Can I cry now?

Anyone who enjoys writing story arcs should be punished because a few people who enjoy them don't like farms? Exactly, who have I, for example, insulted or what done to warrant an attack? What fight have I tried to pick? Please enlighten me.


WN

If I was that prescient, I'd have some better rated story arcs

Actually, yes, you can. You click on the "match keywords" radial to expand the options iirc.

When I write an arc, I know that I will play them. So will my wife and daughter and any friends/family that play CoH. Beyond that, anything else is extra. I hope people will find my arcs and enjoy them immensely, but I'm not concerned about getting ratings/tickets.

I write what I enjoy playing. To me, that's the greatest thing about AE. If one of my characters hits a point where I'm not interested in the available contacts, I can play my own mission line or play story missions from other players (thanks to those of you who post about good story-based missions). I also tend to search for missions with no stars or few plays just to give them a shot.

So "why should I bother to put forth the effort"? Because it's fun. If it's not fun, there's no point in doing it, regardless of the number of plays/stars it receives.

Well, there's a number of factors at work here. Dev silence isn't helping the situation at all. There's a bit of culture clash too. I'd best compare it to badgers who want all badges simply because they exist versus PvPers who'll attack anything that moves in zone. Their concepts clash when forced to interact though some could argue neither is "wrong". With farming in the AE, it very much feels like something is being taken away. There's numerous places (PI, Television arcs, iTrials) where people can farm. There's only one place in the game for story writing and it feels like it's being taken over. Essentially, it's the feeling that someone can pancake on our front porch and we're supposed to to just smile and be happy about it.

There's also the perception of farming and farmers. A lot of it comes off as slash and burn farming that leaves the land barren as opposed to crop rotation that tries to keep in mind that the land needs to remain useful for the future. When exploits got plugged, a lot of farmers simply left their farms sitting there as opposed to deleting them to clear the system. The mindset that farmers using the slash and burn technique is where the thought of farmers burning out and simply leaving comes from. It's happened before. The argument is whether it's truly the majority or if it's just the rather visible ones.

It's not a dumb question at all. There's a LOT of things in AE that simply aren't as obvious as they should be. See the screen I posted? Just click the match keywords button. It has the weakness of lacking a "not" option for filtering out things you absolutely don't want but it will restrict a search to arcs with the matching keyword.

Many of us are simply frustrated by the state of things. The example I always bring up is that I can get people to run the Abandoned Sewer Trial yet I can't even pay people to run one of my AE arcs. We feel pushed to the edge with no way to do anything about it. No dev support, ridicule from other players, no media support. The latter interests me the most since I feel the only way we'll get changes is if either COH's competition outdoes them in player generated content or if a news article mentions the neglect and the devs scramble to look like they want to look involved. I know Massively won't do anything. I don't think Elliot is a bad guy at all but he's already backed off from doing anything with AE. And it would need to be someone large like Massively since while there was some lip service given to the PvP community after a news article mentioned their neglect, nothing has actually been done by the devs (though I will give the community team props for attempting to become involved in events and such).

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

really? didnt think it would work like that, would be much easier if the advanced search just let us choose up to 3 like we can on the architect options screen or when creating an arc

most of the search is not bad, i personally like the 1 random button (although it would be better if it would also allow variants such as 5 random or 10 random, since that 1 random may or may not be what you want lol)

Instead of letting these concepts clash, why not try to fix it as a community?
The problem you have with the farms isn't the existence of the farms, it is the abundance of the farms and to be honest as a farmer, that is a problem for us too.
Would you really care if 4 or 5 farms took your front page slots and the rest was sent to obscurity? That would leave plenty of room for your mission Arcs.

If you wanted to arrange some sort off mass downvote of some of the crappier farms out there, I would support it and join the Crusade. Just leave the good ones alone, the good ones have had some serious effort put into them - no less effort than your story arcs I'd wager and they deserve their ratings. They might not deserve them more than your stories do but they don;t deserve them less either.

I don't have a Fire Armor Brute, so all farms are crap to me.

It isn't fun anymore for a lot of people, what with the profanity filter and the editor lag. Add in the prospect of banging your head against the wall to actually get anybody to play the damn thing (and yes, it is part of the fun to have somebody play your arc, tell you what they liked and what they didn't like, and go back to the drawing board to improve. It makes for a better arc in the long run. Having a better arc is fun. Ratings are really just a means to that end, in that a 5-star rating can sometimes get somebody to play the damn thing.) and are your really surprised if people just don't want to do it anymore?

Edit: I just checked, and both of my arcs have received four more "plays" with no tickets. Oh yeah, that's just coincidence, people really think our arcs suck, and ratings griefing doesn't happen.

Well, the suggestion to change the actual search frontend is where this thought process comes into play. I mean, it doesn't even default to showing the search bar. Wha..? That doesn't make a lick of sense. I think that one change will have a massive effect on things. If you do a search and see a 4 star arc then it doesn't seem that bad and you might play it. As is, the system opts to not even make it obvious that you can search. 4 stars should not be considered a bad thing.

My assumption is that the average player, farmer or not, checks the first few pages and plays what's there. DCs seem pretty static. They see farms and get used to them being there. After looking for a farm they see a new arc on page 4 that gives poor rewards and rate according to that even though it's not supposed to be a farm at all. The non farmer who constantly sees farms simply doesn't know there's more options to search for other arcs. The frontend is simply poorly designed in it's current form.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

They might not be of any use to you but that doesn't mean they are crap and deserving of being rated as such. Surely you can respect the amount of time, effort and clever thinking put into the better farms out there.
I have personally logged over 24 hours of my time trying to tweak my farm to perfection and you know what? My farm is absolutely terrible. I refuse to use it even.
Maybe you should try making a decent farm before you judge them all so harshly just so you realize how much effort and detail is really required.
I am not referring to the plethora of crappy farms out there that you are probably most familiar with. They deserve whatever crappy rating you can give them - literally no thought has been put into them. I am advocating that the masterpieces be treated as such. Those that have been designed to be perfectly efficient with every small detail taken into account and the effort put in to not only do it once but to make a full 5 mission arc.

But all of the above relies on the Dev's fixing the problem and they aren't...
I suggest figuring out the best farms of their class ie the best fire, the best S&L and whatever else is required and bombing the rest into obscurity. If you arranged enough people to make a difference, I would gladly be among them.
We can solve this issue ourselves.
Farmers and Story Enthusiasts can get along.

Confirmed 4 plays with 4 1 star rates to all of their arcs last night:

Wrong Number
Eva Destruction
Jail.bird
PW
Bubbawheat
FredrickSvanberg

That's around 30 arcs.

I also think the person that started this thread got hit too.


WN

One person put in the effort, at some point. Everybody else just copied them. Please, point me to one of the "better" farms out there and I guarantee you most of the regulars here can figure out exactly how to copy it in fifteen minutes or less. Add in another fifteen minutes to look over the S/L sets and find the ones that give full XP while doing the least damage, without def debuffs.

This actually brings up a good point...who do we complain to anyway, since the dev in charge of AE doesn't answer PMs from what I've heard.

I can only confirm receiving 3 low rated plays on each arc, and they occurred Tuesday, not last night (Wednesday). I am jealous of that fourth play that most of you have received. Why? What did I do to deserve only 3 plays? Soooo unfair! I want that 4th play!

Anyway, as I see it, I routinely 1-star farm arcs that have no story, so I have no grounds to complain if some farmer decides to 1-star all my arcs because they aren't farms. Sure, it may seem mean, but sauce for the goose, etc.

In the long run, it's my hope that story enthusiasts that play story-oriented arcs will give positive ratings that will even things out via the power of democracy. Admittedly, this may be overly optimistic, because the current list of top rated arcs seems to suggest the majority of AE players prefer farms to stories. I think this is unfortunate, but seems to be the reality.

I believe it to be the reality because those who would otherwise be interested in playing story arcs in the AE can't find them due to the lack of a story arc tag to search for. After all, when AE started a huge number of people were playing story arcs, until the exploit arcs buried the stories.

You're too nice and don't rant enough. Rant more and the 1-stars will come.

Why wouldn't you file a normal griefing complaint in game? Include the information of how many other arcs were simultaneously hit.

While I expect nothing from it, filing it doesn't cost anyone anything, either.

This will never work as long as the rating system stands as it does now. It's simple math.

31 plays on an arc
27 5 Star Rates
04 1 star Rates
---
31 Total

27x5 = 135 Stars
04x1 = 04 Stars
----------------------'
139 Stars Total

139/31 = 4.48 which rounds down to a 4 Star Rating

So, you need 28 5 star rates just to bring the rating back to 4.5 which is certainly a precarious place to be since even a 4 star at that point drops you back down to 4 stars.


WN

Because a single petition will accomplish nothing. A 1-star rating in and of itself means nothing, and CS will probably just ignore it. Directing the appropriate rednames to threads like this would bring to their attention that a problem does--hey a penny! I don't expect anything to be done about it anyway, just like Crey and Black Scorpion are still on the "profanity" list, but at least this way--oh look that dog has a puffy tail! Then when nothing is done at least we'll be justified in calling out the utter apathy demonstrated by the dev team towards--oooo, bouncy ball!

A 1-star rating means nothing. 4 1-star ratings, on every one of an authors arcs in one night, that coincide with the same number of 1-star ratings on the arcs of other authors who coincidentally happen to be rather vocal posters in the MA section of the forums is something else again. If CS does nothing about that then we don't need to bring it to the attention of any devs to be justified in calling them out.

Which is why I mentioned including that information. And again, what does it cost?