Mission Architect , an opportunity lost

I think that conceptually the Mission Architect fits better with CoH than PvP and traditional Raids. I agree that the form it took was a mistake. It's part of that thing I hate: explaining game mechanics with game lore.

Definitely. That limitation was a bummer. I had the same issue with bases. I'm the only surviving member of all the SGs I was ever in, so I keep getting the message about upkeep... and those messages are years old. I can't even recall the last time I was in any base.

Check out http://starbaseugc.com/ for what STO has done with it. It's a community run website with missions and tutorials. Also, the STO community team is making more of an effort to get Foundry missions in the game more prominently. *shrug* so yeah I guess some good did come of it outside of CoH as well.

Flat out stupid is to give players that know nothing of balance, or just care to exploit it, the ability to balance every single critter.

Even the writers in the dev team were not given as much power over balance as we were given with AE, and that didn't hinder their ability to tell great stories.

That is sort of what ended up happening (minus regulation.) It just resulted in an AE that is only used for powerleveling.

Regulation would have required that all published arc go through an approval process, requiring dedicated staff that did nothing but playtest every single submitted arc all day long.

If I remember correctly, what I said in beta was that the tools were for the authors, search was for the players. Meaning, the tools should be as good as possible to allow authors to make whatever they want to make. But when it comes to presenting the arcs to the players, I didn't give a damn how fair it was to the authors. The goal was to try as hard as possible to make sure the player got to see the arcs they were most likely to want to play, period.

If search found 25 arcs the player was likely to play, but it missed three or four, and you were the author of one of those, too bad. I got the impression that there was a concern about "fairness" towards authors. But that was honestly irrelevant. It would live or die on the ability for players to find good arcs, and the honest truth is 99% of all players aren't skilled enough to make an arc anyone would really want to play, and those needed to be filtered from the players except when they were looking for them specifically.

What I think I suggested is a like/don't-like system with a couple of categories: story, action, mission design, something like that. Players could say they liked or disliked each of those for that arc, and then players could search for the top rated stories, the top rated action-oriented arc, and the top overall designed missions.


What I wanted the game to do on rewards is give full rewards to any player for playing any arc the first time, but then diminish those rewards on successive playthrus within a certain period of time, in a manner analogous to how task force diminishing returns work, but with some detail changes. That way, you granted the maximum freedom to the authors, while still controlling the rewards a bit. You could still farm, but not by blitzing the same mission over and over again. You'd have to run different farm arcs, or switch alts a lot.


I really think the AE was the single biggest lost opportunity in CoH. And in retrospect, I wished I had pushed even harder on it, instead of just picking one primary area to focus on. Normally I'm loathe to dominate the discussion on too many simultaneous areas of a part of the game, but I should have ignored that rule when it came to the AE.


But here's what I know I said constantly in and out of beta. For the AE to succeed, it must have just two priorities. When you're working on the tools, the player-authors are the only concern. You don't break missions every time you mess with a map, you don't put ridiculously aggressive word filters into the system, you don't place any limits on the tools except what is absolutely necessary. The tool is for the player-authors, and it can have only one master. And I'm aware of the challenges that statement incurs when I say it. And when you're working on the search, execution, and exploration part of the AE, your only concern are the players that intend to play the arcs. You only place the minimum restrictions on those players that are 100% absolutely necessary. No other concern matters not even the authors. If the players decide to vote your arc down because you can't spell and have the design aesthetic of a howler monkey, tough. If the players decide to vote your arc down because you're an ***-hat and they just don't like you, tough. *They* decide what they want to play, not you.

I know that wasn't true, and I know it would have taken an act of God to make it true. But if I was in charge, that's what I would have done.