I16 Mission Architect XP Changes

As is usual for COH devs they go from one extreme to the other.

This is simply mind-boggling.

I can appreciate wanting to make the AE more challenging or whatever the mind set is. But penalizing a player's creativity by totally nerfing XP on a custom character is NOT the way to do it. Number of powers alone does not equal a more difficult enemy so this metric is useless.

If you want to make sure that full xp is given for each custom character, then make the effort to create a bunch of custom "template" powersets that we can choose from and forget about all this infantile percentage scaling. This is the same stupidity that got us into trouble with base costs, enhancement effectiveness and various other issues we've had to bear over the last five years.

I have mixed feelings on this one. I understand the mentality to reduce rewards for where the risk is purposefully reduced for the benefit of better results, but some of this is simply not consistent with the game, and goes as far as to penalize players for playing custom content that bears a consistent if not greater risk than developer-made content. Just look at your standard NPC foe, and you will find that they have very few abilities. NO enemies in the game come close to the number of abilities an 'extreme' custom enemy has.

A better solution might be to rate foes according to levels and attack numbers:a foe made for level 15 with two or three attacks is reasonable; just look at how many abilities a level 15 NPC has. A level 50 with only burst and slug? I could see how a reduction would be in order there. A foe with 9 attacks including something like a nuke and all armors including a tier 9 like unstoppable, that foe should be worth FAR more reward than a run of the mill gunner minion.

Just to be clear, I use custom enemies in every arc I've made. I can make them look like new foes, give them abilities not sported by common foes. (radiation, dark powers, and so on which are more uncommon.) I've played around here since the very start, forgive me if I, given advanced tools, wish to make foes that offer a new and novel play experience. I try very hard to make my foes difficult enough that my 50's must play well to win, but easy enough that I can do them with a quick pick up group that doesn't have an 'optimum' build and survive. If I get a team wipe on heroic, I've built the enemy group wrong.

Thumbs up on the enemy group thing, I can see how whole mobs of only minions being mowed down by AoE's would not be reasonable, just as the mobs of boss only mobs standing crazily about to be slapped down aren't. But the custom group things? C'mon folks, we can do this better. Custom groups too easy for their level should be worth less xp, fine, but tough foes should be worth more not even levels of reward. At the very least you should check those custom levels of difficulty and weight some choices: a boss with only healing aura and mesmerize is different than a boss with only fulcrum shift and energy transfer. If you have a problem with some custom powers, penalize the passive/'less dangerous' powers, not all of them. Elsewise, you will find yourselves perturbing the ones you actually made the mission architect for: the writers who are actually interested in making a story.

If you want to balance a system where intelligent people go line by line through choices to find exploits, use the same vantage point to close those exploits. simple as that. Oh, and it would be good if there was some way for a creator to be warned as they make a group if that foe would not give full rewards.

"Now you aren't limited by any "required" powers when choosing the custom critter’s powers. For example, you can create Dual Pistol enemies without requiring them to have any thug mastermind pets."

I'm really happy about this. However...

"We know that a fair amount of the player base is concerned about Architect being used as a farming tool and we want to encourage players to focus more on writing story-based arcs."

I'm pretty confident these XP changes aren't going to encourage anything of the sort. While the basic idea seems okay to me--and is certainly preferable to the suggestions that've frequently appeared in this forum--I think the actual penalties are way too severe.

But, on the up-side, Horatio also says...

"I want to stress that we will be monitoring the scaling of experience with this system - these numbers are not set in stone."

So, I'm going to remain optimistic.

One of the design goals here is for MA to be a leveling alternative. In order for it to be viable as such, it needs to provide rewards comparable to regular content (RC) when MA is being used as intended.

It's already not doing that. No mission bonus, no arc bonus, and patrol XP doesn't apply. For someone like me--someone who's not into the whole farm/PL scene at all--if XP is the goal, AE is already something to be avoided. At present, the only time AE figures into my leveling is when I want to bypass RC that I've done eleventy bazillion times already.

These XP changes are just going to diminish AE even further for those of us who'd like to use it as it's intended to be used.

"We'll be keeping a close eye on how you all feel about these current changes and seeing what we can do to really strike that balance between giving you, the creators, full customization and the players you're writing for incentive to play your arcs."

I'm just not seeing any incentives here. Given these changes, the developers may want to also consider introducing arc bonuses to MA, scaled by how many missions are in an arc, or other incentives along those lines.

Frankly, I can work with MA being nothing more than a tool for SG plot development and the like.

But I'm pretty sure the developers want it to be more than that.

I haven't tested it yet, but I hope that at the very least, the AE Editor now shows us how much our custom critters are worth on the XP scale, as we modify them. Without even judging the changes, I think that not being able to see beforehand how rewarding your critters are, is going to frustrate many authors who do care about making rewarding critters.

My most recent stories have been made largely as showcases for the custom critters that were central to their plots. The ratings don't lie: single mission stories get played, multi-mission stories are not popular, and Very Long is box office poison. Up until this, the challenge has been to put enough interesting feature points in single missions to say that they do in fact have stories.

What burns me most about this was the fact that I bought extra story arc spaces, so I didn't have to cycle through my active roster and could experiment a bit more. Now I want my money back. I'm not going to bother publishing any more if this system goes live. I should have learned my lesson by now that MMOs will break your heart.

I will take down all my published stories when this threatens to go live. They will not be replaced; they take up too much space on my hard drive already. And frankly, I would encourage every story arc author who reads the forums to unpublish their arcs. This should be a communal effort. Let the old farms be all that remains.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

Hitting a few points from upthread:

• I'm closing in on 150 posted reviews, not counting arcs I played but didn't formally review. I have Seen It All. Custom mobs are a nearly insignificant part of the AE experience.
• Arcs that exist only to showcase custom mobs are almost certainly not worth playing.
• Mainstream authors for the last several centuries have limited themselves to stories about perfectly ordinary human beings that live in a world their readers are intimately familiar with, being as it is the one the readers themselves live in. Somehow, they have yet to run out of viable stories and continue to get paid for their work.
• Corollary to the above, there are no stories that can be told outside of Paragon City that could not also be told within it, once you realize the story has nothing to do with what the costume and FX departments are doing.

I think if you make a good mission people will play it reguardless of exp, they just wont farm it which is what the changes are for. I`ve played good missions and enjoyed them and bad missions and quit them without noticing the amount of exp. then I played a hami farm for tons of exp. and was totally bored and havent returned to MA, so I welcome any changes to make it fun to play again, isnt that the whole idea to the game? This isnt a contest where the one who dies with the most 50s win.