What keeps you away from AE arcs?

Usually I have too many goals and too much other content to bother looking for MA arcs to play. When I do, these things usually detract from my experience:

~ A lot of arcs are bad.

~ I don't like comedy arcs. I think early on I ran into two comedy arcs I thought were cute, but after that they've either been bad or a rehash of the same common themes.

~ My high level characters have plenty to do in the actual game so usually when I want to try some AE arcs it's in the 20-35 range. I have learned the hard way to avoid arcs with custom enemy groups. They are much harder than most normal content and they give out crappy XP and tickets. It's a shame because at first I liked seeing new groups but there are so many combinations that are just not fun.

~ I haven't liked any of the guest author arcs I've played. I have liked a lot of the dev choice arcs (minus the comedy ones) but the guest author arcs have been bad. It was a disappointment since I loved the Elementals comics by Bill Willingham and didn't like his arcs.

~ A lot of the arcs try to evoke emotion by either being overly violent or alluding to overly violent acts. I never thought this would be bothersome. I love violent gritty movies. I found that having it being described in an MMO environment really detracted from my enjoyment of the game.

~ No mission bonus or arc XP. This is actually a bigger problem than slightly less creature XP: I am giving up the big juicy mission bonus and bigger arc bonus playing through AE arcs.

That said, here's what I didn't find to be a problem.

~ For the most part I enjoyed most of the Dev Choice arcs. I might not have loved them, but to me most of them (outside the comedy ones) provided a decent play experience.

~ I didn't have a problem finding story arcs that were not farms. For the most part the farm missions were pretty obvious.

~ I found some good low level arcs that I enjoyed better than leveling in Atlas again. Since Praetoria is so much better content wise, however, I stopped looking for lowbie arcs in AE.

~ Most of the arcs were playable if I had AVs turned off for my high level characters, but fewer for my mid level characters. My high level characters want purple and shard drops too much to play arcs so the hard arcs have no play value.

Edit: The ironic thing about my last statement is my one completed arc is geared at high levels and has numerous EBs with the assumption that people who don't want them will have settings that make them bosses. At some point I should probably make them bosses.

It's not easy to find a decent arc, but the biggest thing for me is that I still have a ton of stuff in the regular game to do still. If for some reason I need an extra level or two, I'll either run a TF or run some AE arcs. Or on the rare occasion I'm just looking for a break from the regular stuff.

I'm one of those who used to play and create MA arcs and stopped a while back. My reasons are many, but ultimately it all boils down to this:

Too many sticks. Not enough carrot.

Here are a few of my gripes with AE:

• The interface sucks, and it's virtually impossible to find anything good if you only use the interface. Especially with the same list of missions constantly on the front page.

• There are way too many clutter in the database. All of the forgotten story arcs, broken farms, and half-done arcs need to be wiped out.

• Dev's Choice is not handed out nearly enough.

• The requirements for Hall of Fame is virtually impossible, especially when it's so easy to grief the ratings system, and arcs are getting so few plays nowadays.

• The ratings system is horrible and needs to be reworked. Go with something like a simple "thumbs up / thumbs down" method instead. Anything OTHER than the current "5 stars" method.

• Lack of attention from the devs. We still cannot have bosses guarding hostages, something that we see all the time in the core game. We also don't have "keys" that unlock the next part of the mission and have to rely on chained objectives that might or might not spawn where we want them to. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of other features that have been asked for countless times.

• Lack of purples and shards in AE missions.

What Razor said.

For me sadly the following:
1. Little interaction from the Devs on Dev's choices etc. A few competitions from time to time (abit more then has been) would be good. More active Dev Choices.
2. The search interface is horrible. If we could make our own lists, favourites etc. (Others have said this better then me)
3. When AE launched there was a lot of badges given, then the Devs decided "umm we have made too many lets delete most of them and keep the simplest ones"... Sure, the getting the badges became far to easy (Next time Devs, get a few players with the mindset "How to get things quick" in on the test (sadly it boils down to the "trust not to misuse, not divulge things").
4. Devs thinking that taking things out of the engine is good... Its not. I know they have to fight exploits and tighten those holes, but removing things... just not good. The uncertainty of not knowing what would be in there or not was just sad for me.
5. I know AE is the Virtual reality simulator in the game (How ironic), but fighting enemies and not getting progress towards a few badges (achivements) will in my mind (badgehunter) be a waste. No influence, no damage taken, no healing done, held etc...

Seven pages later....

Initially, as a writer, I was very enthusiastic about the AE and what I thought it might be able to do (this was before I saw the initial 'final' product).

One of the regular in-game missions that always stood out to me because of its pacing and breaking from the regular format of 'all the NPC's on this map you have to fight' was the RWZ mission where you attended a peace conference. To this day if it pops up for me, I'll go dressed in a tux.

So I thought: 'I want to do that! Gives me a chance to tell the story through NPC's.' And I immediately faced frustration a) Because I couldn't access that map and b) At the time, it was virtually impossible to have a virtually combat-free mission (or so I thought).

So I stepped and stayed away from the AE for a long time and let other SG mates write stories (which invariably in my experience went between ridiculously hard missions with walls of text to arcs starring, written and played by the author...with the apparent intention of just grand noting themselves).

I agree entirely that the rating system is broken as deployed; if anything, perhaps the rating system should be used via the descriptions of the arcs. So you break it down by Drama/Comedy/Canon/Non-Canon and so on and find Like/Dislike arcs under those categories rather than lumping everything together like some high school talent competition. So I could happily search in my Drama section and a ticketer or farmer could find what they wanted too.

What kept me away for a long time was what a number of people have mentioned, which is the very existence of the AE buildings in-game. Superheroes playing holographic games of their own missions? Sounds kind of ludicrous, and it wasn't til recently that I thought of ways I could use this to my advantage, using its own in-game story existence as a jumping off point for stories.

I realised that if it's a holographic system, it's still an electronic medium, so villains, heroes, spy groups...they could all utilise it for threats, challenges, covert missions...I did a single-mission arc just this last week with the major NPC mobs from Praetoria and wrote it under the pretext that Longbow wants heroes in Praetoria to scout for them (thus giving people an RP/IC reason to go to a zone that tops out at 20 and has no appreciable mobs but plenty of badges).

I'm totally not interested in having five-star arcs, or Hall of Fame or anything like that. I write because I enjoy writing, and whilst the AE can't do everything I want it to do, I'm still writing with the intent of people hopefully enjoying what I do put together. I'm not out to win popularity contests or feed people XP. There's 50 levels of content I can't even begin to compete with on that front. Heck, I give credit to the Devs for even offering players such potentially powerful player content tools. I admit I would like to be able to take that technology and put down temporary events in the game world, but I still look at the sandbox which is the CoX mythology and set myself the challenge of writing sequels and follow-on stories to the ones I myself have enjoyed.

I'm also with an SG now that has its own section in our forums for AE content, we regularly put together RP and AE events and encourage creativity, so perhaps I'm in a better than regular boat, but I write for the AE like I want to write anything: so that I see things I want to see, and maybe others do too. And to me that's the essence of writing, and it gives me great pleasure just to do it.

For me at least, the AE is another place to express that.


S.

"What keeps you away from AE arcs?"

Unimaginative people who can't spell. Which seems to be the majority of AE arcs.

I made a suggestion that AE should have been from day one - for PvP.

Imagine you could make your own PvP rules?

Yeah, it would have fixed all our issues as the playstyle, balance and allowed us to make our own maps. I honestly thought that is where they were going with it.

I considered playing Dustbowl as a Hero/villain and it seemed an amazing idea. That is what in my opinion PvP and AE should be.

IMO, that's what the Arenas should have been. (Selfishly, I want to keep AE for the storytellers.)

Let's hear it for features implemented in a half-***ed manner!

There are somedays where I feel like the following:

-Running through a well written mission or arc

-Playing a Challenge or "Boss Rush Mode" mission or arc

-Farming for tickets due to my stubborn refusal to pay the prices on the market.

Why I haven't most in 3 months: (Some reasons may be the same as what others have listed)

-Missions filled with gibberish, as if the person was typing with a boxing glove, have been appearing constantly

-Unfair, brutal, and cheaply made custom enemies that make Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 look easy. To make it short: Custom enemies are not balanced. I like a challenge, but there is a reason the Nintendo Hard era ended. I don't want to play a game I can never hope to beat.

-Too many farms. Far too many.

-No one ever wants to run a "Boss Rush Mode" with me. (Though I wish the main game had something like this......and no, just several AVs in a TF does not count. It would have to be every featured AV in the entire game.)

My four biggest problems with the AE:

Architect Entertainment

Like others, I have a great deal of difficulty getting over the whole "playing a superhero who is playing video games about fighting crime in a company created and run by two supervillains, instead of playing a superhero that is actually fighting crime" bit. I also don't like being stuck in that building-- there's a whole world out there, and I'd much rather actually go (or at least have the option to go) to Steel Canyon than have a holographic contact tell me that I'm going to Steel Canyon. It is also important to me that my own stories are treated as real events and not simulations unless I specifically state in the story that they are simulations.

I know that this was done to separate player content from official content to make it clear to players which one they are doing, but this should be made clear to the player, not the character. This can be done through the user interface, by putting a clear "Player Created Mission" in the Nav bar under the mission objective, or having it clearly marked when you accept the mission in the first place.

The Search Interface and Rating System

The star system has been revealed to be garbage, especially the ability to rate an arc without finishing it. It should be replaced with a "Like" button, and maybe a dislike button (but they should be displayed separately, not cancel each other out!), and neither should be able to be checked without completing the arc.

Dev Choice, Hall of Fame, and Guest Author arcs need their own tabs, and the default first page should be completely random to spread the exposure out more.

There needs to be an easier way to separate arcs intended to be story driven from ones that are farms. I don't really care about people farming for tickets, inf, and XP as long as they aren't exploiting, but people looking for stories need a way to ignore these arcs.

Spawn Placement

We have preset spawn points for a reason, and that is great. I totally understand it. But if I want certain events to happen in a certain order without forcing players to run back and forth across the map, I need to be able to say "I want Boss A in Boss Spawn Point 1, and Boss B in Boss Spawn Point 2". Most of the time "Front", "Back", and "Middle" don't work so well-- The first spawn after entering the mission can often be a "Middle" spawn point.

The last time we asked Dr. Aeon about this, he said something about exploits and cramming spawns into corners, which showed that he misunderstood what we were asking. We need to be able to place a given objective on a specific spawn point placed by the devs. We don't need to place our own spawn points.

Custom Critter difficulty

Custom Critters have requirements for full experience that result in them being far more powerful than canon enemies. It's very difficult to create a group that is similar in difficulty to a canon group without feeling like a cheater. Meanwhile, playing against custom critters can be extremely frustrating if the author wasn't extremely careful about how they chose their powers and the makeup of the group. There needs to be an easier way to make a "canon-like" group that authors can then make costumes for. The existing critter creator seems to be aimed more at turning player characters into NPCs than making a well balanced group that won't be far too easy or far too hard.

I can't speak to Sam's sense of humour or lack thereof, but I agree with him that the funny doesn't really exist in the AE building aside from literally two arcs that I have seen (Ascendant's arc and the one that has you paired up with THE MEGA PUNCHER).