What keeps you away from AE arcs?

For me the biggest issue with the MA is finding the good stuff amongst the dross and then finding a team to partake of it. It does seem that the MA is dead on its feet on Defiant at least - can't speak for other servers - but there seems to be a genuine lack of interest in it and plenty of other stuff happening.

That and then actually finding the good stuff.... that's a taskforce in itself.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

1) Interest in other parts of the game. I like AE, but there have been a lot of things added in other areas over the past several months, too, and I've been focused on those.

2) The inability to find halfway decent arcs. Unlike others in this thread, I don't see a way to improve this, either. It's simply too hard to judge what makes a "good" arc from a short description. (This problem isn't unique to AE, either; there's plenty of stuff, even newer stuff, that's considered lousy out in the regular game, too.)

3) The nastiness of the AE community. As much as I love AE, the hangups of the AE community are so odd and so intense that I've never promoted my arcs to any extent on the fora. Back when AE was new, I couldn't so much as list a new arc without one or more of the AE community's self-appointed arbiters of taste lambasting me for using custom characters, or not using custom characters, or being too serious, or not being serious enough, or using a line of text like, "It feels cold in here" (that gets you responses like, "Don't you know some people play robots that can't feel temperature! UR RUINING MA IMMERSION!!!! RARRRGH!"). There's also way too much complaining about the limitations of the system. Personally, I'm glad it works at all.

4) The nastiness of the non-AE community. I regularly get yelled at and criticized in my otherwise great global channels for being an "exploiter" because I use AE, and "AE is only for farming." This sort of thing is coming from people who'd gush about how wonderful some of the stuff in AE, if appeared in regular content. On the other hand, no one will run an arc that doesn't give overwhelming rewards; the achiever mentality isn't as strong in this game as it is in some other places, but it's still significant. Add the "AE is fanfic and fanfic sux!" and "AE is a waste of dev time!" crowd, and it's no wonder AE leaves a bad taste in authors' mouths. (Listen, I think raids and end-game systems are horrible, but I'm not going to trash the devs just for wanting to implement them.) Simply put, the hostility to AE in-game is so intense that I'll only run AE content solo these days.

5) The bad handling of AE on the devs' part. As I've said on numerous occasions, within anyone who creates content that can be communicated, there is an "artist" and an "entertainer." The artist wants to create for the pleasure of creating. The entertainer wants other people to appreciate the thing created and to be applauded for creating it. The AE system does all right for the artist. I can and have used it to create things simply to amuse myself. It does terribly for the entertainer. AE arcs (as opposed to the AE system in general) don't get any significant promotion from the system or the devs. The most they do is promote the odd arc to "Dev's Choice," which does little enough to raise its profile. (It doesn't help that some of the existing dev's choice arcs have been broken by patches and never fixed, but that's a different rant.)

In my opinion, the best thing about AE is that it can be used to create content faster than the two writer-devs can churn it out. The devs need to start making use of that virtue. They should be using their dev-like powers to ram AE content down the player base's throat, and the best way to do this is to go through the arcs that exist and start "promoting" them into the wider game world, assigning them to contacts, and the like. Yes, this would require a time investment for one or two developers. (How large? I have no idea.) Yes, it would require some rewriting and tweaking to convert content from the AE interface to the contact one, which would outrage authors. In my opinion, that kind of outrage is the price you pay for creating something in someone else's IP. All in all, if it gets more "regular" content out there, I consider it a good use of the AE system.

Sig.

Less pithily: the rating and sorting system is terrible. A better system would put good fresh content at the top of the list. Such systems exist, but the devs didn't pay attention to work done elsewhere and instead ran with systems that have already failed in other places. How they thought a five star system was a good idea after having observed the old forums' thread rating system for years is beyond me.

I am not sure it helps you Bubba but I'll give you my reasons.

I really don't care much about story lines, I don't read the regular text so most of the AE stuff will naturally not have a draw for me. The fact that there are limited rewards just makes it not worth my time. I don't get a lot of time to play and it's split on events for a majority of it.

I like to run with my friends who mostly do lvl 50 content and TF's. I will mostly lvl PvE toons via TF's PvP toons I tend to pl. The only time I really do AE is for contests and if a friend says so and so wrote a funny AE arc you should try it. I will always run @Cai's AE contests cause he makes puzzles from the missions and I really like puzzles. I will do arc's from your players choice (when I have some free time respec and incarnate unlock hell ftw) because I like to support community supportive events. (I'll get my vote in on time though.)

When AE first came out, I thought it'd be great to play other people's stories and I eagerly looked forward to the new fun.

Then it turned into a big farm churner.

Now, I play for tickets. I couldn't give a rat's as--piration about xp, or inf, or drops.

If I get a good story with a ticket farm, that's gravy. But, as many have said, there is soooo much chaff, I don't care to go rummaging for them. Also too many broken mishes means I only play things that are no more than 3 months old.

Now, the other night I had fun with a small team of friends playing AE roulette. The star was the bus, everyone got thrown under the bus. The bus victim had to pick a random AE mish searched by a random word from the rest of the team. We had a couple amusing, one very annoying, a decent farm, and at least one completely borked mission. But honestly, none were terribly stellar for story.

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I've given up on AE, both writing and playing, until the Devs get around to fixing it. I fear they never will.

("Fixing it" - clearing out the farms, implementing a rating system that actually works, etc)

QR: Too many instances of hitting "Random" and getting farms. Worse yet, farms that are obsolete with the new rules. I once got a farm that was once a poorly constructed, spread out farm that took too much work and was full of hi-larious jokes about sexual assault.

And I don't really accept "But if you go to this site...". I think that the system should stand up on its own feet for me to consider it. If I have to grab some duct tape and strap a fan-site to it to get it up to chuggin' pace... I'd rather spend time on the features of the game that actually work autonomously.

Edit:

So glad that set up didn't go to waste.

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Something else; the {risk/reward}/time is horribly skewed compared to regular content when using custom enemies. Because each move is arbitrarily balanced on its own difficulty, it means you can create several infuriating and difficult enemies that give less reward than a standard NPC. Or it goes the other way and you can up with a near-impossible to defeat enemy that gives no more than 100%, no matter what (I'm reminded of an old arc with a Mind/Illusion AV; confuses, holds, pets and AV rec/reg).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Acemace Sadly MA arcs lack anything substantially different (read, interesting) from conventional mission content, to merit a separate contact. Familiar maps meet familiar objectives, with pseudo intriguing story lines, which isn't to say there are no creative authors in the games community, there are simply limited tools to breath life into something less conventional then an average tip mission. Player generated maps would be a start in that direction, using the base editor with some added features. ...

That's a good point; with the developers keeping the new tech for at least one or two issues before handing it to us; we're on a constant uphill struggle to even get close to the new content standards, Dopplegangers didn't arrive till i18 after being in two new story arcs and the new Posi in i17, we've just got the new Pratorian content as unlocks and in-game we have tips that feature defeat-to-talk contacts with rolling dialogue. How can we come close to that when the tools we have are i13 standard at best? The reason this tech is being used is because old arcs are boring/out-dated go here, kill/click this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I don't avoid the AE arcs, I just have more than enough regular content to keep me busy. It's a pain trying to find good arcs that stay good. Last time I went into the AE for a day I got fed up with every damned arc having Control/Regen bosses and EBs. The last arc before I quit had Mind or Fire control bosses or EBs in every single mission. Mind Control on lowlevel enemies is just ludicrous. Simple as that. I'm tired of great stories being screwed over by some jerks idea of a 'challenge'.

My experiences creating arcs has been largely positive. My one lowlevel arc, Rebirth, which I made to replace the 1-5 content blueside for me, has gotten a lot of good feedback.

Leave the farms there. Just add a category for them. Voted, Not Voted, Completed, Not Completed, Farm, etc. Less stuff for farmers to sift through looking for their arcs. Less stuff for people looking for story arcs to sift through. Won't exactly eliminate the crap arcs on either side, but will make it easier on both groups.

I see a lot of people complaining about customs being too hard because the author wanted to make a "challenge" arc for their purpled-out Scrapper. I really doubt this is the case with the majority of these arcs. I think most of these groups are due to things like "Darkity dark dark enemies are COOL! I'm gonna give Dark powers to everyone!" or "my author self-insert AV is going to have all the powers my character does" or just plain player-killer GMing. Face it guys, the majority of the playerbase doesn't have a purpled-out Scrapper.

When you rate an arc you have the option of selecting tags. Does this do anything? Maybe it would help if you had both author-selected tags and player-selected tags visible. That way, if players tag the arc "challenging" and the author did not, it's a pretty good bet that the arc is simply poorly designed and will kill you.