Can MA be saved?

I think one of the unsung benefits of the i16 changes to MA (and perhaps the only one)is the fact that SSK is allowing the players to tackle lower-level MA arcs and receive XP for their efforts*

Previously, I'd be looking on these boards at work & see an arc that sounded interesting in someone's sig, then get back ingame and find out it was out of the range of any active toon I happened to have (particularly low level arcs which commonly have a pretty reasonable degree of quality). Although I could have taken the inf, prestige, and tickets for being exemp'd/mal'd, I felt like there had to be a more level-appropriate arc out there that I could be playing and getting xp on top of it. With the SSK changes, MA is now allowing advancement and rewards without having to make sure you had a toon in the appropriate level range to take full advantage of what was going on. Yes, we can basically get it all: inf, prestige, tickets, story, fun, and XP.

Sure, maybe not as much XP as before if it was a solely custom-critter mish, but I'm not really noticing the difference just yet. In all honesty, I've been tending to avoid Arcs with "1-54 Custom group" in the description even when it's a 4-5 mish long arc (suggesting its likely NOT a farm).


* A fact that has got me re-interested in the Ouroboros Flashback system, which does the same thing FYI

The only thing preventing me from publishing more arcs is lack of slots. I made three arcs shortly after the AE release, and I've been sitting on my thumbs (creation-wise) since then, simply because I have used all slots. I could un-publish and publish something else, but there wouldn't be much point, I don't see any new arc I make doing any better than the arcs I've already published, which are firmly and safely entrenched in 4-star territory. So what would be the point? *Shrug*

And no, I'm not paying for the privilege of whitewashing the fence some more. It's fun enough if it's free, but that's as far as it goes.

As far as playing goes, I _have_ been playing lots of AE arcs, there's only so much Frostfire I can take. And yes, it is annoying to have the same arcs that I'm not interested in playing showing over and over in my searches. I'm having to stick to "long" and "very long" arcs in the search parameters, when in reality searching for "2+ missions" would do the trick much better. I want to be able to hide arcs without having to play them. I want a favourites list! I hope they'll add some sort of aggregator like "players who liked this also liked..." kind of thing that has been suggested many times.

Just a reply to the whole farming discussion.

Since AE launched I've held the same opinion on farming, and nothing that's happened since has changed it. Farming is not a problem. Exploits are a problem.

Farming is simply repeating content to receive rewards, like experience, currency, and loot. There's nothing wrong with that. When you get right down to the mechanics of an MMO, that's really the only end goal. Note that I'm not saying that wanting a good story in an MMO is somehow wrong, I'm merely stating that as a game, the objective is to make your character better. Things like story and socializing are separate from that.

If someone wants to mow through a whole mess of enemies for experience and loot, solo or teamed, I say more power to them. They're having fun. I have no reason to believe that the developers think any differently, especially with the fact that they reworked the difficulty system to make it easier for people to fight large amounts of enemies to get their rewards without having to get a bunch of fillers. (Possible bugs with drop rates non-withstanding. Please don't argue about that, this isn't the thread for it.)

Now, what's not good, is using exploits to gain rewards at a ridiculous rate. Going from 1-50 in a matter of hours? Not good. Especially when done in AE. Even if you're not a new player.

Here are a few reasons why. First off, new players. I don't know about you, but it took me a long time to figure out exactly what it takes to build a good character. I'm going to be perfectly honest now. I didn't have stamina on my Scrapper until Issue 2, when I was able to respec into it. Note that I was playing since pre-order. Now, I'm sure not everyone will make such rookie mistakes, some will take the time to research, but the majority won't. Now, even without stamina, I was still doing decently enough, from learning by trial and error to learn how to properly slot my powers. The fact that you slot powers every couple of levels helps with this. You learn which powers as you play that need to be slotted for various things. If you're going from 1-50 in the matter of a day, and this is the only way you've been doing it, you don't know what the hell you're gonna do with all these slots.

Speaking of slots, reason number 2. Less time leveling, especially in AE, means less time to get the drops necessary to slot out your character. Sure, you get tickets, but chances are you'll be using those to try and get things that sell well on the markets. Even if you're not, you can't specifically buy any recipes that you want to slot out your brand new level 50, and you certainly can't get any purples. So this level 50 you got in practically no time at all is going to buy a ton of stuff on the market at once. Everyone who's getting fast 50s needs a bunch of stuff to enhance their character as well, meaning there's a lot more coming out of the market than going in.

The third reason is a less tangible one, and that's stigma. If people are using an exploit to get ahead, and the usage becomes widespread enough, then the exploitive behavior is conflated with the practice of farming. The guy who's farming just wants to kill things to get his stuff and experience. Note that the farmer's a good thing, someone who gets more rewards than he can use, and thus puts the rest on the market, which the community as a whole can benefit from. See reason 2 for why this is the exact opposite of someone who's getting tons of level 50s by exploiting AE.

Level 54 ship raid rikti, Level 49 Green Mitos, Immunes Surgeons, and to a lesser extent lieutenant farms, these are all exploits. Lieutenants really aren't that much of a bigger threat than a minion to a team, and give more than 3 times the experience if I remember correctly. All boss spawns, however, can be rather rough.

Farming really isn't bad for AE in and of itself. I will say that the overabundance of identical farm missions is, however. Unfortunately though, with the stigma that's been put on farming, and with the developers' decree that AE is not for farming, (note: different than saying farming is bad) people who do want to make farms will make their own farm. The likely reason being, if there's one farm mission that everyone is playing, it'll get noticed very quickly and likely be removed.

Wow, that was a much longer post than I thought it would be. I guess I'm in a contemplative mood tonight. I was going to post some thoughts about custom critter experience, but this is long enough for one post.

I don't think anything needs to be fixed. It works just fine for what it was intended to be... an addition *to* the game and not a replacement *for* the game.

With the changes made, I think we slowly see the garbage taken out and the creative mission creators slowly return now that thier arcs won't get burried in the prior morass of min-max farms and exploits.

Once the clutter is gone, I forsee the raating system and Dev's Choice both getting thier fair chance to be evaluated for they're effectivness.

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

*shrug* When I got into the I14 closed beta, I was one of the people that said "I don't think I'll do much with the MA, since I'm not really interested in stories, only XP and the like." I did make an arc or two during closed beta but so much changed between when I made the arc and when the issue actually launched, my arc was horribly broken and I didn't even know where to begin to fix it. Of course, many of the beta testers (myself included after I realized what was going on) pointed out that there was the potential for huge abuse of the system based on the launch parameters, but it went live anyways.

People farmed it. They farmed it a lot. Posi came out and said "You've been bad, and we're going to punish you, but we won't tell you what we're going to punish you for." Many people I knew had characters deleted and accounts temp banned - some legitimately, some accidentally. The resulting blowup on the forums caused a few people I play with to leave, and many of those haven't come back and probably never will. I think that's where it started to go downhill, really: following the mass deletions and temp bans (which, amazingly, some still say never happened), the MA population was stable, and high, but probably not as high as it was at I14 launch. Tweaks have been made since that time in an effort to stamp out the farming, but as is commonplace with this development team, the corrections probably went a step (or several steps) too far and again people just gave up.

I do think that people will continue to farm the MA, simply because it's convenient and usually offers superior rewards (though not quite as disproportionate as they were prior to I16). I don't think that most people who gave up on it at I16 launch will come back to it.

How I would like to utilize the MA feature:

• As a means to create unique SG-focused story content.
• As a source of new content to play with my 50s.
• As a leveling alternative.
• As a means to publish arcs for general play.

• Experience rewards in AE need to be at least in the ballpark of RC. If it's going to be a leveling alternative--and I think it needs to be in order to attract the necessary degree of use--then it has to be viable as such. I don't believe it is right now. Not even close.

• Developer's Choice has to go away or change radically. I was dubious about this feature from the start. After seeing how it's been neglected, I think my trepidation was on the mark. Honestly, unless developers are going to start posting reviews in this forum, I really don't give a toss about what any single one of them might consider good. Based on existing DCs, it's clear my tastes often differ from theirs, so shoving their choices in my face every time I open the AE window is just a nuisance to be immediately bypassed. Either get rid of DCs or have, like, 3 DC slots that change every month.

• There needs to be frequent additions of new content to the system. Honestly, I am truly baffled and amazed that this hasn't been done to any significant extent. There should be new map, new mob, and new package options coming in at a steady pace. Perhaps more importantly, some of this stuff should be exclusive to MA. I believe MA should have at least one tile set that you can't find anywhere else in the game. Even if it's just a recoloring of an existing one.

• Search functionality needs to be expanded further and the ratings system needs to be tossed. There have been some good suggestions about this sort of thing in this thread already. I would be much, much more interested in what Eva, WN, Venture, etc., have put on a "recommended" list than in what rating an arc has garnered from the nameless masses. Largely because the latter is so easily gamed. In practice, it means next to nothing. And even if an arc rating hasn't been manipulated, a high rating just means it's widely acceptable not necessarily good.

Agreed. The devs dug a ditch for AE. As has happened before w/ other issues, they overcorrect for perceived problems.

Maybe this is not an isolated tendency. See the massive oversteering in Champions since launch.

I truly don't see why more measured responses aren't implemented. It is after all all vitual, read imaginary, activity. As such when players are having fun, devs should accomodate and encourage it. What does it cost them to do so? It's just code. None of it's real. Whenever they take away something, it makes me think of a kid who says "It's my ball and I make the rules, so there."

In this case we were allowed to share the ball. Guess we had too much fun w/ it.

I agree with Hydrophidian on all points.

(How's that for "words I never thought I'd say"? )

Just brainstorming here...I was thinking this morning that if the Dev's would implement "wasting" feature with MA, something like they have with the market it would clear out the search list massively. Something like: If a published mission is not played or edited in 30 days it is marked as inactive and will no longer show up on standard searches. The missions would still be there and if played or edited they would move back to the active list. You could also have a box to check in the search feature "Search Inactive Missions".


WN

P.S. - Excellent post Hydrophidian.

Alt, I agree with most of what you wrote, however...

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Alt_oholic . It is only fruitless to make new arcs if you don't enjoy making new arcs. I like making new arcs. I think it is fun - regardless if anyone is playing them or not.

I disagree. For me the real fun is having people play and enjoy the arcs I have made. I would compare it to coming up with a great cake recipe, making the cake and then no one will try it. Disappointing.

Quote:

The MA doesn't need to be revived. It is good as it is with i16. I don't want to see a resurgence of farmers in the AE.

If it is "good as it is" why has there been such a sharp drop in players using the MA? It is not just "farmers" who have stopped playing MA.

Quote:

There are far too many copyright infringement arcs. Paragon Studios needs to have someone in place to hunt down and remove those arcs before the game is sued again.

I have played many 100's of arcs and I can only think of a few that came close to actual copyright infringement and none of those had many plays. It really is a non-issue.


WN

I think the best metaphor, and one that's really pretty close to not *being* a metaphor, is comparing the work we put in creating an arc to the work an author puts into writing a book. Whether they enjoy writing or not, the real joy comes from having others read, and react to, the creation. Seeing others entertained by your work, and even becoming emotionally involved in it (if that's a goal you've worked for) is the reward we're looking for.

As the system currently stands, there are barriers to that that are starting to disillusion creators. Hopefully the powers-that-be will fine tune the search function, find ways of removing farms and broken (and ignored) content, and make the Dev's Choice award a viable and rewarding function again.

Hard data on what? That even on Standard, custom critters are often more difficult than dev-created critters, especially pre-level 40? That the number of people playing MA arcs is declining? That people don't want to fight custom groups? That levelling by fighting groups containing all three ranks is slower within the MA than outside it?

We may know, or at least suspect, that those things are true (although even before the xp reduction a lot of people may have been turned off custom groups by the fact that so many of them are poorly designed) but how exactly do you propose we go about gathering hard data?