The perils of 'official' content
By
Amy_Amp,
Posted on: 2009-08-13 11:19 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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They're also constantly hogging the 1st page, which should be displaying random 5-star and 4-star arcs instead to give other people a chance. Also the ratings on a DC don't mean jack, it was discovered back in beta that DC arcs are permanently 5-starred. We found that out when some new ones were added and found that no matter how many times it was rating anything other than 5-stars the count went up but the average never went down.
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Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
I'm not saying they're the best in the MA, but they're a good start, and they're handily indexed.
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Do a search for 5-star arcs, and you'll see them all. You can filter by number of stars in searches.
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Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
They're also constantly hogging the 1st page, which should be displaying random 5-star and 4-star arcs instead to give other people a chance. Also the ratings on a DC don't mean jack, it was discovered back in beta that DC arcs are permanently 5-starred. We found that out when some new ones were added and found that no matter how many times it was rating anything other than 5-stars the count went up but the average never went down.
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Screw the 5-stars, everyone gets inflated to five-stars at the beginning by their friends until the real ratings come in and the law of averages takes hold. Most of the quality stuff is in the massive 4-star area, most of the 5-stars are grossly inflated.
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Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
Do a search for 5-star arcs, and you'll see them all. You can filter by number of stars in searches.
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...okay, then search for four stars?
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Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
Screw the 5-stars, everyone gets inflated to five-stars at the beginning by their friends until the real ratings come in and the law of averages takes hold. Most of the quality stuff is in the massive 4-star area, most of the 5-stars are grossly inflated.
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To the OP:
one thing I do miss on CoH, is something I experienced in Final Fantasy Online which is fighting my way to an objective. What I mean by that is that I recieved a mission near San D'Oria that required me to get into a nearby Ork camp, across a river and ravine, through some caves etc...
On CoX you can just run through a different street / fly / teleport there with no trouble at all. Whilst I understand the annoyance ( and it is Issue 1 content as mentioned ) I do think we perhaps "miss" the point of these missions a bit.
What would have been cool is a section of ruined city ( think "I am Legend" a bit ) with streets blocked off and so on, with delivery missions where you have to fight to get everywhere, and all of a sudden delivery missions don't seem so bad 
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Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
Screw the 5-stars, everyone gets inflated to five-stars at the beginning by their friends until the real ratings come in and the law of averages takes hold. Most of the quality stuff is in the massive 4-star area, most of the 5-stars are grossly inflated.
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Not all of them.
But avoid the 1 vote 5 starers. They tend to be 'Ooo lookit my arcs cool lolololo votemeplzkthx'
What really bugs me is that both my arcs, with a couple of votes each and 5 star totals, are sat way at the back somewhere. While the 1 vote 5 stars are all piled up at the front. Considering I spent a lot of time making those (AND working around the Devs and their goshdamned stealth editing of destructables) I'm quite miffed about that...
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Admittedly I "missed out" but originally to get to some zones (without a port) you had to do long boat rides (as in several minutes) or when going from the planet to the moon or the other way around in EQ, you had to a) talk to an npc to get a token (so you had to have inventory space) and b) wait for the every-fifteen-minute-event that ported everyone with the token to the moon or the planet.|
Originally Posted by Primal_NA
Judging from the reminisces I see from former EQ players, here and elsewhere, apparently there really are people who enjoy spending a great deal of time just preparing to play the game. Who spent hours of uneventful traveling and waiting so they could get to whatever would finally make them money and/or experience. Or maybe they didn't actually enjoy it so much as endure it with gritted teeth, and now they're considering themselves leet and moaning about how soft players are these days. Could go either way.
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Thankfully, by the time I joined, there was the Plane of Knowledge, linking the whole world one book-on-a-pedestal at a time.
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Personally, I'd much rather have a story to follow.
If you actually read what the contacts are telling you, you find that a lot of the them say "Go see Dr. Sheridan so he can give you the pink ooze you need to survive in the dimension you're going to" or something similar.
Of course you ask "Why can't Dr. Sheridan just give your contact some of it?"
The answer: Because Dr. Sheridan invented the stuff after you got out of the last mission, in which you collected the information he needed.
Everyone complains about repetetive content, and fails to realize that CoH is a story, with your toon as the main character. From your character's perspective, this is the first time any of this stuff has ever happened. It's like reading a book, and then reading it again and complaining that the story stayed the same.
I avoid AE mostly because, in 90% of the arcs I find, there is little or no story. One mission I loaded up had the scintillating mission introduction of "go level". Then the contact inexplicably said "left", and the nav bar read "right". Out of every ten random arcs I find, on average, there is ONE that has a story. The rest are all variations of "I don't want to write anything so here's a bunch of random words you can ignore on your way to stupid high amounts of xp"
I don't care if you want to make a farm mission, but seriously, you can't be bothered to even type a couple sentences? I had a farm mission during the Comm Officer craze, the difference was mine had a plot, if you read it, there was actually a reason to be there. I have an arc that is designed to level one of my own characters, it is technically a farm, but it has 4 missions and a storyline. If you were unaware that it was designed for a spines/fire scrapper to rip through, you'd never guess it was a farm.
If a mission contact can't even be bothered to make sense, why would I want to help them? Telling me "jksuahbi" to explain what I'm going to be doing, and then saying "asyfgwbj" when I go to enter the mission just doesn't imply that I'm doing anything of any importance. For Pete's sake, at least tell us WHY there's a thousand Maniac Slammers infesting the same few city blocks that everything else has infested.
I would much rather travel from PI to Atlas, via zone gates, than run a mission where the most compelling thing the contact has to say is "kill". And I'd rather run a FedEx mission than spend 20 minutes looking for an arc that has even a rudimentary plot.
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately. |
Finding MA arcs with actual plots isn't a Herculean task.
Just check out the MA forum, it's full of recommendations.
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It's because the interface only shows the averages as rounded up or down but it still sorts them without the rounding. As such I have a 4-star arc with 148 ratings that is several pages behind other 4-star arcs with only a few dozen ratings.|
Originally Posted by Techbot_Alpha_EU
What really bugs me is that both my arcs, with a couple of votes each and 5 star totals, are sat way at the back somewhere. While the 1 vote 5 stars are all piled up at the front. Considering I spent a lot of time making those (AND working around the Devs and their goshdamned stealth editing of destructables) I'm quite miffed about that...
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Originally Posted by TsumijuZero
What would have been cool is a section of ruined city ( think "I am Legend" a bit ) with streets blocked off and so on, with delivery missions where you have to fight to get everywhere, and all of a sudden delivery missions don't seem so bad.
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Even in a single-player game like Fallout 3 that has such annoyances in the DC area where I can save, quit, and reload later I'll still use fast-travel all the time once I uncover the metro locations just to avoid all the tedious running and maze navigating. Once is more than enough.
It's especially nonsense in that game as those rubble piles are not nearly so high to be unclimbable, just adding fake length to the game.
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Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
If you actually read what the contacts are telling you, you find that a lot of the them say "Go see Dr. Sheridan so he can give you the pink ooze you need to survive in the dimension you're going to" or something similar.
Of course you ask "Why can't Dr. Sheridan just give your contact some of it?" The answer: Because Dr. Sheridan invented the stuff after you got out of the last mission, in which you collected the information he needed. |
Really, you can't find anything but farms in MA's search?
* Select Rating 4-stars and/or 5-stars
* Select Status "Looking for Feedback" or "Final"
* Select Lengths greater than "Very Short"
* Maybe choose some keywords, such as "Solo-Friendly"
Any of those will filter out the vast majority of farms, the people who write those don't set so many details. Learn to actually use the search beyond the default "Find Everything!" settings.
One thing I'd like to see rectified in CoH is the Paragon Protectors. There's the whole big reveal about these heroes of the city, but there's just one problem.
Up until that point you've probably never come across them, and if you have, they're enemy NPC's.
No working with them or even getting a helping hand from one in the lower levels, no seeing them flying over the city helping out with crime fighting, the suddenly appear and 'oh they're bad'. Just doesn't hit an impact with me. Here's an idea...
What if the Dev's held a contest, every month they'd put up an old CoH story arc for the challenge, and people oculd work on turning it into something interesting using the MA, among other tools. Perhaps an all revamp issue wouldn't go down well, but they could at least maybe work on a few arcs across the levels each Issue. Get some of the new people practicing on there.
(Just please, don't put the person who worked on those new Midnighter arcs on. Or if you do, please tell them there's other tools than ambush.)
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And whoever made Kadabara Kill and the Midnighter armours deserves to be impaled. With extreme prejudice.
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Originally Posted by Zortel
(Just please, don't put the person who worked on those new Midnighter arcs on. Or if you do, please tell them there's other tools than ambush.) |
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Very good point. Except for an mid-level, easy to miss one-shot mission where a bunch of CoT captured some of them you never get to see non-hostile PPs and they don't help you in that mission either.|
Originally Posted by Zortel
One thing I'd like to see rectified in CoH is the Paragon Protectors. There's the whole big reveal about these heroes of the city, but there's just one problem.
Up until that point you've probably never come across them, and if you have, they're enemy NPC's. No working with them or even getting a helping hand from one in the lower levels, no seeing them flying over the city helping out with crime fighting, the suddenly appear and 'oh they're bad'. Just doesn't hit an impact with me. |
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Originally Posted by Zortel
Here's an idea...
What if the Dev's held a contest, every month they'd put up an old CoH story arc for the challenge, and people oculd work on turning it into something interesting using the MA, among other tools. Perhaps an all revamp issue wouldn't go down well, but they could at least maybe work on a few arcs across the levels each Issue. Get some of the new people practicing on there. |
I also want to see them get back to doing a zone revamp every issue or every other issue. We got the Faultline revamp, the Rikti Crash Site overhaul, the Hollows revamp, and then they just stopped. Striga still needs a hospital and Dark Astoria is long overdue for some zone contacts and a TF/Trial to give some actual closure to the whole Banished Pantheon thing.
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Originally Posted by Zortel
(Just please, don't put the person who worked on those new Midnighter arcs on. Or if you do, please tell them there's other tools than ambush.)
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Seriously. Who gives one NPC scaled at his level healing aura and transfusion?
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Originally Posted by Techbot_Alpha_EU
And whoever made Kadabara Kill and the Midnighter armours deserves to be impaled. With extreme prejudice.
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AND Singularity. Let's not forget that bundle of Oh So Fun Holds, Knockbacks and general jiggerypokery...|
Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
Seriously. Who gives one NPC scaled at his level healing aura and transfusion?
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Three sets, count 'em, three!
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Schooled under the same designer who gave us the starting TF being a long, long amble filled with three of the most annoying low level groups? (Posion typed damage, -recharge and exploding zombies? Say hello the Vazhiloks! AoE Knockdown, holds, immobilizes and defence PBAoE bubbles, along with exploding mages? Say hello, Circle of Thorns! Endurance draining, minion summoning, underling spawning robots? Say hello, Clockwork!) |
Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
Seriously. Who gives one NPC scaled at his level healing aura and transfusion?
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Interesting mission resolution or locale? Hah!
New content is nice, but doesn't mean much when there is still an abundance of old content that is frankly an eyesore, and some of the new content isn't that great. (Hello new Midnighter arcs. Using an office block with no radio equipment whatsoever as a radio station? Am I the only one who gets tired of this? We're stuck in instances pretty much our entire leveling lives, at least make them -interesting-.)
We also have the story arcs with no resolution whatsoever. What happened to the Outcasts? The Trolls, Tsoo, Hellions, Skulls, Family, Warriors? That marvellous and underloved gang war with drugs, illegal artifact trafficking and plots against one another?
Maybe that's why the leveling is being increased. Get people up faster to experience the shiney new content, leaving the old stuff to rot.
The leveling speed is increased, but you can voluntarily shut off your XP gain, and of course you can do TFs and be auto-exemplared back down to the proper level. You can also do all the old story arcs in Ouroboros. It seems to me they want the content to be accessible.
But it could use some serious revamping.
That said, I don't really agree that the design of Kadabra Kill is the logical outgrowth of the Positron TF, any more than Ballista force bolt dropping toggles at CoV launch was a logical outgrowth of same. I mean, putting too many missions in a TF is one thing, and even choosing the most frustrating mobs to fight at that level (and the mobs hardest to counter) is one thing, but I think that it's something else to design a mob with overly synergistic abilities.
I do think that giving EB or higher ranked mobs healing powers is pretty risky in general, and more than one should really be right out.
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With the Architect, unfortunately no. I was expecting to have a lot more use for the thing, but between the tickets system and experience restrictions (outside of farming) as well as the ever-present problems with fan fiction, I just find I have no use for it. I have all of two arcs made, myself, but I haven't found many arcs there that I actually liked.
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Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
Heh.
I don't think they're all good, but I think it's silly that a lot of discussion in this thread was about how MA was only farming and PL maps, but then the story arcs that do exist aren't ever good enough, plus custom mobs are stinky. It seems like that some people just can't be satisfied. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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The problem here is actually one of design, rather than basic concept. When you want to travel, and especially when you want to commute, then travel impediments become a problem. This is ESPECIALLY true in Fallout 3, when you have to cross that damn Capital Wasteland up, down and sideways eleventy billion times. Exploring it once is fun. Running around it to get from one place to another on a mission... Not so much. Going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... Is murder. And, yes, the largely identical cut-price metro tunnels are the worst.|
Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
/unsigned
Even in a single-player game like Fallout 3 that has such annoyances in the DC area where I can save, quit, and reload later I'll still use fast-travel all the time once I uncover the metro locations just to avoid all the tedious running and maze navigating. Once is more than enough. |
However, at the same time, there is no denying that oftentimes the journey from one place to another through dangerous wilderness can be the adventure just in itself, rather than the tedium in-between the adventures. Movies have used long, perilous journeys as entire plot segments, games devote entire chapters to travelling... We live in a day and age when travel itself is not an impediment, but merely a time-consuming annoyance. But historically, travelling around the world was a perilous ordeal up until relatively recently. And travelling by foot even today is still an adventure, for those who still like to engage in it.
Travel CAN be an adventure, but the key part in making it such is to ensure that travel ITSELF is represented as the actual mission, rather than travelling being the means to GET to the mission. Which brings us back to what I originally suggested as food for thought - an INSTANCE mission with travel powers disabled, the only point of which were to get from point A to point B through a whole lot of enemies. Think about it - this isn't much different from how our current missions are structured, the only difference being that if you get an outdoor instance, people are either flying all over the place looking for the glowies, or sweeping far and wide to cover all land area. Well, think about a mission the point of which weren't to find a bunch of hidden things, but merely to either follow a route or FIND a route to a specific location. Such a mission could then be HUGE and present multiple official paths, maybe even with a map pre-uncovered.
I've always wanted terrain in this game to mean more. Not necessarily all the time, but from time to time it's good for us to NOT be able to just override any terrain and fly over everything.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I've found several via discussions on the forum. I've found a few via the other means I described above. I've found a handful of arcs that are better than the majority of story arcs available from in-game contacts, and I still haven't scratched the surface. I've also only managed to accidentally step into one farm.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
With the Architect, unfortunately no. I was expecting to have a lot more use for the thing, but between the tickets system and experience restrictions (outside of farming) as well as the ever-present problems with fan fiction, I just find I have no use for it. I have all of two arcs made, myself, but I haven't found many arcs there that I actually liked.
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Of course, I tend to also think that people are excessively snobbish about fan fiction.
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Then you've got players like me -- and my wife and daughter -- who like to do both. We love the AE, but we also love the dev content. No reason for there to be some demarcation line between them.|
Originally Posted by Columnist_Freak
If instant gratification is what you seek, look no further than Atlas Park's AE building. It's got endless repeatable missions, a hospital that is located IN THE BUILDING, and is right next door to the Wentworth's where you can sell your rewards to get greater rewards.
As for me, I'll continue to fly across the city looking down at all the busy little NPCs below and immerse myself. |
I've spent a lot of time in AE since it came out, without running ANY farm missions. I actually level more slowly in AE than in RC for this reason.
Admittedly it bothers me when I see posters who equate AE with farming/PLing. At lot of us who use AE never touch farms, nor do we PL. But I have a feeling many of us who use the AE "as intended" per se don't feel the need to run full 8-character teams; we're perfectly happy running with a small group of family/friends/SG mates or even solo because we're more interested in the story and the adventure than we are about leveling fast or getting rich fast. (No, this doesn't mean reducing rewards for AE; getting new powers and such is still part of growing our characters.)
Frankly, the only thing that has changed about my gameplay since AE came out is that I have more story options than I had before. Being able to design and write my own content is a major draw right there.
Hopefully with the new super sidekicking system and the new difficulty slider, the farm spam and padding spam will be reduced. If not for that spam, many players would never even know it was an issue.
My highest level character is 35 -- after over 36-months of play. Hitting 50 has never meant anything to me; the journey is where it's at. Endgame? Nah. Between dev content, AE content from other players, and AE content I can write for myself, there is no end in sight. Add in power customization, powerset proliferation, the new sidekicking system, GR and so forth and the sky's the limit.
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That's why I'm glad the devs toned down the custom critters with i15; they just hit 'way too hard even on standard. The one arc I've published thus far (Granny Granite and the Senior Moment Gang) was actually very tough -- more so than I wanted -- on the last mission. There were a couple of bottleneck points that were murder to get through.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
That depends on your definition of "interesting." To me, interesting doesn't mean challenging or unpredictable. I like easy, predictable enemies who look cool. I'd pick the Warriors or Crey or even the Nemesis Army over anything and everything I've ever seen a player create. They're simple, they're straightforward and they're easy. I don't play this game, or indeed any stat-based game, for the challenge and the bragging rights. It's a game of numbers that either plays out by the book or you lose horribly. You either have the tools to handle a situation or you don't. And I'm fine with that - I try to have all the tools I'll need and I step on the faces of any NPCs I run across.
If enemies aren't interesting to look at and interesting to watch, they're not interesting to fight. |
Since i15, it may be a little too easy now, although I've only had one player send me a comment to that effect. But custom critters being too overpowered by default was one of the weaknesses of AE to me at the outset. I think the devs have done a good job of alleviating that (though players can still design OPed customs if they so choose).
One reason that I like custom mobs though is for just the reason you mentioned -- they can be designed to look different from other NPCs in the game. The give more visual variety when well done. I do wish that we could give them some of the stock NPC powersets; I also don't want all of the minions to be incredibly unpredictable. They should be minions; leave the more complex stuff to the supervillains and leaders.
The other thing I like about AE is that I can design custom *supervillains* and actually fight them in-game. Nothing bugs me more about some dev content than when you get to the end boss and he looks just like every other mob on the map, just with a different powerset (maybe). *That* is boring. I want to fight some costumed villains, not just another thug-of-the-month on steroids.
That said, in the Granny Granite arc, I don't really have "costumed" villains, but the bosses do have distinct looks in comparison to the minions.
Talking on end bosses, I'd really like to see some generic bosses made for each faction - like say 5 per faction.
There only needs to be a simple change to the standard ones we have now - like making a Council Archon without his helmet on, or a Circle Mage a different hat and unique robe colors, or a Tsoo boss with tattoos that glow like the Banished Pantheon runes.
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City of Heroes comics and artwork
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This ties in with the point I made earlier about viewing AE as either the Farmer's Paradise or the RP'ers Paradise, with no appreciation for the reality that it's both.|
Originally Posted by lionheart_fr
Then you've got players like me -- and my wife and daughter -- who like to do both. We love the AE, but we also love the dev content. No reason for there to be some demarcation line between them.
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As this thread points out, I've been running some "real" content lately.
And I've been running some AE content...both 'farm' maps and 'story' maps (And here I'll recommend Lady Sadako's Dev Choice arc on the 5th Column- tough {for my ar/dev anyway} but lots of fun, and chock full of good dialog & interesting plot).
MA is whatever you want it to be.
It's sad so many people see nothing but a reflection of their own prejudices instead of appreciating the breadth of gameplay it suppots.
Also, another comment about the convinience of AE & how it applies to 'story' types as well as 'farmers':
I was running a mission this morning that killed me several times (a half-slotted ar/dev not being the world's most survivable hero- I'm slowly frankenslotting him after languishing in retirement since ED). It warned me I might need friends, so I didn't begrudge the toughness of the challenge.
What was really nice though was when I got defeated, the hospital was right there. A vendor selling inspirations was right there- wow, I can just buy a couple of Break Frees and defenses, nice! And the mission door was about three feet away.
Instead of wasting X number of minutes running to a contact or the market for insps and trudging back to the mission door (which can be a non-trivial annoyance, depending on the zone and the location of the mission), I was able to stock up and get back to the fight in not much more time than it took to zone through the door.
MA's convinience applies to everyone who uses it.
Rather than investigating ways to make MA less user friendly, we should be considering ways for 'real' content to be more user friendly.
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My City Was Gone
You can also check out review threads, especially if you find a reviewer who's taste isn't far from yours. you can also filter by keyword, number of stars, or other criteria, and start looking.
My point is that there's a lot more in the MA than a series of farm and PL maps, and I was objecting to that characterization. Yes, a lot of people use it for either or both, but that shouldn't be a condemnation of the tool they used.
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