in AE) can't get more than 100 plays in a year, then it's pretty indicative of how many people are still interested in AE for more than just farms.

To be honest I don't blame the devs for it. It's just an inherent issue with player generated content. Sturgeon's law is that 90% of everything is crap. The dev made content has a vetting process to prevent that 90% from ever reaching the player base, but AE has no such restriction (if it did, that would both be counter-intuitive and be a full time job for some poor *******), which makes it pretty hard to find things that are actually good, and after you've played your 4th or 5th absolutely painful arc, I wouldn't blame you if you just stopped trying. It's essentially fanfiction; there might be some really great authors out there, but most of them are writing stories about their favorite characters hooking up. Even though the devs can bribe authors and players with AE tickets (which despite what people think are actually quite good rewards - you can buy rare salvage worth hundreds of thousands of inf with just a couple hundred), it's still not worth it to slog through the garbage.

I seem to recall one of the devs saying that if you re-rate someone's arc, it keeps the higher of the two ratings.

Congratulations to the winners!

I'm a little disappointed in Tomorrownauts' poor showing, though to be fair I don't personally consider it a "comedy", so maybe it would have done better in another category.

Oh well, I suppose I should write a new arc to be eligible for next year :P

I agree, though it should at least factor in the player's level. A boss running away from a +10 player makes sense.

In a normal mission situation though, they shouldn't run.

I posted about this a while ago, so I agree. It doesn't make sense that you can actually carry more salvage with you than you can store in the vault. What's the point of even having storage if you can have so little stored?

I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the term "one-shot", which is a misnomer for the system I've suggested (though it is appropriate for the current system). The idea here isn't really to prevent one-shotting, though it would do that as a side-effect, but rather to diminish the "YOU LOSE" power of sudden damage spikes. Taking massive amounts of damage would still be dangerous because it puts you in a critical position where you need to heal or escape immediately or die, but the point is it gives you the ability to react to it rather than just suck it up and hosp or wait for a rez.

I admit that there are very few enemies that have the power to take someone down from >90% health, but there are several bosses with attacks that can deal more than 60% of your total health if you aren't a tank or brute, which is still a massive damage spike and typically far greater than the power of their other attacks (this is especially true when it comes to custom AE mobs, though those are typically more powerful than a standard mob anyway). With defense, fighting these types of mobs is really just a luck game; you have to hope they won't hit with their big damage attack before you can deal enough damage to finish them off. Resistance is more reliable, but this system wouldn't really have an effect on resistance sets anyway because they take damage through attrition rather than one big hit, and get dropped into the "critical zone" a few percent at a time. The point isn't really to make defense as reliable as resistance, because damage spikes WOULD still be a threat; they just wouldn't mean you instantly drop with no ability to prevent it. If it ended up making defense TOO effective, the critical range could easily be extended upward as much as would make sense; 10% is just an arbitrary number.

It touches on a bigger issue which is beyond the scope of this discussion, which is that random chance alone is not gameplay; random chance is meant to force the player to make decisions they weren't anticipating, which IS gameplay. If your only available action is "die", that's not a choice at all.

I get the impression that a lot of people responding here are PvPers. The intention was that this would apply to PvE, not PvP. PvP is inherently broken anyway and this would most likely break it further rather than have any positive effect.

The thing is, there are a few other temp powers that affect "True Undead" as well, and if they took that approach, those temp powers would also start affecting other things as well.

I'm sure many people who play lower HP ATs like dominators or defenders have noticed that the anti-oneshot code works fine... IF you're at 100% health. But if you take 1 point of damage from a passive damage aura, the next enemy attack could easily kill you and you have no ability to prevent it. I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to start to worry about their HP the second they tick down to 99%.

Instead, an idea from Bayonetta: No matter what your HP is, the most any attack can do is reduce you to 1 HP, then the next attack you take will kill you. That's the way it works in that game, though naturally it needs tweaking in CoH to take into account the fact that HP regenerates. Instead, I suggest that any HP value that's not in the "Flashing red" zone (i.e. any HP >10%) is "safe", in that the most damage any single attack can do is to reduce you to 1 HP (Or maybe something like 0.5% of max, so you don't just get ticked down by a damage aura immediately with no chance to recover).

The key point here is that it shifts responsibility for a player's death from random chance to the player; being killed from 99% is just the computer deciding to roll a hit on a massive damage attack. There's nothing the player could reasonably do about it except pop a green every time they take even the smallest amount of damage (and obviously that's not reasonable at all). Meanwhile, if the player is killed under the changed system, they had plenty of warning: Flashing red HP means "YOU ARE GOING TO DIE" and it's a clear indication to the player that they need to either heal or run right now or the next attack could easily be fatal.

Big, scary damage attacks are still just as threatening as they used to be, because they still have the ability to drop you into that critical zone, and any small damage follow-up attack could finish you off. But the player wouldn't get the unavoidable situation of taking a small, near-harmless attack followed by a big damage attack and dying without any way to prevent it.

I can't think of the specific info for my favorite arcs this very moment (I'll edit this post when I get the chance to actually look up the numbers in-game), but as a tangent to the topic, it would be a nice feature of the in-game AE system if we could tag arcs as favorites which would have their own tab in the browser, so we could go and find arcs we liked very easily.

These are the arcs I can think of off-hand and find the numbers for on the forums.

One Million Eyes #71933 by @minimalist
Forget the Rose, Send me the Thorns #8925 by @hydrophidian

I've recently gotten back to playing my Warshade again and there are a few things that bug me about khelds that I think could be solved without changing the way the AT is balanced; personally I think they're already a viable, if difficult, AT in the game, so my ideas are more quality of life things rather than "OMG BUFF PLZ".

1) The first idea I had was that when shapeshifted, human form toggles should be suppressed instead of detoggled - this would be functionally the same as it is now, except that it would save you the trouble of having to constantly manage your human form toggles if you do a lot of quick back and forth shifting, as is common as a tri-form WS (I don't know if PB's do this as much, but it would still be nice).

2) Something else that bugs me is that shapeshifting toggles get detoggled by running out of end. They should be "free" toggles like stalker hide - it's kind of silly that they have both an end cost and a recovery bonus. I think it would work out pretty much the same if the end cost was just removed and the recovery bonus was lowered to even it out. Technically this would make slotting them for endmod less useful, but I think that would be a worthwhile tradeoff. With inherent fitness being added in I19, you could really just remove the recovery bonus from shapeshifting entirely and just make fitness apply to all forms instead of just human like it does now.

3) Mez protection isn't really that big a deal anymore since you can shift to Dwarf while mezzed, but at the same time I think the inherent effect from teamed controllers/doms should be buffed up a bit since right now it does a whole lot of nothing most of the time - it takes 3 controllers on the team just to be protected from one whole hold. I think the bonus should be buffed up to mag 2 or 3 protection per controller/dom rather than mag 1. People don't usually team with more than 1 or 2 controllers anyway, so the inherent effect should be meaningful with even a low number. If possible, it could start with a larger mez protection buff and get smaller as more controllers join, so a team with a single controller would give the kheld mag 3 protection, but add 3 more controllers and they'd only have say, mag 6-7 instead of mag 12. Another idea here, which is a bit more of a change, would be to buff the protection for peacebringers, and instead of giving mez protection to warshades, each dom/controller on the team would increase the duration of the warshade's own mez powers (Like a mini-power boost). I think that would be a lot more in line with the buffs warshades get from other ATs and also make them even more distinct from PBs. Even better would be to buff the magnitude of warshade controls for each dom/controller, but that would probably be overpowered and a lot more difficult to do anyway.

4) While I sincerely doubt this is possible since I imagine it's probably something deeply embedded into the game's code, it would be nice if defeated enemies didn't fade quite so quickly. They're kind of important for us Warshades! :P

When I come up with an idea I think would make a good arc, I have to make it or else the clown will eat my brain.

As a general rule, I find that Illusion control is almost never justified - it's just way too much of a pain in the *** on MA mobs.

Other powers to avoid are things like elec armour or fire aura - not because they're overpowered or anything, but because they have incredibly high resistance to specific damage types (energy and fire, respectively), which can screw any powerset combo that relies on them. Certain powers are always going to be more difficult to deal with for some people than they are for others, but it's best to avoid the ones that will completely invalidate a particular set.

This is also true for powers like mez protection.

It's kind of weird that salvage storage is only as big as your own personal salvage capacity - with badges and the vanguard bag, your carrying capacity actually ends up much LARGER than the storage. That doesn't make any kind of sense and it really limits the usefulness of the storage banks.

I say make it at least 2-3 times larger than it is - enough so that it will always be able to store much more salvage than you can carry on yourself.

In addition to that, there should be a recipe storage bank as well, for holding on to rare recipes that you plan on making later, without having to use up a market slot or risk accidentally selling them by carrying them around with you.

That's a neat idea too, though that's a bit more similar to GMs where it would be a kind of zone event (though maybe with no notification so you'd have to just find them).

Someone mentioned in chat yesterday that a mission they ran and completed on monday was in their log again on tuesday, so there might have been a small server rollback at one point that voided out a rating someone made on the arc.

That's my guess, anyway.

This is something that struck me when running around the Underground tunnels in Praetoria gathering badges - there should be special, unique named versions of normal mobs that can spawn in those tucked away corners of maps that nobody really visits. They could have unique dialogue that maybe reveals a bit more lore than standard NPC spawns, and maybe have recoloured costumes to stand out from other, normal bosses. They could even have a higher chance to drop salvage or recipes than normal, though I don't know how good of an idea that is; it might encourage people to camp them (Though there could perhaps be a badge for defeating all of them).

It just seems like adding in unique enemy NPCs to otherwise unvisited parts of the world might be a neat little extra reward for people who like to explore around.

I also get the flicker, win7 64bit, Geforce GTS 250

I get it in non-Praetorian areas too, though. It happens everywhere with Ultra mode on. I think it might be an nVidia thing.

Does it have to be an outdoor map? There are a few burning tech maps that are pretty good.

This has always happened to me. I'm not sure why exactly it happens but basically, whenever you're editing a published arc there's some kind of delay between when you republish it and seeing the version you just published in the editor.

As a general rule, your arc is fine, but make sure you check when you're editing that it's the most recent version, as if you republish again when it's an older version, it will overwrite the one on the server and undo your last changes.

I sort of agree with Venture on this one. Making a custom NPC difficult is a lot easier than making them balanced. Extreme/Extreme, you're done.