Darmian

As I mentioned Sunday and somewhere else, I started using the exit mission clue to duplicate the debrief that the leader gets so that all the team can read it. It's not perfect because you can easily lose it on the last mission if you are not being aware of what you're clicking, plus sometimes you NEED that last clue for stuff! But that's one hacky workaround I'm using for some team play AEs.

Had a fun run. Great to see it happen. Everyone else? Join in!!

Well this is a great start and long may it continue!

Good points @Police Woman. Breaking things into Team Play and Solo.

What time are these running at?

Ok, the title may need to be changed. Any suggestions happily accepted! This thread is spun off of a discussion that started here about Dev Choice awards and developed into debate about the various criteria we look at to decide (subjectively) if a story arc is "good" or not. All such comments are me phrasing things while currently at work and again may be revised when I get a chance to think more on how to put this. We had some discussion on good, enjoyable, fun, all of that. Plenty of agreement and plenty of disagreement! We can explore that further hopefully. As well as that we hit the wall of how to make story arcs more visible to those who playing the AE. Further suggestions welcome!

No no. I literally don't mean that. Let's open a new thread, include a link to this as a reference for previous discussion and start afresh. I've now opened this new thread here. In the meantime I return this thread to Dev Choices.

Oh yeah, I've added this to a few of mine that need it. It seems to help.

Hmm. Nowadays I've little time to write but I still have my notes for my final Praetorian Trilogy somewhere. It's Responsibility Loyalist. I've done trilogies of the other three factions and really tried to make them fit (a) into the lore of pre War Praetoria/edging into the start of the actual War; and (b) fitting into a "gap" between Neutropolis and First Ward events. The Responsibility Loyalist is my fave path through Praetoria so I've been very self critical on what I want to put out there in order to satisfy myself on how well it fits in. Eventually I'll get it done I suppose. I'd happily write more Praetorian stuff set later in First Ward and Night Ward if we had any of those maps. We don't. Other than that I've tried to write a long NPC team driven work that spans 50 missions. I had a lot of fun writing it and keeping track of all the spinning plates and I envisaged it as a combo TV series format with a Prequel and three "seasons" that has you engage with a mid level NPC super team and generally get to know them while their world is spinning out of control. I think it works. Comedy is so subjective that I won't even attempt that. And kudos to those who can do it. For things I look for? I'll try almost anything but a solid story and good character interaction will always hook me in. And when I say anything, well look at some of the Christmas AEs that are available! Some of those are insane. And even in an AE that might be 90% awful to me you can find something that shines, that makes me think "how the hell did they do that?" I've been lucky enough that several people have asked me that question about my stuff but here's a little known secret: sometimes the AE's borkiness produces strange and fun things you can find while testing and then the trick is to figure out (usually by redrafting the story bit) how to make it look like I MEANT that to happen 😄 And by now some of the newer AE writers might be discovering how @cranebump and @Ankylosaur are damn good at what they do. It's that they keep doing it. Carnegie Hall, folks!

BOOO! HISSS!

For the sake of @TerroirNoir2's sanity(!) we need a second thread on this. This is the Dev Choice thread. And despite the hiatus (most likely due to the limited time/resources of the Dev/GM team) I think that the award will return at some point. So with that said, any discussions of publicising ALL Story AEs should probably not be here in future.

Yeah absolutely true. However IRL I'm an editor, and if you knew how many of these early publishers didn't bother to hire someone like me because that's a waste of money then...no, you wouldn't be surprised because the evidence is still there to see. If the stories were good then you got away with it. If they weren't it wouldn't matter how many editors you had. I'm convoluting things here, but in general I think I'm agreeing with you. In general. However, I completely disagree with the elitism take. So I ask: why wouldn't you (not you personally, @UltraAlt, the generic "you"), want to get better at what you do? To make sure that your mistakes aren't repeated? I'd like my second arc to be better than my first, my tenth to be better than the ninth, and so on. If someone tries the AE and likes it, gets beyond a "test" mission then the learning process tends to kick in and that learning process drives improvement. And I'm very much NOT speaking here about others reviewing what I've written and telling me I screwed up or whatever. Or telling me I've done well and resting on imaginary laurels. I'm speaking about me wanting to be better at a thing I really enjoy doing. Yeah, my sentence ran on a bit longer than my reference to canon style stories though. You've got some valid points. You've got a few I disagree with, as you know. But you've highlighted something here that needs looking at. We're no longer speaking of Dev Choices but of ways to make Story Arcs visible. There's (currently) 14,267 listed arcs in the AE. I hate to think how many are farms. Well, there's roughly 300 arcs in the AE as of right now with "Test" with no plays, the earliest dating to 2020. I'm not suggesting penalizing players. If you've got a single mission"Test run v6" unplayed for 4+ years then deleting it and returning that AE slot to a player isn't unreasonable I think. If others think it is then fair enough. And I prefer to look for them because I love the comic book universe of COH/COV. But different strokes for different folks.

Oh my stars and garters! Someone ELSE used him? Finally?

Surely this is subjective. And subjectively speaking I've created AEs that attempt to fit right into the canon of what's in game (specifically my Praetorian based ones), a short "What if..." style Cimerora mission, another Cimerora one that "fills a gap", and finally (so far in my paused career as an AE writer) an attempt to create a "Supers TV show long form set of arcs" that seek to inject some comic book chutzpah into various parts of the game world. Others have outright Elseworlded AEs so far that I'm not even sure their arcs are set in COH/COV. And that isn't actually a complaint! Some of those are amazing. (I'm trailing @cranebump and @Ankylosaur in the productivity stakes though. I console myself that I'm more fastidious than they are, but I mainly don't have the time right now) The AE definitely has its limitations. But apart from having to just learn how to use it, the biggest one isn't the AE itself. It's players trying it out, not instantly getting what they want because...well, 10,000 hours to be an expert, you know?...and then abandoning it as a bad deal, or however they phrase it. If I had a way of removing every "I did this as a test" arc that is STILL sitting in the list since 2019 unplayed then I would.

Plus with Marchand's Office there's the FIFTH area. The entire outside of the building is available to use but we can't. Not just the rooftop but the streets below.