So why aren't you using AE?

I don't use it more because too many of the mechanics don't work well - like chaining objectives that claim to be circular but aren't - and because of the profanity/copyright filter that objects to perfectly fine words and names - like anything with "Man" in it or Paragon. The text editor is frustrating too.

I used to make them regularly, mostly to re-tell the ending of arcs or to roleplay out a different ending. They were just for me and my friends and that was fine back before things started breaking and it wasn't too difficult to whip something out quickly. I had high hopes after they raised the size limit but it's been nothing but frustrating for the last year or so.

I don't play other people's arcs now mostly because of a lack of time but also the fear of running into some horrid custom monster. I knew when they announced custom creatures that it would be the doom of AE and I think I was pretty much right. They should have done the customization of the appearance of existing creatures from the beginning and never created the ability to make entirely new ones. Just my opinion of course but it seems like most of the problems come from custom groups and custom enemies.

The review system is terrible and maybe an overhaul on that would motivate me to play other people's arcs but frankly, the AE was always a personal RP tool for me so not a huge factor in what I do.

I wish they would give it a good overhaul, fix the bugs and add some interesting new features. And for goodness sake, give it a decent text editor and trim the filter back to where it was in the beginning.

About two years ago I went searching through the AE for any and all Willy Wonka based arcs. They were all silly and stupid, and that's precisely why I enjoyed them all.

But yeah, both the AE and PvP* in this game are so anemic that they might as well be dead. They're both constant, monumental reminders of what could have been, but wasn't. Very sad.

*(I still use bases!)

Play... I do on occasion. I just am not fond of trying to find arcs any more. On occasion I'll go in just to beat a bunch of stuff up with a tank or scrapper (and keep the tickets for later.)

The search system needs a complete revamp. Really, I'd be happy with a 90 day warning setting all (non Dev choice) arcs to "in progress" - and having those just vanish behind a setting. Let completed arcs that still work be re-published. Put the dev choice in one tab, farms in one tab, non farms in another. Give the ratings system a thorough overhaul - search by plays, last played, multiple categories instead of an overall star system... something.

As for making?

At this point, I'll just say I'm lazy. I've run into the filter and had it just get frustrating... this after buying extra slots. Plus, I've had ideas I just can't *do* in AE - I wrote up a Bane arc (two part, actually, still up there) but the fact I can't start the player off in a cell to break out of starts the story off "wrong." Just little frustrations add up

See my Guides and Tutorials

Simple, no real world impact. I find AE like the holodeck on Star Trek. Fun if you wanna be Sherlock Holmes or replay the battle of 1942 as a Klingon soldier(joke) or events that has already happened. Another example: AE is like reading Elseworlds from DC comics and they are fun to read once in a while but I find some depressing and no connection to the main universe with the characters I know(Russian Superman or ManBat comes to mind). I play to be a comic book hero of today in the main universe not an alternate or elseworld and thus my actions will have an impact tomorrow and SSA 1-7 were a perfect example of this and I played the hell out of it despite some "huh" moments. Real impact, real story I eat that stuff up.

But that is my view and not a knock on anyone who works hard on their stories, I know how hard it is to come up with a cool idea and put it to action.

Having said what I did, I feel obliged to point out that for that other Cryptic Engine MMO, upgrading their player-created mission tool was something they did to make it easier for them to create their equivalent of Signature Story Arcs; the goal was to come closer to unifying what players use to create missions and what the developers use.

It took them over a year to get it done. It sucked almost all of the development time out of other parts of the game, to the point where even bug fixing all but stopped until it was done. It ran way, way over budget, so much so that the publisher gave up on and it sold it and got out of the MMO business altogether. And the users still aren't happy with it, so they have very little to show for it, and may never recoup that expense.

So, no, we can't have nice things, and maybe there's a reason for that: nice things cost way more than we're willing to pay.

I do use AE. I use it to do alternate content for leveling with fun and entertaining stories.

For me? It's a matter of time. Both in terms of using AE as a player and as an author.

Also, I'm a creative professional in the arts from a number of different directions. Though I can never turn off the creative me (the costume creator and light RP--or at very least--concept characters is what has kept me here so long), for me to author some of the arcs I occasionally get the impulse to do, I fear the perfectionist in me would take over. At that point, my thinking is I'd rather put that intense creative energy into other more material things which I'm always working at and generally garner much wider audiences than I'd likely get using the AE. Which is a bummer, because the last time I had a strong urge, almost strong enough to buy a few more slots, I wanted to write some classic silver aged vigilante arcs. I feel the interim alignments are unnecessarily neglected in terms of content and I hoped to patch a couple of those holes for my own amusement.

For myself, I use the AE heavily for filming. I can (mostly) get the maps I want, with (mostly) the mobs I want, and (mostly) the NPCs I want. Then I tell it what I need it to do, and it will (mostly) do it.

But the ratings system we have in place? It blows whales. The AE should so take a page from YouTube, first with the likes/dislikes thing, and second with the comments thing (especially if we have the option to screen the comments first). I do this religiously with my YT vids, not because I only make positive comments visible (nope, almost everything gets through), but the ones that are deliberately spammy, offensive, or flatout tardbeast moronic can get left off.

There is more broken with the AE than there is right. Which is a big turnoff.

Which is why, once again, I would give a great deal for the Powers That Be to devote ONE issue to just QoL changes and repairs.

Call it ISSUE 25: OVERHAUL.
Tagline: "Nothing new... but damn, it sure feels like it!"

Hmmmmmm...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Because I don't know anything about the missions or their challenges before I enter them. Some of the Dev's Choice arcs are littered with Elite Bosses, others are quite fun. There is also too much crap to sift through and some great arcs go unplayed.

Mostly use it to get a few levels these days and leave it alone for the most part.

The reason I don't play more missions in AE? Lately, it's felt like 3 out of every 5 missions I attempt are invalid. Just won't start. Why does the system not filter out invalid missions from search results? I'd have assumed that should have been basic functionality, no?

The reason I stopped creating AE missions originally? Before I even completed my first attempt at a mission, it was made invalid by an update. Then again. Then again. It got old fast. After a while, I decided to just wait it out until the system was more stable.

The reason I'm still not creating AE missions? The name filter issue. I finally went back and tried to clean up one of those old, still unpublished missions, and it was, of course, invalid. The reason? It was titled "An End to All Things," which of course is forbidden. I'm such a rebel for using one of the most common words in the English language, "thing." Sigh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberGuy 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).

And then there's this. It's not a deal-breaker, but it is hard to get immersed in magical arcs (my arcs of choice) when, after every mission, you must return to your contact in the computer lab, then re-enter the data stream. There seemed to be a lot of focus on an in-game, lore-based reason for AE, but not much thought put into how that lore would restrict what was otherwise an amazingly creative tool. "You can make any mission you want, with any contact you want... so long as you don't mind that your contact will be standing in the middle of a high-tech computer lab (owned by villains) for the duration of your arc!" ARGH!


I want to like AE. I want to play more missions there, and I want to create more missions there. But sadly, I'm still at the same point I was a month or three after it was released: waiting it out for the system to become stable. Given that the last time I checked in, the character preview screen had stopped working, I'm guessing I'm in for a much longer wait.

d

I've made an arc and played through several arcs. In general, I don't use the AE though.


For making arcs, the biggest issue is how much time it takes to go through them and make sure everything works. Making the arc well enough to be playable requires running it several times to make sure everything works correctly and there are no glitches you can exploit or bugs that cause impossible missions. It gets harder the more complex you make your arc. While creating an arc that is full of several dynamic elements, I had to run it privately about 30 times to make sure something stupid didn't happen. This difficulty is amplified for every single custom enemy you put into the game. I, personally, reserve custom enemies to Bosses and AVs, since it makes balancing them a lot easier. But, I've been on missions where there are 5-6 different kinds of custom enemies in one large enemy group that makes up the whole arc, and it is very easy to get things wrong.

The second issue is the rigidity of the AE system. I'll have an idea in my head that is outright impossible with the current AE system, so I have to change it and conform it to work. But then it does something stupid like refuse to give AE tickets or experience, so then I have to dumb down the arc even more. Then when I go to revise the arc it is incompatible because of some stupid name copyright that is being violated somehow (Seriously, someone tell me how Van Ruhle's Spectre is violating copyright), so I have to rename the characters for the arc. Then, I have to be extra careful with spawning bosses and spawning glowies and ambushes and escorts because I can't actually control where things get placed in a mission; I have to tell the game where to put them in a large general area and just hope for the best. The fact is the AE system is only an average system, and it lacks some of the more refining tools that would be necessary to create an epic mission.



As for playing AE arcs, there are two things that seem to get into the way of me playing them.

First issue is getting a team to play them. It is that old self-reinforcing problem in that no one playes AE because no one playes AE. The rewards for non-farms are only average, and getting a bunch of people together to do these missions is incredibly hard to do. I've only managed to get a team of 6-8 on an AE arc once, and it took half an hour to do it on Virtue. Not every AE arc can be truly appreciated while solo. The AE arc I designed myself wasn't meant to be soloed at all; it was built for teams to maximize chaos, what with warring factions and supplementary NPC allies and all. The only time I've ever heard someone say "forming an AE mission team!" that wasn't a farm was when a redname was doing it.

Second issue is quality problems. I've been on enough crappy arcs to know that the search function doesn't provide what you are looking for and the rating function is useless. User generated content is like a box of chocolates, except the box is old and a lot of the chocolates are going to be stale. I've been on arcs that don't work, arcs that suck because they're just farms, arcs with overpowered enemies that can't be defeated by a team of 8 IOed out toons (Giving the AV Rise to the Challenge isn't a good idea), arcs where your levels jump around drastically from mission to mission, and arcs that are incomplete test arcs that were published just to see if the system worked. Without an adequate quality control system, a lot of AE arcs just aren't worth playing. You can't find the diamonds in the rough very easily, either.


But don't let that stop you. If you're on virtue and you want to run an AE arc team that isn't a farm, hit me up if I'm online. I'll gladly join you.

I never got into it because you cant make/edit maps and you have very little control over mob placement and you are limited in the number of unique mobs you can make. Finally because theres too much dross and not enough interesting stuff.

I'm not using AE because I burnt myself out, I played a lot of AE arcs, promoted it as much as I could, and never saw myself making any progress. It was always just me and a very small group of players playing each others arcs, and other random arcs that ended up being either horrible or broken and only rarely good.

On top of that, there's been no support for the AE outside of the rare Dev Choice and the occasional bone thrown to add a handful of new maps or some new enemies a year too late. And of course each new patch brings hundreds more broken arcs along with the filter that broke tons of arcs and hasn't been adjusted since.

Because I am no good at coming up with content. At all. It's terrible.


I've run a few of the developer's choice ones but that's it.

I keep meaning to go hit it up, maybe pen some arcs and all that, just haven't yet. I've got at least one idea I think might be fun using the clockwing king and nemesis.

I find the writing in AE arcs generally to be...how to say politely...subpar.

I don't create AE arcs because I find the interface clunky and overall it's really just not my thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Why I don't play AE arcs - same reason I don't read fanfiction. I don't care, and most of it is garbage.
Why I don't write AE arcs - I don't care, and most of what I write is garbage.

I use it for two things!

1. I like making my own starting arcs sometimes, if I'm feeling particularly sick of Habashy and I want something customized to my character's storyline.

2. I like to pretend my characters are playing videogames and choose an arc I saw advertised that seemed interesting. I tend to rp do those with my sister and once described it as 'it's like an x-box where you get beaten up'.

Hmm, why don't I use....

*1. That badge-stripping thing really teed me off. Take my badges? OK.... I'm ignoring your content.

*2. Oh wait, its not really developer content, its player content! Which means if I turned one of my cats loose on a keyboard, he or she could hammer out a better story.

Of all the MA arcs I have ever played, I only remember two, both created by forumites altho sadly I cannot remember which two:

1. The "Do Zombies Like Tequila?" mish

and 2. Someone's "Destroy the CoT Cave" mish.

Those two were hilarious and I loved them. Oh wait, someone had a haunted house mish and I enjoyed that too. Three missions out of 300,000, good reason to go back in there. Or not.

*3. Nerfed rewards. AND nerfed, AND nerfed and nerfed some more.

*4. Player-created bosses intentionally made as stupidly difficult as possible. Pass!

I am sure I could think up more reasons, but those are a few springing immediately to mind.

When I need a break from content I've played 80 times or I just want something refreshing, I'll try to pull up something non-farm related in MA.

However, I do enjoy 1-starring farm garbage and leaving feedback to the creator about their poor mastery of the English language.

I remember someone using the Bat'Zul Cave (or was it the from the Johnny Sonata arc?) titled "Enter Statesman's Colon."