I know I'll get flamed for this suggestion...

No, I'm posting a screenshot of the mission I was talking about in the post you so hysterically quoted in your reply. You know... the reply with all the bold, all caps and personal insults? That's the mission that follows on immediately from the talk to the chief mission. The mission that's showing as lvl 9 when it's given to a level 12 character. You still haven't explained that.

But don't bother. I've pretty much had it with your condescending, ill informed paranoid ravings and thinly veiled accusations that I'm somehow making this all up. None of which changes the fact that a lot of old blueside content is aimless, colourless and directionless.

P.S. CoHTitanWiki shows Linda Summers as a 5-9 contact. You should really edit that, eh?

I'm actually totally in agreement with you there.

Low-level blueside contacts contain far too much "keel seex snow moose" cruft and the lack of any actual arcs prior to 10 (unless you're a kheldian) is silly, but at the same time some of the more interesting missions in I0-I1 content had nothing to do with arcs. Stuff like the auction mission where you had Hellions and Skulls! (And other stuff too! Which pretty much anyone can do in five seconds in MA now, but was actually really rare at the time.) Or the missions from Portal Corp that are the only place you actually find out what the heck the deal is with the Hydra. Even in CoV there are a few bits of background information that are only revealed in one-offs.

Tip missions recapture some of the feeling of the better one-shots, but of course those are all mostly focused on the morality of the players driven by the rogues' gallery rather than exploring background stuff, like you'd get with a contact who specialized in one or two factions.

Not every story worth telling needs or deserves to be an arc. You can easily fit a small but complete narrative into a single mission, especially since the tech for mission design has advanced orders of magnitude beyond the point where finding more than one faction in a mission qualified as really neato keen. A lot of post-CoV contacts who just offer a single arc really feel overly narrow or slapdash to me, and giving them some themed one-shots would help round them out considerably.

Which reminds me, one aspect of early blueside missions desperately in need of revisiting is the antiquated so-called mini-arc.

Before they figured out how to give contacts multiple real arcs, sometimes they'd cheat a second one in by having a contact give a "mission" that was actually a chain of missions that automatically assigned the next task as soon as the first previous one completes. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of newer players weren't even aware those existed, which is a pity because the A Titan Named Joe mini-arc from Crimson is more interesting and infinitely better paced than World Wide Padding or To Save a Thousand Outdoor Glowie Hunts. But you don't get souvenirs from mini-arcs, or arc bonuses or merits, or redo them via Ouroboros, and of course if you level in the middle of one every subsequent mission is still going to be -1 to you.

Pointing out the errors in your posts is hardly hysterical. Your first screenshot showed a pic of a mission that didn't even take you into the hazard zone like you were claiming.

Yeah actually if you bothered to read my posts I did. We are able to get the Boomtown missions at a lower level because the devs removed the level restriction on hazard zones at our request with Issue 16. The missions in question were re-evaluated and lowered from level 11 to level 9 because they are so easy to accomplish. Before they lifted the level restriction we had to wait until we were level 11 to get Boomtown missions.

Good then you can choose to make use of your ignore feature.

Meh a minor error on my part but thanks for pointing it out. I was looking at the list of contacts that send you to her and she sends you to. (see unlike you I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong. )

But I notice that you missed that according to the wiki link Linda Summers doesn't even send you to the Boomtown Security Chief.

According to the CoHTitanWiki her missions send you to the:

Kings Row Security Chief at (-752, 32, 1452)
Steel Canyon Security Chief at (-3188, -84, -499.5)

and that's it.

The Boomtown Security Chief is at (-2894.5, 0, -3436).

So much for the accuracy of the wiki, but then the wiki relies on players to update it and it isn't surprising that things get missed when major changes to the game are made.

That's good to know

All kidding aside I didn't know the chiefs were floating contacts - I've usually fled the issue 0 levelling experience for the Hollows or Midnighters by that point. I suspect a lot of people do and that's one reason why there's so much PLing past the lowbie blueside game. Only one reason among several, of course.

Going back to the original suggestion - a tip style system would be interesting, but would it work any better than simply giving existing contacts some short story arcs? The AP/Galaxy contacts are okay - simplistic missions sure, but coherent and they sort of tell a story. It's really only when you hit Kings Row onward and dive into the maze of existing contacts that the flow gets lost in among street hunts, chats with the security chief and very few actual arcs at all.

This sums up my feelings quite neatly. All of CoV feels like it was made on a tight budget and on a short deadline (which it probably was) because it has almost nothing other than the most high-value items, such as story arcs. However, not every story needs a multi-mission arc to tell it, indeed. Arcs are good, but having one-off missions in addition to them is even better.

Papers and tips don't quite cut it, partly because they start looping all too quickly, and partly because they don't actually tell a story. Paper missions depict an event and tip missions focus on character morality, not story narrative, and they rarely end with narrative rewards, to boot.

One-off missions that reveal faction-specific lore or other canon not available in arcs are a very good use for these, especially when they're subtly referenced later on. Take, for instance, the Executable #whatever mission against Crey. It's a two-instance mission, but is not part of an arc. Some time later, "the Doctor" reveals that she is working with Executable #5 against Crey in the Revenant Hero Project.

Tips don't really do that. They rarely have anything to do with any plot thread in the game, and indeed appear to have been written by someone who'd read comic books, but hadn't played the actual game, since they involve Z-list characters and have plot threads independent from everything else in the entire game.

Crimson is a weird case. He has a give-or-tale 20-mission arc in World Wide Red and EVERY other mission he gives out is a three- or four-instance mini-arc. That one contact probably has more raw content to his name than the entirety of Praetoria.

What's funny, though, is that what we used to consider "mini-arcs" has become the standard for story arcs proper these days. A Mini-arc would usually be three instances and a "talk-to" mission, or four instances as is the case with Crimson. Well, most of the post I8 story arcs ARE three missions long. Take Jim Temblor, for example.

1. Save Fiusionette
2. Fight Kurst
3. Fight Nocturne.

The end. That's his entire arc. He then sends you to Penny, whose entire arc consists of:

1. Save Doc Delilah
2. Defeat Muxley
3. Save Wu Yin.

The end. We are then sent off to Doc Delilah, who has the following missions:

1. Find Akashiknight's body.
2. Find Akashiknight's SG base's location.
3. Explore Akashiknight's SG base's location.

Off to Agent Six! I won't list his missions, however, since he has about five or six. The ENTIRETY of Faultline, however, constitutes less content than JUST Crimson's World Wide Red. In fact, it constitutes about four or five of his "missions."

---

You know what kills me, though? "Zone arcs." Ye gads was that a bad idea. The so-called zone arcs aren't arcs in the slightest, they're just one-off missions artificially stuffed into the same over-long list of missions that constitute an "arc." This means that most contacts in the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa don't actually have a story ARC to their name. They just have a collection of one-off missions that they pass off as a story arc.

To my eyes, this concept needs to die in a fire. It's not a story, it needlessly locks you into it, with the contact forever displaying a red book, and IT IS NOT A STORY! To my eyes, a contact need both a story arc AND one-off missions, not just one or the other. That's what it comes down to.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

To be honest I've been avoiding those zones for so many years that I completely forgot how we got directed to those contacts/mission arcs. And it wasn't till after I read and posted about how Linda Summers doesn't have the Boomtown Security Chief listed on the wiki that I started having that niggling doubt pestering me that I vaguely recalled getting sent to that hazard zone from different contacts. So I had to hop online and verify it, and if it turned out I was wrong (which I was) then fine I'll admit it.

But yeah the hazard zone contacts are floaters similar to the PvP zone contacts and as soon as you reach the level that unlocks them whichever contact you have active that you go to first will refer you to them.

On a kind of annoyingly funny sidenote. Dr Trevor Seaborn had me run thru the introduction to Perez Park missions at level 11 while I was verifying how we got the Boomtown stuff. So I had 4 or 5 street missions killing grey conned Skulls and CoT in Perez because I never went to Perez when I was level 7. The character I was on went straight to Kings Row at level 5 and started doing Radio Missions.

Decent idea. I'm not sure the devs are really thinking that way, but not bad at all. However, since you asked.

Well now, see, I think it's playing pretty fast and loose with the term to call a lot of World Wide Red "content." Technically newspaper missions are "content." But spending entire missions, of what by current standards are newspaper-level quality, on obtaining single pieces of information that only minutely advance the plot is nothing more than padding for length. If someone went through WWR and gutted all the filler you could probably get it down to half its current size, and it'd be all the better for it.

Not that I don't agree the Faultline stuff was a bit short, but that was I8. They'd just finished banging out ten full levels of content on a skeleton crew. I'm willing to cut some slack there.

(The VEAT "arcs," now, those are pretty inexcusable.)

I don't consider anything in World Wide Red padding, myself, because every mission advances the plot, even if not by much. Contrast this with something like To Save a Thousand Worlds, where the words "Your princess is in another castle!" come to mind. Almost every mission in that arc consists of nothing at all, as almost none of them advance the plot one iota. They're just busywork. Not so in World Wide Red.

You call these "newspaper quality," but I disagree. Newspaper missions have basically no plot and never amount to anything. "Elvis Presley rules downtown! Like spit he does! This ends now!" is not a plot. At best it's a plot point, but for lack of an overall story, it's meaningless. I assume you equate those to newspaper missions because their internal mechanics aren't complex enough, which I can see as nothing but a GOOD thing. Not once in seven years have I asked for more complex mission mechanics. I may have asked for more choice, I'll give you that much, but hostage escorts and ambush spam are not choice. The VERY few times actual choices show up in missions, it's very cool, but these are so rare as to not be worth mentioning.

To me, World Wide Red is the perfect kind of arc - it has a pretty damn elaborate plot when you put it all together, but the missions themselves are simple and uninterrupted. It gives me my fill of plotline in-between missions, but it also gives me my fill of flow in games without halting my playing experience ever step of the way with an ambush or a mandatory conversation or an escort or plot twist or a sudden inexplicable timer or with annoying sidekicks or with constant intercom chatter or with non-combat missions or with any of a whole host of complications that take me out of the experience.

I don't like the new design philosophy of the newer missions, I'll be blunt here. This philosophy seems to regard "killing stuff" as something bad that should be avoided whenever possible, so missions potter along from one set-piece to another, with action treated as a necessary evil to get us from point to point. Look, I made a guy with a cool sword or a cool gun. I want to use that, on real enemies, if possible. Have plot, by all means, but don't let that keep me from, you know, killing stuff.

It's like professional wrestling. Yeah, yeah, we want to follow the storyline and see the "soap opera for men" to its conclusion. That's part of the fun. But ultimately, we're there to see people wrestle, not take turns giving promos for two hours straight, with every match being either a gimmick match or ending in shenanigans or a disqualification.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This. +1