My frustrations with AE, any advice?

Defense and resistance both reduce damage by a percentage.

Normal mob hit chance-> 50%
Add 45%
Mob miss chance-> now 5%

90% mitigation compared to base

Tanker/brute resist cap- 90%

Of course, it gets nuts if you manage to put capped defense with capped resistance, effectively giving a total of 99% mitigation. Tasty.

Of course, defense buffs tend to be a lot easier to find than resist buffs, and is easier to cap on a team. Defense has the downside of being random, with the bonus of being able to avoid debuffs attached to those attacks.

Speaking in a general sense, I agree with you, Rigel, that this sort of suggestion isn't useful. It's not the kind of thing that will help players in general. But in this specific instance, given the OP's post, I feel it probably best to present simple, binary options like that that will drive the player away from the AE.

AE is one of those things that I, in my elitist way, wish was somehow gated. Not necessarily 'you can't play AE unless you're one of the chosen,' but I would very much wish there was some way to ensure you had to be good at using the tools before your material could get put up in the AE.

Failing that, search engine overhauls, etc.

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Fair enough, but the Standard, Hard, and Extreme setups strike me as outdated. The custom critter XP formula seem to imply that the system is now balanced around a hard maximum of 5 damaging powers per critter, a suggested maximum of 3 damaging powers per critter, and non-damaging powers totally optional.

Yeah, but how do you gate something like that? In an ideal world you would have to prove a basic grasp of English before you could publish anything, and a comprehensive knowledge of game mechanics before you could create a custom critter, add an Archvillain or use ambushes, but there's no way to implement that.

Gating by level and/or vet badges would only serve to annoy creative newer players while still allowing barely literate 6-year vets to make "Kill Riktiz for ticketz!!1!!"

The Standard, Hard, and Extreme settings are awful. Hard is actually Extreme for a lot of powersets, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the Extreme setting should be removed entirely. It seems to just beg some people to make overpowered mobs. Yeah, you could still make them overpowered with custom settings, but then at least you'd have to make a conscious decision to go wreak havoc; the Extreme setting is like leaving a chainsaw and a stick of dynamite where a deranged lunatic is sure to find them.

You can't. That's the worst part of it. Hence 'wish.'

The only real opportunity I have is for a much, much better search engine.

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Thinking about it I tried to make an AE when I played about a year ago and I made all of my mobs extreme/extreme because I thought "May as well make it challenging, right?" then when we tried it taking on one group was so hard, not to mention ambushes) that I don't think I had a team that got past the first room...haha. Would explain it though if the extreme/extreme is just plain too hard, I guess I never thought that could have been the problem.

Another cool thing, besides a better search engine, would be if you could do a "test run" of your own map with 7 other allies that heal/buff/tank/damage as well as the option to make yourself invincible, but not get exp from the test run, just to be able to see how much damage the mobs/AV's do, fine tune certain bosses/mobs/etc. move ambushes to certain other areas, you get my point :P however I doubt they could/would implement that, though I guess you can already sort of do that.

Thank you for proving my point.

Well, I guess the devs could always badge gate stuff. Force people to experience bad content before they have access to tools that enable them to create similar bad content. Synapse's Cohort to make 4 mish arcs. Portal Smasher to make 5 mish arcs.

But I'm pretty sure any sort of gating would just create a forbidden fruit effect.

Yeah. Plus, our developers have a very strong philosophical stance against that kind of thing. Gates tend to be time sinks, rather than skill divisions.

When AE was first announced, I had a very negative view of the very idea when it was mentioned to me by my friends. My reasioning at the time, which has borne out, is that most people aren't very good at writing. I hang on Virtue, which draws a large body of people to it who are, supposedly, roleplayers and creative. What I'd learned in a year of playing there was that most people aren't good at creative storytelling.

So when AE finally hit, I hadn't once considered its exploitability. Or even that it was going to be used for challenge mechanics.

Now, I'm too much of a pluralist to act like it's wrong for people to do this. It's fun for them, so hey, let them do it. But the AE will never provide for me the kind of things I want it to provide in its current state. It's not going to be like a periodical fiction publisher, where you submit and editors review and then the best gets published. It's much more like fanfiction.net or livejournal, where everything that can be seen is seen.

I've never been a big advocate for fan-created content like this. When I dorked around with games like Dark Reign and Quake, I was happy to see the difficulties involved in making something decent, because it meant that the community's control mechanisms pushed the best stuff to the top of the pile. There were huge FTP sites full of crap, sure, but there were far fewer, and far more interesting, small sites full of tested and quality-controlled project.

(Now, to be fair, that's what this forum is for. My inability or dissatisfaction with this forum is not actually a sign of the success or failure of the system at large.)

Where was I going with this?

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I think you were about to volunteer to set up one of those small sites with "editors" to weed out the crap and to push the "editor-chosen arcs" that are good, to let us all know what to play and like.

Oh yeah, that's why I had the review thread.

Maybe I should start it up again.

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Actually, there is a no XP Test mode and you can opt to make yourself or your teammates invisible or invincible. You can also instant kill enemies or allies as needed.

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