Mission Architect Bugs and Problems list

Nobody has mentioned this yet so I will: EBs are now being treated as bosses for spawning purposes, and will show up in regular spawns unless they're specifically flagged "Don't Auto-spawn." If this is WAI it's a bad idea.

I didn't see this mentioned, but earth assault for custom critters deals far more damage with the stone melee powers than the versions in stone melee. For example, at level 50 an archvillain's seismic smash will deal 1715.58 damage if the critter has stone melee, but it will deal 3113.75 damage if it has stone assault. The jump in damage is a different percentage for different critter ranks, with bosses gaining about a 50% increase in damage and archvillains gaining roughly an 80% increase in damage over stone melee. (Don't quote me on that, I'm not the best mathematician.) It looks like they somehow got the wrong damage scale.

With the elimination of various exploits and the introduction of the new difficulty options, ticket limits of less than 1500 on smaller maps should be removed. I did a mission at +1/x8 with bosses on the map V_Warehouse_30_Layout_11 and reached the limit at about 260 tickets. This was a typical Freakshow mission (arc #232253) with some nasty custom bosses at the end. I hit the limit early on and didn't realize it until I was in the middle of fighting the bosses.

The ticket caps and experience limitations are a serious impediment for people who like to run new and different stories and still get reasonable rewards. I have no problem with caps to avoid abuses, but if I pick any arc at random I have no idea whether I'll hit the ticket cap early or run into custom mobs that give little or no experience.

Giving us the ability to set our solo team size indicates the intent for us to garner more rewards for more risk, yet other parts of the system haven't been adjusted to reflect this.

The extreme variability in the rewards is likely one reason players avoid arcs they haven't tried, and always run the same farms.

If these changes are considered to be too prone to exploits, then every mission should be marked to indicate whether a lower ticket limit is in effect, and whether there are custom opponents that give less than 75% of standard experience.

Yes, these indicators would be the kiss of death for an arc. But more importantly, they give authors the tools to know whether their mission needs to be adjusted to give adequate rewards.

I find the number of tickets you get is insanely high to start with. They should rather lower that, then the limits will be fine.
Ever compared AE tickets amounts to normal content's Reward Merits?

Well those of us who like rewards but don't feel like running the same mission over and over again DO care about reward merits and AE tickets.

Developer-created content is finite. AE content is not.

AE tickets can't be compared to reward merits. They are not the same thing.

BUG with ALL CUSTOM AV'S (regardless of flight) AND "Lore/In-game" AV's that have flight.

-Even when set to do not flee based on health or enemy defeat...they all seem to run, and run like hell. This was not this bad before i16, now it seems out of control. I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, because it's definitely a bug.

About those timed missions... http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=196741

Enemies that are set not to auto-spawn, are spawning anyways.

In fact, I have a full faction. 2 mins, 2 LT, 2 bosses, and 1 special boss, who is set to not auto-spawn. In an ambush, ONLY the special boss appears.

Can we get the damn name bug fixed already? I'm tired of some of my arcs having the wrong author name because I didn't know about the bug when I went to edit them. Heck, even some of the new DCs are effected by it, I hope for them that it won't be permanent.

Some bugs I've noticed (This are finicky and really only show up if you're trying to do some really advanced stuff in the MA, so they probably don't affect too many people but it would be nice to see them fixed anyway):

-Allies set to "Do Nothing" or "Wander" will follow the player if the player runs out of range, then runs back and "Rescues" them again. They should continue to follow the behaviour they're set to rather than defaulting to follow after the first time. Something additional that would be nice is if allies set to "Do Nothing" would continue to loop their animation after being rescued - currently if they have a "Looping" animation, they'll keep doing it as normal before being rescued, but afterwards they'll go through one cycle and then reset to the default animation - despite the fact that they're still just standing there (And it's not like you could exploit this for exp since hostile/betrayal allies don't give any exp).

-This isn't so much a bug as a design decision (And part if it might be a bug, but it's kind of a good bug so please don't fix it or you'll break half my arcs :P) - The way the text input fields in the MA seem to work is they just stop letting you enter data when you hit the character cap, but you can still use right-clicking to enter formatting and break the cap. The arc still publishes fine because it seems that for publishing purposes, only visible characters are counted towards the character limit on specific text fields - that's the good part, don't fix that (And it's not that the count itself is broken, because the arc WILL be invalidated if you use more visible characters than the cap allows - so again, please leave this as-is, it's a really nice feature for people like me who use heavy formatting)! The part that I think should be fixed is that since publishing ignores formatting when it comes to the 1000 character limit on text fields (1000 is just an example number), editing those fields should ignore formatting as well; so that if we do "Break the cap" with text formatting, we can still edit the text without having to erase all the formatting first to bring it down below the cap.

-This is a weird one, but escorts/mobs set to "Pacifist" AI behavior (i.e. they can be damaged, but can't fight back) will charge into melee range with enemy mobs - as if they're trying to attack them but since their AI doesn't allow them to use any powers, they don't. For escorts it actually makes them a real pain to keep alive, and for mobs (Okay so you can't set mobs to pacifist, but you can make a hostile escort/ally and set them to that), it's just kind of weird. I've got a two-fold suggestion for this one:
#1) Mobs set to "Pacifist" should treat all other mobs as "Untargetable", so they'll still follow their AI behaviour of following the player but won't charge at enemy mobs like they've got some kind of death wish.
#2) As a corollary, they should also have their fleeing behaviour disabled so that they won't immediately start running away because they're being attacked and can't fight back.

Not sure if this was covered or not, I had expereinced it some time ago but haven't been back to MA until last week.

Sometimes, even if the character has no recipes on them, they can not roll random recipes. An error message saying "recipe inventory is full" comes up. As a work around, sometimes you can roll an inspiration then go to roll a recipe. Note that even though you waste 20 tickets on an inspiration, this only sometimes works.

It seems like the longstanding target lock of allies on Oranbega crystals has been broken.

I ran an arc last night and had no problems leading an ally past beneficial and baneful crystals.

...though I was running Maneuvers and Tactics at the time. It may have been something in one of them and not a global fix.

Looks like we can add the "Smooth caves" set to the list of maps with reversed "back" and "middle" spawn locations. Also, according to someone (sorry, can't remember who) on the MA Arc Finder channel, the Longbow set also has this problem (not surprising since they're basically reskinned tech maps).

Another problem I ran into using a "smooth cave" map, not sure if it's exclusive to them: The count for "Boss" objectives counted "any detail" spawn points, but did not go down if I used those points for captives or allies. For example, if the map had 6 "boss" points and 6 "any detail" points it would allow 12 bosses....but if I filled 3 of the "any" points with captives, the editor still said I could place 12 bosses.

The problem with "back" and "middle" spawn points reversing seems to be spreading. This weekend I encountered it with a map that I know spawned properly a few months ago (Council Robot factory). In fact, I haven't run into a map lately that didn't have this problem.

Sometimes when I'm composing the arc's text, I get second thoughts about chunks of it - "this needs to go after the mission accept, she needs to tell them this before she warns them about the sandwich, that chunk of text needs to go on mission 3 not 4", etc. So I cut and paste that chunk to wherever I want it, then go back and highlight the now-redundant text and hit delete.

Use to be that was that - text gone. Twice today I did that and it deleted all the text in that window not highlighted. And of course we don't have a Control-Z function.

This may have been just a one-time bug or something with my system, but after having it happen to me twice, I quit tempting fate and backspaced over any text I wanted to delete.

I haven't been playing a lot and certainly haven't been working on my MA arcs like I feel I should, so this seems new to me and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen it.