Where do we go from here?

A simplistic question for a rather complex issue. Any new feature is bound to lose interest over time. However, numerous things ranging from (needed) crackdowns on exploits to poor behavior of some users have soured the general populace on Architect Entertainment. What can be done to increase AE's popularity? Are we in lost cause status where we can't do anything more than damage control?

To be honest, when AE first came out, there was so much hype. People were actually afraid that no one would ever do regular missions again..hehe. I was one who kind of got sucked into the hype. I started to (or tried to) build a story arc but never got around to finishing it. Lazy, not enough time, too complicated, not sure why I couldn't motivate myself to build one?

I remember in the early days of AE, the AE transport room would be packed with people lft. After about a couple of months, I started to lose interest in doing any of the AE mish'es. Yeah, sometimes I would get an invite for a team and I would usually accept if it wasn't a farming type AE mish which I won't do. And speaking of farming, we all know how crazy AE was with people power leveling like crazy in the early life of AE. I think I power leveled up 20 levels in just a couple of hours. After the dev's nerfed those exploits, I think that more people started to migrate back to CoH and CoV again.

So, for the past maybe 8 months, I have yet to do another AE mish again. And now that GR is out, even less motivation to venture back into AE mish'es. Who knows, maybe I will take a peak and see what's new. I read somewhere that now you can make a doppleganger of your toons. In those cloning mish'es I've always felt that was fun going head to head with yourself. So, maybe some life might still be left in the old AE?

I can think of a few things off the top of my head.

1) The Devs need to make players more aware of things like the patch that nerfed all XP just for friendlies being in the map is gone. How many people even know about the Designated Helper system and the XP being restored? That nerf was a huge blow to an already ailing part of the game.

2) How long has it been since we had ANY new Dev Choices? Are we even having an Architects Awards this year either?

3) The Devs need to look into revising the Hall of Fame requirements. Right now it is close to impossible to achieve that status despite having many arcs that could easily be worthy of the title but at the current rate of plays would take years to gain 1000 5-star ratings.

4) Revise the ratings system so that ratings below 5-stars are not so heavily weighted. Right now it is much easier to downrate an arc into oblivion than it is to promote it up towards Hall of Fame. Also on that note, change the rating system to require the player to complete a certain percentage of the arc before submitting a rating. That would kill a lot of ratings griefing if they cannot simply start the arc, quit, 1-star, and move on.

5) Clear the cruft! Farmers don't clean up after themselves and there are also a lot of old busted pre-issue 15 arcs just clogging up the search results. It doesn't encourage players to keep searching for interesting arcs when the random button gives them 10 farms in a row.

I'd like to see them clean up a lot of the old junk and farm arcs, or even the "This is a quick mission I made testing out AE" MA's. One of the big turnoffs for me is seeing a ton of dead MArcs. The problem is how to clean them up, do you do it by number of plays, last played date, rating? You pretty much have to pay someone to go through them, one by one, and weed them out. And even then it would be subjective. Either we make a broad definition, and cut out too many things, or narrow it and leave in too many things. You won't find a perfect middle ground.

Something that may help is when I-19 comes, we'll probably see the Praet maps added to the MA. There's a lot of nice mission maps I'd like to use for stories. ( I also want ghouls. Fun!)

I think they will get back shortly. GR looked like it was an all hand on deck kind of project. New mission writing, new art, new everything. The stories have Aeon's touch. He'll likely be popping up in here again soon.

I can think of a simple criteria that will clear out a lot of the really old crap. Many of the arcs were made back in issue 14, before the WIP/LFF/Final flags were added and as such all arcs were flagged as "Work in Progress" by default. Let's do a pass of all arcs published between the start of issue 14 and some time during issue 15 that are still flagged "Work in Progress" and send the authors an email that if they don't reflag their arc within X days it will be deleted from the system.

Those who really care about their arcs will fix them up and reflag them. Those who do not get their arcs deleted. Arcs do require some maintenance with every issue, the broken arcs and abandoned farms should not be considered immune to pruning if the authors cannot bother to take care of them.

Now some more advanced criteria will be needed for clearing out other arcs, but this would be a good start and clean out a massive percentage of them.

Here's another idea that keeps coming up repeatedly in MA community discussions: remove the arc slot limit.

There are a lot of good authors out there who are simply strangled by the 8 arc slot limit and with the unlikelihood of reaching HoF or getting a Dev Choice they get stuck fast. In any content system much of the best stuff will be produced by a minority of the authors, so why are we putting such a limit on their output? Most of them have a lot more stories than arc slots, and it's often painful for us to have to retire old arcs (and throw away it's hard-earned ratings) if we ever want to put up a new story.

If the Devs want to continue to charge us for extra slots, so be it. Why is it that we can buy so many extra character slots but only 5 extra arc slots? I really doubt that AE arcs somehow require much more storage space on the servers than entire characters do.

I just know that I've had to throw away a lot of arc ideas because of "why write it if I can't publish it anyway?" It's also the reason I only write long and very long arcs, with so few slots publishing a short arc feels like I'm wasting that slot.

To play devils' advocate: Those who have slots locked for infractions could buy more to circumvent that.

I'm in a different position of having more slots available but lacking the drive to write more. Especially since some of them are sequels.

There are so many crappy arcs clogging the search already. More arc slots wouldn't help that proportion at all.

I want more arc slots, but they won't deal with this specific problem.

A better search engine would achieve what you've asked for, Lazarus, without necessarily requiring one-time events like purges.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Give it a few weeks. Nobody cares about AE right now. Heck, I don't care about AE right now. I fixed my arcs to be i18 compatible and haven't touched AE since. I have my AE leveling toon sitting at 32, all those new Praetorians are approaching my level and will need stuff to buy, and I can't bring myself to care right now.

Once the new shiny has lost some of its new and shiny, we could use a few more Dev's Choices. Then they can start working on revamping the search engine and ratings system, and clearing out some of the dreck.

You know, using the tagging system and adding "i18" or "i17" to the description of your arc would make it easier to search out the new stuff.

Clearing abandoned material, maybe. Revamping the search engine is probably more work than picking a few Dev's Choices though.

I would actually say the first priority would be to disallow rating arcs you haven't completed. We have a bunch of new and returning players, once they're done with the new shiny they might want to author some arcs, and ratings griefing is discouraging to authors. After all, we'll need some new content to replace the outdated stuff once it's removed.

Opinion:
MA suffers from a few things.

A bad reputation. Mention AE and the first thing some folks think of is the farming frenzy we had at first. Y'know, first impressions stick the longest, bad ones doubly so.

Being cluttered up with broken or abandoned arcs. I use the Random buttom for the lulz, and I gotta admit that I find a lot of garbage. Really hurts the signal:static ratio.

Frustration and confusion with the rules changes. I have three arcs. I don't know if they are i-18-compliant, and if they are, will they be i-19 compliant? i-20 compliant? They weren't designed as farms at all, but one has customs (a 5-critter group) and an AR/Dev (optional) helper.
If I hit that random button, will I be playing an arc that has reduced rewards because the author wasn't up to the latest patch?

Custom Critters that scare folks off. Yes, most of you know how to build for balance, but you've probably wandered into those others. The ego-arcs where someone wanted thier pet character to kick your behind as a maxed-out AV. The maxed-out mobs that make the arc look like a 12-year old DM's P&P RPG game where he kills all the PCs off in the first room of the dungeon.
Or the map full of kill-me-quicks designed as wet paper bags full of XP and AE. tickets.
Will that guy's arc with customs kill me at the front door? Will it be full of critters that give no <rewards of desired kind> worth a darn? Screw it, I'll look for the next arc with Freakshow or Warriors or whatever..

And of course, the newest shiny. GR. Through no fault of it's own, GR will lure customers away to it's golden shores. At least for now. Most will return. Some will run thier Preatorians through the other side of Primal Earth to grab badges or whatever.

We aren't likely to see again the hordes of players in the AE like we did during the farming rush. But to see a resurgence, the Dev team are going to need to purge the trash out of the database, give the system a bit of a polish to refresh it's shininess and then advertise those actions. No one shows up to your garage sale unless you put signs up.

Right now, the AE is on the list of things that have been abandoned for a while, that need to get some attention, along with Bases.

People keep talking about how a better search engine will make cleaning out the garbage unnecessary, but never have any good explanations for how this improved search will do so.

Allow us to search by specific date? That only works if you know when much of the farming stopped.

Allow us to specify actual level ranges? Only works if it ignores the 1-54 arcs.

Implementing just a better search without removing the dreck is like telling a person "You just need to find the needles in this haystack, here's a small magnet that might help."

Some things that could help IMO (aside from the cleanup, which is pretty much a must at this point):
- Add 'if you liked this arc, you might also like these arcs:' list to each arc when browsing (or after finishing the arc) ala Amazon; basically a top-5 list of arcs that were also played by people who played the arc in question and were given good marks. This'd make navigation much better imo.
- Add favorites lists, ability to share these, and allow friends to browse your favorites lists.
- The ratings system really needs a fix -- the 4-star limbo makes browsing frustrating and almost useless, ensuring that your arc won't be found in a random search (neither of my arcs have received ANY plays in the last half-year, and only a handful in the 3 months before that). I've read about a thumbsup / thumbsdown system like youtube instead of stars in order to eliminate the 4-star limbo effect, but I'm not sure how well it'd work... could just end up as a "second # of plays counter" instead of a quality indicator.
- (drastic) After a new issue, delist all non-hof/dc arcs from browsing until the authors 'refresh' the arcs. Such a refresh might only involve flipping a switch in the arc editor ("This arc is ready for play in Issue x!"). Downside: this'd punish great arcs whose authors take a break from COH for whatever reason.
- (less drastic) Switch arcs to 'work in progress' unless the author flips the aforementioned switch. Don't show work in progress arcs by default, but show them when someone is specifically searching for arc id, author name, or has 'show work in progress arcs' checked.

Honestly however, the biggest stigma of AE atm seems to be that it's just... not really worth it from a reward standpoint. Maybe adding some cool titles or non-combat pets or costume pieces would entice people again... or more likely, just cause an influx of farming arcs all over again and/or potential griefing against non-farming storyarcs (stupid story, stop getting in the way of farming my AE gerbil pet!). No easy solution, sigh.


-- Z.

This topic has still been weighing in on my mind. I've got this sinking feeling that the situation can't be improved. Oh well, I run sewer trials so I'm not sane enough to give up yet.