Mission Architect , an opportunity lost

IMHO what COH has going for it is half of a succesful mission creation system. The problem with the MA is the same problem with most search engines. The basic search gets you a lot of junk you don't want.

According to theory there are five different ways to search on data. You can search by time (avg completion time for adventure). You can search on locations (include or exclude the map used). Alphabetic Order would be useful for something like Creator ID. Category is already used in the sort engine. This leaves one last type of data sort.

IMHO what they should have done is to create "scores" based on the type of player. Powergamer score for an adventure would be average XP per minute played. The Threat Level would be number of Mobs needed to clear , number of AVs, and average damage per mob per minute. The roleplay score would be the rating from players who have their RP flag turned on. There would be a statistical score for each player type.

Knowing which missions match up well to playing styles is very similar to targetted advertising. Once you know what people like you can create more of it. If everyone knows which mission has the highest powergamer score then the professional farmer isn't worth a whole lot. The laundry gamer might only want missions under 20 minutes so they don't mess up laundry with your 113 minute mission roleplaying an infected stealing a cheesburger.

Before you dismiss the scores idea remember that the scoring algorithms for Internet Search engines are currently worth $$$$ to their companies. What do you think a decent scoring algrithm for online games would be worth?

I'm programming-simple so I don't know how that would work any better than the tags it currently uses.

Sure would have been nice to be able to sort missions into a Difficulty that meant something. The ones I made were all relatively short (one was 3 small maps, I believe) yet they all got tagged with "Long." I suspect it looked at something like the amount of space you used rather than actual time it took to complete them or map size/number, because my favorite aspect was creating custom enemies for the missions. That maxes everything out right quick.

Mission Architect could've been amazing. I think it's too bad so much effort was wasted on PvP that could've been directed to something more useful and more in keeping with CoH's core ethos of player customization.

Only problem with AE's search function is the massive amount of farms out there, hogging all the space. I can find all sorts of arcs pretty easily with the advanced search features, it's just a pain to wade through farms is all.

That and the rating system needed a revamp. There's a reason Youtube abandoned the five-star rating system a long time ago. I really wish someone would've come along and replaced it with a "Like or Dislike" system instead.

On the last Twitch broadcast they said they were going to move to a "Like" system, where ratings 3-stars and up translated to a "Like" and everything else was going to the dustbin. It would be exactly like Facebook's rating system, apparently. I'm not sure it would have helped much, since farms tended to get high ratings already, but it was a step i nthe right direction.

Actually, that was among the stuff Aeon wanted to do with the AE but time wasn't going to be scheduled for it. It was pretty clear that the devs had written off doing anything further with improving AE.

Alright, but without the "powergamer" rating.

No sense in encouraging farms.

I wanted it to be a YES/NO rating system, but I was shot down. I also wanted players to be able to mark a mission as a farm mission. Just make it a legitimate category, that the un-interested people could filter out.

IMHO MA was a mistake on a massive level and shouldn't have been introduced to our game.

I said as such at the time it was introduced, and nothing I've seen has made me change my mind.

What I would had made different about AE:

From day one:

1. No hospital in the building.
2. Contacts would not be a replacement for a hologram, instead they would show up in one of various predetermined "lobbies" accross the city, at a random door entrance.
3. You would not have to visit any particular building to create or start an AE arc, it would be a GUI element (entirely enforcing or making redundant my first point )
4. I would not have allowed for custom power selection. Characters would have had a pre-created set selection, one primary one secondary. The critter level decides how many of those powers would be used. (I still today feel power selection didn't add a required storytelling value to the AE author)
5. I would have forced one offensive (summon/melee/ranged/assault) and one utility (armor/buff/control/manipulation) set per critter or two offensive sets.
6. All melee sets get at least one ranged attack (this was added after AE launched)

1. I would have penalized enemy groups that did not contain a variety of damage types.
2. Replace the star rating system with a "like" or "thumbs up" count.
3. Ambushes give no XP.
4. Rezzed enemies give no XP.

I suspect that AE was something that the devs saw as being the ultimate utility in the game for players to explore their creative talents.

Unfortunately the reality was/is that AE is a power leveler's paradise - and still is.

AE was a massive mistake and I rank it as one of a handful of nails in the coffin of this game.

TBH, I think the MA was the beginning of the end for me. So much potential, but good stories got burried underneath all teh farms, exploiters resulted in endless nerfing of the system, and the buddy-system badging (I gave you 5 stars, now give me 5 stars... or else) was atrocious until Positron was forced to gut most of it to keep the system from becoming a badge farm.

The gaming and exploitation of the entire system, as opposed to using it to reward players for telling enthralling stories or just to have a good time (which is why I'm on the fence for farming (whack-a-mole) missions) really put a dent in my admiration for the CoH community, adding to my cynicism and putting my CoH attitude on a downward spiral.

OTOH, I think that other developers learned from a lot of the MA's mistakes. It looks like Neverwinter's Foundry will be a lot more robust, for example.

The Mission Architect is great. It's a shame it wasn't more popular, so that it would have received more attention and improvements.

I didn't bother with the search function very often, I'd usually play arcs people listed on the forums, because that usually meant they put some time and effort into them. I'd also occasionally play some brand new arcs, just to surprise the creator.

I don't think farms are what killed interest in the MA. I think MMO players just don't like to be surprised. They want to know what they're up against, exactly what an enemy can do, and whether the challenge vs. reward ratio is to their liking. For many players, the excitment of brand new enemies to face isn't worth the possibility of defeat (and to be fair, a lot of the custom enemies were very tough.)