Clave Dark 5

I did a recent SBB led by a "Mister Roake," and just had to say "De pain boss de pain!" when he was defeated in the arena. My point is that you were both asking for it (as un-cool as it is to say that).

I've never seen the reverse Monolith before either. Did it like revert your toon to a monkey throwing a bone in the air?

Well, there goes another idea for getting people to play AE stuff. I was thinking that I could make a collection of basically "radio" missions* and run them instead of the usual PI repeating treadmill, but that'd be a hard sell with that sort of XP hit. Ironically, a step taken to prevent ridiculous farming practices ends up making AE farming the only way make playing the AE worth the time of "numbers go up" players ha ha. *Too much reading, too many mechanics to think about, larger maps, scary custom-built foes are just chasing people away, perhaps, so why not condense the simple story down into the intro and the pop-up, allowing the usual easy "all levels welcome" steamrolling against a few different foe group on different but small maps?

Especially that middle one, yep!

Have a few questions that I can't seem to find addressed in the wiki, perhaps because there is no difference: I seem to recall hearing that XP inside AE missions was nerfed compared to "the real world," is that right? How badly? How're the drop rates, the same as non-AE chances? Do XP boosters work as they normally do with-in AE missions? I am clearly no farmer or I'd know all this by now of course ha ha

I've made silly, I've made fairly straight forward, and I've made surreal stuff. I'll play any, really admire a strongly put-together story, because I know how much hard work it is (hence the silly and surreal options in my portfolio ha ha).

Farming, silliness. People who make bad choices. E-peen measuring contents.

Oh, I agree their time is limited... yet look at what they dedicated those precious few hours to: a farming arena, as if a game that allows AFK Farming needed more farming options ha ha! It's like taking the possible sweeping epic of a great DnD campaign and turning it into a side-scroller. It's pretty clear where their interest lies and it is not in the AE story telling.

And that's how you do it. "I played this story, liked this, not that, and think this needs work but ultimately enjoyed it/didn't like it." Then we read it and make our own judgements. And people like you putting together these lists is very helpful considering the mess of AE's list and the apparent Dev apathy to award more Dev Choices.

The couple of times I've taken a gander at base building, dear lord, there's so many options to choose from! Name a graphically rendered thing in-game, base builders have it, and it's glorious. The level of craft I've seen in bases is staggering. Why doesn't the AE system have access to any of these too? Why not the zillion possible options for glowies or maybe even destructibles (I am clearly speaking nonsense here)? Why can't we click on a Christmas tree if we can put one in our base? Collectables alone are a list limited to like what 30 objects? Why?

But back to the idea of a list. The idea behind this is simple and clear and seems self-evident, really. However, I know from painful experience, this is unfortunately not something that would be simple to do, and will probably blow up in the face of anyone who tries it. @cranebump is standing right over there, Dacy. I mean, sure, they've caught flack but...

That alone would disqualify some of the in-game stories ha ha I'm for a fairly lax overall approach: following the usual rules for film critique (I forget who coined these) it's What was this story attempting to do? Did it do that? Was it worth doing? Point 3 there is obviously the most subjective and where a critic can really live or die, so we could even ignore that and just got with 1 and 2, because just about anything above barely-above-Radio-missions-quality is already a lot of work in this janky system. Plus, hey, would still beat doing more PI radios right?

Currently working my first two-part story, five chapters in each, and it's mighty slow going. Due to the nature of the story it really has to percolate a bit in my brain to get inspiration to strike. Probably some of my fault, as I'm hopping about working on any section of each story, might benefit more from really starting work from one chapter to the next 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, really going to try and finish this year haha

Huh, never heard of the "Ocelot Rule" before. I did have one player back on Live once point out I had written something do that sort of thing a bit too much for their liking, but... I didn't are ha ha.

One basic rule of thumb I've heard was that it's best to just never give any custom foe any armor powers, just attacks, because when you start building for "challenging" you can end up really shutting down some players in some way - players whose armor say has a Psy hole in it, or end up sending a Psy toon against a custome who's armor doesn't have that hole, things like that. But you want to make them challenging without being "too much," so it's going to take some experimentation on your part. Defeat All Snakes' suggestion there sounds like a good start. You're probably going to have to test, test, and retest with different toons, at different levels, etc. A lot. AE is janky and really eats up time doing this sort of repetition, I know, and often you just can't make it do what you want; it's about trying to make your vision fit it, not the other way around, and sometimes you'll fail anyway and have to start again from a different angle. But if you can make this work? You'll have really achieved something, something that few other apparently know much about! That would be pretty cool, right? I have a feeling there's not going to be one easy silver bullet answer to this though, you may have to accept "good enough" and face the chance that some squishy Defender may end up messaging you to complain "I couldn't finish it, this was too hard!" Other random thoughts: You can always of course include a warning in the story description, "don't walk in here with squishies." Being able to include two versions of characters isn't a bad work around really, just... again... time consuming. Best of luck!

The only near-jungle maps that I can think of are the outdoor Nerva maps, but I don't think any of them transition to anything else. You might consider splitting the mission into two parts, "part one outside, then part two inside the caves" but... you're out of chapters by then. 😕

My written notes: Same title for different objectives, incl. required AND optional -- I may have known this but semi-forgotten it, so helpful reminder Pop-ups to re-tell the story so all players, not just the team leader, can keep up -- The way every story in this game is mainly just player/known by the team leader is a a real failure, imho, so it's nice to be reminded we do have some work around (all my stuff's been written assuming solo play). Which reminds me of a question, when a clue drops, do all players get to see them, or just the leader? Test Mode allows you to jump to next objective -- whoa, really? Totally new to me, I should have looked I guess. Then again, I like running around a map a number of times to get a feel for it for the mission. Make custom teams of 3 minions, 2 Lt.s and one boss -- I remember reading this on the old forums (maybe from you even) but had forgotten this good rule of thumb. Don't use long interaction timers for collectables -- That's the perfect barrier to hide "set decorations" behind as you demonstrated, which is helpful as I'm currently working on a mission with a lot of such decorations. Oh, and a late #6: Don't walk into a level ten mission sets at x4/x8 😛

It's probably not every map that blocks this, just exactly the ones I had my heart set on, or were specifically called for by the story I wanted to tell; "can't tell a Mercy Island story using a Grandville exterior," for example. You know, because that's how it always works. 😄

Whoa, I need to run this one and be ready to take notes. ETA OK, ran it, and I guess I've been here too long because I knew I knew most of this, ha ha. But, I have run arcs before by people who clearly didn't know this stuff, , it reminded of tricks and stuff that I'd forgotten, and I did make note of four newish things to me, so it wasn't at all a waste of time. Great idea and a good way to help out the community.

I recently ran into the sad fact that many larger outdoor maps do not allow for allies/rescues (including one map that I know has such in the one of the game's story lines!) and I'm not really sure why. Was that some farming trick they had to clamp down on? So much of my work in AE is "hey, so here's my story, so let's put this on this map and... oh, it doesn't work or I can't. Now I have to reframe the entire story to try and put something like that on a map something like that." I figure so much of this is getting into the deep weeds and will never be addressed in any meaningful way...

Agreed: I said much the same in my comment: cute idea, well realized with fun touches along the way, and good costume work. I would however complain about map choices, just too big! Or the first and the last anyway, iirc. I failed the last one trying to find the last collectable. I was playing a pretty bullet proof tank and had some Invisibility as well so there was no concern for my health, and ended up circling the map I dunno how many times in the last say eight minutes and could not find it. Some of that is my bias however, I prefer smaller maps when I can to (as I see it) keep the story line streamlined and zipping along. It's a fairly small quibble overall though. I've seen some real animus towards timed missions on these boards before, glad that seems to have died down.

The very few who are still hammering away with the incredibly janky system in the AE. (Acknowledgement: I am sometimes in that group, but more often than not, not, because of said janky system.) Some of these creators do it on a regular basis and take the time to discuss them as well, so good on them! Meanwhile, these works are generally ignored, I see many of them out there with the numbers of plays in the single digits after months. Probably because if it's not a farm no one interested, yet will run another Posi 1 for the trillionth time, numbers are king. Can you be an underdog in part of the game no one cares about anyway? Probably not, but they seem like the best to me.

Stupid work schedule that keeps me from playing during popular hours...

When following a build someone else made that has purples in it, I skip them, too costly imho. So what I then do is go to the wiki page for those IOs ("Ranged Damage" in this case) and then compare, as it turns out that most purple sets are "a lot like that other set, but with slightly bigger numbers." Figure out what that other set is, then slot that one instead; it might not be the same +10% Recharge, maybe only 4%, but you've saved yourself a ton for only marginal returns (again, imho). You can also look at the built and figure out what sort of bonus they were chasing (say, Recharge) and then pick the "non-purple set that amps that up. And of course, if it's just your build, you just scan down the list to find the best +Something to work towards you build goal.

I first played redside as a Stalker and appreciated how that freed me to wander about sight-seeing without getting attacked at every street corner, so that's my AT suggestion.