ZamuelNow

Out of curiosity @Police Woman, what search terms do you use for finding arcs?

It feels like it would be good to link the publicly stated GM stance on using public domain characters:

Well, okay...smaller maps are often more useful. Now that I have your attention, my question is: What is the physically largest instance we have access to in Mission Architect (ignoring things with multiple floors)? I'm wanting to test something and need the distance.

The XP boosts made sense for the first month or two but not longer. Considering that Excelsior was genuinely straining the server and was a danger to itself, I'd say a carrot, a stick, and a mix would be better. The stick would be to simply lower the max shard population. I believe the max is higher than 1000 which seems a lot for a game with older code yet multi-shard architecture. This could backfire if people can ping the server while waiting and aggressively impatient people keep clicking the button to enter (though I forget if the option to click even exists when a shard is full). The carrot would be to promote the player events that happen on smaller servers or choose those servers for doing events. I think this was part of the reason for why the anniversary costume contests were where they were, though the first created shard and the European shard make sense as locations. The contest on Reunion wasn't at earlier times and the one on Torchbearer didn't take screenshot of every instance but no one's perfect. Promoting things like Saturday Night Synapse or Themed TF/SF Saturdays won't attract everyone but helps showcase things that are going on. The mix would be being stricter about things like multiboxing during events. It's a stick to the person multiboxing but a carrot to everyone else.

So, this will be kinda stream of consciousness. A lot will be in response to @UltraAlt and @Dacy but not necessarily direct quotes. I think a lot of things need context to why they're the way they are. If forced to tldr, I think playing on teams and posting reviews will do the most to boost Mission Architect and while things look bleak, I have faith that the devs will fix at least some things. Before I wall of text, I guess a bit on where I'm coming from. I joined in I14 with Mission Architect being the thing that finally pushed me to get City of Heroes. I've had a "review" thread where I helped people fix typos, grammar, and mission flow. Never been the most prolific AE author but been around pre shutdown. Only joined Homecoming after the NCSoft announcement. The main benefits to Dev's Choice are showcasing high quality player created missions and giving the players of those missions better rewards than normal AE missions. Both of these are slightly broken. For the first, the fall off on rewarding new Dev Choice's makes it feel dead even though people can obviously play already existing missions. "Is there anything other than farming?" For the second, it used to be tickets were default and you only got to pick between tickets and standard rewards on Dev Choice. I was asking myself who made the foolish decision to expand the choice to all missions. Tickets had an, admittedly minor, effect on farming in that not getting standard drops requires players to alter things to gear up. Tickets also opened some marketing niches. Things have been established for a while so changing things back would cause more harm than good, I'm just pointing out that Dev's Choice is technically broken as a concept. Only slightly, though. It can still do good but as a holistic solution, not a standalone. The thing about "five missions, level 50 only, Final Destination" when it comes to getting newcomers to try out AE is that it's intimidating. It can be intimidating to ME and I've got experience with the system. There's this behemoth in front of you, advertising that it's part of a long series, and you have no idea if it's any good or if it's good but not to your tastes. Not everyone wants to play their 50s to the exclusion of everything else. Mid size and smaller arcs have their place and are better introductions to the system. But all of these have reasons. Some people want to play at 50 and don't want to lose those powers exemplaring down. Some arcs are long because the author had a ton of ideas (though they need to watch for bloat). Villain and Praetorian arcs stem from feeling there's gaps in the official game (but countered by the high number of hero only players). While there are outliers, I think a lot of people want difficulty similar to rest of the game. Annoyingly, that's kinda difficult. The damage and debuff numbers on custom critters are often higher than other at level enemies. And thanks to the farmers, we have to take more custom powers than we used to for full rewards. There are ways to mitigate this for balanced arcs but it takes a delicate touch. What doesn't help is the difficulty of planning around varied player builds. Someone with a min-max build can skew things for more lightly built players. As far as the four types of arcs in the system, there's actually five and I think that fifth one is actually the most populous--a quick test out of curiosity or for badges that was left in the system instead of being deleted. There's a graveyard of them but you don't notice since they have few to no ratings. Honestly, I think most story writers wouldn't even bat an eye at farms if there weren't so many and farmers just collected around a few good ones. The thing about a Tanker Tuesday type event is that it's a great idea...and we did something similar pre shutdown. Not seeing a regular AE group was the thing that most shocked me when joining Homecoming. Actually running arcs gets people talking about the arc and builds memories among those who attended. So...I guess I'll try to be the change I want to see. I've started putting out feelers to see when other things are running so I don't try to run at the same as a MSR or other large event. In looking to the future, I think being specific about needed map fixes to the devs may be the way forward. The I27p7 fixes were a ray of hope but it required being specific with /loc coordinates. I think the devs are (mostly) sympathetic to the plight of Mission Architect but I'm not sure if any have their fingers on the pulse of the community. Granted, it hasn't felt like a community in a while.

This thread reminds me of a discussion back on the retail forums that effectively "difficulty" is measured by melee players. Wish I knew where the thread was because I remember it making interesting points, though it was about the game as a whole as opposed to level 1-20.

Scrapped my original comment. Ugh, may take me until the weekend to reply because there's a mix of valid points that need addressing and I have work in the morning.

Thanks for the information, Dacy. This does leave me with a question for people: Is this initiative primarily to get new Dev Choice missions or to bring more plays to story missions in AE? These are overlapping but not actually the same goal.

Intriguingly, I think they do care but there's a combination of it being subtle and that dev time isn't infinite. Some of the developer insight about the under the hood work on the Labyrinth revealed that part of it's creation stemmed from trying to make more interesting mission structure. There's been a lot of interesting under the hood changes to the game as a whole that will probably do a lot for the game when they get expanded. What catches my attention the most is when AE stuff actually gets fixed. Makes me wonder what we can do that would help them the most when it comes to bug fixes.

In my mind, there's two parts to this based on things I remember from before the shut down: -There should be more contests run by players, even if just done annually. A lot of attention gets brought to arcs when nominated for a contest, regardless of if the entry wins. When I was crawling through the older posts of the forum, I think I saw one or two player run AE contests but it seems to have fallen off. -There should be more players/groups running non farm content. The thing that I found most disappointing when joining HC was that there didn't seem to be a version of the MA Superteam. For those who weren't in it, it was an informal "supergroup" that rotated the servers it played and ran a mix of recommended and randomly searched arcs. I don't know if the players who tended to lead them never joined HC or if they lost interest by the time the servers opened. Server culture feels harder to gauge here than in the retail days but that's a discussion for another thread. The overarching problem is that a lot of people who write arcs don't actively play the arcs of others.

What does this mean for enemies such as Caleb who spawn at night but require daytime defeats to do so? Especially since it would seem to be a fitting enemy for the time of year.

Not a regular instance but an AE map. [-4026.6 0.0 -4692.1] is designated as a Front boss spawn point for the Steel Canyon SERAPH map but it spawns in the back. Should probably be designated as Back instead.

Wait, any powerset? If so, tentatively put me down as Operative Hugo - Arsenal/Forcefield Controller. Would actually be my first one of these on a villain.

All Blaster was an experience but was a good run. Had a lot of fun. Though, I forgot about Krakens and the Hydra singling people out and going, "That person needs to die."

This will sound like...and I guess technically is...a suggested nerf to something in AE. huang3721 discovered that the maximum amount of customs that players can possibly add to a mission before it can't load is less than half of the listed max file size. Considering a number of people have mentioned having trouble loading their arcs when they hit 40% of the file size, it may be in the best interest of system stability in AE to cut the max file size in half. Link to file size tests: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/51835-adding-hundreds-of-custom-critters-into-a-group/