Question for those running SFMAs. Sort of.
By
Barata,
Posted on: 2009-05-13 23:12 in Mission Architect
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It's a difficult enough subject to discuss with straight talk in the context of the forum. Adding a layer of satire, obfuscation or false modesty would seem to me to have an effect opposite of promoting "healthy discussion".
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and
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"The healthy exchange of ideas" necessarily includes ones that you may disagree with. If it's just praise you want, not discussion...
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Absolutely correct. I made the mistake of interjecting satire to soften the somewhat serious nature of the thread, which was probably a mistake. In retrospect, I regret that.
To disagreement; well, yes. Although, as I've mentioned before here, there is a distinct difference between disagreement or discourse (say, criticism of an arc or a thread's topic), and unfounded hostility (PMs containing profanity and insults with no inherent point other than to offend, etc). The former I have no problem with, and gladly encourage. The latter is, unfortunately, a truth of the internet as a whole. People say what they want to say here with no regard to their target audience, because there are no discernable repercussions for doing so.
I do not want praise for my work. What I want is for people to at least pretend to be civil. See, I'm schizophrenic. Among the many problems I struggle with in that is unusually high levels of aggression, and the occasional inability to discern certain things, which can obviously cause issues. Still, I work very,very hard to be civil both here on the forums, and in-game. It's something I struggle with in everything I write and do. From where I sit, many take the ability to be civil for granted, trading a little bit of courtesy with scathing derision for no apparent reason but that they can. I've never understood this about people, and it's a little frustrating.
At any rate, I've probably done enough damage here. I say sincerely that I am sorry for dragging this topic up from the depths, and whatever follows I probably deserve.
Honestly, I'm not too enthralled by the Dev Choice arcs. There's what, 1?, that's a Medium length. No Shorts or Very Shorts. And given the "Play <x> Dev Choice" badge series, makes playing the...rather bland IMO...DC arcs a pain. I haven't run across one that I'd like to play repeatedly.
Have there been any new ones in the last 2 weeks?
I haven't played any DC arcs yet. I prefer shorter ones as my time can be limited, plus if I get into an arc and start having trouble with getting wiped by custom mobs during mission one (this happened to me once, but not on a DC) I feel extra annoyed, not sure why.
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does anyone out there actually LIKE any of the DC arcs?
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Yup!
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I enjoyed a couple of them, and others I didn't. I didn't expect to enjoy all of them though. Subjective, after all. 
Live arcs: 517377 and 517381
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I've enjoyed some of the DC I've played, but most are horribly, horribly average. I haven't played all of them yet(mostly because I just can't bring myself to do it based on their bland descriptions), but I really hope some new, more deserving ones get in there.
And I can't wait for search functionality because I'm basically refusing to use those stupid tags, especially when I'm already fighting the 300 character limit.
Weird post. Not quite sure what you're after here. Could respond less monosyllabically if your questions and concerns were a bit more monosyllabic.
I find it interesting, though, to see such a rambling and incoherent post on the subject of trying to make sense of the relationship between MA author and audience - because that relationship itself is so incoherent.
With the ability for people to walk straight into our work and be submerged in it, to directly experience it in its totality, it's natural for us as authors to expect some kind of reciprocal communication - to be able to read their minds as they wander around inside ours. But we have to remember that we are not the observer in this relationship - we are the observed. We want to know what the eye of the beholder sees, but we are not beholders ourselves; we are the beheld.
Some have made it their work to create meaningful responses to an author's work that can then be observed by that author (and others), in the form of reviews. But we cannot expect that every audience member will take this responsibility upon themselves, or even most. It is presumptuous to expect it from anyone.
I've had the exact same problem with people running my arcs.
I don't play Dev Choice missions much at all anymore. I played some of them during beta and had no desire to play them again on live. Also many of my favorite DCs from beta didn't get to keep their status on live anyways.
The lack of tickets is part of the reason that I don't play them, but the other is that many of them are rather poor in my opinion. These are far from the "best of the best", many of them just got lucky in early beta and have been long surpassed by many non-DC arcs. Especially those on the SFMA list.
Many of the DCs would get no more than 3 stars from me and many of the other reviewers if you look at the sort of criteria that we tend to judge upon. They make all sorts of mistakes (lack of level ranges, lots of defeat alls, etc..) and it's even worse that they are frozen and cannot be fixed. Or at least if they can, the authors haven't bothered to do so. Some were broken in open beta and were never fixed before being brought live even!
It's also because of this frozen nature that I don't review or rate DC arcs. What really is the feedback going to accomplish for an arc that cannot be edited? What good is rating an arc that is set to be 5-star anyway no matter what? If the ratings griefers didn't exist (and I bet they target DC arcs anyway the same that they do with HoF arcs), I think it'd be very interesting to see what the public really thinks about the current DC choices.
The bad news is that indeed DCs are frozen. I have a lot of fixes I want to make to mine -- notably, ramping down the difficulty of the enemies, which became drastically overpowered after the patch changes -- but no ability to do so. I've sent a PM to Hero 1 requesting an unlock since my /tells have gone from "Had fun!" to "This is impossible!", but we'll see if the devs are willing to unlock for a 'non-critical' problem like that.
One positive? In I15, DC arcs will let you pick between normal drops and ticket drops. I know I for one prefer ticket drops; I'm in an SG with five-year vets sitting on vast piles of inf, and we rarely really IO the hell out, so we have low operating costs for our alts. Being able to snag exactly the items I want instead of money+shopping is terrific.
Global @Twoflower / MA Creator & Pro Indie Game Developer.
Mission Architect Works: DIY Laser Moonbase (Dev Choice!), An Internship in the Fine Art of Revenge (2009 MA Award Winner!) and many more! Plus Brand New Arcs for Issue 21!
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One positive? In I15, DC arcs will let you pick between normal drops and ticket drops. I know I for one prefer ticket drops; I'm in an SG with five-year vets sitting on vast piles of inf, and we rarely really IO the hell out, so we have low operating costs for our alts. Being able to snag exactly the items I want instead of money+shopping is terrific.
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Ah, I had misread the "Selectable rewards" part to mean that DC authors would have a selectable reward of some sort for having their arc tagged as such. That's...disappointing. More incentive for the runners of the arcs I suppose, but not really any for the writers. It's funny, I was beginning to think that there would be a silver lining to all this negative flak business in the form of said reward, figuring that I'd maybe get a silly custom pet or something along those lines.
To the question about DC arcs getting feedback/ratings; True, feedback doesn't really help us in the sense that we cannot do much about an arc that's broken, or seems short in some places, but the ratings provide a steady (if small) trickle of tickets to the writers of the arcs. For me, it's been the one saving grace of the whole debacle.
I tend to avoid DC arcs, as I feel them being published and praised from the get go gives them an unfair advantage to the rest of the stories.