City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Change to AV scaling in the 6/8 Patch

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-06-14 14:46 in Mission Architect

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sardan View Post
This times 1000. I haven't done MA in ages because there are so many clones-of-clones-of-clones of old exploit farms.

Please, please, devs, put in a feature that has old missions auto-unpublish after 120 days. You can email the player's global at the 90 day mark and say "Misson such-and-so is going to automatically unpublish in 30 days unless you republish it." MA authors who cared about their missions would take the few minutes to republish, but most of the old farms would quietly fade away.

IMO that would be one of the best things to happen to MA; clear the chaff.
Gotta disagree with this solution. If, for instance, someone that has a very high quality arc decides to leave the game... for whatever reason... we'll then be losing a good arc simply because there wasn't someone to republish it. And, frankly, why should an author who only published one or two arcs that are doing well, are well-tweaked, and need no further effort, have to come back to re-publish it just to satisfy this "fix."

There has to be a better way.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Aeon View Post
Hey everyone,

I wanted to pop in to speak about changes made to scaling enemies in the recent patch. We've disabled archvillains from scaling beneath their minimum level. Regular enemies, minions, lieutenants, bosses, etc, will still scale down beneath their minimum level. We made this change because combat scaling affects Archvillains/Hero class critters much more than other foes. This leads to strange numbers at the extreme low end, numbers that were never designed for or balanced against. Coupled with the rewards of defeating an AV, a fix was necessary.

I hope you all understand the reason why this was changed. Please feel free to let me know if anything isn't working as it should be or if anything is unclear!

Dr. Aeon
I'm unclear on something. Specifically, what makes you think anyone is actually going to ever want to play AE missions again, since you spend all of your time fixing exploits and doing NOTHING to attract players.

Please stop wasting your time and resources on this black hole and just remove the rewards and let it start gathering dust already. AE was an interesting idea, but is an abject failure since almost no one plays it. Time to move on.

 

Posted

Quote:
There has to be a better way.
There is, and it's to delete arcs that haven't been accessed by their authors or played in X days. If no one has played an arc in (e.g.) 90 days and even its creator isn't doing anything with it, it clearly won't be missed.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
There is, and it's to delete arcs that haven't been accessed by their authors or played in X days. If no one has played an arc in (e.g.) 90 days and even its creator isn't doing anything with it, it clearly won't be missed.
I have to agree with this.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
There is, and it's to delete arcs that haven't been accessed by their authors or played in X days. If no one has played an arc in (e.g.) 90 days and even its creator isn't doing anything with it, it clearly won't be missed.
This works. Flag it as abandoned, hide it, and people can choose to look for it if they really want to. It could be a search option.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
I'd go one further and hide arcs flagged as "Work in Progress" by default as well.
Agreed. I do this anyway whenever I try to search for arcs, and it does a decent job of hiding some of the complete crap.

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Posted

Perhaps that can be another condition for dropping an arc: if it remains flagged as "Work in Progress" for more than X number of days/months the author gets a warning and X days after that it is deleted. If it has been flagged as that for a year do you think the author or anyone else will really miss it?

Of course people will just flag their arcs as "Looking for Feedback" or "Final" right away to avoid it, but it would give an easy way to weed out all those abandoned arcs from before issue 15 when those flags were added as they will all be flagged as "Work in Progress" by default.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazarus View Post
Perhaps that can be another condition for dropping an arc: if it remains flagged as "Work in Progress" for more than X number of days/months the author gets a warning and X days after that it is deleted. If it has been flagged as that for a year do you think the author or anyone else will really miss it?

Of course people will just flag their arcs as "Looking for Feedback" or "Final" right away to avoid it, but it would give an easy way to weed out all those abandoned arcs from before issue 15 when those flags were added as they will all be flagged as "Work in Progress" by default.
Honestly, this and Venture's suggestion has been made many times before. It's pretty much in 'no brainer' territory. The fact that it hasn't even been explored as a solution tells me there's something going on behind the scenes preventing it. Whether it's schedules that are too tight (including coder time coming at an extreme premium) or something more appearance oriented (ala 'Over 2 million stories have been created using our mission architect system', ignoring the fact that only about 40,000 of those arcs are playable or worth playing mechanically. Marketing fodder, basically). Problem is, the feature is being choked to death on fecal matter (so to speak) and the only thing that seems to happen regularly are band aid fixes that don't really fix anything.

I can only hope that someone with a modicum of authority grows fed up with the feature limping along and drawing developer resources with constant band aids and actually green lights a freshening (and cleaning) up of the system. Especially since right now, the arcs created for legitimate storytelling purposes are gutted in many cases (forcing authors to change/revamp stories to account for the system's newest stopgap deficiencies) while the latest farm du jour, which the devs have repeatedly tried to stamp out (and repeatedly failed miserably) is still going strong. I don't have anything against farms (my personal missions are all farms, made from stock mobs chosen to fit my primary characters' strengths), it's the exploits that annoy me (and no, the two terms aren't synonymous) due to the Jack Emmert-esque reactions they cause with this team.

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