Twoflower

That holds true for any powerset, really -- don't give it to every single critter you have, or even multiples. All willpower minions, all rad blast LTs, what have you... it all stacks and stacks and stacks until you're facing a wave of crushing mez and/or debuff.

For Flash Arrow, unfortunately you can't have a trick arrow character without them getting FA. It's standard issue regardless of difficulty. I use it myself, but only on a one-time EB encounter, not for general use.

Yes. Open "My Published Stories" and edit them from there. You can't overlay a published story with a local copy of it, though -- my recommendation is after publishing, you only make edits on the published version, then after editing, save your local copy from the published version. That way you always have a backup, but the "master version" is the published one, not the local one.

Unfortunately no, there's no display of the exact rating -- but if it's visually **** and then ***** and back again, that logically means that it's average is wobbling between 4 and 5 when rounded, IE 4.4 and 4.6. If it was wobbling around 4.0 it'd be a solid four displayed stars without ever jumping as high as five.

Wyvern and the Legacy Chain are incredibly underutilized.

As is, there are only four "heroic" factions to fight in COV: Longbow, Paragon Police, Wyvern, and Legacy Chain. Problem is, PPD are limited to the city, and Wyvern and Legacy Chain end before L30 and are barely used in missions outside of the Radio. Hence: Longbow, Longbow, Longbow. Ugh.

These two groups have some fun hooks:

Wyvern is anti-heroic. They're brutal bastards who believe evil must be destroyed, not merely tussled and tossed in jail. They wouldn't hesitate to use dirty tactics like torture and murder to put an end to the scourge of the City of Villains. I'm using this in an arc of mine, where they kill a fairly harmless villain, and his daughter wants revenge.

Legacy Chain are more paladin-ish, but are very, very specifically magic focused. Great for magic arcs, since they seek to stop all practice of dark magic, and ensure magic is only used for good purposes. Plus, they supposedly use Malta's cell-style terrorist structure to do this, with anonymous contacts and no superstructure to speak of. Hunting down members and trying to uncover their identities is good mission fodder.

The visual display rounds itself to the nearest star amount. If it's 4.4, it's 4 stars displayed. If it's 4.6, it's 5 stars displayed. Since the display was wobbling, that means it was wobbling around 4.5, not around 4.0.

4.5 is not a feasible rating due to various factors I pointed out in the other thread. 4.0 I could see; it's more practical under real-world voting conditions and still ensures a pretty damn good arc.

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You don't need to be above 4.5 to get HoF, you need to be above 4.0.

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The last official dev word on the subject was that it's 4.5+, and the evidence from the one wobbly HOF arc confirms that.

I repeat myself -- again -- I WANT to be wrong. Obviously I will not be cheering an HOF system that's nearly impossible to attain.

However, aspects of the issue still remain. 4.5 is a very flux-unfriendly rating, as we've seen with the ONE arc that's made it wobbling on and off. The mechanics of it may still need adjusting. I still feel that 4.01 is more realistic AND a good quality indicator, especially given the sheer amount of ratings required and the flux factor.

Or would you prefer I say "Oh no, I am wrong, you are right, you are so awesome, I should crawl under a rock and die?" I'll say that if it makes you happy, I suppose.

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The OP is obviously still wrong, though.

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Considering I'm talking about an outcome I don't desire, I have no objections to being wrong. But there's still some issues here to iron out, considering it keeps wobbling between HOF and non-HOF due to the extreme rating requirement.

Glad to hear we've actually got someone who made HOF... un-glad to hear it's got problems attached with it.

Being able to lose your rating combined with what's clearly a 4.5+ average, rather than 4.01+, means that if you can get it you can lose it just as quickly and lose the slot that comes with it.

Thanks for the hard data, itsMu. At least we've got some player confirmation of how it works, in lieu of a dev confirming things.

Part of the problem is that we're using player powersets, and are forced to take at least three powers from each set. Almost all the player sets have some sort of baked in mez or debuff in their attacks. War Mace? Disorient. Ice? Slow. Rifle? Defense debuff. Energy melee? Disorient from HELL! Etc.

There's a reason why the critters like Hellions don't get the same powers we do, or they get watered down versions, and this is it. I recommend anything that says "1-54, custom enemies" not be attempted until you have SOs -- and lowbie level designers, stick to stock enemies aside from the occasional VERY carefully designed boss!

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At this point I bailed out of the arc and one-starred it. If zero was an actual option I'd have used it.

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Zero is an option.

Click 1-star twice.

[/ QUOTE ]This is good to know!

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There goes my hopes this was a bug, and not working as intended. Dev confirmation they want people zero-starring. Ack.

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As I understand it, you have to actually click 1 star then unclick it for the rating to be 0 stars.

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This. Tested and confirmed by dev chatter as to how someone can vote zero stars -- just leaving it blank won't do it, you have to pick a rating and then UN-pick it.

You'd think "well, who would do that?" and the answer is "some people are doing that", also confirmed. And it does pull your overall down pretty hard.

The problem is sometimes your story just CALLS for one of these maps. You could use a generic, but it would feel strange, and would lack the atmosphere that would turn an above average mission into an exceptional one.

I've got an arc up that's a SINGLE mission, not that much of a chore -- that one mission has multiple bosses, multiple objectives, and a big fight at the end. Plenty of stuff to be contained in the Green Fog Office Map, despite it being 7 floors (two of which are tiny). So you get your money's worth and it's not too sparsely loaded with stuff to do.

And I STILL got pegged with a 1 star rating from someone last night who told me "ur map is too long make it less floors". I CAN'T make it less floors, it's a unique map! Agh.

Don't get me wrong, these should be used sparingly, but they DO have a useful purpose.

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Ye Gads! Why do I keep reading these whiney "my sooper arc can't get an award cause of all u meanies!" threads.... I see em, I know what they are, and I just read em anyway! Stupid stupid.

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To repeat for the third freaking time -- I am not whining. I'm pondering the logic of the way the ratings system is set up, because a 4.5+ is not realistically attainable. (Hey, it's the title of the thread! Wow!)

Would I enjoy more slots? of course. Is that the sole reason I posted? No. My concern is that the current system is flawed and I wanted to see what the range of opinions were about it. That is all.

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I was told, "There will be no limits placed on the amount of Dev's Choice a person can earn. Why would we stop anyone from making the game better?"

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Okay, good to know. My impression from my own dev interactions was that they were shying away from multiple-DC due to all the backlash -- if you talked directly to a dev and got a clarification, though, that renders some of my point moot. I don't mind being wrong.

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I feel Twoflower's pain, but he does have 25% more slots than most of us already, so it's a little difficult to wholeheartedly sympathise, especially considering I didn't see any of this 'fix the system!' from him on test where he had 6 or more DCd arcs and was sitting pretty at the top of the lists.

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Let's not make this about me specifically, okay? I don't give a hoot if you 'sympathize' with me. Sympathize more with the playerbase who have to deal with a system that is potentially flawed and unattainable. I'd like to think that just because I have a DC I'm not somehow ineligible from discussing the game mechanics.

Anybody who writes well and could potentially contribute more good content to the game if only they had the slots to do it should be getting more slots, be it by DC, HOF, microtransaction, crafting, sacrifice a goat to Zeus, whatever. And in this particular case I'm not seeing how HOF is a realistic option, due to the 4.5+ average.

If I'm wrong about the 4.5+ average, if it's really 4.01+, then that's a BIT more attainable; basically half the arcs you see up there with 4 stars would be HOF candidates. I'd love dev confirmation one way or another, though.

I use my Patrol XP as insurance against an arc suddenly tossing something horrible at me that murders me in an instant. All my debt burns away as patrol XP! Nice.

I guess to min-max it, papers would still be better, but honestly I don't like papers very much. I'd rather play interesting and engaging new stories, given the choice.

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Bad Thing #1: Giving Force Field set to an EB.
Bad Thing #2: Giving Force Field set to an EB.
Bad Thing #3: Giving Force Field set to an EB who appears in the arc three times!

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Yup. I had to change out FF on an end of arc EB I made because of this -- some players were amused by him detbubbling you and then running Aid Self, but not many else were.

There's just too many sets that come prepackaged with annoying powers. Web Grenades, Smoke Grenades, Carrion Creepers (to an extent), ANYTHING on Extreme. And the Blaster-Defiance means all of MA is really, really nasty on controllery types.

My favorite example, and I say this with love since it's from one of my SG mates, was a Stone Armor / Energy Melee LT. With Buildup. Two of them punched through my scrapper's mezprot and killed me in under three seconds. Yow! Fortunately, knocking them down a level was enough to make them challenging instead of bend-over-and-lube-up.

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But you can still create as many missions as you want can't you? I was under the impression that we could create as much content as we desire. Its just that we're limited to 3 slots for publishing?

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Semantics. I could write eighty thousand novels and never show them to anyone except my neighbor, my dog, and my mother, but getting them published is another matter. And the end product is the focus in both metaphors -- getting your missions out there to be played (and without destroying your work just to make room for more).

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So let's get this right, the devs went out there and provided the first ever player based content in an MMORPG, and someone's already [censored] about not having enough spots to make arcs?

Sounds like the forums to me!

Here's a tip, make those spots count, and have fun with it.

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All I'm saying is that the mathematics behind the HOF requirements (assuming it is 4.5+ as originally stated in prerelease materials) are unfeasible even for an amazing, high quality arc that's getting plenty of votes. We'll be lucky if we have even a handful of HOF arcs after many weeks based on the ability to knock a ranking down extremely hard with a 0 or 1 star rating.

If I was [censoring], I'd be saying "WAAAAAH WAAAH I WANT MROE SLOTS THIS SI STUPID THE DEVS ARE EVIL AND STUPID AND WHY WON'T ANYBODY VOTE FOR MEEEEEE" or something along those lines. I'm trying to take a more logical approach instead by saying that the current system may not work out the way the devs are hoping, and that it can't be considered a reasonable way for people to earn new slots.

As for "have fun with it", I did have fun with it. Now I'm out of spots. Now I'm not able to have more fun with it. That's the crux of the side issue, which is slot limitations. If HOF remains in its current shape then 98% of the population will have this same problem.

I've never had a boss do an emote right, and I've done a lot of boss spawns with a lot of different bosses. I've heard this is primarily on bosses which have armor secondaries, since they keep toggling up / detoggling, but I've seen it even on pure assault bosses. They seem to rapidly restart the 'generic enemy taunting' animation over and over.

An EB can never go UP, but it can go down. If someone's playing at the lowest difficulty and solo an EB becomes an ordinary Boss.

You can, and that'll certainly close it from the public, but you'll get no XP, inf, or tickets.

Yes, but I'm out of slots and I can't publish them.

The key to making good lowbie content is to avoid customs. Custom characters always get a robust amount of powers, but lowbie enemies intentionally only get "shoot a pistol once" or "swing a knife once" to keep them managable. So, hellions, skulls, contaminated, snakes, RIP, etc. are okay.

Unfortunately, no. Multiboss spawns with multiple specific bosses and no clones are not possible. You can do many boss spawns in the same area (front/middle/back) as you've discovered but you can't force the player to fight all of them simultaneously.

I'd do that, but I don't trust them not to edit it slightly, and repost it saying "Look at this awesome mission I wrote! It's so great! 5-star me." I don't like people stealing my work and claiming they made it, and even if forumites who know me would know it was stolen, the vast majority of the playerbase wouldn't.