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

I used it for the stories quite a bit, but I've cut back on that lately mostly for reasons unrelated to the AE itself.

1) I have had shorter blocks of time to play, and when I do play, I am subject to interruptions both real-world and from in-game friends, making following a dedicated storyline tougher

2) I've been pulling old, pre-Invention characters out of retirement and rebuilding them with IO sets. This takes an amazing amount of time for some reason. I have finally made enough money to proceed with the shopping, but I'm too cheap to pay the "buy it nao" prices and so I bargain hunt and pore over the lists and lay trap bids that sometimes take weeks to fill if they fill at all. I've stopped buying rare salvage too, at least the ones that have spiked to over 3 million, and I do use Architect to generate tickets for those.

My loading screens are long, and they're even worse with I-17. While this doesn't impact AE specifically, it does mean that the process of checking market/checking vault/using base crafting table/tossing in base racks/loging out/logging in new character/zoning into base/ checking base racks/getting item/slotting item/zoning out of base takes a shocking amount of real-life time, sadly. Sometimes I get a tell from a friend and abandon the process to go play, meaning it sometimes takes me two or three evenings to craft and transfer a recipe.

3) I've started playing a lot more "hardcore" mode, where we delete our characters if defeated. Unknown AE missions are ridiculously dangerous for hardcore characters, and I'm not taking them in there. I've seen big ambush groups of bosses with Headsplitter, resistance debuffs, and Build Up running around in those things. *shudder*

I plan to go back to "creative" AE missions sooner or later, just being pulled in different directions right now.

If you play with a group of RL friends that are all Defenders, it's not hard to be playing in an environment where you are buffed constantly to the cap while all of your foes are debuffed to the floor. So non-purple-patch foes have like a 5% chance to hit you for 10% damage while you are hitting them 95% of the time for x4 damage.

For these people, Extreme settings at max difficulty are the closest the game gets to mechanically challenging. So these people create AV farms in the AE and run "Master of..." challenges and trials all the time.

My feelings are similar to Sam's, though I do like humor if it's done subtly (I have to admit I'm not really into the LOLBAT deal; otoh, the arc I did with the custom faction with little guys dressed as billiard balls I did get a kick out of).

From the creative standpoint, I made an arc right out of the gate that tried to play off of existing lore, expanded upon that with an offshoot custom group, and had an EB battle at the end (with the option of a helper). Nothing out-of-the-ordinary (even with the EB, it was an arc geared to 40+, and an EB in an arc is pretty standard at that point). I tried to make the narrative make sense, I tried to keep the format clean and I tried to use good grammar/spelling/punctuation. It's not particularly tricky or clever, but I thought it solid enough. It got four ratings, settled in at four stars. I haven't checked lately, but last I did it still had just those four ratings. Would it be nice if others saw it? Sure, but I'm not going to pander for folks to play it (who probably wouldn't like it anyway). At least I still have fun playing it from time to time.

As for other arcs, I'll play them sometime but it's a mixed bag. Most stories aren't really tied to CoH. Some have great custom factions, but don't have a story that makes any sense. Many are painful to read from a grammar standpoint. Some are just nigh-on-impossible.

So, I'll stick to what I know largely - non-AE content. If I need tickets to outright buy salvage or to roll some recipes, I'll play my own arc.

My supergroup, which interacts in-character the majority of the time, uses the architect as a way to create interactive story threads. And since there is near-limitless capacity in the human mind to create meaningful plots, we can't get enough of it!

If I had one wish to improve the architect it would be to improve the interactivity of the NPCs, allowing branching dialog options and fights taking place depending on the choices a player makes.

I agree with Sam also about humor and about difficulty. I find other people's humor to be on a different wavelength than my own. I also hate painfully difficult fights. If I can't roll your mission with a generic-IO empathy/electric defender on +1, then I'm quitting it. If my Earth/Empathy character can't actually get through the mez protection on anything and/or he can't complete it, then I'm going to knock off a point on my rating. That's just the way it is.

Also, while I had never thought about it, I can see Sam's point about "you think" and "you feel". I need to go check my missions and remove those, if I have any (I don't think I do). I might leave in "you think" when referring to the senses, such as "you think you saw a flicker of movement as you came in the door" but otherwise I'm going to make the effort to remove mine.

Anyway, my missions are "kinda" story-based and "kinda" reward-based, in other words for farming. Well, its no more farming than doing door missions in PI, because I use only generic canon foes to tell my stories, so the drop rates and experience point rates are totally in line with what you'd see in a normal door mission. So, I only call it farming in the sense that I run my own missions over and over and over. There are certain foe types I really like (CoT, for example) and certain maps I really like (certain office space layouts, some outdoor layouts). I hate having to zone (or abandon mission) to get the ones I like and avoid the ones I can't stand, so I made a bunch of equivalents to PI door maps and foes, but only the ones I like. I also really love the tedious COT temple/cave/teleporter maps so I use those a lot. THEN, I wrap a bit of story around those. Not much, just a little. I have a mercenary little Necro/Thief chick who has morally grey missions that are phrased in such a way that heroes or villains could do them. When my heroes do them, I always feel a little worried that she is using me, and when my villains are doing them, she and I share a knowing wink.

I've only just started wrapping these light bits of story around my missions so its in the process of transformation right now. I only have 1 map with custom critters, so I need to go see what the changes have done to them (they are all Willpower/Dark blasters and Willpower/Dark Melee scrappers). I havent run the mission since the recent changes to the AE critters and reward rates. But my other missions (across all 3 accounts) are all against generic villains only. I have no problem using canon foes for stories, and its nice to know that my reward expectations on them are baseline so that I don't have to tweak much when changes are made to the AE, and I don't have to worry about nerfs.

Lewis

I wonder to what extent they have considered giving critters AT mods and/or Inherents.

Closed beta is but not open. However, Test server has one distinct advantage and that's the fact that there's a smaller volume to look through.

Replying to the OP:

I play my own stories on nearly every character I level past the 20's, which is about the right difficulty spot for my arcs. I've actually done all my arcs on a few characters recently, rather than just a couple per character, because the arcs' rewards have been so reduced by changes to AE. While I primarily play them as a change of pace and where thematically appropriate (using my Legacy Chain arc for magic wielders, for instance), I also use them as a means of getting through the higher levels of the game without having to do, say, Cadao Kestrel's arc for the 50th time.

I still working on writing AE stories for my own amusement, though I may never publish another. This is because of a phenomenon I mentioned in i16 beta, when AE rewards took their first significant hit, that I refer to as "artist and entertainer." Any creator of fiction, including AE arcs, does so for two reasons. As an artist, he creates them for the pure fun of making them, drawing fulfillment from the act of creation. As an entertainer, the writer gets fulfillment from having the work appreciated, enjoyed, and praised by others. (I didn't come up with this idea; I swiped it from an article by literary agent Ethan Ellenberg, which you can find by searching for his website.)

Right now, AE does an adequate, though not perfect, job of satisfying me as an artist. I can control the story and characters in a wide variety of ways, and I have a good array of choices when constructing an arc. Yes, there could always be more maps available or fancier mission technology, such as the oft-demanded ability to place a spawn at a specific point. Still, I feel that what we have is adequate. (I may be a bit more easygoing about this than some others because I like to save my most creative ideas for non-City of Heroes projects.)

However, AE does a terrible job of satisfying me and, I'm willing to venture, most other arc authors, as entertainers. Even with constant promotion, it's difficult to get arcs played by large portions of the AE community, let alone the game community as a whole. It's even harder to get a handle on an unplayed arc's quality. As this thread shows, people have different standards for what makes an entertaining arc. This results in widely varying ratings scales; many AE community members won't rate an arc with five stars unless it waxes their cars and does their tax returns while reading like a combination of Anna Karenina and that Mass Effect game everyone seems to love. This causes wild variation with the four-star rating, which in turn leads to what a lot of authors call the "four-star ghetto." (This is especially problematic if you yourself feel that four stars is about the right rating for an arc; even though that puts it in the top half of the ratings, it also means no one will ever see it.) The prevalence of farms, many now nonfunctional, and arcs broken by patches exacerbates the problem. Even Dev's Choice arcs aren't immune to the problem; I've been unable to play a favorite of mine for more than six months because its second mission has somehow become irreparably bugged. Finally, reductions in AE rewards drive away large numbers of potential arc players. The best authors can do to combat all these forces is to write an appropriate arc title and a description that determined searchers can find with the still-clumsy arc search feature. All in all, it's just too difficult for an arc to reach its ideal audience for the AE to serve an author's goals as an entertainer rather than an artist.

In this connection, I'd also like to mention that the AE community has really soured me on the entire feature. While there are some nice, helpful people there, I've generally had bad experiences with it.