Which of your arcs are still playable?

while i agree the AE needs to have its holes patched up, i think they kind of knee-jerked a fix because they are currently testing i17, why not just add this to i17 first and put it through alongside i17?, as many others have said, the little exploit has been around since we could select custom powers for custom critters (which was at least i16 if not before)

on another point of view, this did hurt the AE community because while your mishs will still be playable, the amount of poeple actually wanting to play a mish with 80% reduced xp/inf/prestige (or more) is very small, i honestly dont like playing mishs with more than 25% reduced xp/inf/prestige

if your more story oriented and dont care about rewards as much, then more power to you, and this blanket fix wont affect you

I was somewhat wanting to stay out of these threads but I do have to make note of this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Warkupo ...this band-aide helps in that it removes that clutter so that the actual story missions can be more easily found and enjoyed.

The fundamental flaw in that thought process is that there's a lot of stuff that was just left in the system as opposed to being deleted. Some of the exploiters may be scrambling to find a new exploit but this hotfix does not actually remove the clutter. That still rests on the shoulders of the fact that the actually search engine and underlying star average metric sucks. They are a connected problem and fixing them is what would help spread more story missions.

To the original question, I side with Venture on this. The fix sucks but we need to grow up and get over it. My arcs are fine structurally and I encourage fellow architects to kick back, relax, and play them.

This is funny, actually: I wrote several arcs midway through I14 closed beta. Was at first disappointed to discover I couldn't set the level of my missions without manually bracketing them with the appropriate level NPC groups (fixed in I15, but that wasn't the case when I was first writing these arcs). Still, I managed to get them to work, but by the time I14 went into open beta my arcs had been so badly broken (just by the changes made during closed beta, let alone anything during open beta or after I14 went live!) I just gave up. Looking back on it now, I ended up actually saving myself all the headaches I would've had to deal with by constantly adapting my arc to changing limitations by simply not publishing the arcs on live in the first place.

What bugs me about this and drives me to agree with Heraclea's point is...what is so absolutely vital about pushing this 'fix' live right now when it is so obviously broken to a huge degree, in that things that cannot possibly be exploited are penalizing the exp in a mission?

Furthermore, it doesn't seem like the so-called 'problem' this fixes is some new development. It's referred to as a 'long-standing' problem. So if this is such a long-standing problem, why is it so vital to fix that it has to be band-aid 'fixed' with a horribly broken fix?

It's ironic, I've just recently come back to the game and discovered how interesting making good stories in the MA system can be, even with its flaws and limitations, and then a huge number of the tools to make such stories get broken. I won't be putting any further work on the stories I've been working on, and I'm not going to publish them until I can use the already very limited tools in order to tell the story without making the story worthless to actually play through.