Toril

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They gave us potatoes. It's OK to make french fries instead of hash browns, but making vodka is forbidden.

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But Potato Whisky is horrid!

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*sigh* Can we at least attempt to stay on topic here?

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Dude...are you on drugs or what's up? You're the one that went off topic.

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Hmmm.. Who started comparing the MA to the Illiad again?

I would be cool with it so only if there was some sort of reward for it. Such as when you exemp for Oro arcs. Merits, influ, etc.

Really it doesn't matter how good the content is if it can't progress a character in some way. And to me, another badge isn't progress.

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The patch notes are in the same place they have been for the last 4 years...just saying.
http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/patch_notes/

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Patch notes came out later in the day and don't mention the fact that standard CoH mob descriptions now invalidate arcs because the character limit imposed on them causes the arc to become invalid. This has effectively put 27 arcs I tried to play today offline that I know had nothing to do with rikti comm officers.

Its not a #$@$ description we put in that is invalidating arcs due to its length. Its the default @#@@# description for the mobs thats too long.

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So I was a little shocked when I checked a test mission I had and the single error now showing up is that the Statesman default description text now exceeds the field limit.

Made me chuckle.

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This is a blowhard in a costume.

Saved alot of characters there...

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Busy week! Sorry it took so long to get back to you guys.

Toril - think you could enlighten us/me on what you additionally did to reduce the size to make your storyarc work? I'd love any extra info on what can be automagically reduced for future versions.

Tigra - I think that was my bad, and have posted beta 7 to rectify what I believe to be the issue with those colours. There are actually 4 colors and while two of them are rarely used, they do get used from time to time (as with wings and possibly shields). They were being eaten by the program.

Wuigly - that's a known issue with the in-game editor opening files that have been IGOR'd. All the information needed to publish is still in the file, but the information that the in-game editor uses to cross-reference (badly) the storyarc's critters with your critter files, despite not actually updating the former when you change the latter, is removed from the file by IGOR.

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You're already doing it with IGOR, Pokey.

Starting at the front of the file and moving toward the EOF :

All I did was look at what the text file looked like after the program edited it and then went through and hand edited to do the same thing, but to take care and not remove the custom boss info that was being pulled. For some reason pulling that info was making the mission invalid for me to the point it wouldn't publish. Hand editing it was a PitA, but by seeing what IGOR was doing I was able to avoid delete out enough non-essential crap (which IGOR was doing already) and get another custom mob I was needing.

So basically the only thing I did that IGOR wasn't was hand editing it to avoid accidently pulling info that seemed to be needed to stay. I also quit editing the file when I got it down to about 90k, as there was no reason to go any further, and it published.

You're on the right track, but I think pulling out the custom boss info is causing more problems that initially being seen. It may not cause problems with the arcs you have done, but with some its giving fits. I'll give beta 7 a go and see what it does as well.

Also, any differences between using Vista and XP as an OS base? I'm using Vista here.

You should always have story, even if it can be farmed. MA is there for you to be able to tell your story, not to make the perfect farm mission. The story doesn't even have to make sense. For reference, see half of cannon CoH content. :P

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Hands Toril a hedge trimmer.







Better?

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Ooooo! Hedge Trimmer!

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Hands Toril a razor.










to much?

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<Smiles>

/e cutself

<runs madly off to cut voodoo>

<peaks out from behind a bush>

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beta 6 seems to be causing custom bosses on boss events and ally events of mine to remove the custom boss/critter from being selected, thus making the arc invalid and having to go in and edit it resulting in re-bloating of arc size, an infinite loop of not-working-ness <_<

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Is this happening when you actually test the mission? Or is it only when you're looking at it in the editor? The events and what have you should still happen in the actual mission itself. However, the mission editor won't be able to read custom critters correctly from the IGOR-crunched files.

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That happened to me when I went in to look at it. VPokey advised me to not open as it would work but show those errors when I went into edit the IGOR'd file. However there is some other sort of issue going on with my file and it still wouldn't publish. VPokey's work did lead me in the right direction to do some hand editing of the file on my own to reduce file size though and in the end I got my arc where I needed it and put it back up.

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So did you show them? Or did you just point and laugh making them want to leave that much more?

You can't have it both ways...you can't complain about people not being in the zones and then ridicule those who step out of the AE and ask you questions about the game.

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This was back in the days of Winter Lords. We left him in the CoT prison to think about what he had done.

I've done something similiar with building a group, but the underlying theme is they are all female and have been brainwashed/banded together by an entity that collects beautiful women.

Hence there are none of the manly women from the Cabal ehhehe.

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I'll freely admit to running a team through one of these "farm" AE missions.

But nothing said, "this should get nerfed" more than having the level 26 Mastermind ask in team chat, "how do I make my pets move?"

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Right up there is a level 50 asking where Skyway City is and "What's a CoT prison?"

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Translation -- Zwoof took a mission for a lower level, was auto-exemplared, only got Inf as a result, took this as an insult and one starred it. Hooray for misunderstanding

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Ok, thought that may have been it.

Thats like me saying that somehow everyone has designed thier missions to only drop influence for my characters. Even though I've just been MAing on 50s. :P

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So did they get rid of farming? I ask because I go to Architec to do a couple missions for a change and its empty. On liberty Server. When Architec first came out it was jammed but now very few there if. Probably because you get less exp per hour doing architec missions vs the game missions. Not to mention some dont offer any exp at all and just influence. Whoever makes those inf only missions please put it in description, you scores might be judged higher rather than piss off the people who need exp. Also no drops. I am still looking for a post that explaines how this so called farming (grinding) hurts them. K back to looking. Thanks.

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How is it that they get just "influence" to drop? I'm curious on this one.

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From what I've seen, a favorite farmer tactic is to make groups that have nothing but bosses. I'm not sure why (better ticket rewards over time maybe?). I haven't really investigated the farming stuff too much, just what I hit when I was trying for the early bird badge.

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Simply put, more tickets per mob. Remember me commenting about how I had a virtual arc (which I refuse to publish because of the no story/defeat all thing) with nothing but AVs that would always spawn as EBs? Well, it was giving no tickets after a quarter way into the map in a full team before the team tickets were changed, but with most of them on extreme/extreme, I went back to solo it and probably averaged over 25 virtual tickets a mob.... Only a couple didn't drop tickets. In fact, I found a published mission last night which had about half a dozen ambushes from EB only groups, obviously to boost the ticket count.

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Jack there is another thing that could cause the EB only ambushes.

The ambushes won't allow just a single to come. If you have an ambush group and only want and EB to ambush it will come out with an entire spawn of EBs. I had this issue in my arc when we first played it. The last boss fight got insane. I had to go make new special mobs that were LTs instead to get the difficulty about where I wanted it.

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Well, in this case, the ambushes, mission, etc... didn't exactly have a story and were clearly being used to create more things to get tickets from.

And yes, you can set a single elite boss to "ambush" you by using the defeat boss function and selecting the appropriate surrounding enemies group, but it rarely really works correctly because you have to hope there's another spawn point nearby (best on smaller maps, as well). If you use the ambush function, you can only choose a villain group, so you're not choosing a specific enemy to fight, unless that enemy will spawn within a villain group spawn.

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I've done that in my arc, but as you said, it doesn't always work correctly. Typically it doesn't.

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Toril - what's the pre-reduced filesize on your arc, and how many custom critters? You can ignore the errors you see in the editor when you open an IGOR file in the in-game editor, though. If you're worried that its actually removing things, put one of the missions from your arc into its own 1-mission arc, make sure the publish button is lit for it, then IGOR it and test it to see that everything is still in place even though the editor will say things are missing. Something IS missing - bloat.

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Will try that. Before its 112k. After its 98k.

12 Custom critters.

Edit : Ok, after killing out all but the last mission it will allow publish. Still has that error of course, but it will publish. So now I am guessing its still got too much info in it somehow. I'll try pruning out a critter and seeing what happens.

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The only exploit I currently see in the missions are the no basic ranged attack for most sets. I think all mobs should have a basic pistol attack or soemthing just to keep you from being able to hover above without being in danger.

Comm officer EXP is the lesser of two evils....basically you either get harder than normal minions for crap exp or better exp for a harder challenge. They took the exp away from the summond mobs already. That is why they have better than normal exp anyway. Now if they all summoned portals as a priority in the attack chain instead of one or two of them....I think it would be a different ballgame.

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I would prefer they go back to the original method of normal comm officer xp, but you get xp from the mobs that come from the portals. And allow every officer to be able to open a portal.

Fun times were had during those days and there was risk in those spawns.

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To go for broke on the reduction, it pulls out the referencefile lines (which do nothing but make a link between each of your custom critters and their original files... which we DONT want in this case). The bosses are not removed at all, but as was stated previously, you'll see a slew of errors if you open it in the editor after IGORing it. Most notably statements that custom enemy name or custom group names are missing. They're not missing until the editor loads the storyarc and finds the critter file links missing.

Yes, one of the things IGOR does is remove hard spaces which each use up 6 bytes. HTML, as you see from your posting, only does one actual space in a row... after that each space becomes   -- which is a giant waste of space if you're already over the filesize (?) limit.

This is only the beta. Once everything is settled I can but in configuration options that let you choose which reduction actions you want taken, or not taken, if you're finding you have an absolute need for hard spaces.

Its important that, when you report errors, you mention whether they're errors during publishing or errors when you open the resulting IGOR file in the editor. The latter is going to happen, the former is where we need to be concerned.

As to the question about "does this mean we can never edit the file?" -- yes, that's what it means currently, though IGOR does not alter your original storyarc! It creates a new copy of it that is reduced. So, if you need to edit your story arc... edit the original then re-IGOR it. Its possible to do a lot of reduction while still leaving the IGOR file in a format that will not give errors... but if you edit it and re-save it... it'll be back to full size, so... best to publish the IGOR versions, but work on your original versions.

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Upon sending the file through the program and reducing the file size the publish button still didn't light up to allow publish. Upon looking at the arc it said it had a correct file size, but it gave the errors about the custom critters missing.

Will try to post a more detailed explanation tonight when I can give it a pass through and detail for you what seems to be happening more accurately.

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From what I've seen, a favorite farmer tactic is to make groups that have nothing but bosses. I'm not sure why (better ticket rewards over time maybe?). I haven't really investigated the farming stuff too much, just what I hit when I was trying for the early bird badge.

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Simply put, more tickets per mob. Remember me commenting about how I had a virtual arc (which I refuse to publish because of the no story/defeat all thing) with nothing but AVs that would always spawn as EBs? Well, it was giving no tickets after a quarter way into the map in a full team before the team tickets were changed, but with most of them on extreme/extreme, I went back to solo it and probably averaged over 25 virtual tickets a mob.... Only a couple didn't drop tickets. In fact, I found a published mission last night which had about half a dozen ambushes from EB only groups, obviously to boost the ticket count.

As for Voodoo, I completely agree. I try to avoid the defeat all maps, even if there is a story line purpose to it, partly because it just takes that much extra time where I could be testing out any other arc. I WILL say that defeat alls don't have to be annoyingly time consuming. I've used them, but I usually make sure to add allies, including maybe patrols as allies or battles, etc.... Patrols seem to make them go the quickest (for a published example, see my arc "SPLICE" mission 3, though that mission does have a boss/EB at the end).

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Jack there is another thing that could cause the EB only ambushes.

The ambushes won't allow just a single to come. If you have an ambush group and only want and EB to ambush it will come out with an entire spawn of EBs. I had this issue in my arc when we first played it. The last boss fight got insane. I had to go make new special mobs that were LTs instead to get the difficulty about where I wanted it.

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I'll make a few test maps when the game comes back to up to try to figure out what this is.

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Ok Gim, Let me know what you find out. If its giving more than LT experience for a minion then its bugged.

It should give XP as a LT of the same level.

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Those com guys seem to payout boss level experience.

A +4 gets a 1.9 xp multiplier
A +1 gets a 1.2 multiplier

e.g.
@ 31, a normal minion is 240
An lt is 800
and a boss is 2400

800 x 1.9 = 1520
2400 x 1.2 = 2880

Roughly twice the xp.

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Arc id where you are seeing this? As the one's we've been fighting at L50 are giving out roughly 9k influence. +1 cons I believe. Pull a custom LT in the same mish and they also give roughly 9k.

If they are giving out that high of xp I'm thinking it might be the ones that were supposed to have been removed that were from the mothership raid.

Or maybe the XP is horribly skewed on them, as the only metric I have to measure stuff is influence at L50. Which is mostly the chars I play.

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Oh, I probably will, from now on. That's not going to help too much when I need to get my Cape and/or Aura missions. Or get told I need to speak to Azuria or Smythe. Or to head to the Vanguard building. Or to (if I ever actually can) get a Sewer Trial...


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Wait. Wait. Wait! WTF.

How exactly is this affecting your ability to get a sewer trial?

1.) You need like minded individuals to run it anyway. You don't just grab a random PuG from anywhere and try to run that unless you just desire failure.
2.) There is no need to go to Atlas.

Sooooo? Please explain.

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Havn't ran a Sewer trial recently have you?

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Sewer_Trial
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The majority of the Trial is designed to take place in the Abandoned Sewer Network. The contact (Mairenn MacGregor) is located near the Atlas Park sewer entrance.


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They moved it from Founders?

My apologies on point 2 then as its invalid. Point 1 is still very valid though. This isn't just something you jump into with random people and expect success.

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The traffic was so bad that I was rubberbanding so much it took me more than three minutes to move 200 feet.
And this is on Victory. Not one of the major populated servers.


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Wow, I've rolled 3 new toons since I14 hit, and played them through Atlas with no lag, ranging from 3 PM, to 11PM (Hey I have altitis and pact mates I level slow. )

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Its not a problem with Victory. Its a problem with your machine if you're having lag beyond the initial release week of I14.