Destructible Item Patch Invalidating Arcs

If this has been mentioned elsewhere, forgive me, but I couldn't find it. Anyway, I just logged in and found that both my arcs were unpublishable because the destructive items I'd selected had been unselected. I don't know if that affected the live version, but I had to reselect the original items and republish.

I'm sure it's a result of the patch that made destructable objects that used to cause damage just destruct now.

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The SOLUS Foundation - a Liberty and Pinnacle SG

"The Consequences of War" - Arcs # 227331 and 241496

It's in todays patch notes.

Only dev choice or guest author arcs still work with them.

Hami farms died today too.

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Yeah, well you're lucky you could just reselect them. The Generator is gone from the list. I was using it, and now it's gone.

It'll probably be back sometime after the Crey map with the tubes and the burning forest.

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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

Why would they take out the generator? It's the only "power source" item in the list and as such was easily the most useful of the destructible items.

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The Generator is gone?!!?!? You mean I gotta re-edit and re-publish my story-arc yet again? Sheesh... with the amount of adjustments we need to do for our published story-arcs, I'm starting to think there is some truth in saying NCSoft should now start paying us for maintaining our story-arcs in proper playable condition!

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati

[ QUOTE ]
Why would they take out the generator? It's the only "power source" item in the list and as such was easily the most useful of the destructible items.

[/ QUOTE ]

The only possibilities I can think of are
1) It was an oversight, when they replaced the regular destructibles with ones that don't affect players or enemies they forgot to replace the generator, or
2) They couldn't/didn't want to make one that doesn't blow up, so they just didn't.

Now that I think about it, is the small generator we get in MA used in any dev-created arcs? Or is it a scaled down version of the big generators the dev arcs use?

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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

I seem to recall it's used in Ambassador Kuhr'rect's arc. I could be mistaken though.

I can't believe they silently removed options... again. I don't think I was using any of the affected items, but it is an incredible PITA to have to re-edit arcs every patch. This is by far my biggest complaint about the AE, ranking far higher for me than anything related to farms.

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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

Ya I just reselected the object and republished my arc.

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Wonderful. My arc has a mission where you have to destroy generators that are powering a force field. I guess the force field is now going to have to be powered by crates, or maybe a clipboard or something else sensible.

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Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!

My arc Tailor Made has over 20 destructible objects (was trying for a mayhem mission-esque feel), so I spent a good portion of my evening resetting them and then testing. I also had a generator among them, so I had to replace that with something else. That was pretty annoying.

Anyway, I hope they re-add the generator. There's nothing else similar from a story perspective, so I imagine a lot of folks will have to make heavy changes to their arcs.

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I've already replaced the generators in my mission. Luckily for me, I originally never referred to them as "Generators", so it was relatively easy to replace them with something else. However, I feel really sorry for those of you who actually referred to "Generators" in your story-arc text fields. As you know, search-and-replace tools, or any other meaningful text editing tools aren't functional on an already published story-arc.

Here's another fine case where AE could've used some refinement. Maybe in I18 we'll get even better editing tools, but I do wonder, how many authors out there will have simply given up on their arcs by then...

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati

I wound up replacing them with unexploded Rikti bombs and just renaming and describing them as generators. Not perfect but better than an obelisk I suppose.

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Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!

And to think all of this could've been avoided had the Devs removed those objects from the list before even releasing AE...

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati

If it's the generators I'm thinking of, there may have been an issue with them completely blocking certain cave passages, making mission uncompletable. I remember there was a dev-created arc way back that had the same issue. Destructible items probably got reset because the list of available items changed.

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The patch notes actually state that certain destructible objects were pulled because they were affecting both players and enemies in unwanted ways; i.e. either buffing, debuffing, or generally doing damage when they blow up.

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati

[ QUOTE ]
If it's the generators I'm thinking of, there may have been an issue with them completely blocking certain cave passages, making mission uncompletable. I remember there was a dev-created arc way back that had the same issue.

[/ QUOTE ]

The ones in that dev-created arc were the huge ones from the Hess TF. The MA ones were much smaller. They were certainly smaller than some of the objects that were left in, like the truck and the dumpster.

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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

[ QUOTE ]
The patch notes actually state that certain destructible objects were pulled because they were affecting both players and enemies in unwanted ways; i.e. either buffing, debuffing, or generally doing damage when they blow up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Lots of stuff that buffed, debuffed, or did damage when it blew up was replaced by the same object that didn't. Most destructibles do damage. I don't know why the generator is so special.

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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

[ QUOTE ]
Lots of stuff that buffed, debuffed, or did damage when it blew up was replaced by the same object that didn't. Most destructibles do damage. I don't know why the generator is so special.

[/ QUOTE ]
Possibly because it would take some time to actually replace the object in the AE pool, and the Devs wanted to kill two exploits in one patch, one that was already widely used (Mitos) and one that possibly could've become a bigger problem once people put their minds to it (objects).

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The patch notes actually state that certain destructible objects were pulled because they were affecting both players and enemies in unwanted ways; i.e. either buffing, debuffing, or generally doing damage when they blow up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Lots of stuff that buffed, debuffed, or did damage when it blew up was replaced by the same object that didn't. Most destructibles do damage. I don't know why the generator is so special.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's probably an oversight. The fact that all of the destructible objects need to be reset makes me think that a likely scenario is that they just wiped the old list and put in a new list of the updated objects, which didn't have generators in it by accident.

By the way, already published arcs didn't become unplayable. What happens with live arcs with destructible objects, is that the destructible object just isn't there. You can complete the objective just by killing the enemies that are guarding the non-existant group.

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OK, but that's still incredibly lame.

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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

Yeah, that's even lamer than sticking the generator in a crate labeled "Generator. Do not blow up."

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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

I'd like my generator back, too. The 3rd mission in my arc was 'destroy the storm generator' ...sigh.

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