SAMUARI - Endurance

ok, Since Rafa's samuari mission isn't published anymore....I remade it and made a story for it. It has a detailed story. I made it with the same samuari Rafa had, and gave them revive as an added power without taking anything away from the standard powers. Which to me, making them revive makes the mission harder to kill. I followed the rules of AE guidelines in making the custom toons, and creating a story. If some wanna use it as a farm, I can't help that. I just thought it was a cool mission and I didn't wanna see that concept gone.

That being said, STOP COMPLAINING. If you don't wanna run the mission, don't run it. I got a complaint comment on it saying it has almost no story text. ********, it has story text. I thought it out for like an hour. Even the clickie has a story text. He also put nonsensical custom mobs set to a high level with self rez. Well, I set the custom mobs to standard and just added revive....to make it HARDER!!!!!!! Also, he put, lots of identical buffing allies. Well, if your running through there solo, it's good to have allies, and I put alot in there b/c they die off fast or they stop following if you move too fast. And I put the 1 glowie to end the mission for 3 reasons. It was like that in the original Sam mission. 2, If a team enters the mission, and something isn't right like difficulty settings....it's easier to click the clickie and end the mission rather than exit, quit the TF and reform, get the mission again, and go in. And 3, there are MANY mission made by the devs...regular contact missions....that the only goal is to click on 1 thing, or save 1 person and the mission ends. If the devs can do it, SO CAN I!!!!

Nice rant. Needs more CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!!!! to really sound rabid though.

However, it really seems like all of this is just you explaining how you made up some random story stuff and added it on to a popular farming mission in order to bring back the farming. Nowhere in this rant do you talk at all about what the story actually is, and spending "like an hour" on story is not exactly a strong selling point. I'd be more convinced if you were so proud of the story that you felt moved to share, well, any of it with the rest of us.

At the end of the day, it sounds like this was more about adding 'story' window dressing to the Samurai mission so that it could be farmed and less about telling a good story. So while I applaud the community-minded spirit you have in the first paragraph and always commend anyone who does something for the players at large, I wouldn't be suprrised if this too eventually gets pulled.

I'm not going to post the story in here when all you have to do is look up the mission in the game to read it. I wanted max mobs in my mission and aside from revive, all their powers are the standard set for SS/Regen. Other than adding Revive to them, they are normal toons to go in and fight. The fact that I added more mobs is meant to just add to the difficulty of the mission. And how would you know if the first samuari mission got pulled. Rafa could have just let his account expire. It was a Hall of Famer.

And as far as people calling this a farm mission. ANY AE MISSION IS A FARM. A normal farm is any mission that is used to gain xp, but not completed so it can be reset and played again and again. Ok, lets make this alittle more simple. A farm is clearing a mission but not completing it so you reset it and run it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The devs want their missions completed. However, the AE system is really nothing BUT a farming system. It's whole concept is all about farming if you think about it. It's the only thing it's really good for. The only difference between AE and regular farming, is you get tickets instead of drops (no purples or salvage but you still can get recipes) and you can complete the mission. And after you complete it...guess what, you can go back in again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.....and so on...just like a regular farm.

So all that being said, stop complaining about AE missions being farming missions. THEIR ALL FARMING MISSIONS!!!!

ok, if your gonna say something that makes no sense or if your not gonna elaborate what you mean by stretch, expand, or alter.........then don't post. That made no sense without explanation.

It made sense to me. He basically called out the fallacy in your statement that all AE missions are farms. Unless you stretch the definition of farm to 'anything one does more than once', you're wrong. And if by those terms all AE missions are farms, then so is everything else in the game.

As for the what you said in reply to me, you're right, I don't know if the Samurai mission was pulled or not. And while people were definately farming it, that alone shouldn't be grounds for it to be pulled - people farm plenty of things that aren't purpose-built for farming and that's the critical difference. You're quite right that the Samurai mission could have vanished for other reasons.

However, your OP is specifically aimed at the assumption that it was pulled for farming reasons and your reasons for adding story are aimed at that assumption - this was what I responded to. If it (or any misison) is pulled as a farm, then adding window dressing backstory for the sole purpose of reintroducing the farm is unlikely to be effective. That was my point.

Whether or not the Samurai missions in particular were or were not considered farms by the GMs and whether or not they were pulled as such I of course do not know for certain. I personally didn't think they were blatant farms compared to some of the other offenders I've seen (Rikti Comm, Hami, etc) and was surprised to hear they'd vanished.

As for the AE system being inherently a farming system, that's just flat-out wrong. Nothing really more to be said there. Not only is it not a farming system, it's been stated I don't how many times (quite a few, from well before it was released and right up to the present) that it's explicitly not for farming. Of course, people abuse it anyway, but that's why blatant farms are removed. It's not a farming system. Yes, there are rewards, but the primary purpose of the AE system is player-generated content. Stories. Not farming. The fact that large numbers of players choose to focus on farming rather than story doesn't change the fact that the AE exists for the latter, not the former.

I never said or pointed to the assumption that it was pulled. As I said, his account might have expired. It was up and running and everyone was talking about it for a month or so, and made hall of fame. With EVERYONE talking about and running the Sam mission, don't you think the devs would have done something about it a long time ago if they thought it broke any rules they established?

And BTW, Until they make AE missions playable 1 time per toon (for teams that counts only for the leader of the team) AE is a farm system. Since all you do in ANY mission AE or regular contact is go in and kill (maybe click on something or escort) and exit..... Any mission is farmable. But AE makes it easier b/c you don't have to exit and risk losing the mission.

Okay, seems like you just prefer to misunderstand, but I'll clarify one more time.

1) I'm not saying the Samurai missions were pulled. I'm not saying that you are saying they were pulled. I am saying that you posted your OP rant and you added story elements based on the assumption that they were pulled as a corrective measure. I pointed out that such measures by their very nature don't work because they are window dressing on a farm mission rather than a story mission that happens to be farmed - a critical if often subjective distinction.

2) You remain quite wrong on the subject of farms. AE missions are no different than regular missions with respect to their replayability. Timed missions aside, any player is capable of repeating any mission as many times as he or she likes, either by resetting the specific instance or by using Ouroboros. Since we now get experience while exemplared there's really no difference.

Is it easier to farm an AE arc? Sure, in many ways. There's player control over the content itself, the mission door is always in the same place, and you can repeat the mission immediately after you complete it without the need for additional steps like Ouroboros or resetting the instance.

Does the fact that it's easier to farm the AE mean that the AE is for farming, that farming is the purpose of AE arcs? No. Just because something is farmable doesn't mean that it exists solely or primarily to be farmed. The Devs have been extremely clear on this point - the AE is not a farming engine. If it were, only exploitative arcs would be removed and farm arcs would not. The fact that blatant farms are routinely removed bears out this point.

And, since you seem to be responding only to bits and pieces of what I've posted, I'll reiterate again that I am not arguing the Samurai mission was a violation. I am not arguing it was a farm. In fact I've already said I was suprrised to see it vanish and if it was indeed pulled then I think that was probably uncalled for. My response was to your intent to add story to a pulled arc in order to make it okay, something that in both theory and practice is dubious.

I was not making any kind of comment on the Samurai arc. It was popular and as far as I could see it wasn't a blatant offender, certainly not on the scale of farms I've seen in recent memory. As I've already posted all of this, however, I think this thread's reached its endpoint, at least as far as I'm concerned. And while I think that your heart was probably in the right place trying to restore a popular resource to the community, it was either pulled as a farm - in which case adding window dressing story doesn't accomplish much, or else it was pulled by Rafa (either due to inactivity or a deliberate pull by the author to make changes) - in which case it's his to do what he wants with and republish or not as he sees fit and really probably isn't anyone else's province to address.

It seems like a homage, rather than a retread with token story, would have been a better solution and could have featured real strides in narrative at the same time.