ZamuelNow

Everyone on the team can see the clue but just the person who clicks it gets the notification. Actually, most of the team can read the mission text, it's just the text when you return to the contact or the contact's waiting text that can't be seen. It's just that teams often don't slow down to read those, while pop ups are more in your face. I might expect solo play but I try to plan for teams when I write an arc. Jumping to next objective is the most useful when you think a glowie might be stuck in geometry. If you jump to it, you can be stuck in a shipping container, too! :)

When creating an arc, players have the option to select three keywords from a few columns. I'd like to suggest "Tutorial" for the center column. Some missions are more designed as interactive teaching than a traditional adventure.

I figured regulars would know most of it and would be more useful in suggesting additions, considering I deliberately left some spawns Empty. But since some things were newish to you, I'm wondering what they were.

Oh, a lot of the AE maps are frustrating to work with. That's why I'm thinking of only trying to focus on two or three at a time. We players can only make stabs in the dark when it comes to trying to suggest fixes. I'm just saying, why not sharpen our knives? As far as outdoor AE maps and allies, I think the Paragon Studios devs simply didn't think to add the spawn points in some maps. To curb farming, that feels like a scalpel fix and most anti farming tended to be a chainsaw (that missed...).

While I have the Early Bird badge, I'm also wondering if it's based number of plays or amount of time since it was first published.

While getting new powersets in AE is nice (and was admittedly requested), what a lot of us want is map fixes. One of the problems with that is that the fixes we want (primarily Front/Middle/Back adjustments) stand the risk of breaking other people's arcs if done wrong. I believe we have at least one Dev's Choice author who has passed away so if their arc was broken it would never be fixed. But...presumably additive changes to Front/Middle/Back can still be made. So, I figure we can get changes if we're organized, specific, and limited. Not "this map is broken" but directly pointing at spawns and detailing the issue. Limiting this to only two or three maps per Page allows us to collaborate on troubleshooting. For this, I will focus on Atlas Park 01 and President Marchand's Office. Atlas Park 01 Bear with me on the images since I only have so much experience with this forum's attachments. I tried to name the images in a way that they're understandable. For Atlas, it says there's both Front and Back spots in the editor but it's only showing the Front locations on the map. In game in Test mode, it isn't showing either. These look like genuine bugs that need fixing. On Quality of Life adjustments, there's no glowie locations so adding some would be useful. Might even be a blessing in disguise since the new ones can be better placed than most. For floor glowies, I'd suggest one at Front /loc [162.9 0.0 189.0], one at Middle /loc [233.4 17.9 -497.8], and one at Back /loc [-318.3 0.0 -1208.9] or [549.6 -0.0 -1228.5]. This would mean one 1n the park near the mission entrance, one near city hall, and one farther out. Limited spawns means you could plan your story around them. While outdoor areas often aren't the best for Wall locations, the area around City Hall presents some options such as /loc [65.0 -0.0 -1063.4]. A Wall glowie could be along the concrete wall near the trolley at /loc [636.0 -0.0 -1186.4]. It would be useful to have a Middle boss at /loc [127.9 15.9 -178.7] but that's highly dependent on whatever's going on with the Back spawns. President Marchand's Office The most infamously broken map for AE and mainly for the desire to use it but it not working how people expect. Looking at the screenshots, the text claims that there's only 3 floors but the mini map shows 4 floors, which is correct. The second floor is showing the icons but not the floorplan in the editor, though the floorplan does show in Test mode. The fourth floor is showing as blank in the editor and it's missing in game, which feels odd since I thought that only Trial mini maps were blank in the game. You discover more problems when you check the maps in Test mode. On the first floor at /loc [-4554.0 -1128.0 -3044.8] is a Back spawn point but that's right in the middle of the player spawn location. This is despite the editor not offering Back spawn locations. Presumably, this should be on the top floor but we can't see the map for the top floor. On the second floor at /loc [-3058.0 -1110.0 -2832.3] is another Back spawn but it's showing as being inside the wall. If these two misplaced spawns were moved to the fourth/top floor and they were made directly accessible in the editor (I've heard of people getting them on accident), would be helpful. Presumably, inside the fourth floor's office at /loc [-2614.6 112.2 -770.0] or [-2576.0 112.2 -777.7] and/or the fourth floor exterior at /loc [-2729.0 127.5 -626.9] [-2744.6 160.0 -759.5] would seem best. While of vastly less importance, it seems like /loc [-2614.8 112.0 -652.6] would be a good spawn point for a GM on the fourth floor.

Super late to the party but I never forgot this. Have you had a Consideration of Knowledge recently? It's 1-9 instead of 1-10 due to a lot of default enemies changing when they become level 10.

Kinda surprised to see my name in this thread. Well, I hope my schemes for 2025 live up to the nomination.

Consideration of Knowledge - Arc ID: 65341 Wandering into your local Architect Entertainment building, you discover that the game may be talking to you. Is Mission Architect using an arc to teach you tips on writing in Mission Architect? Low XP but high knowledge! [SFMA] This has been in the planning stages for a while but December put me in a sprint to completion. With this arc, there's two specific reasons why it exists... For the first bit of inspiration: Back in the retail days there was an arc called Knowledge Is Power (by @Paula) that used a witty style to teach tips about Mission Architect. It managed to earn a Dev's Choice and had mild popularity. I was disappointed to not see it on Homecoming. Don't know if the author isn't on HC or chose not to republish. I felt there needed to be something like it. Not an exact copy but I don't remember it clearly enough to copy even I wanted to. From that, eventually came the second inspiration... https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Architect_Edition While the AE hologram stream is acid green in game, a quiet portion of my brain thinks of AE with a blueprint blue. I joined CoH in I14 with the retail copy and with that I stumbled upon the idea of: Why not give back by making the teaching arc heavily reference the mission from the inside cover? With my own twists of course but it felt like the right way to handle things. I decided to recreate Tough Love and Cosmic Bleed from scratch as the main stars of the arc and make the whole thing self aware. I'm also gifting their costumes to the rest of the community. ToughLoveAndCosmic Bleed.zip

Was about to report this but I see it was already reported.

With this stopping just shy of level 21, I'm wondering if this is finished. If so, what all observations did you make with this playthrough overall?

I added a renamed Animus Arcana to the fourth mission of Indelible Curse of Hate. It feels small but the enemy group was lacking variety and it lacked it in a way that clashed with my own suggested spawn sizes in. It badly needed more minions.

Surprised no one linked to the custom powers post:

I'm starting small so I can better assess any problems that might pop up in the first few runs. There's also the issue of the differences in shard culture that may make this not as feasible on some shards.

Roy Cooling was on Live (I distinctly remember blueside only players being shocked at how nasty PPD are to fight) but it's a "newer" arc and really feels like it would be in line for a hero only accolade.

Hey! I don't know how many of you visit the Mission Architect section of the forums but I'm putting a version of the Mission Architect Sunday Special thread here for any questions people might have. I know some people on Discord plan to attend at least the first one for this shard.

Hey! I don't know how many of you visit the Mission Architect section of the forums but I'm putting a version of the Mission Architect Sunday Special thread here for awareness and any questions people might have. At least one Torchbearer player plans to attend so that's a start.

Interested in teaming for story missions in Architect Entertainment? 2025 brings you the Mission Architect Sunday Special Using the style of a double feature, the Mission Architect Sunday Special is a monthly event for story based AE missions consisting of two arcs. Generally, the first will be selected ahead of time by the team leader while the second will be a random pick or chosen by one of the other team members. MASS will be across shards but the first Sunday in the month will always be on Indomitable. I would like to expand to other shards but I have only so many characters. However, I'm trying to design this in a way that others can replicate it. The first Indomitable week be January 5, 2025 and the first Torchbearer week will be January 12th, 2025. Both at 2PM EST in RWZ for co-op teaming. EDIT: The planned times for the next rotation look to be: Indomitable is the 1st Sunday of every month Excelsior is June 15, 2025 Everlasting is July 20, 2025 Torchbearer is August 17, 2025 Reunion is September 21, 2025 Victory is October 19, 2025 2PM EST in the Rikti War Zone (unless otherwise announced).

This is pretty useful, especially the AT section since hero/villain color coding may affect some set choices for authors.

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.