craggy

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I noticed a piece in MMOZine about City of Heroes and its Fifth anniversary.

Good advertising you may say, but what do we get about the future?

Something like "We have tons of stuff planned for the future but we cant tell you anything."

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt but I cant tell you what is on it.

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but theres loads of cool stuff, honest!

Seems like theres a fair few really good SGs on Union, and it shouldn't be too hard to find someone in one of them. Making your own is time consuming and disheartening, as most of the experienced players are already in one and seem to be quite loyal. In my experience I ended up with a bunch of people who I never saw again and one who, whilst active always seemed to be on at different times from me.

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I seriously love MA, but there's one or two things about NPC creation i'd like to see added/changed;

Power frequency / disable powers
- When making themed villains/story characters, certain powers don't work with the design, but are put in automatically by the computer.
- Either put a slider by the powers (full bar means the character will try to use it at every oppertunity, no bar means will never use the power) or just allow the powers to be turned off (but you can't turn on any powers that that level chharacter can't handle)


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Oh yeah, definitely. I'd thought about the option to turn specific powers off, but the slider method is a much better suggestion.
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Pool Powers
When choosing powers for toons, you should have access to the Medicine, Fighting, maybe Leadership, as power sets that can be chosen, as either primary or secondary.


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Yeah, pool powers would be good, especially for minions where you don't want them to have too many powers. Easy setting melee attacks and maybe acrobatics or something would be cool. It does say the power sets in the MA are not the same as the power sets available to players, but modified versions, so why not modify some more?
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Constant Flight
- For toons who should be in the air at every oppertunity, not just when they want to move or when their enemys are (for style or stratergy reasons)
- As far as I can tell, 'flight' on the current version dosn't work this way


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Agree again. Maybe have the flight option with a slider like powers, to say how often an enemy is likely to fly if they can.
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Ranged avoid
- An attack style, rather than just standing back, the character will persistantly move position between attacks

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that'd be cool.

Other stuff I can think I'd like to see in MA:

The option to take powersets from in-game mobs, or even just some generic powersets cobbled together from those the AI enemies get to use. Its a bit strange that all the custom mobs seem to have more "super"-powers than many of those well established villain groups.

Existing faction costumes for custom characters. I know this is tricky what with clipping issues on some pieces, but maybe even just the option to change one or 2 parts of existing mobs costumes and maybe the colour scheme would be good. I was very disappointed after shelling out tickets for the Arachnos costume pack to discover I couldn't even colour the helmets different on my custom Arachnos Boss. They've already got a dedicated Arachnos costume design interface, at least that could get incorporated to the MA, even if they don't do the same for other enemy groups.

Bigger file-size! (100k is just too small for a lot of ideas. I had to drop a 2nd custom group from the arc I'm making and use Longbow instead. Not a big deal, but a bit sad.) I really don't know how they expect you to make an arc with 5 missions in it unless you're really stingy with map sizes, objectives and text. I don't think many of the really memorable dev-created arcs in the game would fit into a 100k file.

Same mission, different text. I had an idea for an arc that would be fun for both heroes and villains to play, but the motivations for each side to carry out the mission would be different. Trying to make the text morally vague wasn't too hard, but without it making the heroes seem corrupt or the villains a bit too kind-hearted I can't think of a way to make it work. I don't know if this has been done before (although I suspect so for some of the special event missions) but being able to write a different briefing or objective title for reds and blues would be cool.

Finally, most importantly, more stability. I have a lot of problems being able to use MA, which I've sent bug reports about, but right now I'm seriously thinking I'd rather have the Dev's old spreadsheet. Harder work? Almost certainly, but without having to mess about rebooting, or closing and logging back in all the time I'd probably have an arc published by now.

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I think healing, damage, mez, debt and mentor badges should count.
Also reverse the test and published defeat badges.
50000 in test mode is weird(lolposi) and does not reward people playing published arcs.
Regular defeats unsigned though

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I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage rigorous testing of one's arc and rewarding such with a badge. Of course, it is possible to be farmed, I suppose.

I don't think I have Windows Defender. I've got a lvl 50 one though!
I've mostly just been on MA trying to make an arc, but the times it crashes are inconsistent. Happens often when loading an animation box of a character (like the "Fight A Boss" one) but more often than not is ok with me selecting custom Bosses. I've been on creating costumes/characters plenty of times, sometimes for a long time, and had it once or twice after only a very short time, then earlier today got it after just starting designing a costume. Then most recently I got freeze/crash whilst actually testing my mission, something I've not had before. Grrr. + Arg!

been a pain today. added to the occassional random mission architect freeze and crash i've rebooted my machine 4 times, logged in at least 8 and got quite shouty. i did manage to get a mission wrote for my arc though.

people want to farm that's fine for them. Its not really something I play the game for. Sure, if an interesting story happens to have enemies in it that will earn me a badge I'm happy, but I play for either a fun story, or a fun team.

i'm not a farmer, i'm a city boy.

"so, I was going to Dr. Strange's house, and what did I find? Another Starbucks!"

Wow, that's crazy. I'm assuming it was just the place that you were teleported to was wrong, and the mission door was somewhere else. Or were you teleported to the right place but the right place wasn't there anymore?

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I'd rather not think of William Shatner's mother in that witches costume, thanks

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You'd prefer him in it instead?

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i'll...get you...my...pretties. andyourlittledog. too.

oh, yeah, suppose so. I've been getting a lot of them just by playing normally. But I suppose I won't end up having them all by the end of the first week the thing has gone live. Oh well.

granted, I don't really see the point of farming in general (unless we're talking fish, cows or chickens or something) but why would you use the MA for farming enemies? I'd much rather do it in a normal mission where I can get badges for defeating the billion or so enemies.

not an immediate purchase, but there's some stuff i like in there. probably get it when i've got some money spare

appears that it's a problem only with playing mob animations in the MA window. everything else is ok so far (touch wood) and i've finally been able to test out my mission, and create another for the arc. i can cope that they suck, cause that's my fault. have bugged the freeze problem

ragequit so far with me has been from minions being overpowered and mastermind powers showing up in minions for no obvious reason other than "ooh, looky!"

went to PI and it was quite empty. but so was Atlas one (room B) when I went in earlier. It let me create a few custom mobs and then crashed as I was adding in existing ones. Let me play a couple of created arcs though.

edit: I've just updated my video card drivers, so we'll see how it goes.

so damn tired of this now. anyone got anything to offer in the way of advice on how i can acutally make use of the thing I've been waiting for for months?

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Anyone else play the Lionhead game "The Movies"? Same thing happened but after a while it sorted itself out.
Then again that had a better interface though.

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I loved that game. Probably with a bit of tweaking roleplayers on here...or anyone really...could do an interesting intro/trailer for their created arc. Of course, similar things could be done with comics, or just drawings, or even a faux magazine article or something. Someone going to a little bit further effort to promote their published arc would be far more likely to stand out and make me give it a play. If of course, the bloody thing would let me make my own one without crashing the game first.

i dont even get mapservered on it. just freezes completely.

It didn't fix the MA crashing COH whilst I'm trying to make an arc. (or this damn forum software)#

edit: over at announcements

okay, I've tried 3 or 4 times now to get on with making a mission, but every time I do, I get maybe 10-20 mins in and it just freezes. Thanks to autosave I've now managed to get as far as setting up boss dialogue. But every time it's done it, the game just freezes up. I can still hear sounds, but task manager says program not responding. It really isn't responding, and when I click out of it I can't get back in. I hear the sounds again, but that's it.
Anyone else had the same problem or able to offer advice on how to resolve?

I don't like the tickets thing for ratings. Only getting tickets if the arc is rated 3 or more makes it seem like anything 3 or lower is either just okay, or really bad. I'm quite stingy when it comes to rating things usually. Out of 5, I'd say 2 isn't all that bad. 1 is, obviously just something I don't like, but I might see merit in something but just think there's a bit of room for improvement and mark it 2. 3 would be good, but nothing special and 4 would be something I really enjoyed. I'd hardly ever give out 5's unless I thought it was well done, memorable and I had a really good time, so much that I'd do it again. I'd much rather had a percentage score, or at least an out of 10 system. But hey, we don't so...

As for getting to HOF, I'd suspect it might take a good long while.

A little more in-depth than this, which I can't help with I'm afraid Ace, would be some kind of listing of what the different maps actually are. Maybe a floorplan, or at least more indication than Sewers Map 1.
Anyone know if this is being worked on by anyone? (I'd suspect this might so up on paragonwiki but maybe not)

worst part of "go here, do that", is when you get a new contact from one person, and go to another zone to see them, then the first mission they give you is to go to another zone altogether.

npc attacks on bases-signed, so long as they only get triggered once in a while, when there's a lot of your sg on and they beat up your butler.