Who interacts with the Mission Architect with consideration to its stories?

It may also help to remove "Very Short" arcs from your search. Even single-mission arcs are generally at least "Short" unless they are farms. Searching only "Medium" and longer arcs does cut out pretty much all the farms, although it doesn't do anything about outdated missions.

As I'm already 50, I only play the AE for the stories

I try and do one arc each time I'm on - I just open the search screen, set the filter to "not voted on", and play the first non-Villain arc on the list.

I've taken a break from CoH lately, but because of RL stuff not because of the MA, which I think is still awesome. Rewards? pfff. Story is King.

And i don't find it too difficult to find good story arcs either. Ask in the MA Arc Finder Channel, look on the Sotries and Lore forum, chekc people's sigs...it's easy.

Just don't bother trying to use the in-game MA search engine, cos that blows.

Eco.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

I LOVE the AE, mainly for running VG RP arcs - which we do multiple times a week! XD
As such I'll defend it to the death against all those who cry to have it put down because the vast majority of people are idiots who PL other idiots to 50!

I pretty much agree with Liquid's assessment, except I'll repeat part of his comment as my main issue with AE in general:

"As someone who likes the AE for the story aspect, the setting breaks my immersion. I want my characters to be fighting or perpetrating crime, not playing video games. I actually want to travel to another area of the zone to get to the next mission; it makes me feel like the story is actually taking place in the world."


If I wanted my character(s) to play some sort of game, I'd rather have the pinball machines in the game actually work, even if simply (or would like an emote to sort of look like it is, '/e type' is close) *. Or he would shoot baskets at any one of the numerous basketball courts (hm, never thought about punting, read: knockback, street criminals into a basket.. hmmm.. ).

(note: When I'm more involved in chatting than playing and a pinball machine is nearby I'll have the character stand at it and do the '/e type' emote. Yeah, I'm a role-player, why do you ask? )


* I guess I could play CoX in window mode (first I'll have to figure out how to do that), shrink it down to half the screen size, and bring up any pinball game into the other half and pretend my character is playing the game.. but that just doesn't seem right, either.


Not that I really want the devs spending effort and resources to make pinball machines work in the game. Although, I'd like to have a couple to put in my SG/VG bases, along with a billiard table or dartboard, but that's another topic for other discussions.

You guys Should try my AE Arc Storys, Look up @Super Ratz

I play with the AE occasionally for stories. I mostly play Dev Choice and Guest Author arcs, with the occasional one I spot in a forum-goer's signature, and have created a few (They're in my sig).

I wish the search engine did a better job, too. It's so hard for the good arcs that aren't Dev Choice to get noticed, and that is just as frustrating for their creators as it is to players. My first arc, From the Abyss, has gotten only 12 ratings in the whole time it's been up, which was shortly after AE was launched. And my other one had 7 ratings before I took it down to revise it for I17, and since then the only rating the new version has is a 5-star from the SG-mate I duo-ed it with for him to proofread.

When I've created arcs, I advertise them in my signature, in the "announce your latest creation here" threads in the Architect sections of the forums, and on the Virtue server forum's Arc list, and via LiveJournal's MA community. Are there any other was to get my arcs noticed?

I create arcs for my characters using the Mission Architect. The stories are just as important to me as the rewards.... but by the same token, the rewards are just as important to me as the stories. I need plot to keep me going, and I need rewards to be equivalent to what I get in the standard missions to give me the feeling that my characters are progressing at a decent pace.

Unfortunately, the recent MA changes nerfed the rewards for my most interesting stories big time. I'm having a hard time coming up with arcs that don't include captives and allies. So despite having some nifty new maps available, I haven't been using the MA lately. Hopefully the devs will make some adjustments in the near future that will inspire me to get back in the AE buildings.

Despite the bits that do not quite work right, MA system is a wonderful tool for those who like to express themselves in a creative manner. The MA, though not perfect and flexible enough of a basic tool to endulge everyone's needs, it does allow a nice set of options to impart a narrative. That is also a double edge sword and potential "arms race" between dev and those who choose to exploit the system in regards to reward vs risk and time.

The abililty to create new custom mobs is one of the most intrigueing bits of the MA system. It might not be the dream tool that the creative type would like to have at their disposal, complete with all the bells and whistles, but I have found it does the job quite nicely. The current implementation of weighting powers to derive a percentage of XP as a very nice solution to the problem of exploits on a large scale; Those numbers may need a bit of a tweak though, after all it is a large number of potential combos to deal with and who knows what crazy combo might be the next FAD in custom mob design that could be defined as exploit.

I've been using the MA for some time now, both creating my own arcs and playing others. First, my experience with creating arcs. The architect tool makes it fairly straight forward to create a simple story, even a more complex one if you've got the inclination. That's a good thing. However, after pouring a fair amount of time into creating these stories I've struck the following problems; PUG teams aren't interested in the story, in fact they barely get to see most of the story because only the team leader sees the contact dialogue, which is where most room is allowed for story-telling. Which leads onto the second problem I've had with my stories, a lot of players aren't interested in the story in the slightest. I've taken a few groups into my stories (which are not optimised to maximise rewards in the slightest) only to have them bail, either one by one, or enmasse with comments like, "Need Moar XP," "XP sux", etc. Well, I'm sorry for writing a story that people might want to play, it was silly of me, it seems people are actually more interested in the Shiny!

My experience in playing MA arcs of others has been mostly good. I know how to use the search feature to find arcs I like, sometimes I have to go through 1 or 2 missions before I find out it's horribly broken and try another, but mostly I'm impressed with the quality of writing in the arcs and the way the mechanics have been used. The biggest issue is narrowing down the search field to avoid the farms! Yick, I don't like farm missions, every single enemy is the biggest toughest evilest creature that can be designed, and takes an aeon to kill, then it's onto the next one, just the same as the last. If you don't have the FoTM AT with all the IO's, this just makes these unplayable.

So, those are my 2 cents. Now, PLAY MY ARCS!

You guys do realize that others can see the contact intro and send-off dialogue by clicking the "more" button or the red star in the nav bar right?

Oh wait...some of you probably don't because the game doesn't give you any indication that you should do that. The "more" button should be in a more obvious place, both for AE and regular content (just in case there are still people who read TF dialogue instead of looking it up on ParagonWiki after the fact.)

The only thing your team members can't see is the "still busy" and "return to contact" dialogue, which is why a lot of authors who design for teams don't put any crucial information there. A team leader can copy and paste that dialogue into the chat box for everyone to read.

Inspired by this thread, I went to tonight and visited the AE.

Wow... that was dire.

I started out looking at random pages of 4-star arcs. Page after page of abandoned farms, unfinished arcs, ones that perhaps looked interesting but then I'd see "Custom Enemies. Warning: EXTREME Archvillains!", etc.

Oh well. I'll try the no-rated arcs. I'll even sort them by date starting with the newest. Right now some fledgling author is probably waiting by his or her screen for that first "You have received 25 tickets..." message and maybe a shot of yellow text praising their story-telling efforts.

BM Farm
Time to harvest for Farmer Clem
BIG XP FARM
batle maidin farm
Veggie Time!!
Plant Killahz
myfarm
FARM 4 GROOPS

Eventually a fellow SG-mate gave me his arc number which was entertaining. But I could have been there all night trying to find something worth playing unless I stuck to the HoF/Dev Choice arcs or ones gleaned from the forums. Pretty depressing news for the story minded.

This is why I created Virtual Lad. He's playing a video game and is quite aware of it.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

I use AE for story sometimes. My general policy is that I won’t use AE at all unless I’m either farming, or teamed. I won’t use AE for stories while solo unless an arc is specifically recommended to me by a trusted friend.

This is for a couple of reasons, many of which have already been mentioned:

Good arcs are hard to find. The ratings system is not at all helpful. Anything that doesn’t have 5 stars isn’t immediately visible, anything that doesn’t have 5 stars tends not to get played. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that a 5-star rating isn’t necessarily a guarantee of quality. A lot of surprisingly bad arcs have 5-star ratings. Some of the stuff in the 4-star pile is pretty good, but then, a lot of it isn’t. It’s hard to sort the good from the bad. So hard, in fact, that I find it's not really worth my time to try.

I can’t play through many AE arcs on my normal settings. Player-made enemy groups tend to be overpowered. This is a sweeping generality, and there are a few shining exceptions to it, but I find that it’s true more often than not. The system makes it far too easy to crank up the difficulty well past the max you’ll find in a dev-made arc. I find it incredibly frustrating to come across groups and encounters in AE that make it impossible for me to progress without lowering my normal difficulty settings substantially. I especially hate it when I’m actually enjoying the arc and the story, and then have my fun brought to a screeching halt by an Extreme/Extreme Elite Boss who is both a required mission objective and unsoloable with my build, AT, sets, or skill level. This kills otherwise enjoyable arcs for me – instant ragequit.

The rewards system as is encourages farming and punishes playing through a mission normally. Rewards are based on map size, not risk or enemies defeated - ticket caps get larger as map size increases. Thus, the best way to maximize your reward is to farm on an extra large map until you’ve got half the required tickets, then click the glowie to get the other half. If you’re on a small map, the maximum number of tickets you can get is far smaller. This makes zero sense since they changed the difficulty options, since you can now always choose to fight the number of enemies required to hit the largest ticket cap, even on the smallest map. This means that if a story arc has maps that are smaller than extra large (i.e. most story-based arcs), rewards are going to be much smaller, even if you fight the same number of enemies.

Having Ticket Caps scale with map size is silly, because enemy count no longer has a lot to do with map size. Technically, larger maps mean a larger total number of enemies, but that's a bit academic when the largest cap would still be reachable on the smallest map type if you're fighting at x8. I would absolutely love to play through story arcs as they're meant to be played in order to get my tickets. Unfortunately, the rewards system discourages this, and the stories themselves tend not to be so excellent that I'll play them even without the reward carrot.

This last point might have been changed since I last looked – I haven’t bothered to solo with AE for a few issues, now.

I totally thought this thread was about something completely different

I don't use the Architect. Not at all, not any more. My reasons are actually pretty simple, and come in two parts:

1. Making arcs in the Architect is pointless, thankless trudge. The only way to get your arc played in any meaningful way is to get it played is to advertise out the bung hole, and I didn't sign up for an MMO to play marketing. And if you don't advertise, and advertise CONTINUOUSLY, then your arc doesn't get played. I've had arcs that have had less than 20 playthroughs each, and one of those was published the day the Architect came out. I could spruce them up with the I17 goodies, but what's the point? They won't get played, so no-one will see them, so it makes no difference.

As an amateur writer, I know one thing for a fact - writing is fun, but having your stuff READ is monumentally more satisfying. Considering that putting together good, interesting, creative missions is basically HARD WORK (harder than actually writing stories), which in itself kills the fun of the creation process, to trudge through the toil with full knowledge nobody is ever going to know or care leaves me with no motivation to bother. Why should I?

2. I would describe myself as a cynical, curmudgeony ******* of unpleasable taste. I don't appreciate humour, I HATE insider references to stuff I don't know or care about, I dislike exuberantly tough fights and I abhor narrative that says "you think" or "you feel." God damn it, people! If I managed to make an arc about your character doing things of his or her own volition without once using those expressions, so can you!

All of this means that I just don't really like other people's arcs most of the time. That's not to say I hate arcs as a concept, as the few arcs I've been expressly asked to review have largely been decent and entertaining, but pulling an arc out of the air is just hopeless. And I'm not talking about farms at all. My tastes and opinions are just such that I hate most people's arcs just naturally and instinctively. That's not to say developer content is that much better (often it's actually much worse on the older stuff), but I give official missions a LOT more leeway than I give what is essentially fan fiction. This is only compounded by the fact that a lot of people take HUGE liberties with canon.

In fact, I guess one of the main reasons I don't enjoy other people's arcs is because of all the custom factions. Everyone's basically translocating the narrative into some other setting, using their own unique factions that I've never heard of and don't honestly care about, writing their own stories completely divorced from City of Heroes content. No objective criticism here. I just don't like that sort of stuff.

As a result, I have no reason to make content and I have no desire to play content from the Architect. I don't foresee any way to change my mind on this subject.

*edit*
You know what? The Architect is a lot like the base editor. I REALLY wanted to like it and enjoy it, but the circumstances in how it's implemented and how it's used just kill it for me. With the base editor, it's the CRUSHING complexity and the sheer amount of hard, concentrated work I need to put in for very little effect. Add that to their restriction to not just groups of people, but large, active groups of people, and it just kills the use for me. I'd have liked something simpler, easier and more personal. Similarly, arcs being this hard to make and so limited in number is what kills my desire to make any. I'd make arcs for myself, but with 30 characters and three slots... And I doubt I'll ever become a fan of other people's work, by and large.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Certainly, something needs to be done about the state of the arcs available as others have stated. I've yet to go back through my two arcs for compatibility with the latest patches so I have no idea what state they are in.

I'd love a system that removes from listings (forcing the owner to Republish before listed again) any mission that....

- At any time it becomes flagged as invalid
- Any mission not marked as "Final" disappears after 30 days of a (re)publish

... plus send a Gleemail notification of such removals to the owner.

And for the love of $deity rotate the Dev Choice "stickiness". Only keep the recent Dev Choices up top, let the rest sink down to the bottom (so you can search for "Dev Choices" but they're not taking up page after page).