What's the downside to the AE thing?

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Also, if you level up in the AE, you'll miss a lot of badges and the accolade powers that come with them. You'll miss opening up Ouroboros and the Midnight Club and unlocking hidden contacts (redside) and TFs (blueside).

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ProTip for getting Oro without leaving the MA building:

"hey, can someone drop an Oro portal for me?"

Hop through and get the badge.

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But after you leave Ouroboros, you won't be in the AE building anymore. Then you'll have to, like, travel back to it. That's tooooooo haaaaaaaaard.

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Dang, hadn't thought of that!

=(

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It was such a great plan. It worked right up until it didn't.

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Load up an AE mission, use oro portal, then use mission teleporter. Solved.

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Don't forget, you have to leave the building to level up.

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Don't I know you???

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The ever-common 'Oh, I'll come with you on this mission, since you'll never beat up [Archvillain!] without my help!' contacts are downright obnoxious, though.

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This happens once in the last mission of the arc...but I don't think I overdid it any. It's not because you NEED help. You can always send feedback.

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Hmm, I'm guilty of this as well. But I did it because I didn't want to be accused of having a lazy contact who wouldn't do things for herself - which honestly, some of the dev arc contacts totally are. I didn't realize I was contributing to a cliche.

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It's more that a lot of people use it to go 'OH LOOK AT HOW SUPERBLY POWERFUL MY CHARACTER IS.' Just like putting the same character in as an extreme/extreme enemy archvillain.

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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.

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It's more that a lot of people use it to go 'OH LOOK AT HOW SUPERBLY POWERFUL MY CHARACTER IS.' Just like putting the same character in as an extreme/extreme enemy archvillain.

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My arc doesn't even have an EB in it...so I'm not guilty of this one at least. I wanted it to be more story driven.

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That said, I'll stand behind some of the use of their own characters as the leaders of filler factions. When done well, it actually gives a face to them instead of just 'oh, hey, here are these other guys that need beat up.' (Which is kind of how the Knives of Artemis always come off in the canon material, to me.) The ever-common 'Oh, I'll come with you on this mission, since you'll never beat up [Archvillain!] without my help!' contacts are downright obnoxious, though.

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My beef with people making stories pretty much about their characters isn't the very notion that someone would do that. Heck, that's the first thing I thought to do when I heard about the Architect, though I never got around to it. My beef is that, more often than not, these either feature as cameos that, while it's OBVIOUS they're meaningful, you have NO idea who they are, or as entities with entirely too much story behind them to put in a five-mission arc, which makes it feel like there's a whole lot of backstory going on that would be terribly relevant that you're not getting at all. Mary Sue "it's all about MEEE" don't even blip on my radar most of the time.

The problem is that most of us who've been here for several years have a loads and loads of characters, many of whom are interconnected in an intricate web of correlations that's probably never going to make sense to anyone we don't share a consciousness with, or unless we spend a few years publishing expanded universe novels. And it's even worse when you compound that with people who come with 20 years of PnP or own comic book characters baggage. This isn't bad in and of itself, of course, but when people try to excerpt from this to form a short story, invariably you end up with so many hanging pointers that you spend half the time wondering if this or that isn't meaningful and if understanding it won't make the story make more sense.

When people try to tell tales of their fiction, they always seem to make it over-complicated. When you meet an important-looking, plot-relevant character who keeps laying down strange references, you can BET that's one of the author's title characters.

I've seen people try to make their stories episodic, so that they can spread their arcs over more missions and better tell a story, and I can't say I disagree with that approach. But five missions just isn't enough to tell a long, complicated story. Yet it seems that that's exactly what any arc which isn't a joke, a farm or a string of paper missions does. Sometimes I feel that people should make up brand new characters to put in their story arcs, just so that they aren't burdened with years of backstory.

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Sometimes I feel that people should make up brand new characters to put in their story arcs, just so that they aren't burdened with years of backstory.

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I put two allies in the last mission of one of my arcs to give a little extra help to teams that spawned the final boss at Elite Boss level. One is a Spines / Regen Scrapper to help with a little killing. I discovered that she has scrapperlock, so she doesn't last long if she manages to get ahead of the team. She is based off of one of my existing characters, and plays pretty true to form.

The other ally is an Emp / Rad Defender who was created just for the mission. After I finished making the arc, I decided that I liked the character design and capsule description enough that I wanted to flesh her out and create her on Live. This is how Amber Green came into existence on Liberty.

While there aren't a lot of my existing characters who I am planning to put into my story arcs, I see the second scenario playing out quite a bit as I build more story arcs.

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New story arcs coming soon (ARC IDs will be aded when I finish the arc):
So, you want to join the Hellions? (level 1-14 Villainous arc)
Sparks & Steel (level 5-20 Heroic arc)
and
So you want to join the Skulls? (level 1-14 Villainous arc)

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That it doesn't do that in the slightest? Seriously, where do people keep finding these Architect arcs that exceed developer-made content in terms of quality?

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Let me turn this around. Where do you find developer made content that takes your breath away with its wonderful storytelling?

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Compared to the "take your breath away" MA Arcs? Oh wait, there aren't any.

While they don't take my breath away (nothing really does in any game anywhere), some of the stories I really enjoyed have been:

The Imperious Task Force
The Mender Tesseract Task Force
The Diviner Maros "Cult of the Shaper" arc
The Technician Naylor "Automatic Villainy" arc
The Mender Lazarus Task Force
Veluta Lunata "An Arachnos Ghost Story" arc
Doc Buzzsaw's "Die by the freak!" arc
Marshall Brass "Aeon Conspiracy" arc
Serpent Drummer "Dreams of Peace and War" arc

And I found Vernon von Grun pretty entertaining throughout all his arcs (even if I did get sick of just being up DE)

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There are a few issues with MA that can hamper good story arcs. Firstly, the file size limit is too small. Maybe 150k would have been better...but 100k is all we got.

Secondly, there is no 'Ask about this contact' option. Why?? One of the best ways to learn about COX lore is to read the story of your contact. They don't give us that option and it forces you to use precious resource space in the missions to say some stuff about the contact that you're working with.

As an example of this. My contact, Char-Spryte is a young heroine who asks for your help. She's been an active hero in Paragon City for a little under six months. She become a partner and love-interest of a hero named Marrow-Spike. They both get help sometimes from some fellow heroes (N-Pulse and Darkmourne).

I could have written that kind of stuff easily into the 'Ask about this contact' space...but it doesn't exist. So I had her mention them in the arc...more so Marrow-Spike...who she wants at first to keep out of her current crisis. I don't have any cameos by them, by the way.

My point is that limiting the resources we have to work with, helps limit what we can do and say with MA arcs. Dev story arcs can be as long winded as they need to, in order to tell a story...but ours can't be.

I'll also point out that when I posted against the MA back before it released...you were arguing against me vehemently...now you're the one saying you keep away from it. And I'm the one saying its not THAT bad...but its still the cart before the horse in my mind that the devs have released it before making the core game deeper.

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Compared to the "take your breath away" MA Arcs? Oh wait, there aren't any.

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Well its odd...because the very people who you say are creating vastly superior stuff are stamping Dev Choice on quite a few of those absolute stinkers. Of course you're probably going to say they are either all lying about the fact that they enjoyed some player made stuff or that the players who got Dev Choice have sucked up to the devs in some form or fashion.

For the record I enjoyed several of the storylines you listed in your post. But I still wouldn't say its impossible for a player to create a story that is as good some of them.

The Neverwinter Nights community had several people that produced stuff good enough to get them job offers from Bioware. I find it hard to believe that we don't have one decent storyteller in all of the COX community. Of course, that's one decent storyteller that's up to your standards.

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Compared to the "take your breath away" MA Arcs? Oh wait, there aren't any.

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Well its odd...because the very people who you say are creating vastly superior stuff are stamping Dev Choice on quite a few of those absolute stinkers.

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I too am perplexed at the criteria for dev's choice. However, that doesn't suddently change my opinion of the content I've already experienced and enjoyed in the game.

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Of course you're probably going to say they are either all lying about the fact that they enjoyed some player made stuff or that the players who got Dev Choice have sucked up to the devs in some form or fashion.

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I wouldn't even begin to speculate in such a fashion. I have no idea why the devs selected those missions for devs choice, and unless they choose to tell use, any speculation we could engage in is purely academic.

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For the record I enjoyed several of the storylines you listed in your post. But I still wouldn't say its impossible for a player to create a story that is as good some of them.

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Sure it's possible. But it's also unlikely. And when it does happen it's going to be rare. The vast bulk of the MA is never going to rival the rest of the game. A handful of player created missions that are as engaging as the existing content isn't about to usurp the rest of the game.

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The Neverwinter Nights community had several people that produced stuff good enough to get them job offers from Bioware.

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I remember. I also remember that they were few and far between

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I find it hard to believe that we don't have one decent storyteller in all of the COX community.

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I don't think anyone ever argued otherwise.

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The point was that it seems the system is too good, to the point there's no reason to do anything else. There should be a clear benefit to NOT leveling via AE. Like not having to run all over to get to your next mission is a clear benefit of doing AE.

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Here's one downside to AE:

I played a dark/arrow defender over the weekend. Monday evening I was 28 and I wanted to make 30 (extra costume slot!) When I didn't find a team right away, I figured I'd go to Atlas and find an AE team. (Oh yeah, this is on Freedom... boy is Atlas Park a zoo on that server especially).

Anyway, someone I'd teamed with in Talos before asks if I want to join an AE team. Perfect, right? I know he's not just running a PL farm.

Then he assembles a team of varying levels, and picks a mission that doesn't auto-sidekick everyone up. Oh, and he doesn't have mentors/sidekicks figured out, and the math doesn't work, and anyway I'm five levels above the level of the mobs.

So we finish the mission quickly and he picks something better, although now we're facing high level Nemesis on a mostly 20's team and it hardly matters that we're auto-sk'd up, it's still a very difficult mission for a relatively low level team to handle. It takes a lot of time and I finish the evening without having gained even half a level.

Last night I logged in, and after a bit decided to try AE in Atlas again (I don't learn quick do I?) The spam is ridiculous. I join one team but the leader drops almost immediately, apparently due to dc issues because of massive lag. About five minutes later the same guy invites me again. He gets a full team, then asks if anyone knows a good mission to run.

>.>

Things do not go well, he picks a mission that does not auto-sk everyone, the level spreads are impossible, and the team falls apart. He's supposed to reform the team but I never hear from him again.

Another team forms. Guy goes to pick a mission and finds out it no longer exists. He was apparently looking for his favorite exploitable farm mission anyway, although he hadn't warned anyone of his intentions. He asks if anyone else knows a good mission... silence.

So yeah, he picks something at random that has level 54 bosses and we're auto-sk'd to 50, but with low levels not prepared for what we're facing. That team fell apart too.

After that I had an epiphany. Even though I had my lft flag up and comments in search saying I like mission teams, no mission team was probably going to add me if they saw I was hanging out in Atlas. I moved on to Brickstown, found a team immediately, and gained 2 levels before the night was over. Sure it was just running radio missions, but I had fun and gained exp, and that's all I wanted. ^_^

Moral of the story is, one of the downsides to AE is all the people who don't know how to form a proper team or find an appropriate mission. The auto-sidekick feature is a big boon to teams with varying levels if you know what you're doing, but a lot of people don't, and a lot of people just stand around in Atlas spamming in broadcast, which gets VERY old after a while.

I haven't tried forming my own mission teams via AE, so I'm unsure how easy it is to find people who A) want to do AE and B) aren't just looking for a farm.

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my lil RWZ Challenge vid

Actually, I was in AE the other day and saw a group of people standing around talking in local/broadcast. There was a Warshade there who was happily proclaiming that he didn't know how to form a team. Scary to think of teaming with someone like that by accident.

In any case, for those of us like me, who only solo or team with SG mates and known friends exclusively, there really isn't a big downside.

I tend to think that XP should have been slashed down significantly for AE. Maybe at about half the usual rate. Since you are supposedly playing it for the good missions/stories.

Then people who are realizing they are spending all their 'life' in MA buildings may be encouraged to step outside and find a real contact or run a TF/SF now and then. Meh...its just speculation on my part.

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