Twoflower

O NOEZ you have found my hypocracy I will kill myself.

I'm JOKING, okay? I'm fine with the tag because it's a fun way to commit suicide. Get over yourself and let's get back to being productive here coming up with tags.

Yes, because a perfectly legitimate use of the game is to create effortless kills that are unable to fight back against you so you can move your little blue bar without any risk whatsoever. Let's get that whole pesky "game" thing out of the mix and just play Progress Quest. (Google it.)

I have no sympathy whatsoever for HAY GUYS LETS FARM MOAR types. If you don't actually want to play a game, just get points, you could at least download Folding @Home and let your ever-increasing progress bar do something of value like cure cancer.

tl;dr -- PUGs for the lose. As noted before, you get a random group of strangers, odds are you're gonna end up running whatever the most boring and XP-rich activity of the day is. Previously: newspapers. Currently: MA farms.

Solution: Don't team with a bunch of random schmucks who don't care about fun, don't care about happiness, and see City of Heroes as some variant of Progress Quest. Find people who appreciate interesting content and good stories and play with them instead.

I've been here for five years and TWICE have I run with a PUG. I belong to a medium scale supergroup and there's always someone around to play with, and weekends we organize up and do eight man teams. Any time I can't grab someone I just solo. Works fine and I don't have to deal with the FARM MOAR kiddies, be they sewer crawlers, paper runners, or MA farmers.

My SG and I are using this for the great story-driven arcs, and the tools to write missions during the week that we run together on weekends. It's awesomeness incarnate. Just because some fools are using it for HAY GUYS LETZ FARM is not my problem. Our COH experience has improved considerably thanks to AE.

If you want to run an arc that isn't just a bunch of easily killable nasties and no story, see my sig.

SMVA and HLMA work for me. They're very straightforward.

I also agree with categorizing -- we have similar groupings of tags already -- and that it's up to the author to decide how specifically and extensively they want to tag. None of these are mandatory. It's up to the author to self-identify and how far they want to take it.

[ QUOTE ]
Curious. Did you have something in mind that would make this different from an [SFMA]?

[/ QUOTE ]

Genre/tone. It's possible to have a funny SFMA and a serious SFMA. These aren't exclusive concepts, in the same way you can do a Team Pro Challenge and a Solo Pro Challenge.

I really like the idea of my VMMA, although the tag itself and name could use work.

We need a tag, essentially, that tags arcs which are villain based, but instead of the standard COV style where you work for the contact, you're trying to achieve a goal for yourself and the contact either doesn't exist or works for you. My DIY Laser Moonbase arc being an example of this. Self-directed villainy is something I'd love to promote more of, so having a tag for it would rock.

Any ideas on how to refine it?

Yeah, but those aren't uniquely searchable. If I search "solo" I could get dozens of arcs that read "This can't be soloed" because the four letters appear in order. And you can't search for brackets.

The point of using commonly agreed on acronym based tags is that they can be searched on uniquely. Searching for SFMA will more than likely only pull up arcs tagged as story focused mission arcs.

I'll thumbs up [MLMA]. I have some arcs coming which are good for that range. I'd expand it to 20-40, though... basically post SOs, pre epics.

Also good with [RBMA]. I think it'll be a fine way to say "Mods, come annihilate me!" but hey. Caveat author.

We need to start promoting a few tags to the official lists. If you see any here that are proposed which you approve of, sign on the dotted line. Full consensus isn't possible, but if enough folks think it'd be a useful tag it may as well go in.

I've actually got an arc called the Mender Jenkins Task Force which I plan to post once I have a free slot. MA is in dire need of more Jenkins.

Obviously not. If it's not [in brackets], if it's part of someone's NAME I highly doubt someone searching on ELMA will go "This wasn't an elseworlds as advertised 1 star."

I'm just saying a reasonable level of false positives is to be expected. This is why I want a true dev powered metadata system. Without it, we're just going to have to accept the reality of the situation that you can never find a 100%, in perpetuity on into the future, combo of unique characters which will never be typoed or used harmlessly that also neatly encapsulate the tag's idea. We gotta go with non-obvious combos and just accept that.

Edit: NCMA works for me.

As long as it returns Not Too Many false positives, it's fine. ELSA out, but ELMA could be close enough tom be workable. I'd say if there's six or more false positives a new acronym's needed.

Sticky get! Hooray!

Brainstorming more. Don't auto-add these, they're just off the top of my head. Let's get some agreement first.

[VFHA] Villain-for-Hire Arc. Your character is brought in to work for the contact as hired help.

[VMMA] Villainous Mastermind Arc. (this needs a better name.) Your character is self-directed with their own goals, contact helps you instead.

[CMDA] Comedy Arc. Without actually breaking fourth wall, this is a silly arc with a focus on satire.

[DRMA] Drama Arc. By and large a serious story, although occasional comedy relief is fine.

[ELSA] Elseworlds Arc. Takes place in another setting or timeline entirely, not grounded in COH canon.

Yeah, I prefer / marks too. It does mean you can't search for [TAG], you have to search for TAG... so let's make sure these are nonsense-combos of letters rather than anything actually-a-word. Like FARM :P

I've PMed a request this thread be stickied. I was iffy on using player tags because I rillyrilly want dev tags, but this will help a lot until something official comes along. I'll add them to my arcs tonight.

Edit: I don't think striking the MA will work. Remember, this is to make an adequately long and obscure combo of letters that you can search on. Searching on two letters is more prone to false positives. It's either the whole tag or no tag, to maintain consistency.

I do hope that in the future, we have an actual baked-in tagging system -- something coded by the devs, rather than jammed in by players into descriptions. My descs are pretty freaking long already.

Here's some more suggestions:

[TFMA] - Team Focused Mission Arc. For things that we don't recommend you try to solo unless you're a purpled out warshade or something. Handily it shares the same acronym as "Task Force" which also suggests group content, so it should be visually apparent what this implies.

Team Focus is different from Pro Challenge because they could be used in conjunction or seperately; [PCMA] means badass soloers or good teams, [TFMA/PCMA] means badass teams only.

How should we be adding multiple tags, by the way? [TAG1][TAG2], or [TAG1/TAG2]?

If you mean "I want to take a Malta Sapper and change his goggles and make him yellow", it's not possible. Existing NPCs are non-editable.

What you CAN do is make a faction that consists entirely of Malta Sappers, Carnie Illusionists, and Earth Thorns. You can add any existing NPC into a custom faction, alongside your own custom mobs or just by themselves.

My guess is since Fearghas only has 4 slots and one is perma'd as Ep#1 due to DevChoice, Ep#2 was deleted to make way for Ep#5.

Maybe in the future, other slot obtaining methods will be available and back issues can be reposted. Shame good content has to be removed from the game due to this limitation.

(Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.)

You can't force-set the level of a custom group in that way.

The only way you could do this would be to find some in-game enemy that ONLY spawns at level 53, probably Lord Recluse or something, and add that to the map.

Be aware that no way in hell would a lot of people play a mission like that.

Personally, I'm hoping for an actual metadata / tagging structure to be added to the system, with a limited taxonomy.

(Translation from geekspeak: let us pick things like "Story Focused" and/or "Challenge Arc" and/or "Lotsa AVs" and/or "Parody" and/or "Scifi" etc.)

I've been considering the glowy-triggers-an-optional-ally path, especially for the reality TV arc (where I can work it into the game show mechanic; it's a "lifeline"). But this isn't always an option, storywise or mapwise.

As for scaling based on difficulty, I'd agree, but I have gotten dinged for "unsoloable content" from people who either don't know or don't care about adjusting difficulty. I'm not sure if I should ignore that or drop the EBs to satisfy them.

Don't use unique maps our outdoor ones if you need goals to appear in specific order. Many of the uniques, even ones based on existing office / warehouse / etc. templates, have screwy spawn placement.

If you use one of the stock map types you should get very accurate spawning. You can refine it more by picking a specific map instead of "random medium" and the like; there are some good and VERY linear maps in the lineup that should do nicely when you need precision.

Something I've been pondering lately.

My test character is admittedly a pretty powerful one -- a Mercs/Traps MM, kitted out with various pet aura procs, designed to provoke-tankermind murder an EB. A Boss dies in nothing flat with this character. So, when designing arcs, I've largely been using EBs for finale characters and other major milestone fights, figuring strong soloers like me and teams would enjoy that more than someone you pave over like a Freakshow tank.

But what about everyone else? Midtier soloers or folks who just want to enjoy the story? An EB is a roadblock for them, especially one which has an armor secondary.

So, what I've been pondering is knocking them down a peg. Take all the EBs in, as an example, my Best of the Rest of What's Left / Reality TV arc (there are three of them) and bonking them back to being Bosses, so that anyone can run the mission and have fun. Less fun for teams, but more fun for solos.

What do you think? Is it worth trading in a challenge for a lower challenge so more folks can enjoy the arc? Or should things be left as-is and have folks rely on adjusting mission difficulty to auto-lower them?

Paragraph breaks are your friends.

I'm not seeing anything really stellar in there. Basic early 90s mainstream cyberpunk type stuff. Maybe in action it'd be more interesting, if you can make some good chained goals or unfold the mystery through clues; getting it all dumped in a single forum post doesn't have the same effect.

Okay, I tried clearing out all my folders (after backing them up, of course). Opened it in the editor. No problems there. I even picked some other character and back again to see if a poke would help. Republished.

I go in to play, and... "All Custom Characters" again. Jeez!

Okay, so no ninjutsu, trick arrow, energy aura, shields, super reflexes, dark melee, dark armor, regen, controls, force fields, sonic resonance, most control sets...

...so what CAN we use?

I don't mean that in a snide way, I'm just wondering what sets are safe to use. Lately all I read about are sets which are too dangerous to use in MA, but finding GOOD combos which make enemies that aren't overpowered is getting difficult.