Mission Architect Utterly Borked?

So last night I spent hours - literally two hours - trying in vain to create a new villain group with custom villains for a new story I'm planning for MA.

First, the costume creator seemed to be borked (at least for me) in such a way that the "rotate" buttons (for the preview) intersect with the scale sliders, making it nearly impossible to adjust one or more of the scales without rotating the preview, or vice-versa.

Second, and most annoying, almost every villain I designed failed to save due to an invalid costume. I logged off in disgust, having wasted valuable game time to accomplish literally nothing.

Finally, when I checked the "known issues" section, I found the following very unhelpful information under "Mission Architect":

Quote:

Existing custom characters will display an error when you attempt to edit them in previously published missions. You will still be able to edit the characters but they display the initial error message due to changes in costume categories.

None of that really pertained to either the broken rotation/slider field nor my astonishing lack of ability to save even one single finished weapons-based character.

But then I noticed the following, also in the Known Issues (but under the Tailor section):

Quote:

An issue with the Tailor makes it impossible to change the costume of characters who have weapon based power sets equipped.

Does this include the tailor in MA? If so, that would explain why, when trying to create weapons-based villains for a weapons-based story, my failure was so complete.

I've got to admit I almost hit the "unsub" button last night, never to look back. Bad software and bad documentation don't leave a particularly pleasant taste or texture in my mouth, especially when I could play the game for free if I wanted to avoid the aforementioned badness. But instead, I decided to try the forum, in the hopes that this is the best-kept worst secret in CoX history. Can anybody confirm whether or not MA is utterly borked right now, and if so, is there any information about potential fixes in the pipe?

Thanks in advance for any helpful information.

Oh, to acknowledge some anticipated FAQ's:

1) Yes, I owned all the costume pieces in each costume.

2) No, none of the costumes were in any way exploits nor TM or (C) imitations.

3) Yes, I have plenty of experience in the MA and have designed numerous custom characters successfully in the past.

4) No, this is not a troll.

Just out of curiosity, did you try to build the custom characters in the regular costume creator (new character or tailor), then save that costume and load it for the custom NPCs?

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Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I think it may be an issue with any unlockable costume pieces. I know that any defense or IDF pieces will work in the costume creator, but will show an error when you try to save it. This may extend to other unlockable pieces like the cyborg pieces or any other store-bought pieces regardless of whether they're supposed to be available on your account or not.

Agreed, I cannot use any of the IDF sets on my critters; I should look to see if its been added to the list of those that can be unlocked. Also, though I purchased Beam Rifle and Street Justice, its a given that they would not be available in AE given that they are powers not costume pieces. But IDF and the incarnate costumes are ones i cannot use there.

There's a thread buried somewhere in the known issues forum for i21:


It seems that pieces you have unlocked (either by purchasing them, by having them inherently unlocked as a VIP, or otherwise) are still causing MA to think you don't have them unlocked. It happens with the IDF defense costume pieces as well as pieces you purchase from the market. Purchased pieces seem to be hit and miss - have had some of them cause failure have had others not.

As I said in that thread it comes off as poor programming, but that seems to be the issue. Haven't checked that thread lately to see if the devs have responded by I doubt they have. Knowing their response time to MA problems, don't look for this to be fixed earlier than i21.5...



I recommend what has already been recommended - either build them on a new character and save the costume, or what I usually do is just take a character to icon and build a bunch of costumes in there and save them all. That way if it does fail in MA you still have the costume saved so that when the bug is finally fixed you can just load the costumes and go.

You can always just build the characters now and give them random costumes so that you can at least build your mission awhile and test it. Then once the bug is fixed, load the costumes and publish.

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