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The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
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Highly productive post there. I shall interpret this as a reverential silence befitting my godlike hubris.
Would be a cool feature if the MA arcs could scale a bit differently depending on the team makeup and enhancement levels present.
Of course, this would be a lot of work, people with IOed 50s would probably not notice a change, and people would complain about the balance for exactly 134678614 minutes before moving on to something else.
Sarcasm aside, I agree with your initial point, making things more of a challenge for 50s makes the MA missions way hard while still leveling, and might need a tweak somewhere.
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Designers, stop trying to challenge me.
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Maybe the designers are trying to challenge someone else, who actually wants to be challenged?
I think there is a huge liability in the way the system is currently set up. There's no way to specify that your arc is to be played by level 40+ characters and not level 10s other than putting text in the description and crossing your fingers. And the Fortunata settings aren't sufficient to differentiate them; a mission that's playable at challenge level 1 for a level 10 character is probably going to be a cakewalk for a level 40 character on challenge level 5.
The devs actually designed level 40+ critters independently of the level 10 critters in a given faction for exactly this reason. MA mission designers don't have that leeway.
There's also another problem in that the rewards don't scale with the intended challenge. Critters designed for level 10 characters give the same rewards that critters designed for level 40+ characters give. In that environment, there's basically no rewards-balance reason to ever use anything other than "standard" for all your customs. Doing so means that players playing your arcs are essentially paying a reward-rate penalty to enjoy your story, which definitely sits badly with me.
I have a few thoughts about how to address this, but I'm not sure how feasible any of them are. I'm beginning to think the MA was just released too early.
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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Short version: Lengthen your timers, tone down your Mary Sues, and actually put stories into your story arcs.
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no
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More reverential silence for my godlike hubris? Excellent.
I don't think it would kill you to slap a "HARD" into your mission description, at least. Cake lovers and pie lovers can co-exist peacefully, but there's no reason to be putting your baked goods under a sheet and tricking the pie lovers into eating cake.
Arc #41077 - The Men of State
Arc #48845 - Operation: Dirty Snowball
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Highly productive post there. I shall interpret this as a reverential silence befitting my godlike hubris.
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Well, I can agree with one word of that post.
I actually have more to say about this though, this has been something I've been thinking over for a bit now.
The other day my first arc (see sig) got a feedback about it "not being soloable for anything less than a tanker", which struck me as untrue, since there are no AVs or even EBs in it. The player had mentioned that "after the last patch, the bosses are too tough" so I ran it through again with my 50th level sloppily-built DB/Nin Stalker (with IOs but nothing ridiculous like Numina or purpled out), on difficulty level 1, and even without using my AS it went by very quickly. I kicked it up to difficulty 3 and still made it through without going to half HP more than once. So who knows what the player was using, what difficulty level they were set at, etc.
So this set me to wondering about this whole issue. Maybe some people haven't gotten the idea that they can't run these missions at the same difficulty levels they do regular content, maybe they hate the idea of having to admit their builds aren't so uber or something and toning it down. There certainly are cases of people building bosses that are way tough, I was fighting some with an MM this morning that rezzed and drained End that were just too much (still survived them all though . Like normal combat, some builds or ATs or level ranges are just going to flat out be BAD at facing certain types of foes in MA. I kind of think it's up to the player to know their limits and not the MA creator's fault for not tailoring the arc to them. If any squishie could solo an arc, not many would be much of a challenge, which is what some people are creating and playing them for (not me, but some do).
I suppose you could fault the devs though for not allowing us a way to scale down an arc far enough so that "any squishie can play this", if that's what you want to create.
There are some people, like me, who only care for the mission architect for its challenges. The stories are sadly irrelevant to gameplay, and the rewards are fleeting. If I don't have to think for a moment to succeed, I just don't give a [censored].
Although, I'll note that for the brief periods that I've published missions, I noted their unusually high difficulty. Anyone that doesn't play through his/her arc with more than one character to determine the difficulty is doing the targeted audience a disservice.
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I suppose you could fault the devs though for not allowing us a way to scale down an arc far enough so that "any squishie can play this", if that's what you want to create.
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Nah, but they do need to automatically compute a relative difficulty level and recommended number of players to complete an arc. The presence of EBs and AVs, ambushes, mobs that are hard or extreme, problematic power sets, etc., should be incorporated into a general difficulty level and a recommended minimum team size.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a ballpark estimate that people will get used to over time. Yeah, some character will be able to solo AVs and everything you can throw at them. The estimate should be made for the missions as designed, ignoring any modifications made for team size and challenge level. Players will know this adjust accordingly.
Then we need to be able to search for missions based on this difficulty and minimum team size. This, along with predefined keywords of some sort, will really help people zero in on missions they will have fun playing.
Well, search engine revamp on the way at least. Sadly, we don't know exactly WHAT until I15 goes to beta.
Dec out.
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So this set me to wondering about this whole issue. Maybe some people haven't gotten the idea that they can't run these missions at the same difficulty levels they do regular content, maybe they hate the idea of having to admit their builds aren't so uber or something and toning it down. There certainly are cases of people building bosses that are way tough, I was fighting some with an MM this morning that rezzed and drained End that were just too much (still survived them all though . Like normal combat, some builds or ATs or level ranges are just going to flat out be BAD at facing certain types of foes in MA. I kind of think it's up to the player to know their limits and not the MA creator's fault for not tailoring the arc to them. If any squishie could solo an arc, not many would be much of a challenge, which is what some people are creating and playing them for (not me, but some do).
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Soooo TRUE!
I couldn't agree with this sentiment more. Well put sir.
I'd just wish more people would put eb/av warnings in their description. That way my 50s can go, oh a crunchy, and my lowbies know not to waste their time.
And if you're designing an arc specifically for low levels, think twice before using custom critters. They're just way stronger than the regular low level mobs and low level chars often don't have the tools or the slotting to deal with them.
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So this set me to wondering about this whole issue. Maybe some people haven't gotten the idea that they can't run these missions at the same difficulty levels they do regular content, maybe they hate the idea of having to admit their builds aren't so uber or something and toning it down. There certainly are cases of people building bosses that are way tough, I was fighting some with an MM this morning that rezzed and drained End that were just too much (still survived them all though . Like normal combat, some builds or ATs or level ranges are just going to flat out be BAD at facing certain types of foes in MA. I kind of think it's up to the player to know their limits and not the MA creator's fault for not tailoring the arc to them. If any squishie could solo an arc, not many would be much of a challenge, which is what some people are creating and playing them for (not me, but some do).
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Soooo TRUE!
I couldn't agree with this sentiment more. Well put sir.
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Well, the problem I have is not that I expect the MA missions to be playable at the same level as PVE missions - its that I have NO way of telling thier difficulty, whatever is in the description. I do like playing close to the edge and with PVE missions I can judge where that is fairly well whether I am paying my scrapper, mastermind or blaster. In the MA I will run one mission that is a walk in the park at level 4 and then the next one will kick my [censored] even at level 2 and since I have to run out to adjust my mission level every time I figure that out it means I have a choice of playing at level 1 and being bored most of the time (except for the occaisonal deadly at L1 mission :-) or spending a lot of time dieing, resetting my mission level, then possibly being bored if I guessed wrong this time.
Also - a mission that is a walk in the park for a tank and reasonably balanced for a stalker could easily by death to a blaster, controller or other squishy. This is one problem with custom content - since you can't know what sets the custom content has you won't know if they are going to be immune to your controls (totally butchering controllers/dominators) or dish out a ton of ranged damage (killing basters faster than they can kill back) until you go in the mission and die - frequently in a single volley, which is frustrating.
They could fix the first problem simply by putting a field analyst/fateweaver in the mission room (why they haven't, I don't know - they actually provide easier access to inspirations which means you can burn through an entire tray per mission if you want to - but you can't reset your mission level). The second problem is not so easily addressable although at this point I pretty much avoid missions that are all custom mobs.
Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13
Designers, stop trying to challenge me. There's a little thing called a Fortunata I can use to alter my challenge level. But your "challenging" all-boss spawns are barely a speed-bump to my DM/SD Brute, while they murder the heck out of my lvl 10 controller. A superbly built and IO'ed character can do anything sane this game can throw out; anything built to challenge that character will mutilate everyone else.
Short version: Lengthen your timers, tone down your Mary Sues, and actually put stories into your story arcs.