Shorter Arcs getting more Play and more Ratings
By
Aura_Familia,
Posted on: 2009-05-15 13:43 in Mission Architect
I don't have a problem with shorts getting more playthroughs, because that's one of the great things in AE - don't have a lot of time at once? Do a quickie! (And I've been slammed for free time for a month, so that has huge sympathies with me.)
And I'm already likely to make an arc that's only as long as it needs to be, because it's so hard to make something that paces well for everybody, and I personally would otherwise err on the side of too long. (I mean, take a look at that sentence, for example!)
I do wish that there was a better way to designate Short/Med/Long, as I was looking around for a couple quickies to do this morning before heading out, and in general they're longer to play than my shortest arc, which is "Medium" because it uses three tiny maps.
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It makes sense that shorts get more playthroughs.
I do want people to play my arcs, but I am more concerned with making my arcs the best they can be. My stories are ambitious, so I end up using a lot of space.
I myself generally play shorter arcs when leading a team. I've got people waiting for me, I need to pick something fast, and if it turns out to be poorly written I don't want to have to quit and start over somewhere else.
I do find that longer arcs tend to be better vetted and better written. People with ambitious stories seem to be more perfectionistic about the final product.
So I tend to look for longer arcs when soloing. Unlike most people in the thread, I don't care about finishing in one sitting. Often, when I'm soloing a long arc, a friend will come online and we'll finish the arc together.
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It appears that here maybe far more people running very short and short arcs as compared to longer arcs.
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This isn't a big mystery. People are writing arcs that are too long.
Every good-story arc I've played through can be told in half as many missions, gaining brevity at no cost to content. Tools such as sequential objectives, optional objectives, front-middle-back placement, dialog, and clues keep the story moving inside missions, so you don't need a new mission for every new development.
In other words, the story shouldn't be told entirely by walls-o-text between missions from an obnoxiously omniscient contact. (Unless you're shooting for Dev's Choice.)
Agreed. I put up an arc of just you in a room fighting Statesman (1069, very short) and it has 61 reviews at 3.5+ stars.
The arc I spent 2 weeks on and off editing... sameish review score and only 16 ratings (1059, very long).
Happens. I put the states arc up as a joke, but if I want 250 stars one day I'll have to leave it up!
Thank you, City of Heroes, for giving me a superhero social network combined with amazingly smooth game play. Petitions signed with realistic expectations.
I don't like long arcs. I don't care much for story. I play this game for rewards. If I wanted a story, I'd read a book.
Only way I'd do a long arc is from actual dev content, and if I have time.
Overall, shorter arc = faster to gain rewards rather than sit there through a long arc.
This is, of course, just MY opinion and my preference.
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Happens. I put the states arc up as a joke, but if I want 250 stars one day I'll have to leave it up!
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Happened to me as well. I made a 4-mission story arc. I spent weeks working on it, designing it, tweaking it, and troubleshooting it.
I then made a silly mission about how my cats and my brother's cats would interact with each other if they were superheroes. It's a short arc, one mission, nothing but pure fluff.
Right now the short mission has roughly the same average (if not better) than my story-focused arc, and nearly twice as many ratings. I'm leaving it up until I eventually get "Living Legend" from it. (Only a bit under 2,100 more stars to go!)
Play my MA arcs!
Tracking Down Jack Ketch - ArcID #2701
Cat War! - ArcID #2788
My need to do actual arcs is so far overriding my need for badges. I think also as the novelty of MA wears off and people start using it less for badging and more for levelling, longer arcs may become more popular, especially as there are more and more ways to promote the ones we actually put effort into. I know I've been doing more of them, mostly ones I find through the forums and the SFMA tag.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play. A short arc that takes 15 minutes is going to get eight times as much play as a long arc that takes 2 hours, and that's just with people playing arcs randomly.
When they actually start demonstrating any kind of length bias, well Katie bar the door.
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)
Maybe if it was made more obvious that later missions in a longer arc give more tickets, it would give people randomly sifting through arcs some incentive to try the longer ones.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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Maybe if it was made more obvious that later missions in a longer arc give more tickets, it would give people randomly sifting through arcs some incentive to try the longer ones.
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I think it would also be good if instead of a hard 1500 ticket cap, they should shift it so that the longer missions have a larger cap.
I'm pretty sure that cap is per mission, not per arc. If it's per arc, it's shouldn't be. If it is per mission, the fact that people think it's per arc is problematic in and of itself, possibly stemming from the fact that "mission" and "arc" are so often used interchangeably when referring to the MA.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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I would say its the ticket nerf more than anything else. Why do a longer arc if you are going to max out on tickets? The benefit we had before with the extra ticket bonus that increased as the arc went on is basically worthless now.
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This is wrong. The ticket cap is per MISSION not per ARC. A longer arc will, by definition, net you more tickets on average than a shorter one.
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Originally Posted by eltonio
This is over the top mental slavery.
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Yeah, I think the fact that shorter arcs get more plays is primarily due to time constraints
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This seems likely.
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Originally Posted by eltonio
This is over the top mental slavery.
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Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play. A short arc that takes 15 minutes is going to get eight times as much play as a long arc that takes 2 hours, and that's just with people playing arcs randomly.
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Wait, that makes no sense. If all arcs are selected at random, short arcs will get picked no more often than long arcs. The only difference is how quickly they get finished and another arc randomly chosen.
Assuming all arcs are played to completion, people who choose randomly will statistically participate in just as many short arcs as long ones.
Assume that there are two types of arcs - Type A (that take 15 minutes to complete) and Type B (that take 2 hours to complete). Let's further assume that there are an equal number of Type A and Type B arcs. Assume 80 people selecting them randomly.
After 15 minutes, 40 people will have played a Type A (to completion) and 40 will have played (some of) a Type B.
Then the 40 who finished a Type A will (statistically speaking) evenly split between selecting a Type A and selecting a Type B.
So at the end of 30 minutes, 60 people will have played a Type A and 60 will have played a Type B (4 who started 30 minutes ago, and 2 who started 15 minutes ago).
Then the 20 who just finished their Type As will again split evenly between picking a Type A and a Type B -
So after 45 minutes, we'll have 70 who've played a Type A and 70 who've played a Type B (40 who started 45 minutes ago, 20 who started 30 minutes ago, and 10 who started 15 minutes ago).
And so forth.
Sorry, couldn't just let that slip past my mathematical fascism 
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I would say its the ticket nerf more than anything else. Why do a longer arc if you are going to max out on tickets? The benefit we had before with the extra ticket bonus that increased as the arc went on is basically worthless now.
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This is wrong. The ticket cap is per MISSION not per ARC. A longer arc will, by definition, net you more tickets on average than a shorter one.
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They should have made it explicit that longer arcs have greater ticket bonuses. People also need to stop confusing "arc" with "mission" and thinking that it is 1,500 tickets for the entire arc when it is 1,500 per mission inside the arc. The cap is reset with each mission. Reading comprehension is so poor these days.
As for the cap, the only time I've passed 1,500 in a single mission was on a 4 man team in a mission with over a dozen objectives and even then we only missed out on 50 tickets at most according to the overflow badges (which work when you're at the mission cap too, so that makes them a bit easier to get now I guess).
I've been testing this over the last few days. On an all-lieutenant outdoor map (the Ghost Falcon store-unlock map), I just about reach the ticket cap solo at the end of clearing the whole thing. Dual-boxing, I reach it in about 2/3s of the map. This makes no sense to me; I get that the number of critters on the map doubled, but there are also two teammates to split the rewards.
On an all-boss map, I reach the ticket cap solo in about 1/2 of a demon farm map. Dual boxing I hit it in 6-8 spawns.
Something definitely seems wonky about the way tickets scale with team size. I don't quite have enough data to say what is going wrong though.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
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Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play.
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Demand is just half of supply and demand.
If there were more short arcs written and fewer long arcs written, plays per arc would be more even between the short and long arcs. Thus my conclusion that people are writing arcs that are, in the aggregate, too long for the tastes of the playerbase.
Yeah well, you know what? I'm a player. I play long arcs. I prefer to play long arcs. It's easy to keep me interested for one mission, but if you can hold my interest throughout your five-mission epic, you've done a good job, and I think you should be rewarded with a play and a good rating.
If we're going to be catering to the tastes of the majority of the playerbase, I guess we should all be writing single-mission joke arcs full of Rikti, 5th Column and easy custom critters with cute costumes and funny bios. Since that seems to be where the tastes of the playerbase lie.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
For me to give a single-mission arc more than 3 stars it has to be DAMN good or very clever. There is only so much story that you can cram into a single mission and most of the single mission joke arcs are not very funny at all anyways.
Most of the single mission joke arcs are lazy. They're essentially paper missions, only instead of beating up a guy because he's evil or called you out you're beating him up because (insert joke here). They don't bother to go beyond that, thinking that the joke is enough to carry what is essentially a bunch of guys waiting to be beaten up.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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I agree short arcs will get more play. I think this is a direct result of the TF mechinism. I really have no idea why they had to make you be on a task force to run the missions but I see people not wanting to waste time quitting tfs and reforming them if they do one mission and feel the arc is not worth playing. If you could just drop the mission arc and remain teamed, you would have a better chance the team would do longer arcs in my opinion.
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Are you sure about this? I've invited people into MA missions before. I was in the middle of the mission and they logged in, I invited them, and they joined me in the mission. I thought it had been modified so you could invite people mid-mission/TF.
I also think that the size indicators for overall arcs can be slightly misleading sometimes. In my 3 mission arc, the first mission is ridiculously small since it takes place in the Lucky Six and the second mission is only an average sized yet overall it is listed as Long
Honestly I think the only real deciding factor on how often people will play your arc is whether or not the current overall is a 5. I ran my newest arc with 3 friends. They all 5 starred it. The next day it had shot up to 12 ratings and still at an overall of 5. Then it went up to 14 ratings and an overall of 4. Stopped getting ratings after that.
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Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play. A short arc that takes 15 minutes is going to get eight times as much play as a long arc that takes 2 hours, and that's just with people playing arcs randomly.
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Wait, that makes no sense. If all arcs are selected at random, short arcs will get picked no more often than long arcs. The only difference is how quickly they get finished and another arc randomly chosen.
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Hmm. Yeah, that's right.
I think I was approaching it more from a packing perspective - someone can either play 8 short arcs or 1 long arc, and if that's a random choice, then etc.
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)
Yeah, I think the fact that shorter arcs get more plays is primarily due to time constraints -- if you're not sure you have the time to commit to a longer arc, it's easier to run a short one. I've done that, though I'm always on the lookout for longer arcs that look fun/interesting.
Something I've started to do is search through arcs that have no ratings or plays -- it's ridiculous how many of those there are -- to see what looks good. I've got a whole list of arcs I'm going to try just from that. I figure the people who already have 999+ plays don't really need my input anyway.
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