How Will the Latest Patch Affect You?

Agreed. I only make and play arcs for the story. And I try to limit the use of allies anyway.

I get the message they are trying to send. The CoX world is a horrible cruel place and everyone is trying to kill you. To try to pretend otherwise is "not using the MA as intended."

I'm fairly certain my one, and first Arc (393301 - Questionable Ethics) will be dramatically affected by this patch. 3 Missions, all of which have rescues, 1 with many battles between an enemy and ally group, and 1 with an ally (who is actually an enemy that just gets away).

Here's the kicker - I have spent over 60 hours working on it (finding the right maps for the objectives and atmosphere, writing the story, tweaking and testing the difficulty, figuring out how best to create the encounters with the limited tools, costuming the custom villains, advertising in game, etc.), it is my first Arc, and pretty much the day I finished it is the day the new patch came out! And on that same day, I go into the AE building in Atlas, and it is dead, dead, dead.

Thank you so much for killing my desire to make more AE story arcs guys. I spent 60+ hours making a fun, well written story, with interesting encounters that make use of captives and allys that exist solely for story, and you destroy all my hard work with the wave of a hand. I've only gotten 20 ratings last I checked, and something tells me that number isn't going to be going up very quickly now.

Glory Days has a single Ally in virtually every mission. That probably won't be good. Toil has a couple in the last mission, but... hell, no one plays that one anyway.

While my friends and I are very much non-farmers, I admit it's hard to motivate us to drop an hour of our limited free/gaming time on something that gives no reward other than story. We're not to that point yet, but...

Yeah... don't want to be overly dramatic, but it's kind of the final straw for me; despite all the advertising venues I tried, I couldn't get more than 10 plays outside my SG on an arc that I spent about a month on. And now it's going to be worth almost 0 xp basically ensuring it won't get another play unless I bribe people to play it, wheeee! Doesn't exactly make me want to design new arcs.

(The 'To Dream of Nothing' arc has two allies in every mission; they are LT-level with relatively weak powersets. They are closely integrated with the story and are important to help the player defeat the EB/boss in the last mission. There is also a rescue in the third mission, which is the one that has most of the fighting and hence xp...)

My first arc (The Coldest of Wars) is unaffected, but still... bleh.


-- Z.

Yeah, this messes up most of my arcs. I routinely put 'friendly' characters within missions...whether it's to interact with the contact character more personally, to rescue an 'ally' that betrays, to discover a conflict between warring factions, or to find join forces with someone with similar objectives, the 'ally' faction is a nice way to make stories 'deeper.' The developers knew this, they put it there.

When this feature came out, I went crazy with it, learning the ins and out, the limitations, making a good slew of arcs and missions. Some were better than others, but I put 1-2 weeks (including weekends) into each arc. I have a job, am involved in my community, and try to maintain a semblance of social life so this game time was all of my game time.
Then come the first slew of changes. My arc is invalid? No problem, adjust, go on.
Then the next changes. Drat, it doesn't work again? Adjust, go on.
The next changes. Adjust..
It got tiring.
Meanwhile, the server's weekly architect story night was petering off. First 5 full teams. Then 4. Then 3. 2. Finally, there were just 9 players.

The straw that gave the camel his back troubles was the original power rating change thing: tougher foes, or less reward. It tried it, but the council pushovers gave a far better reward than the custom enemies that were wiping teams. I looked at the powers that were 'required' for full rewards and asked myself "really? Really?"

I don't make my missions just for me. Though I do like getting my characters more abilities/stuff, I'm fine going through my own stories just to see them in action. But I'm not self-centered enough to make my friends do so without letting them get something in their time. They work, have lives, so the time they have to play is all the time they have to work on their characters.

I'm trying to give them something new/different/fun to try. I'd also like more people to find/use/enjoy the stuff I made. The gameplay I'm putting together I'd like to compare favorably to other portions of the game. My measure of success is this: if an in-game contact gave the missions, would people be glad to go through the arc? People can stand an interesting arc even if it's not the most lucrative in the game. But imagine if a player is given a mission by a contact that gives poor rewards based upon the time/danger it exposes them to? They'll /bug it, or complain about it.

I realized by this time that stories were now second priority, well behind their first concern: exploit repair. My weeks messing with new content is less important than somebody else's power leveling? That made sense at first when all people were doing was boss farms at the AE, but when they were still whacking my missions despite a great downturn in AE farming, it just seemed wierd. I accepted that my missions will be (by system design) inferior to the dev content, so I took a break until updates could make my stories a viable time alternative risk/reward-wise again, so I could try new stories and promote them. The announcements for updates of the MA in I17 got me hopeful they'd ironed things out again...then this.

*sigh*

I'll wait longer still. I personaly wish that the time/input of MA story authors was their top priority, (customers paying to give the devs new content) but can accept that as personal bias. This change is temporary, they'll get a fix for this change in a few months. Then I'll rework my stories to make them valid again, and maybe even try a new one or two.

Bleah.

I don't think I've spent 60 hours on all my arcs put together. What are people doing?

I love being creative and making arcs. I also like running content that is different than what I've repeated over and over for the past 6 years. That said, I don't enjoy either of them enough to not get rewarded at least comparatively to what I'd get through normal content. I realize that there is a community ingame that doesn't mind lower rewards, but like many have said its a very very small number. This is a game, with targets and goals and I think while most players don't have to go at warp speed; a turtles pace isn't acceptable either.

While it's not the only reason (there are a few others), I've pretty much given up making arcs and continued reduction in rewards will make me pretty much stop going to AE all together.


That said, I'm not whining, threatening to leave the game, complaining or any of that. Just adding my two cents to the discussion. I still love Coh/v; it's just sad this great tool is getting distorted out of its original purpose: an alternate (and equal...I'm not talking PL speed) way to level a character.

I find the normal content generally low quality and stuff I've done many times before. AE is the only, and I mean only, reason I am subscribed. My normal approach with new characters is to grind to level 3-4, start doing AE missions, get a radio and do radio missions until I can get a safeguard mission and raptor pack, then pretty much spend the rest of my career in AE.

If AE worsens XP significantly, I will leave. And that's not a petulant threat, just a statement of cause and effect.

I'm not all torn up about what it's like presently, because I'm generally willing to give devs a month time to fix any big mistakes that transpire.

While I wasn't affected by this patch too much, it did render one of my arcs pretty much completely obsolete. The reason for this? The final mission is riddled with allies in order to deal with the large amount of stronger enemies if you are alone. So, that's one arc of mine down already. I have to admit, I do really hate to see this happen to the AE, which is pretty much the first of its kind in an MMO and it might as well be the last for how many people have actually attempted to exploit it for gains. I can understand where the devs come from when they do this though; they've released this awe-inspiring device that they've worked hard on that gives us, the players, the chance to let our creativity loose and how do some of us repay them? By creating exploitive farms with buffbots and one-boss custom groups. So, this patch hasn't affected me so much that ALL my arcs are down, nor has it stifled my belief that the AE can one day be truly magnificent and exploit free with everyone trying to think up some elaborate stories.

Li'l question on this though: The RWZ maps? Some, maybe all, have turrets or Vanguard soldiers or both that are there whether you like it or not, they just come with the map. Do they count towards the reward cutdown too?

All my arcs have been nuked by this.

- Jumping in Feet First has two allies and one destructible object in the last mission. Given that it's a low level (1-9) arc, where I carefully picked the map sizes so that the level progress for a level 1 or 2 is very smooth from mission to mission (no fighting greens because you leveled already and the map's too big, big enough to make sure you ding between missions - meaning progressively longer maps), nibbling at the XP on the longest mission is going to be quite a bummer for lowbies.
- Invasion of the Bikini-Clad Samurai Vampiresses from Outer Space: Allies, destructible objects, allied battles in all maps...
- Of Mentors and Legacy: Several release hostage objectives (one map has 6 XP-eating objectives!), three allies in the last map... Sigh.

Dunno about you, but I'm not going to change any of them for now. We'll see where this goes.

Well, I don't know what is going on...exactly. I have some suspicions or notions of my own about the nerfs....but they're based on personal opinions or biases of my own...so there may not be much substance to them.

Right after MA became active I could log on to any server, take a toon to the AE building and find the game room absolutely stuffed with players. There might be as many as half-a-dozen teams actively playing arcs. There was a level of excitement that I hadn't seen in the game in a long time.

Of course....there were exploits....and no one expected those to last. We were certain that the nerf bat would be brought out eventually. What we didn't expect was that the CoH community was about to split into two diametrically opposed bodies of opinion about the merits of the MA system as a whole: the "purists" who believe that a new player can't properly develop their skills unless they are playing the original developer's mission arcs; and the dedicated AE players themselves.

A nasty undercurrent of contention arose between the two groups. The "purists" felt that AE play made it difficult to organize teams for developer's content missions. They felt exploits were ruining the game and its players.

Unfortunately, they had the developer's ears. Some AE players went along with the tide of opinion to keep the peace within the community, and to help to smooth out the contentious issues in the AE content.

But the more the "purists" got in the way of change, the more they wanted. Perhaps that's unfair...but it sort of captures the spirit of the thing. They've gone over every aspect of the AE system with a microscope...looking for all manner of sins....and the developers are still listening. Where the needed changes could have been accomplished with a feather-duster, the developers used a sledge-hammer.

Now the excitement that swirled around the original AE system is long gone. What little life there is left is being methodically stripped away. The AE system in all but two of the servers are now ghost towns.

Damn shame.

It doesn't affect me one bit.

This seems to be a badly designed over-reaction.

Defendable objects kill your XP? Really?

That's working as intended?

I'm pretty sure Pop Tarts and Toasters has been XP hammered.

Rescuing a Cat Gurl band nerfs your Xp

I agree with Heraclea: I, somewhat grudgingly, can accept the reward nerf for allies that fight alongside you, whether they have attacks or not, though as has been mentioned if they have attacks you're already getting less XP. But I cannot understand why captives or other completely non-combatant also trigger reward reductions. My one arc is hit hard, considering it centers around a group of five NPCs. No way I'm going to change it, though, since without them there's no story. Not that I'm getting any plays recently anyway....

There's gotta be some way they can tell, programmatically, the difference between a combatant and everything else. I mean, we have to specify that they are combatants when defining the missions, right? Set as Defensive or Aggressive or whatever.