How Will the Latest Patch Affect You?

Uh. Is the issue with allies a new problem?

I'm wondering why they needed to put out a 'stopgap measure' for what seems to me to be how things have been for a year+ rather than wait the 'real soon' when they have the right solution.

Am I off?

I believe that a number of people in this thread are getting a little apocalyptical about AE being ruined forever on this patch, I think people haven't quite seen that this ally nerf is actually an 'exploit stop-solution'.

I heard that phrase stop-solution being mentioned when the custom critter XP nerf came down and a lot of people were angry it happened, I can't recall what exploit lead to that exactly, all I knew was the the stop-solution itself heavily reduced rewards on custom mobs. But my point is, an exploit stop-solution is a very quickly devised and hastily written hotfix to force the exploiters to cut that **** out now, and to have spent any more time to implement a less harsh fix would take too long.

I believe most people who've seen the features of Issue 17 will know that custom mobs will have improved options to properly balance and renew rewards given for custom powers for mobs, and that was the solution to the previous (and first) stop-solution. What you people need to realise is that somewhere down the line, this ally stop-solution is going to get it's 'proper-solution' and then you can have allies that won't punish your legitimate arcs again.

As for will the patch affect me? It doesn't affect me now, but it may affect how many people would play my arcs when I finally get into writing and publishing them of course. It's a real shame that allies got harshly hotfixed all because of exploiters torturing poor defenseless AVs with tons of debuffing and buffing allies.

What I'm hoping is that if a proper solution to the ally stop-solution isn't quickly implemented in Issue 17, that optimistically they might have it in time for Going Rogue/Issue 18, or the very least Issue 19, but I say GR/18 because they might add some new stuff to AE for the expansion and would be the most logical time to add a more sensible solution along with what they already devised.




Also to clarify to some people, it's only for arcs that have more than ONE ally that's affected by this stop-solution. If you have zero or one ally per mission, the rewards /should/ remain the same as before. But there's not been a confirmation of whether things are working as intended.

Edit:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lazarus Writing good arcs. Oh by the way, Dr. Aeon has finally spoken on the issue.

Ah nice! A lot can happen when you're writing a post! Good to hear some confirmation on the issue

Oh yeah, that custom power nerf hotfix is a good example of how they implemented a quick solution to avoid exploits, and then amended the fix with a better fix a scant... ... oh, right, they haven't actually fixed that patch, have they?


Here's the thing. If the problem hasn't been so bad it needed fixing in the last 10 months, why jump the gun by 2 months? (Or whatever)

By comparison, I think my work flow for a typical story arc goes something like this:


Daydreaming/idea phase: work effort 2-4hrs, duration 2-90 days
Storyboarding: work 1-2hrs, duration 1 day
First draft (in test mode): work 8-16hrs, duration 2-7 days
Playtesting: work 2-4hrs
--- publication ---
Advertising/promotion: work 1-2hrs, duration forever/until unpublish
Rework & refinement due to player feedback (in "live" mode): work 4-24hrs, duration forever/until unpublish

TOTAL: 18 to 42 hours per arc (average 30 hours).


Some of my arcs require some research, mostly poking around ParagonWiki and Wikipedia for interesting bits of game lore and real life lore. I count this as daydreaming/idea phase.

I don't count doing arc reviews as part of "advertising" budget, as it isn't directly related to one of my story arcs, though it does earn me a lot of plays (especially on my less well-known story arcs), so maybe should be counted.

I've published a total of 10 story arcs on live (8 are still up; 2 have been unpublished). At an average of 30 hours each, I estimate my lifetime total as being 300 hours.

My billable rate would make that quite a sum, but the truth is, I did it because it was fun. I enjoyed the act of creating something that I thought was cool, and that I hoped other players would think was cool too.


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Regarding the original topic, "How will this affect you", the current patch impacts 7 of my 8 currently published arcs. I find that my writing style uses a lot of allies, hostages and battles, to make missions seem more interesting than the average radio mission. The only one of my arcs it does not impact is Attack of the 50 Foot Villain. Ironically, this is my one arc which I've had several players accuse of being a farm.

I don't plan to rework my various story arcs to try and conform to the standard set by the 4/7 patch, as I believe the 4/7 patch is Not Working As Intended and needs to get rolled back or fixed.

What took me 60 hours to do my arc?

1. 5 Custom villains with well done costumes, power choices, full dialogue and descriptions.
2. 1 Custom villain group again with well done costumes, power choices, etc. (5 mobs in all in this group)
3. 3 fully detailed missions with all dialogue and text well written, and thought out. MANY changes here.
4. Interesting encounters that are more than just go kill this guy or go save this guy.
5. Lots of play testing, minor tweak, repeat.
6. Lots of difficulty tweaking.
7. Several rewrites of a few of the missions to get them just right.
8. Oh, and this was my very first experience with the tools - so I had to learn how to use them, and to learn how to use them effectively to pull off things that most arcs don't do.
9. And let's not forget the time I spent advertising in Atlas AE and Atlas Park, and the time trying to get groups together to run it with me (for play testing purposes)
10. Iteration, iteration, iteration. A former boss once told me - You spend 90% of your time on a task in the last 10% of the work to be done.

My 3 mission arc uses about 99% of 100k.

Take mission 1 for instance <SPOILER ALERT>:

You come into the map, and are expected to rescue someone. Toward the back-middle of the map you find a body bag. Upon opening it, you discover the person you were meant to rescue is already dead, and your new objective becomes to locate a deep cover operative (which you are told about in the introduction to the mission). You find him at the rear of the map, being hassled by enemies. You rescue him, and he tells you the person you were meant to rescue left you a message, hidden in plain site. You must now escort him out of the building, and find that message. You find the message, and it spawns the final boss which killed the person you were supposed to rescue. There are ambushes that happen as well at specific moments during these objectives.

As you can see, this isn't a typical go in kill X boss and rescue X person - mission complete. It has been painstakingly set up to spawn objectives in a specific order to make for a good story. Its basically a 4 objective mission, but not all at once. Dialogue and clues are all fully detailed.

Mission 3 uses a great trick to have a boss that gets away, etc.

So you ask what takes me 60 hours to do an AE - there you have it. It's not much different than building content for a game as an actual developer. I speak from experience. It can take a long time to get it just right. But the more comfortable you get with the tools, the quicker it goes.

In this case, I agree with Venture. Travel time does not equal content.

Don't be ridiculous. There is no more or less travel time in mission 1 than normal. LOL. You haven't even played it, and you hate it. Too funny. You have no idea what map was used, or how things are placed. You make assumptions without any experience at all. The arc has a 4 star rating, with 22 rates so far, so I must have done something right. I'm not shooting for the moon here, but just trying to make something fun and compelling. Play it before you use strong words like hate to describe it. If you still hate it then, to each his own.

You travel toward the back, killing mobs along the way, then back to the front, as part of an escort mission, but along the way you find another objective and a boss to kill. Simple. The only reason people would run back and forth through the map 4 times, as you say, would be if they deliberately choose to ignore the objectives right in front of their eyes. And that can happen on any mission.

Moving on...

Megajoule, nobody said I was using travel time as content. I don't even know how that would be done, nor why you would assume that is the case. The content is the story, the mobs you kill, the people you save, etc. Travel time is - travel time.

But, if the both of you think travel time in a 1 floor warehouse is excessive, then maybe you should try some other MMOs that aren't so heavily instanced, with instant teleports everywhere you go - like EQ or WoW. Then come talk to me about excessive travel time.

Chained objectives are vital to maintaining a sequence of events, whether in a big outdoor map or to ensure someone doesn't sneak past boss 1, defeat boss 2, and see dialog that assumes you took care of boss 1 first rather than the reverse.

Exactly! Any mission that has a story and dialogue that is tied together needs the ability to have chained objectives. Not all of them do, but chained objectives are very handy.

And on top of that, to say that the majority of AEs that use them are badly done, is like stating the obvious. The majority of ALL AEs are badly done. That's bound to happen when you have thousands of AEs written by people who can't write a story to save their lives, or who have no idea of how to design good encounters, or who don't know how to tweak difficulty settings for monsters, or for that matter who don't have an artistic bone in their bodies when it comes to costuming.

I'm not pointing to any specific AEs, but you gotta expect, regardless of the tools we're given, that the majority of the AEs are just poorly done. Sure, everyone might think they're the greatest writer or whatever, but that doesn't make it true. I'm not trying to be elitist here, just making a point. Not everyone can be a da Vinci, or a Rembrandt. But they CAN have fun doing it, and in the end, that's what I think the best part of the AE system is. Everyone can see what its like to be an MMO content developer (in a very modest way), and have a good time doing it, even if they would never actually be hired by an MMO company.

And to finally get back on topic here - it is sad to see the system being so heavily nerfed, resulting in far fewer users, and the disenfranchisement of competent AE authors.

I agree with Venture in this instance.

To quote Arbiter Sands:

"Well, adopt, adapt and improve, I suppose. At least it will give me a chance to re-organize things after we clean up."

Venture likes to say things. Don't mind him.

Frankly I don't understand the need. You lose experience for any damage allies do so having lots of them gets you near nothing in a mission. Also a EB ally and a minion ally are hardly the same thing. Hard to keep minions alive even.

It is unfortunate that some people ruin things for everyone but what you gonna do?

Looks like my Mastermind for a day arc isn't coming back. I made one where you could pick up like 6 minion allies and try and fight an EB (who tended to kill them very quickly given the chance lol)

meh, will it effect arch's that i make

short answer: not really

long answer: why because i write for story so if i dont write here that just means i will spend time else where. but im going to wait until after GR to see what happens.

in the mean time i will post stories on my blog for people to read and else where mainly. this was/is? a way to become a better writer for me if AE becomes to much of a problem i will just writer else where.

The Beating Heart of Astoria has 170 plays and a 4 star average and makes use of chained objectives in nearly every mission.

Captain Skylark Shadowfancy has 50 plays and a 5 star average and makes extremely heavy use of chained objectives and has backtracking in a few missions.

There are no MA features that are automatically bad just by existing. Even defeat all's have a use occasionally.

Also the latest patch will probably kill the exp in several of my arcs; I like to use non-combat allies as scenery. I don't particularly care, though; it's a temporary change and I don't really write arcs with exp in mind.