Challenging vs. Frustrating

Where does "challenge" end and "frustration" begin?

Today I published my first AE story arc since 2009. Sadly, I had to delete the 2009 missions because changes in the underlying structure caused the missions to load random enemies rather than the original custom enemies I'd created for them.

Going through the process of putting the story arc together meant testing it with a number of different characters. The weakest character in my stable is a level 7 Storm/Ice Defender. The strongest is a level 50 Robotics/Traps Mastermind. In between are stalkers, corruptors, dominators, brutes, and scrappers. No tanks and no blasters. They're just not my thing.

During the creation process I had to reduce the difficulty of several enemies. I started with some "extreme" Lieutenants, for example, only to discover they were more difficult to take down than a "standard" Boss. Other than one "hard" Elite Boss, everyone is "standard". For some reason the "standard" Elite Boss was a complete pushover and I didn't want to make him into an Arch-Villian, so I bumped him up a notch.

I also originally had every mission set to "Defeat all enemies", but the maps I chose quickly made that untenable for any character without some hyped up travel powers and solid defense to fight off unexpected multiple pulls. Strangely, by deleting the "Defeat all enemies" from each mission the number of enemies on each map dramatically increased. Multiple pulls are now more common, but paradoxically, easier to manage.

The maps are all outdoor maps. I wanted to emphasize as much as possible a naturalistic, almost fairytale ambience and that's kind of hard to do in a sewer or an office building.

The downside, of course, is that many players absolutely hate outdoor maps. Also, the darn spawn engine doesn't seem to consistently follow the "Front", "Back", and "Middle" settings when placing an event on an outdoor map. Every time you run the mission, the key objectives are in different places. For me, that's fine. On an outdoor map finding the objective is half the challenge. The maps I consider frustrating are all indoor maps with multiple layers per floor, winding caverns that look and feel like intestines, or sewers that go on and on forever but never seem to spawn very many enemies so you wind up spending half your time trudging through green water staring at rusty walls.

But that got me to wondering. How exactly do other AE authors and players define "challenging" and "frustrating"? I've read several reviews, but there doesn't seem to be any consistency. What one person finds frustrating, another welcomes as a challenge. I haven't seen it lately, but back when AE first went online a big problem was reviewers blaming the author for spawn placements that they had absolutely no control over. Fortunately I haven't seen much of that lately, but I still worry about it sometimes, both as a player and as an author.

If anyone is interested, here is the story arc I published today:

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Arc Name: Torn Asunder
Arc ID: 536752
Faction: Neutral
Creator Global: @BKM61
Difficulty Level: One Elite Boss and One Arch-Villain. If your character does not like to melee, you might want to bring a friend or lower your difficulty rating.

Estimated Time to Play: It should take about half an hour for most characters to play through all four missions. A bit less if you're an experienced player, a bit more if you're a newer player. Twice that long if you actually take the time to read the story. Defenders and Blasters are probably going to want to bring along a friend.

Synopsis: One day while out for a quiet walk in the woods you discover that an army from an alternate dimension has fled an invasion in their homeworld and landed on Earth. They'd really like to stay, there's only one caveat, their leader wants to be Queen of the Earth and she has a super-powered army to help her achieve it!
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But the important point is the question I opened with:

Where does "challenge" end and "frustration" begin?

In general I often feel "frustrated" when I stumble across mechanisms that annoy everybody, but an author seemed to forget it when he put them in his missions, to "spice things up" a bit. E.g. I don't know anybody who likes to wait for a enemy's god mode to wear off. It doesn't make the fight more difficult or challenging, it just makes it last longer (the end being particularly boring).

If I want a fight to be more difficult, I prefer to speak to a field analyst or a fateweaver and/or choose a faction that can exploit the weaknesses of my character.

Otherwise it's hard for me to pinpoint what is challenging and what isn't. To give some specific examples: once, I played an arc where the custom enemies minions were all (or almost all) recolored Rikti Drones, who like to stay at range. Having set the diff to x8, I had to herd almost every mob behind a corner not to spend an eternity to finish every Drone (I think it's also in this arc that lieuts would summon Singularities and put Thermal shields on their allies x_x).

In another arc, one of the missions took place in what seemed to be the biggest office map available, with several glowies to find in a short amount of time. My widow would have sneaked through all the floors with no problem, but for my defender it looked like a tedious "defeat all" mission. And nothing in the plot would really justify this timed mission, you just knew the author wanted add a little bit of difficulty, but it turned to be awkward.

The thing that really irritates me is multiple chained spawns. That is, when you click glowie A, which spawns boss B, which spawns glowie C, which spawns boss D. This can wind up making you sweep the entire map at least four times (or more, if the objective spawns in a place that's hard to spot).

This is especially annoying on huge outdoor maps with tons of places to hide, such as the KR maps. In theory it shouldn't be quite as bad on indoor maps where front, middle and back are supposed to work. But quite frequently objects spawn in out of the way locations, and you wind up having to run around the map multiple times.

There are some dev-created missions that do this, including one very annoying tip mission that chain-spawns Croatoa witches in a Crey lab. It's hard enough to get pickup teams to do tips in the first place (so many people only want to run Council radio missions), but when you get a mission that wastes your time running around the entire map looking for the NPC you thought you'd free but didn't click on to talk to, it's very annoying.

Similarly, defeat alls really bug me as well (and the devs, ironically -- one of the NPC instructors for AE advises against such missions). There are some small maps where it's okay (certain bank maps) because it makes sense, there's nowhere for them to hide, and there's only one way to traverse the map from the entrance to the vault, so you can't really miss mobs unless they flee. But defeat alls on outdoor and big indoor maps are a big no-no.

In order for something to be challenging it must be possible to fail at it. There aren't a lot of things that qualify for that in City; in the vast majority of cases if you can't succeed it's because you never had a chance in the first place. That's not challenging either, just a gear check.

Also, putting a defensive set on a custom and selecting powers to give them more than 70% resistance to any one particular type of damage is going to earn you hate whenever somebody whose primary attacks use that damage type tries out your arc.