MA: I weep metaphorical tears of despair
By
3dent,
Posted on: 2009-04-10 24:12 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Just think of it simple: it will only get worse.
I think the majority of players do not know you dont have to publish a story in order to play it with a team. The rating will probably make it slightly worse, not everyone is a perfect rating-giver and its always based on personal flavor.
I play my own ones, i play the ones my team offers. That is just enough to keep you busy, unless you want to dig through thousands of missions, where someone has made a very very good arc but yet got blown over by the trashload of low-quality submissions.
50)Sinergy X/(50)Mika.
(50)MaceX/(50)Encore
Sign the petition, dont let CoH go down! SIGN!
But we can work to improve this state of affairs by reviewing and rating. 
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But we can work to improve this state of affairs by reviewing and rating.
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So long as the feedback gets through...
...oops, wrong thread.
Personally I can't see how the devs are going to do any kind of fair "devs picks" for players. Some of the best stories are going to be languishing in limbo for a very long time just because people aren't going to be able to find them. There will be a lot of 5 star missions played regularly as teams won't want to take a chance on an unrated mission (unless it was created by a team member), but there will be some real diamonds in the dross with zero ratings because people are too lazy to actually rate a mission or they are never found.
I've decided not to create any missions. I have the type of personality that doesn't cope well with being ignored and the idea that I can spend many many hours creating something to the best of my ability then having it sit unplayed and unstarred fills me with horror. There isn't even any point in waiting a few months till the novelty wears off as the problem will only increase. If there are 20+ pages of arcs on the first day of release I dread to thing how much dross there will be to sift through to find the nuggets of gold in six months time.
MA = the BASE AND GAME KILLER!
Yesterday my base got "map failed to start" messages.
Remember reading a GM will respond when you send petitions now = BS.
Today my base did "start" you know what I found when I got in? :
A small empty room!
Hundreds of millions in inf for Purple IO's and top end IO's all gone.
"Help" channel gets a broken message.
"Request" channel along with bug reports and petitions get Ignored = I'm just loving the hell out of I14 and MA!
Brutes: Doc O'Bay (yup, was me lvl2-48) Doc O'Bay Jr., Sihing, Belphanior, Mr. Lich & Joker's Wylde MMs, Rad'Man Corr, Lockup Dom, Suicide King Stalker, Lord Florentine DB/WP Brute, Tygercide Scrapper......Scrapper?? what the heck is he doing here???
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But we can work to improve this state of affairs by reviewing and rating.
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Can we really do it by rating?
The number at the side of the rating stars is the number of ratings, not the number of times played, or the number of players who played it.
So the worst we can do to excrement is to give it just 1 star. Unless it is petitionable, which is a different matter.
Now if I see an arc with a single rating of 1 star should I avoid it if I'm being fair to the author and myself? Not really, IMO
You cannot please everyone all the time and so a single one star could be the one person in a 100 who hates an otherwise univerally adored arc...
So how many people do need to rate and 1 star the pap? And given how much there appears to be, how long will that take?
Maybe we look the other way - at 5 starring really good arcs... we still need to wade through the mire to find them. If we go off a few limited suggestions (review threads etc) then only a few arcs will get found and reviewed and popularised. The other good arcs will still be left amongst the silage.
And how do we use ratings to find the arcs with general appeal amongst the arcs that got 7 5 star ratings just because a full team of 8 all played each others arcs and rated them 5 stars??
The best way is really to try and stop drivel being published in the first place...
I'd almost be up for a minor fee to allow publishing an arc just to act as a barrier to entry to dissuade people from publishing without forethought... but that would be very wrong and would also dissuade the creators who (whether I 'like' their works or not) do actually try to put some thought into their creations.
By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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Now remove all the ones where the publisher* shows a complete lack of imagination and can't even be bothered to make it look like they care and I guess we'd be down to about 10% left.
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Well that's just Sturgeon's law for you. And we've got an entire unfiltered slushpile right in front of us hitting in a tidal wave.
It going to take time, and yes better search/categorisation/review/word of mouth tools that we currently don't have ('this arc author recommends...'). And yes, possibly there isn't an actual feasible solution.
In the meantime presumably the initial rush will die down a little as everyone hit's their 3 arc limit, and we each invdividually get bored with making things in MA and go and do something else, or don't get bored, but start having to replace our initial sucky arcs with ones at least we ourselves think are better.
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I cite this
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Bah, beaten to the punch.
A Penny For Your Thoughts #348691 <- Dev's Choice'd by Dr. Aeon!
Submit your MA arc for review & my arcs thread
Anyone else play the Lionhead game "The Movies"? Same thing happened but after a while it sorted itself out.
Then again that had a better interface though.
It's not running away. It's advancing in reverse!
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Anyone else play the Lionhead game "The Movies"? Same thing happened but after a while it sorted itself out.
Then again that had a better interface though.
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You mean the crappy stories or the destroying of the Bases?
Brutes: Doc O'Bay (yup, was me lvl2-48) Doc O'Bay Jr., Sihing, Belphanior, Mr. Lich & Joker's Wylde MMs, Rad'Man Corr, Lockup Dom, Suicide King Stalker, Lord Florentine DB/WP Brute, Tygercide Scrapper......Scrapper?? what the heck is he doing here???
Crappy stories.
It's not running away. It's advancing in reverse!
I suspect your despair will be short lived
Many people will throw together and publish a dogpile just to see how it works. They will then try their own arc and a few other equally poorly thought out arcs and quickly lose interest - especially when badges get awarded so they have "done what they needed to do."
They'll then go back to their normal game.
The creative types who actually have something to offer will persevere and hone their craft and the percentage of "good" arcs to the dogpile norm will increase until there's a pretty good quality to a "significant proportion" of the published MA arcs.
Of course this could just be wishful thinking and I might be wossnaming in the wind
Thelonious Monk
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MA = the BASE AND GAME KILLER!
Yesterday my base got "map failed to start" messages.
Remember reading a GM will respond when you send petitions now = BS.
Today my base did "start" you know what I found when I got in? :
A small empty room!
Hundreds of millions in inf for Purple IO's and top end IO's all gone.
"Help" channel gets a broken message.
"Request" channel along with bug reports and petitions get Ignored = I'm just loving the hell out of I14 and MA!
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I'm confused what has the destruction of your base got to do with mission architect (in the context of the original topic) people writing bad missions aren't going to destroy a base.
Sure, great ideas: keep making more, then when the servers that can't handle it and the memory is all eaten up and Your Bases are gone or the game even fails to start then maybe ppl will see MA has more issues than just crappy storytelling.
Brutes: Doc O'Bay (yup, was me lvl2-48) Doc O'Bay Jr., Sihing, Belphanior, Mr. Lich & Joker's Wylde MMs, Rad'Man Corr, Lockup Dom, Suicide King Stalker, Lord Florentine DB/WP Brute, Tygercide Scrapper......Scrapper?? what the heck is he doing here???
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
MA = the BASE AND GAME KILLER!
Yesterday my base got "map failed to start" messages.
Remember reading a GM will respond when you send petitions now = BS.
Today my base did "start" you know what I found when I got in? :
A small empty room!
Hundreds of millions in inf for Purple IO's and top end IO's all gone.
"Help" channel gets a broken message.
"Request" channel along with bug reports and petitions get Ignored = I'm just loving the hell out of I14 and MA!
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm confused what has the destruction of your base got to do with mission architect (in the context of the original topic) people writing bad missions aren't going to destroy a base.
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I14 and MA is what caused it, it just did not do it on it's own, I'm not the only one either = it was on the U.S. forums.
Brutes: Doc O'Bay (yup, was me lvl2-48) Doc O'Bay Jr., Sihing, Belphanior, Mr. Lich & Joker's Wylde MMs, Rad'Man Corr, Lockup Dom, Suicide King Stalker, Lord Florentine DB/WP Brute, Tygercide Scrapper......Scrapper?? what the heck is he doing here???
[ QUOTE ]
Get rid of the ones with absolute minimal imagination/effort that are just done to be ill-considered ego-boosting 'this is the origin of me aren't I uber' arcs (but we can leave the well written entertaining ones) and we have about 40% left.
Now remove all the ones where the publisher* shows a complete lack of imagination and can't even be bothered to make it look like they care and I guess we'd be down to about 10% left.
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I appreciate the sentiment, the sheer quantity and scale of quality is overwhelming, The problem is (if you pardon the analogy) One man's "Juggs Weekly" is another Man's "War and Peace". NCsoft have a fine line to tread regarding subscribers freedom to publish within the EULA and actual offending content. Its very possible the MA authors you despise have tried their best bless em, they could be 9 years old for all you know.
What can I say, the cream will naturally raise to the top and the rating system is your friend re: searching for new content.
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Its very possible the MA authors you despise have tried their best bless em, they could be 9 years old for all you know.
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If these arcs display the level of imagination that children have then the parents ought to be ashamed. Time was that children showed (and were encouraged to use) imagination.
By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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Its very possible the MA authors you despise have tried their best bless em, they could be 9 years old for all you know.
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If these arcs display the level of imagination that children have then the parents ought to be ashamed. Time was that children showed (and were encouraged to use) imagination.
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Blame 30 years of Blatcherism mate
Thelonious Monk
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I suspect your despair will be short lived
Many people will throw together and publish a dogpile just to see how it works. They will then try their own arc and a few other equally poorly thought out arcs and quickly lose interest - especially when badges get awarded so they have "done what they needed to do."
They'll then go back to their normal game.
The creative types who actually have something to offer will persevere and hone their craft and the percentage of "good" arcs to the dogpile norm will increase until there's a pretty good quality to a "significant proportion" of the published MA arcs.
Of course this could just be wishful thinking and I might be wossnaming in the wind
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I have a feeling that MA will end up being a very popular item amongst a relatvely few players.
On the design side, even taking aside MAs limitations, it's going to be hard motivating yourself to make arcs you know almost noone (except maybe your close circle of friends) are likely to play.
On the playing side, well, because MA isn't "canon" I think that, like you say, the majority of players will revert to their normal game. Maybe occasionally they'll dip into MA for a bit of diversity.
That isn't an altogether bad thing. Diversity is always good. But it seems to me that the only way MA will really become a longterm main feature is if they do enable some of the missions to be canon and expand what you can do with it entirely. Which, in itself would be odd cause we'de kind of end up doing the devs work for them.
Don't get into a flap. It's only my opinion and I'm thick
Arc 56763 Lord Anarchys heaven
2 mission arc. Bring friends cause Lord Anarchy means business...
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The problem is (if you pardon the analogy) One man's "Juggs Weekly" is another Man's "War and Peace".
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I take the analogy to be correct, but possibly not how you mean.
It's like farms vs skill tests vs story/RP arcs. Each appeals to different audiences (hence the need for categorisation in search) but each should try to have some merit rather than be the cheapest, easiest, thrown-together-in-1-minute kind of affair that dominates the MA repository at the moment.
I bet that even "Juggs Weekly" have some standards of quality that they try to attain.. although they are obviously different to those sought by Tolstoy as the target audience is (presumably) different.
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What can I say, the cream will naturally raise to the top and the rating system is your friend re: searching for new content.
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What can I say - optimistic faith in the ratings system as it stands.
By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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So for ages I was getting quietly optimistic about MA.
Even done halfwell there would be a great source for:
* the imaginative people to be creative and tell new and interesting stories
* xp/INF farmers to create there own farms
* people who just want to play but know the dev-arcs off by heart to get some new stories and encounters, and even new custom mobs
* skill tests and challenges for the people who consider CoX to be too easy (whether in general or for specific characters)
Heck - you pays your money you play your way. MA could deliver something for a lot of different playstyles.
There are bugs, but every large program change is bound to have bugs. If you don't think that's acceptable then please accept my application to your game when it's available. 
OK - if I'm honest IMO it needed to wait til after Easter, but that's not the the thing that's got me a little riled...
I think that the devs have pretty much delivered a decent v1 MA editor (heck - if you knew me you'd know that this is actually high praise).
But...
...then I look at the abhorent arc browser, the poor feedback mechanism and worst of all I looked at the mass of arcs that were appearing.
In under 24 hrs I think there had been 12000+ missions published (although many were later unpublished or dropped off the browser). IIRC There were 6000+ published arcs appearing in the browse results at c.20:00 last night...
Many of these arcs are utter dirge that seem to have been thrown together ASAP just to get whatever badges might be going. They are the type of thing that would be more than acceptable during beta on test, when trying to test the system and find bugs, but on live?!?!?!
If we remove every 'play me for easy badges' we'd get rid of a good percentage of the published arcs... we'd maybe lose 10%.
If we then remove every duplicated farm (heck I don't mind people having farms.. but do we need so many?) and every duplicate mission (that was published twice from over eager button-clicking) we'd lose a further 20%.
Strip out the blatant IP infringing ones, the defamatory ones about famous RL people and the bigotted ones (if the mission info was correct I really can't understand people who use a tool like MA to create the homophobic rubbish that one arc seemed to be) and I think we're down to about 60% left.
Get rid of the ones with absolute minimal imagination/effort that are just done to be ill-considered ego-boosting 'this is the origin of me aren't I uber' arcs (but we can leave the well written entertaining ones) and we have about 40% left.
Now remove all the ones where the publisher* shows a complete lack of imagination and can't even be bothered to make it look like they care and I guess we'd be down to about 10% left.
If we removed all the above from infecting the public MA reopository then we could probably just about manage with the inadequate search functionality that exists, as most arcs would at least stand a chance of having general appeal and the author spent more than 5 minutes thinking about them.
I know that my tastes won't be everyones - but I'm not asking that every arc is good in my (subjective) opinion. But it would be good if at least most arcs tried to have some appeal...
I don't mind farmers having farms. I don't mind the odd 'play this for x easy badges' arc. But I just think that anything of any real quality or value is going to be lost in the sheer size of the landslide of excrement.
It's a little like how when the computer finally started reaching homes virtually every shop selling them had at least one computer where some idiot had started 10 PRINT "KEVIN IS GREAT! ": GOTO 10...
Such a waste of a tool with such potential committed by tools with such little potential. 
* note: not 'author' or 'creator' as both these terms carry implied creativity when referring to 'stories'.
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2 points, one is who are you or me or anyone to decide what a [censored] arc is and think it's better to have them removed.
And two, is did you really believe this was going to end any other way?
I dont think this was a waste of a tool, i think it was a waste of an issue, that has left a lot of people with a non event. But thats just an opinion of course.
Well, of course the one-minute jobs dominate it right now... it's not been out long enough for a lot of people who intend to put time into their arcs to publish, yet. Obviously there are the ones that were complete in test, but not everyone bothers until live, and I've certainly not had the time to complete an arc yet.
I do agree that the search facility needs work, and hopefully the dev team will see this and work on it. I think they should be comparing it to how various web-based user-content systems work. It's very easy to find lots of stuff you might want to look at on YouTube, for instance - we need tags, similar arcs displays, maybe lists of good arcs like you can make lists on Amazon, etc.
I can understand where Dave is coming from. I played around with the tools on test but have not yet put an arc up for publishing. Mainly because I don't think it's good enough yet. I like to tinker, some people don't.
And so instead of creating I've been playing and yes, there are some terrible arcs up there (IMHO). The MA is a new toy and I'll bet that most people have dived straight in and bashed out the first thing that came to mind. But the MA is new. It's been live for two days and it's a new toy to play with for most players who haven't been on the Test server. So of course there's going to be a flood of stuff generated that's of questionable quality.
But I honestly believe that once the initial interest is over and the madness dies down, the rate of arcs published will go down as people get bored and go back to doing what they normally do. A number will remain who will do their best to squeeze every bit of potential out of the MA, even if that is to make excrutiatingly difficult missions.
For a new release, it's pretty good but I think that as time goes by, more search filters will be necessary to identify what kind of arcs are available. At least I hope so. And although it's tempting to introduce some kind of 'quality filter' that's a very subjective thing to do and as has been said, one man's disaster is another man's masterpiece. There's already been a number where I've questioned why exactly it warranted five stars.
Be patient and hopefully once the lunacy dies down, we'll start seeing the real good arcs emerging. 
@Dante EU - Union Roleplayer and Altisis Victim
The Militia: Union RP Supergroup - www.themilitia.org.uk
So for ages I was getting quietly optimistic about MA.
Even done halfwell there would be a great source for:
* the imaginative people to be creative and tell new and interesting stories
* xp/INF farmers to create there own farms
* people who just want to play but know the dev-arcs off by heart to get some new stories and encounters, and even new custom mobs
* skill tests and challenges for the people who consider CoX to be too easy (whether in general or for specific characters)
Heck - you pays your money you play your way. MA could deliver something for a lot of different playstyles.
There are bugs, but every large program change is bound to have bugs. If you don't think that's acceptable then please accept my application to your game when it's available.
OK - if I'm honest IMO it needed to wait til after Easter, but that's not the the thing that's got me a little riled...
I think that the devs have pretty much delivered a decent v1 MA editor (heck - if you knew me you'd know that this is actually high praise).
But...
...then I look at the abhorent arc browser, the poor feedback mechanism and worst of all I looked at the mass of arcs that were appearing.
In under 24 hrs I think there had been 12000+ missions published (although many were later unpublished or dropped off the browser). IIRC There were 6000+ published arcs appearing in the browse results at c.20:00 last night...
Many of these arcs are utter dirge that seem to have been thrown together ASAP just to get whatever badges might be going. They are the type of thing that would be more than acceptable during beta on test, when trying to test the system and find bugs, but on live?!?!?!
If we remove every 'play me for easy badges' we'd get rid of a good percentage of the published arcs... we'd maybe lose 10%.
If we then remove every duplicated farm (heck I don't mind people having farms.. but do we need so many?) and every duplicate mission (that was published twice from over eager button-clicking) we'd lose a further 20%.
Strip out the blatant IP infringing ones, the defamatory ones about famous RL people and the bigotted ones (if the mission info was correct I really can't understand people who use a tool like MA to create the homophobic rubbish that one arc seemed to be) and I think we're down to about 60% left.
Get rid of the ones with absolute minimal imagination/effort that are just done to be ill-considered ego-boosting 'this is the origin of me aren't I uber' arcs (but we can leave the well written entertaining ones) and we have about 40% left.
Now remove all the ones where the publisher* shows a complete lack of imagination and can't even be bothered to make it look like they care and I guess we'd be down to about 10% left.
If we removed all the above from infecting the public MA reopository then we could probably just about manage with the inadequate search functionality that exists, as most arcs would at least stand a chance of having general appeal and the author spent more than 5 minutes thinking about them.
I know that my tastes won't be everyones - but I'm not asking that every arc is good in my (subjective) opinion. But it would be good if at least most arcs tried to have some appeal...
I don't mind farmers having farms. I don't mind the odd 'play this for x easy badges' arc. But I just think that anything of any real quality or value is going to be lost in the sheer size of the landslide of excrement.
It's a little like how when the computer finally started reaching homes virtually every shop selling them had at least one computer where some idiot had started 10 PRINT "KEVIN IS GREAT! ": GOTO 10...
Such a waste of a tool with such potential committed by tools with such little potential.
* note: not 'author' or 'creator' as both these terms carry implied creativity when referring to 'stories'.
By my mohawk shall ye know me!
my toons
Funny: Ee-Ai-Ee-Ai-Oh! #3662 * The foul-mouthed Handyman! #1076 * City of Norms #132944
Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)