The ultimate MA payoff?

To me, the ultimate payoff for investing your time and imagination would be this: If the devs judge your Arc to be 100% flawless, fun, and canonical, then not only will they award you a free X-month (whatever's reasonable) subscription to CoH, but also they will convert your arc AS IS into an actual in-game mission that you could potentially get from an in-game contact (or even play from Ourouborous)! Think about it -- maybe instead of being offered "Bonefire" for the umpteenth time, your Kings Row contact would actually offer up YOUR arc! Wouldn't THAT be the coolest prize EVAR???

Great idea.

I've played any number of really fantastic MA arcs that beat 99% of the 'real' content hollow.

This would work for a lot of arcs out there. Not so much for the "non-canon" arcs though. You can only do so much with the Portal Corps defense. It also would run into issues if your awesome arc contradicted someone else's.

On the other hand there are a lot of great arcs out there that are set in the game world but don't directly deal with canon. It would be great for those types of arcs.

When I say "canonical," I just mean "not contradicting what has come before," be that dev in-game content or content previously imported into the game from MA.

Yeah that'd be really cool but it'd also present problems for the developers.

Think about the big picture. There's only so many contacts in the game. Your arc would have to revolve around an already existing contact. They wouldn't add a new contact for one arc. I mean that'd have to be one awesome arc there.

What people want are the same rewards they get from regular missions. Then they 'might' come back to AE to do something besides farm. Then again it presents a whole host of problems dealing with people exploiting drops.

Just playing devil's advocate here. I like the idea and all of us would love to be immortalized within the real CoX. Reality says it couldn't, wouldn't, and probably shouldn't happen.

If they just fixed the Hall of Fame and recategorized the search engine where people can find new arcs. Also some sort of incentive needs to be established outside of tickets. Those few things would do wonders.

Just offering people a new costume piece for playing 20 new arcs or something could bring a little life back to AE.

Too much work for the devs. It will never happen. They aren't sitting at their desks playing WoW all day you know. These are real jobs and they are overloaded as it is.