Twoflower

Keep in mind that A) you can only make them look like a kid as much as the costume editor already allows for that, and B) if your mission content is a bit too squicky for the T-for-Teen rating for the game has you could get moderated.

When I drop below the legal age I've been using teenagers, mostly, since super powered teens are a staple of comic books. Superpowered preteens and kindergardeners I guess would be okay provided it's something like "A Wacky Crimefighting Adventure!" and not "Muscles Manslaughter's Cannibal Corpse Child Abattoir".

No.

However, you can put in the description "This mission was designed just for my SG, and I'll be depublishing it in an hour or two. You might want to avoid playing it." and that'll shy folks away.

Wow, lotta replies... okay...

If the requirement is actually 4.0001 or above, that's a bit more attainable. That means all 4 and 5 star ratings help you, as opposed to only 5 star ratings helping you. If your work is good, the occasional "it wuz too hards lol" vote may hurt but it won't utterly cripple you. ...can we please get a dev in here to confirm the actual rating? is it 4.01 or 4.5?

Buying another account is not a "solution" to the issue of new slots. It works, but c'mon, another $15 a month? That's like saying a practical solution for street crime is fuel-air explosives. It's overkill and will certainly cost you more than buying new slots would. Look at the cost benefits of buying another account to get character slots vs. buying character slots directly -- ongoing sub versus one time fee. We need a similar model for story slots.

As for "don't be worried why your arc isn't in the hall", honestly I could care less about the badge or even being in the hall of fame. I just want to be able to write more stories without destroying my previous work. I want to be able to have more published things, by whatever means. And my point is that since the ONLY means available to us is HOF, DC, and deleting your work... none of these means are acceptable to me. If you're happy removing your stories from play so you can post others, good for you. I'm not. A lot of folks aren't. (And a lot of folks are, but that doesn't mean the other point of view is instantly negated.)

It's a bug.

You made a farming map for quick ticket gain and specifically boasted its easy kills, and you're surprised that they removed it?

I'm kinda speechless.

Not possible. Only one ambush can be tied to the rescue goal.

One thing you could do is put a boss in the Middle, which when defeated, spawns OTHER bosses or such in the Front. Then you'd have some extra resistance when you're jogging your way out after doing a rescue in the Back.

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I think the ratio of 1% DC, 1% HoF is perfect.

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So 98% of all players will be stuck with 3 slots forever? I think many of them would object to that notion.

If the devs introduce the blindingly obvious, namely buyable / craftable / whateverable extra slots so that prolific authors can do their thing, I could POSSIBLY see 2% being given free slots.

But if DC/HOF are the only methods that will ever be provided, we're really not going to get the growth we need with MA. Quality authors bring quality content bring players to the game, which is good for COH's health in the long run. And I'm guessing that more than 2% of all authors are of a high enough caliber to produce lots of solid stuff.

(I honestly believe the devs WILL introduce other slot methods... but they haven't said anything. They haven't hinted at anything. They've said jack. And I'm not going to assume they see the obvious, I have to work with what's in front of me. A lot of things that are "obvious" never came to fruition in the past.)

Make sure you tie a decent story to that farm you're building, or the moderators may become Unhappy.

Tickets are really not that hard to come by, anyway. You can get enough to unlock almost everything you could want to use by playing two long arcs.

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2 is nearly impossible and once you have it you never get another

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Where did you hear this? Because it's not true.

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It is true. They decided not to allow any multi-DCs when they transfered over from live and I doubt they'll allow more in the future, because of the forum brouhaha over it.

Either way, given they've said it'll be awarded to 1% of people out there, it hardly works as a solution to the problem of low slot counts. It's just as much a piece of Unobtainium as an HOF. (Yes, yes, I have one, but how many people reading this right now have one also? Not a heck of a lot, and I want slots for anybody who could make good use of them, in an ideal world.)

There are only three ways (currently...) to get one of your story slots back.

1. Unpublish, losing all your ratings and forward progress.
2. Get a Dev Choice, which will happen to maybe 1% of all arcs at best and only can happen once per author.
3. Make Hall of Fame, which requires a 4.5+ rating overall and 1000+ votes.

1 is self-defeating, 2 is nearly impossible and once you have it you never get another, so that leaves 3. And 3 is not attainable.

(For purposes of this discussion we'll ignore "how do I get 1000 ratings in the first place" because that's another problem entirely -- but keep it in mind when putting this into scope.)

Consider. You can rate 0-5 stars. The ONLY rating which helps you in any way towards Hall of Fame is 5 stars -- everything else, including 4 stars, pulls your rating downward. 4 less so, but 3, 2, and (egh) 1 will do serious damage. And the amount of slap-dash, inconsiderate rating going on out there even on decent arcs is quite silly.

Worst of all, if someone actually hates your work enough to slap it with zero stars, that effectively negates multiple five star ratings in a single shot -- and it is entirely possible to have a great arc 0 starred out of malice, incompetence, or just hatred of some trivial issue; I've heard so many anecdotes about this today it's not even funny.

We already have multiple arcs with 1000+ rating... but they're between 4.0 and 4.5, because getting 4.5+ is mathematically unfeasible. The only way anyone can conceivably ever get Hall of Fame is if the vast majority of voters decide to be kind and rate it five. Not "Really great work, but not perfect" 4, it's gotta be fives up the wazoo to get 4.5+, balancing against "I couldn't farm this / my ice/ff controller couldn't solo this" votes of 1 or 0.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Solution: Change the requirements, or at least give us other means to get slots -- microtransaction, craftable, ticket buy, veteran reward, I don't care. Otherwise, for 98% of us, it's gonna be 3 stories and then you can never use the feature again without destroying your own work. And for the 1% of us who are lucky enough to get DC, that's 4 stories and then you can never use the feature again etc. etc.

If COH wants to be the YouTube of MMO gaming, this isn't gonna cut it.

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Talk to them and explain what you're trying to do and why it's not actually a farming mission.

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A GM hasn't actually contacted me yet -- this was just a player complaint that got tagged on my mission. It doesn't give the name of the person who complained, either, so there's nobody to explain it to.

If one does buzz me, though, I think it'll be patently obvious it's not a farming mission. All the enemies are custom, they all kill the hell out of you, there are no allies, and there's TONS of dialogue.

As I said, enemies can only be assigned specific animations to play while waiting to be aggroed when they're in those goal spawns. Ordinary loitering-around spawns, just generic ones that fill up 90% of the mission, do not have custom animations.

Plus, players can't see the complaints. Only you and the moderators can.

One of my missions (the freak out) got dinged for "Content Violation (Describe Below)", whatever that means, and "Obvious farming mission with lots of buffers", which makes no sense since there isn't a single ally in the thing and everything in there can kill you hard.

You can't set a desc for the entire group at once. But yes, copy and paste work; control+c and control+v. I recommend writing it in WordPad or something which has a spellcheck and then pasting it in, though.

Well, you can create some using the custom enemy creators, I guess. I don't think you can use the official Civilian NPC group as an enemy type.

You may need to open the MA system, go to "My Enemy Groups", and edit the group there. Then click the name and pick the (Remove) button to the right of their name. I'm not sure if you can do it within the mission editor itself.

Can't be done. Groups with no overlap between them can't be used in the same mission, and you can't "scale them up" in the manner described.

What I did when I wanted Outcasts was I made my own Outcasts in the critter editor. Goldbrickers are a tougher bunch since they have those guns and jetpacks; maybe take the other group you want and remake it for lowbie romping with real Goldbrickers?

If you mean the "ambient panicking civvies" effect on some official missions, where they're just untargetable and there for fun, it can't be done at this time. You can add a patrol of them, but they'd be pretty much murdered on sight by aggroing enemies.

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I'm not sure about that. I tired adding the max 26 bosses on a cargo ship mission, and i was nothing but boss groups.
No normal groups.

I think it just replaces them, not adds

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By and large, yes, it just replaces a spot where there'd be a normal spawn and instead drops in your boss / patrol / whatever.

Object defense / destroy may work differently, though -- those key off Glowy Placement Spots, and then spawn some guards around it. Which means if you had a metric ton of destructible objects, you'd get the Endless Room of Freaks that was used for farming earlier today.

(If I'm wrong, correct me, MAsperts.)

Balance is hard as heck. I've debated turning my EBs into B's many a time because even if *I* can solo them to death within a minute, not everybody can. (Mercs/Traps MM.)

But I keep getting such a wide range of feedback ("too easy" "too hard" "just right!" or just "This rox") that I'm inclined to leave things as-is and hope for the best.

I'd like to think that any glaringly obvious balance problems -- say, having LTs that massively buff their allies to the point where it's doom day on doomtown with extra doom, or putting Willpower on every minion, or having three hard ambushes all tied to the same EB -- would be easily to spot in the feedback. Hopefully that'll be the case once the initial rush of speed players dies down.

I've got all the unlockables already, even Payoff. (Love that one!)

After this, I'm gonna be rolling recipes, probably in the 35-39 range since that seems to be the best. Anything I can't use goes on the market. Anything I CAN use, I'll buy my own salvage with tickets. No more 5 million inf arcane rares! Yeah!

Do you mean a way to make it so you HAVE to play one particular 5-mission arc before you can play its sequel 5-mission arc? No, there's nothing like that. If you meant a particular clue letting you branch into a different mission, we don't have branching yet either.

I recall LittleBigPlanet (another user-level-design focused game) had a way to put keys to other levels in your levels, but that's the only example I can think of.

Yep, once it's unlocked, it's unlocked no matter who you're logged in as.

No idea about Romulus. I'd guess no, but I suggest testing it out.

It's your global chat name.

Also: consider floor glowies instead of wall glowies. Floor ones have to be anchored to, well, the floor. And if it's not, DEFINITELY /bug it!