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There's absolutely no reason to write defeat alls
[/ QUOTE ]Frankly I disagree. However I will say that throwing in a defeat-all for no reason will simply frustrate the player. The bigger the map, the better reason you need to have to setting it to defeat-all. But I can see a legitimate reason for a defeat-all on any given map.
If you're going to include defeat-all, though, don't use enemies that stealth.
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If you're going to put an AV or EB in your missions, make sure that you mention this in your description so that people who are actually interested in your content can be sure to turn down the challenge level.
[/ QUOTE ]I recommend taking the same approach to EBs/AVs that the canon missions do; the contact says something along the lines of "You should bring a team for this mission" before you accept it, and the text is in a different color to make it stand out. Exact phrasing can vary based on the contact's character and the mission in question.
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Finally, if your arc contains overpowered or excessively tricky or truly obnoxious mobs (AVs, EBs, Electric Brutes that drain ALL your Endurance, Cold Corruptors that slow your movement and recharge rate down to zero), be sure to mention or at least hint at this in your description.
[/ QUOTE ]Because we don't have any way of limiting the frequency of a spawn (eg, there will only ever be a single Malta Sapper in a spawn), the best course of action is to limit your somewhat annoying powers to lieutenants, and truly annoying powers to bosses. Giving minions things like Radiation Infection or Hide is just cruel to the player.
I'll also add:
Take time to write up a good souvenir. I've been quite disappointed with the majority of the souvenirs I've gotten in MA, but it's really not that difficult to write a good one. Take the following souvenir example:
A Foo's Widget
Contact Hologram gave you this Foo's Widget after your final battle with Bar. You like to keep it around to remind you of the time you like to call...
The Example of the Foo
It began with {summary of mission 1}
Bar's plan was incomplete, however, and {summary of mission 2}
...
etc.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
I think defeat alls have their purposes, but they really, really should be restricted to fairly small, fairly linear maps, like tech maps. I still have occasional nightmares about trying to do those Defeat All missions on the ship map.
One arc i have planned could quite legitimately be a "defeat all", but I'm changing it due to the hate. :/
I have one that has two defeat all's back to back. One on a ship. Because of the nature of the story, there was no other way to do it.
Another I played was set back in the first Ritki Invasion. The goal was to hold your little patch of ground. It was the same map as the Psy-Clockwork King. That's a nasty map for a defeat all, but the purpose of the mission was to stop the invasion. There's not really a good story based way to do that and still leave some standing.
The EB/AV thing I agree with completely. In fact, I think I may need to adjust my "Now Hiring" arc. I can't recall if the last guy is an EB or just a boss.
Same with the souvenir. By the time the mission is over, and the souvenir read, there should be no question at all what actually happened in the arc. No loose ends.
One note on Minions and radiation infection though. Last time I tried to give Rad to a custom, Rad Infection was the only power available to minions. I'm hoping that's changed.
My first short story (detective fiction) came out in Jan-2012. Other stories and books to follow, I hope. Because of "real writing". COH was a big part of that happening.
It may seem strange, but it's encouraging to read about how generally poor many of the arcs are. I realize there's some really good stuff out there, but if what I've read about the general state of things is any indication, even my arcs are probably slightly above average. That's not saying much, but considering I've just started and haven't really been focusing all that much on the story, it's not terrible either. I'd say my stuff so far is probably about on par with average dev-created content. I realize that's not what people are looking for, more of the same, but it's a start. I've gotten some positive ratings, but that might just be people being kind.
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Take time to write up a good souvenir
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Interesting. So far I haven't filled in any clues in my missions or any souvenirs. I'm not in the habit of looking at them, so I guess I didn't consider them to be important. It didn't occur to me that someone might be disappointed that I left them out.
Clues are easily ignorable if you need to save space.
A souvenir should be fleshed out, in my opinion. Remember, sometimes your souvenir will be the ONLY way that others who are NOT the team leader will be able to read about the story of what they just played(Especially if they don't want to play it again due to length or team-oriented, difficult content).
Make your souvenir tell the details of the story they just ran. It really works great in the long run.
I'll add some of my own rules of thumb, things that work for me. (One 4-star arc, one five-star.)
<ul type="square">[*]Show, don't tell. Take a long look at all of the information you put into mission intro briefing, mission send off, successful returns, and clues. Is there any of that that you can move to word balloons inside the actual mission? It takes almost no effort to add a patrol. One front patrol, one middle patrol, and one large patrol is 6 lines of dialog that you can insert into any single mission, and they will almost always be told in that order.
Now considering adding up to 3 "allies" set to "non-combat" and "run away." (Not captives. Allies get better dialog options, and there isn't anything you can do with a captive that you can't do better with an ally.) One front, one middle, and one back is another three 4-line dialogs that you can add to your mission, and again, they will nearly always be told in that order. And, obviously, never forget to give your end-of-mission boss some dialog, too.
Patrol, ally, and boss dialog show up for every player on the team, and usually in the middle of the screen. Clues only show up in the team leader's clue window, and even the team leader may not have the clue window open. Chat-text gets buried in the chat window among all the combat results, team chat, and reward drops. This is a comic book game; use word balloons as much as the system will let you.
[*]Moving is better than standing still. When you add the ally and boss encounters described above, take a long, long look at the animation options, and use the heck out of them. They may not work on some mobs, either because of animation issues or because they trigger a power during setup that cancels the animation. But if you can get them to work, they are always a welcome alternative to the generic "taunt" animation.
Also, once you've added your dialog patrols as described above, consider adding even more non-dialog patrols. It's possible to over-do this, if for example you make all of the spawns patrols. But somewhere between a quarter and half, it makes your mission look like people are actually living or working there, not just waiting to be beaten up.
And if there is any justification you can fit in for a fight to have already broken out on the map, adding one to two battles gives you yet more dialog you can fit into word balloons, and it's yet more movement, yet more another alternative to mobs just standing around. Doesn't it seem odd to you that nothing bad ever happens to the NPCs until you show up?
[*]NPCs with names are better than NPCs with titles. Google "random name generator" and pick one. If you don't give an NPC a name of their own, players won't care about them.
[*]Name-drop whenever you can. Over in the Guides section, there are a couple of concise (and spoilerific) summaries of the canonical plotline. Get to know it, if you haven't already. You can also find a list of every mission in the game, by contact, in a nice graphical-layout form at RedTomax.com: heroes here, villains here. You can also find a list of all of the canonical mini-boss names for each faction by searching for that faction name on ParagonWiki; it also has a list of the Police Radio missions and the Newspaper missions.
So rather than make up a name for a new magical artifact for your McGuffin, why not use one from a Newspaper mission? Rather than make up a politician name, why not look at the list of existing Paragon City councilmen in that one higher-level Circle of Thorns arc? Rather than make up a new name for a high-tech lab or business, why not either use the name of one of the hero stores, or one of the high-tech business names already used in missions? Sure, it's less work and arguably more creative to make up your own, but people feel a thrill of recognition when they see someone referred to in your story and go, "Oh, I know who that is!"
It also spares you from having to put in long, long text data dumps to explain who the character is, what the object they're chasing is, and why they should care. If you use canonical story tokens, many of the players will already care when they arrive.
[*]Use Unique maps sparingly. Yes, they're pretty. Yes, you're bored with the generic randomizable maps. But it it still absolutely possible to over-use them, because if you use them sparingly, and only at dramatic points in the story, it adds a lot of emotional punch to the scene that you use them in. If you use them in every scene, the impact is lost.
[*]On generic maps, use the smallest map possible. Once you're done writing all of the dialog-patrols and dialog-rescues and battles that you need to move the story forward, set the map size to the smallest possible map that will accommodate those options. People want to move the story forward, not stay in a single map all day grinding identical mobs. The one possible exception might be on the fifth and last mission of a high-drama story arc, where you're going up against what's supposed to be their whole army at once ... but still don't. Really. Nobody wants to do this. Any use of a map described as Large will cost you at least one star in average ratings, because by the time anybody gets to the end of a Large map, they're almost certainly bored.[/list]
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Clues are easily ignorable if you need to save space.
A souvenir should be fleshed out, in my opinion. Remember, sometimes your souvenir will be the ONLY way that others who are NOT the team leader will be able to read about the story of what they just played(Especially if they don't want to play it again due to length or team-oriented, difficult content).
Make your souvenir tell the details of the story they just ran. It really works great in the long run.
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Actually, the mission briefing, the send-off and all the clues are available to the whole team.
Dec out.
My pet peeve with some arcs : multiple identical main objectives.
Fighting three, four, five times the exact same boss, destroying four, six, eight times the same object, with the exact same dialog, isn't fun. Don't get me started on multiple identical escorts !
(I've got no problem if it's optional - in this situation, it makes sense to have multiple so the player sees at least one of them.)
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Clues are easily ignorable if you need to save space.
A souvenir should be fleshed out, in my opinion. Remember, sometimes your souvenir will be the ONLY way that others who are NOT the team leader will be able to read about the story of what they just played(Especially if they don't want to play it again due to length or team-oriented, difficult content).
Make your souvenir tell the details of the story they just ran. It really works great in the long run.
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Actually, the mission briefing, the send-off and all the clues are available to the whole team.
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Understand that teammates don't get to read the dialogue from the Contact for your missions. That's where a lot of the meat-and-potatoes of the story is typically situated in.
They do. You just click on the mission title and it opens a box with all that text.
Which is correct, and what I was referring to with "mission briefing". You even have the send-off stuff included there.
Dec out.
I think a good alternative to "Defeat All" on the map is the "Defeat All" in back room types.
I just began to fool around with creating a mission last night, and when testing it...I realized, that it was making what was supposed to be an easy to solo, hard enough to team mission tedious.
So I set it to defeat all in final room. Tested that and it was much better.
I won't use Defeat all on map unless I have a good story reason for it.
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I'm mostly interested in the story aspects of arcs. After running through several MA arcs, I have compiled a list of pet peeves.
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I agree with your pet peeves (even though I like multiple ambushes, I always make sure to mention it in the description).
Let me add a couple of my own.
1) Exposition Dump - Nothing says 'I am a weak writer' better than having a massivly huge amount of text given by the contact prior to the last mission. The story is supposed to be told within the missions themselves. If a contact needs to go into some long diatribe just so that everything makes sense, then the story needs to be reworked.
2) Contact saying too much/too little - People play the arcs for the missions, and not for the wonderful way someone has found to turn a phrase. Huge blocks of text will go unread, and small blocks tend to not give enough information (naturally, there are exceptions to this).
3) Poor/No Dialogue - Perhaps nothing can make a mission feel more life-like (i.e. immersion) than good dialogue. Dialogue is my pick for the weakest area overall in MA missions. This goes doubly, triply, and quadruply (if those are even words) for ambushes (unless a sneak attack) and battles.
4) Not making checks to see what the reader would/should know - If the only way to get the story is through the contact, then everyone in teams (save the team leader) will not know the reason for their actions. The missions are what should be telling the story.
5) Not using the Nav bar to give an idea of what the mission is about - Not only does this scream lazy, and give the impression that the author doesn't bother to edit, this can be a huge source of confusion. Being able to determine the objective of a mission (along with the reasons) should very, very, very easy.
I could go on (I haven't even gotten into the poor handling of cliches), but I'll stick with these 5.
TL;DR version: QQ
Some people like kill-alls. Some ppl like surprise visits from AV's to spice things up. Some ppl like [insert thing you don't like].
Ask a dev sometime about pleasing all the people all the time.
When you play user-created content you have to be prepared to be both awed & disgusted - but above all you have to be prepared for another person's point of view on how the game should be played. Often it won't match your expectations.
Some arcs created to date are pure win & desserve every accolade they can get. Some are so funny & enjoyable that although not a quality work, are replayable & totally worth the effort.
Others are train wrecks. You don't want to keep playing them, but it's so incredible bad that you can't help but continue because you need to see what they're going to do next.
Bottom line: There's a "get me out of this arc rite nao!" button. Use it at your convenience. There is a whole Developer-created world out there that is all too happy to occupy your free time if you decide that your fellow players just don't have what it takes to entertain you.
Or...in the words of Spazz: "Make it your own damn self."
Why do I do do do things I do
Nobody was ever there for me to talk to
Once I was youngster, pure and true
Now I'm running with a sick, sick crew.
EDIT: Never mind...I pretty much misinterpreted EVERYTHING you wrote. Nothing to see here but some old embarrassed guy. 
Dec out.
I've found that a very good way to help the team to know what's going on in a mission arc is through the use of the mission pop-up. I have one arc that could get kind of confusing for teams who jump right in without reading the contact information (he's supposed to be a little addled and forgetful - keeps changing the enemies and such) so I used the pop-ups to be a kind of Architect Entertainment briefing, even giving the text its own personality. With each mission the fictional person adding the summary to the popup gets a little more exasperated with the scatterbrained contact.
With regard to dialog, I would add the caveat that too much in-mission dialog is a bad thing. The problem is this: in mission dialog usually fires before the player is in visual range, and it all fires instantaneously. Having patrols have conversations is nice, but having long conversations with more than one statement/answer loop just gives the player alot of random bubbles on the screen that often obscure each other.
Also, when assigning dialog to a boss, make darned sure that boss is tough enough to be around to deliver it all in a timely fashion. My first boss had volumes to say at sight, attack, 3/4 health, half health, nearly dead and dead. The problem was he was only an easy boss, so when my scrapper jumped in he killed him flat with a critical in around seven seconds, giving the boss a crumpled body and diarrhea of the mouth. Speech bubbles were EVERYWHERE all at once.
Same thing goes for multiple ambushes on the same boss, but that's another story apart from dialog (learned that one the hard way when five ambushes showed up AT ONCE to defend their dead boss. More speech bubbles flew.)
Oh and I have to give kudos to my wife (not that I'm predjudiced) for finding the best use of in-game dialog that I've seen to date. She wanted to have the spawns around her destructible objects be invisible spirits, so of course she gave them Ninjitsu. Would've been a PIA but for one thing: she gave them dialogue. Their inactive dialogue was a placeholder when I first saw it, and was just "....." and when they attacked, they said "...from the darkness."
It. Was. Terrifying. The first time I saw speech bubbles appear on my screen with no mobs around I thought "How cute. Patrols." Then BLAMMO! Bonesmasher to the head=dead scrapper. From there on out, any time I saw "...." I jumped, backed out like mad and popped a yellow before proceding. Really made for a fun mission.
The Scrappers' Guide to Dark Melee | Kheldian Binds and Strategies
Please do mention if your arc is solo friendly or not, and whether it is intended for low or high level characters. Custom group scaling is borked up right now, so this is especially important if you don't use stock critters. I have lost count of the number of missions I have had to cancel due to crazy numbers of orange con custom LTs spawning in arcs. 
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Please do mention if your arc is solo friendly or not, and whether it is intended for low or high level characters. Custom group scaling is borked up right now, so this is especially important if you don't use stock critters. I have lost count of the number of missions I have had to cancel due to crazy numbers of orange con custom LTs spawning in arcs.
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It's not broken. Having a ton of lieutenants show up is what happens when the author doesn't put any minions in the custom group. All the minions are replaced by lieutenants.
It can make for fun solo times but a team is going to die, die, die, and die again.
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
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If you're going to put an AV or EB in your missions, make sure that you mention this in your description so that people who are actually interested in your content can be sure to turn down the challenge level.
[/ QUOTE ]I recommend taking the same approach to EBs/AVs that the canon missions do; the contact says something along the lines of "You should bring a team for this mission" before you accept it, and the text is in a different color to make it stand out. Exact phrasing can vary based on the contact's character and the mission in question.
[/ QUOTE ]
I would disagree with this. The AV/EB message should be in the Description as well as possibly in the contact's message. You don't see the contact's message until you start the TF or are part way through it. Even at level 1 AVs will be a problem and many will want to just avoid the mission.
Moreover if it is in the description hopefully we can come up with some "approved" descriptions like noAV/EB, AV/EB so that you can search on missions.
----------------------------
You can't please everyone, so lets concentrate on me.
I was going to start a thread like this, but I'll add my hints to this one:
1) As mentioned above, Defeat All's are the pits. On a smaller map, they're far more tolerable. On a big outdoor map, they're just obnoxious (or clearly there for farming...but that's another debate).
2) Think a bit about power selection for custom enemies. Having too many unbalanced powers together makes for either impossible, frustrating, or pointless encounters. A challenge is good, but if you're not careful it quickly turns into futility.
Examples: an elite boss with Storm powers -- very challenging.
An elite boss with minions surrounding her with ALL of the storm powers = an entire room full of Hurricanes, Storm Clouds and other super annoying powers.
An elite boss with Illusion powers -- very challenging.
An elite boss with minions with ALL of the Illusion powers = an entire room full of Phantasms, Phantom Armies, Spectral Terrors, Confuse and Invisible powers going off. (I counted at least 20 Phantom Army guys in this one mission last night after fighting ONE GROUP.) This actually turned a potential 4 or 5-star arc into a 2-star for me since the final room was unbeatable. What this says to me is, this person didn't test his own arc. Balance your custom groups.
You can adjust which powers minions and lieutenants have. Please make judicious use of this feature.
3) Don't be lazy. Yes, there are a lot of options to fill out, but the difference between the "okay" arcs and the "Dev Choice" arcs are the extra care the authors used to flesh out in-mission dialogue, souvenirs, and character descriptions. I found an arc last night were all the dialogue was "BLAH BLAH BLAH." That's a good way to get one starred. (Curious that it was rated 5 stars, though...people apparently have oddly low standards).
4) Escort missions in enormous maps are also boring. Also, if your escortee is combat capable, please make them semi-durable. The AI causes them to attack quickly, and if they die quickly it means a fast mission failure and there's nothing the player can do anything about. (This also suggests that somebody didn't test an arc out properly, or they'd have seen this.)
I'm sure I'll think of more as I run more random arcs.
Arc# 92382 -- "The S.P.I.D.E.R. and the Tyrant" -- Ninjas! Robots! Praetorians! It's totally epic! Play it now!
Arc # 316340 -- "Husk" -- Azuria loses something, a young woman harbors a dark secret, and the fate of the world is in your hands.
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If you're going to put an AV or EB in your missions, make sure that you mention this in your description so that people who are actually interested in your content can be sure to turn down the challenge level.
[/ QUOTE ]I recommend taking the same approach to EBs/AVs that the canon missions do; the contact says something along the lines of "You should bring a team for this mission" before you accept it, and the text is in a different color to make it stand out. Exact phrasing can vary based on the contact's character and the mission in question.
[/ QUOTE ]
I would disagree with this. The AV/EB message should be in the Description as well as possibly in the contact's message. You don't see the contact's message until you start the TF or are part way through it. Even at level 1 AVs will be a problem and many will want to just avoid the mission.
Moreover if it is in the description hopefully we can come up with some "approved" descriptions like noAV/EB, AV/EB so that you can search on missions.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but don't the individual mission blurbs in the AE interface contain information like "Defeat all, escort hostage, boss, AV?"
I'm going to start work on my first arc tonight (it's going to be epic!) and I will definitely be putting "expect multiple AVs/EBs" in the overall description.
Arc# 92382 -- "The S.P.I.D.E.R. and the Tyrant" -- Ninjas! Robots! Praetorians! It's totally epic! Play it now!
Arc # 316340 -- "Husk" -- Azuria loses something, a young woman harbors a dark secret, and the fate of the world is in your hands.
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With regard to dialog, I would add the caveat that too much in-mission dialog is a bad thing. The problem is this: in mission dialog usually fires before the player is in visual range, and it all fires instantaneously. Having patrols have conversations is nice, but having long conversations with more than one statement/answer loop just gives the player alot of random bubbles on the screen that often obscure each other.
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I agree with you. However, I'll add my own caveat that it works wonders in creating background noise. Patrols should almost never be a source of critical in-game information, but should be used to enhance the flavor of the mission.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but don't the individual mission blurbs in the AE interface contain information like "Defeat all, escort hostage, boss, AV?"
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It just says "Boss". The automatic description doesn't distinguish between normal bosses, EBs, AVs, or even Lts. or minions that were placed using the create-a-boss tool.
I'm mostly interested in the story aspects of arcs. After running through several MA arcs, I have compiled a list of pet peeves. They are, in order:
1) Defeat all missions: These are the pits. Especially the ones with invisible mobs on huge maps. There's absolutely no reason to write defeat alls: your mission should have well-defined goals beyond "kill everything." You are wasting your players' time when they have to hunt down that last hidden mob. If they want to defeat all enemies, let them decide to do it.
The devs agree with me; check out the tutorial for writing good stories from the contact in the AE building.
The only time you can justify a defeat all is when the map is tiny (like some banks or Roman caves) and you can't avoid defeating everything anyway. Since the ticket reward is proportional to the mobs defeated, players aren't getting anything extra by skipping some mobs.
2) Unmentioned Arch-villains: If you're going to put an AV or EB in your missions, make sure that you mention this in your description so that people who are actually interested in your content can be sure to turn down the challenge level. But before you put an AV in your mission ask yourself if you really, really need one to tell your story. Most of the time you don't. A boss is usually sufficient.
Also realize that Bosses, AVs and EBs don't spawn the same way in MA arcs as they do in regular arcs. I don't know the rules, but I've been a three-person team where mobs defined as Bosses spawned as Lieutenants at Challenge Level 1, and I've been solo in a Challenge Level 3 mission where the AV appeared as a full-fledged AV. Whether these are bugs or intentional, I don't know. But that's what I'm seeing.
3) Just try and whoop my character missions: these are just plain boring. Go into a bar and try to beat the author's character. These are usually combined with:
4) Stacked ambushes: Yes, you can send a four or five waves of hard ambushes at a character trying to defeat an Elite Boss or AV. Remember that lots of people are going to be running your mission solo because they're interested in the STORY and not getting pounded into the ground. If multiple ambushes are integral to the story (which they rarely are), make sure you mention something like "not easily soloed" in your arc description.
One or maybe two ambushes is okay. But if you send four hard ambushes that could mean more than a dozen mobs attacking a solo character. The IOed-out tanker you use for testing your mission may not have a problem with this, but lots of scrappers will, not to mention defenders, blasters, scrappers, stalkers, corruptors, etc.
If you do use ambushes be sure to give them some dialog so the players know they're coming.
Finally, if your arc contains overpowered or excessively tricky or truly obnoxious mobs (AVs, EBs, Electric Brutes that drain ALL your Endurance, Cold Corruptors that slow your movement and recharge rate down to zero), be sure to mention or at least hint at this in your description. PvE players are used to slamming through missions quickly and easily, in large part due to their familiarity with the existing villain groups. They know what tactics are required to dispose of the standard mobs. With your custom mobs they may not have any idea what they're facing. This is both good and bad. As long as they're expecting the unexpected, they can't complain too much. (Yes, truly observant players know what to expect from most mobs just by looking at them, but not everyone has that sort of experience and in-depth game knowledge.)
Remember, the more up-front you are about what your arc contains, the more likely you are to get good ratings. If you say your mission contains multiple AVs and ambushes, people who are just interested in story won't bother with it; if you say your mission is easily soloed, people who want a real challenge will likewise avoid it. The automatically generated tags can give the reader some hints, but they don't really give a true idea of the magnitude of the difficulty. If your players get what they expect, they'll be much happier.