So why aren't you using AE?

To make arcs or to play them?

I do try to play AE arcs. I find that the ratings in the game are useless - 5 stars typically just means a farm.

So I have to search for SFMA (story focused mission arc) in the in-game search or go to the AE board and look for arcs people have posted.

There are a lot of great stories in AE, it is too bad that more people don't play it.

For me the main reason I don't play it more is that it isn't good for teams. I am torn between wanting to play mission arcs, read the stories, read the clues and really get into it, and joining a team that just blasts through content.

I really like MA, even tried to level up a character almost entirely on MA, but there are a few issues I have:

1) Broken missions. I've wasted enough time on arcs that won't launch correctly and don't have a good way to filter them out of the results (like "hide arc"), or be easily notified when they're fixed.

2) Server-wide rating system. People have different interests, and lately I've been seeing 5-starred content-less farms that go so far as telling you the easiest AT's to farm with. Totally not my interest, but enough 5-star those (and 1-star stories that don't have optimal XP rewards) that the rating system is rather useless.

I can't alt-tab out of the game easily on my PC to check the boards for player-advertised arcs or aeon's weekly MA arcs, but that's about the only reliable resource I'd found.

Imagine if the game had a "review/refer system." Imagine if you could see the ratings from JUST the people you've friended (who may be more likely to share your interests) or added to a "reviewer list. You'd have a personalized rating system that better reflects what you want out of the AE system.

3) Not enough time.
This weekend I finally completed all the DA arcs once. I haven't done an Incarnate Trial since before Keyes was revamped. I still have yet to play through the other I22 content. Nor have I played street justice, time manipulation, beam rifle, titan weapons, beast mastery, or (now) staff melee despite being a self-proclaimed altaholic. Maybe I'll eventually take those new sets through MA content... but I23 content looms on the horizon.

most of the reason i dont use it is sub optimal rewards (i dont mind a story but i dont want rewards to suffer as a result)

i also do not use it much because the search function is VERY limited

as others have said the number of trashy broken arcs clogging up the arteries of the search function is partially why the search is useless

limited time. as with chase, i just finished da this weekend, and still haven't finished first ward. some people burn through content, but some of us are still catching up to issues ago.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I don't make arcs because of the Filter the Legal Dept had placed on the MA system about a year or so ago. It makes it very difficult to create stories and adventures when many common words are blocked. For example, I can't create a character named "Thorn" in the MA system because the word "Thor" is part of "Thorn", so is thus blocked by the Filter.

Its a shame that such a great labor of love by the Devs not sits mostly unused due to the company's Legal Dept who are so overzealous in their job they actually made the MA system near useless for those of us interested in creating stories with it.

I use it to create missions when I'm running a story for the people I regularly play with; I think it's fantastic for that.

Why I don't typically use it for everyday play:

1. The search/rating system. It's difficult and time-consuming to find anything I might be remotely interested in via the in-game interface. Easier, of course, if I get recommendations from the forums.

2. The wealth of new dev-created content we've been given over the last few issues. There are arcs that came out the issue before last I haven't played yet, and others I still enjoy playing repeatedly, because I like them so much.

3. The continuous XP nerfing. This is the big one for me. I got really turned off on AE by the string of changes that were made in an apparently utterly ineffectual attempt to slow the power levelers down. Doesn't seem like it had any effect but to destroy the ability to make any sort of meaningful progression for those just playing through stories. I mean, it was a slap in the face.* I'm not mad at the power-levelers about this; I couldn't care less if another player gets to 50 in a day. I'm mad at the way it was responded to.

Well, I was mad. I suppose I've gotten over it now, because I'm actually considering creating a new character who's "project" will be to level entirely in AE, just so I can reacquaint myself with some of my old favorite stories and see what new stories people have come up with.


* There, now you can all take a drink. Don't say I never gave you anything.

It's not like I don't use it at all... But, when it first came out, I was whipping up personal story arcs for myself and other people's characters and our groups and it is a tool for us to create the most immersing, specific and fun personal character stories possible. I should be using this a ton more than I do...
And I still do use it, but there have been a few things that have made it almost an afterthought for me, even though my SG mates still run regular original AE arcs every week. I sometimes join them (not all the time though) and that is now about the extent of my AE use.

Why?

Mainly because of the damned AE building (that gets zero pluralization, because it is the same damn building everywhere).
I got so sick of being in the same damn place, the same room with holographic contacts and AE terminal screens and... gah!
Here we are... gathered for the greatest immersion possible within the game, but we have to put on the blinders every time we go to the missions and exit them and continue the story.
It's a bit jarring at best... and down-right disappointing at worst. No matter the story, no matter the plot, it's like being in Bill Murray's Ground Hog Day... without Bill Murray and Andie McDowell (but the occasional Chris Elliot is sure to be around).
It seems like a slightly silly thing... and I don't rant and rave about it... It is just something that somewhat subconsciously grew extremely tiring for me... and it was only after I hadn't set foot in an AE building for MONTHS that I realized just why that was the case. That damned AE building.

I love the AE for the role-play and tailor-made personal content we can create - not for the farming.

I used to create missions very frequently and pretty quickly (some things were more involved than others, but sometimes it is just a matter of a good location and/or a good fight).

The other reason(s) I've had a hard time getting back into it is the lack of updates and improvements to things we can do and options to pick. No power customization, several newer powersets missing, no improvements on NPC dialog options or map placements or features.
We got a lot of reduction of xp and options that'd hurt xp gains (which weren't a big deal, but it impacted the advancement rates), but we got little that actually benefited telling stories and creating and playing good tailor-made content.

That and, after taking a break due to recurring AE building interior fatigue (RAEBIF), I found figuring out which maps were what I wanted to be a lot more troubling than I could muster the endurance for.
So, actually, a better way to preview maps might be another major factor.

Okay, thanks for pulling that rant out of me, dug!

I use AE for Mission RP. I usually have plots building up to them or someone else in the group will.

Playing (there are overlaps, but for different reasons):

• Immersion-breaking concept: The AE concept takes me out of the story every time I zone between missions, and reminds me that it's fake and my hero is uploading his/her consciousness into a system created and run by supervillains.
• Too difficult to find content I like: The rating system is garbage. We need a Youtube-like rating system that drops stars, has likes/dislikes, and has player-created favorites lists that we can follow from in-game. We need short public comments that allow players to explain why they liked or didn't like an arc (e.g. "I wanted a farm", "Nonsensical and riddled with typos", "Awesome hero's journey arc", or "This is a great farm"), so that farmers and story-tellers aren't competing for plays.
• Extremely unbalanced custom enemies: Even in good story content, most custom enemies are grossly overpowered compared to standard NPCs, due to the XP requirements and the default options. For example, Rage and Build Up don't appear anywhere on NPCs in the normal game (outside of Doppleganger tech, which shouldn't use them either), and don't belong in the AE either, without the creator specifically choosing them for the sake of challenge. Custom enemies almost always have more secondary effects than standard enemies. I can adjust my difficulty level, but there is no convenient way to do so while in an AE mission. One step they could take to help this would be to add the difficulty slider NPCs to the AE.
• No end-game rewards: Outside of Dev Choice arcs, you cannot earn shards, threads, or components in the AE, so I feel like my level 50s are wasting their time in there unless I've already maxed out my Incarnate slots.

• Story undermining concept: the AE treats all my stories as not being real events, but instead VR games hosted by supervillains. I dealt with this once by actually writing a story as a VR game created by an unscrupulous company, but I don't have much interest in restricting all of my stories to that same framework. I understand marking player-created content as such for the player in the UI, but creating lore around it to mark it as such for the character is both unnecessary and undermines the author's work.
• Buggy, difficult text interface: I have some extensive writing revisions that I have needed to make to one of my arcs for nearly a year, but I haven't done it because my use of HTML in the text has put me way over the character cap, which means I can't just edit it, I have to pull all the text out, remove all the HTML, rewrite it, paste it back in, and apply HTML again. Sometimes I'll be typing and nothing will show up, and I'll click elsewhere and back in and suddenly everything I typed that wasn't showing before will be appended to another location. Sometimes it doesn't line-wrap automatically.
• Too difficult to advertise to players that would like the kind of stories I write: With the only in-system means of advertising to players being the rating system and the (I suspect rarely used) category system, I'm mostly left with self-promotion options that I find tiring or distasteful like spamming channels for plays or forming PUGs to run my own content. Some people have put a great deal of effort via review threads and contact trees in the MA forum, but there isn't much traffic in there, and there should be in-game means to do the same things.
• Extremely difficult to balance custom enemies: It's very difficult to make interesting custom enemies that aren't overpowered, and still give decent XP to my players. We need more basic powersets that are similar to existing NPC groups, so I can make a 1-10 mission with foes that use baseball bats without all of them having a significant chance to stun.
• Tiny population of users: In the early days of the AE (first couple of months), I would get plays and comments frequently, and see lots of people in the AE buildings. I now can go for months without plays or comments, and most AE buildings are completely empty. This is likely because of the reasons listed by players why they don't play (duh), and much of the community generally believing that AE is for exploiters and farmers. Without an active population that might actually contain a few people that would want to run my arcs, I'm not very motivated to work on arcs.
• The Filter: plenty of totally legitimate words are filtered, words that may have been used as a name for some obscure hero in DC or Marvel, but should be totally fine to apply to an object (like "Access" as in "Remote Access Terminal"). Also, actual Paragon IP is restricted so that certain groups and NPCs can't be used.

I use AE for various reasons at various times. Always have always will.

Burned myself out way back when it started gathering material for an internet radio review show.

I use it all the time. RP plot missions and the like where the team is actually concerned about the clues and such.

Why I don't play Architect arcs is because the great majority of them are garbage. I don't mean anyone in particular, it just seems like a lot of people put a lot more time into coming up with ideas than they did actually realising those ideas... And those ideas are rarely good to begin with. It's fanfiction all over again - a select few are great, the great many suck.

Secondly, I don't play Architect arcs because I hate parody, satire, comedy and jokes in general, and yet it seems like this is 99% of what I run across when I pick a random mission, and 100% of what I run across when I pick a Dev's Digest or a high-rated arc. I'm not asking for angsty drama, of course, but I'm sick and tired of jokes that aren't funny.

---

Why I don't make arcs is it's a TON of work. Days of writing, re-writing, proof-reading and testing, days of wrestling with broken mechanics and trying to figure out why your objectives don't work like it says on the box and so forth, and all for what? I've had an arc listed since the Architect came out and it has all of 20 playthroughs, most of which are actually people I've specifically asked to run it. I have another I made a few months after the first one that has 8 playthroughs all told.

Why would I bother making these things if no-one's ever going to see them, while farms consistently top the charts? I can think of so many better uses of my time, including writing stories no-one's going to read, as opposed to making arcs no-one's going to play.

Quote:

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.

I use AE all the time. The Rare Salvage you can buy with tickets is hot hot HOT right now.

I use it quite frequently to play story arcs that I see advertised on the forums.

I don't play other people's arcs because the search tool just utterly fails to help me find anything that I would actually enjoy. The 5-star system fails all the way down from Sturgeon's Law into Gresham's Law territory; to see that an arc got 5 stars tells me less than nothing useful about it. It doesn't tell me why it got 5 stars, it doesn't tell me who gave it 5 stars or anything about those people's tastes. That leaves me with just picking them more or less at random, and the last time I tried, half a dozen randomly selected, reasonably good looking five-star arcs got me six pieces of trash in a row.

When AE first came out, I begged for a matching system like the one that Amazon or Netflix uses: once I've rated some arcs 4 stars or better, and some arcs 2 stars or below, compare my tastes statistically to other people who've rated those arcs up or down the same as I did, and move arcs that they liked to the top of the list. Until they do that, finding anything that's both fun and interesting will continue to be basically impossible.

I don't use it to write arcs any more because writing arcs for myself is no fun, none of my personal friends play CoH (they play that other game, "because that's where everybody is"), and the arcs that I do have up there are languishing in four-star limbo -- last week I actually had one of my arcs played, and it was the first time in a year. So who am I writing them for?

Also, the tool just isn't very good. You can try to make it do something other than text intro that only the leader reads, kill all, text outro that only the leader reads, but the tool fights you the whole way. There's another Cryptic Engine MMO out there that has upgraded their version of AE twice since AE was last overhauled. Their current version allows player-created maps, branching missions, and full on-map event triggers.

(It's probably not a coincidence that "why aren't you using AE" and "why aren't you using PvP" threads are at the top of the General forum the same day. They're both features that were highly hyped when they came out. They both disappointed. They got one minor system update each. And then both of them were abandoned as too expensive to fix.)

I tried it for awhile, but sifting through all the garbage available was tedious and none of the missions I played were good enough to make it worth it.

If I played arcs advertised on the forum and found them to not be good, I'd feel compelled to be critical where they were advertised, and no matter how gentle I might try to be, I'd be raining on someone's 'hey I just made this awesome mission' parade.

Ultimately, the only reason I'd have to play missions on AE would be to complete some lengthy and tedious character-build goal that required me to accrue components and/or recipes with tickets (or generate funds with such items). Since that's not something I do, I just avoid playing there (unless a random team invite just happens to be for an AE team, but that's been an almost non-existent occurrence for quite some time).

As for making missions: to do it right takes too much tedious effort.

*If* the Devs had made AE a central mission hub where you can pick real contacts to give out your missions and those that play them actually have to go to that contact, travel out of the AE buildings to map locales, etc, like real missions require. If you really want custom contacts, then each zone could have a single contact sitting somewhere that morphs into the appearance of your custom contact (and ala combat phasing, isn't visible at all when your missions isn't selected).

Essentially, I wish it felt like real missions instead of matrix hologram playgrounds. That, and I wish the Devs would comb thru the published missions more, select the ones that are balanced and fit in with Canon lore, and make them Dev's choices and treat them as if they were Canon.

Were these two things in existence, I'm sure I'd play AE very often, as opposed to how much I play now (ie. pretty much never)

As a consumer of content, it's a mix of not being properly meshed in the game world and difficulty finding interesting stuff even when overlooking the conceptual disconnect between what the content is supposed to be (a holodeck) and what I want ("real" adventures for my characters).

As a producer of content, its the limited audience (I have limited interest in creating something no one will see) and the idiotic filter that was added.

For those not aware, that filter means that words that are trademarked names are barred everywhere, not just as names. For example, you cannot use the word "apocalypse" anywhere, because it happens to be the trademarked name of a character. Think about how many words are used as names like that across the major comic publishing houses.