Make Oro historical ARCs non-TF

[MsSmart]

Hi:

 

     From time to time, I want to finish an Arc I already commenced but outgrew and thus can not finish the story. Ideally there should be no restriction to go back to a contact and do their missions and even get new contacts to get their missions too, I think at one time that was a feature that for some reason went away.

 

     Today, you can catch a good chunk of those arcs via Ouroboros which is nice, but...

 

    Ouro arc missions comes as TFs, which has unfriendly elements to it, such as you can't invite new players along the way to replace those that left, or when you began it was early in the day and there were not many players, etc.

 

    Often, when I do these arcs, is as a side thing, not a main effort. So finding myself trapped in a long arc with out a means to save it for later is very annoying. I would be doing a 12 mission arc, and after 4, I see an ITF looking for members, I need the exp more than anything but here I am stuck. Do I abandon the TF and lose all my work, or give up on the very important opportunity? The issue is why must I be forced into this decision?

 

    So instead of making the oro arc a TF, it reduces your level (as it already does) and sends you to the quest giver, who because you are of the right level is open to give you the mission. This way, like any other mission, you can stop progressing in the arc and do other group related activities and when finished go on with the Arc. Even as you do the arc, friends may log on and be willing to help you with it and since it is a mission, you can invite them. This would make an awesome QoL at least for me, I am sure there are others who may enjoy this QoL as well...

 

Sue

 

[r0y]

While I love this idea, just for the fact it'd be nice to add people to it, like a regular arc, I think the coding changes might be too massive for this.  You're being auto-sidekicked down to level-appropriate range, not sure that can be done outside of a task force instance.

 

It would be that or REMOVE LEVELS completely from missions/arcs/tf's, etc.  Make it all SCALABLE, which is also a massive code-change undertaking, but would be cool.  I think Guild Wars 2 did this with their zones.  Other games, too (SWTOR, etc).

 

The GW2 solution solves a lot of problems but would be a monstrous undertaking, but I'd love it!

[blayzemaster]

Scaling of everything would be really useful. It would require a lot of effort but imho it would be worth it.

 

It also does already exist on other servers.

[MTeague]

Auto-scaling may have issues when the enemies in question only exist in certain level ranges though. 

• There is no such thing as lvl 45 Skulls. 
• Now, we can take a low-level Skull, and we can boost up his HP, make him count as lvl +1 if he's a lieutenant, etc.
• But that Skull would have no new attack powers beyond what he had at lvl 14.
• You would have all your powers if you're not auto-exemplared down.  So it's a super lopsided fight unless they take time and trouble to add high level powers to all low level enemies and make sure those enemies only have access to those powers if they scale up to a certain level.
• You would have all of your set bonuses etc if you were not auto-exemplared down, etc. 
• Also it would have a strong effect on who chooses to use what IO sets.  Sometimes I use Eradication or Sircocco's Dervish for PBAE sets instead of Obliteration because I can keep the set bonuses all the way down when I'm exemplareed. So suddenly IO sets that only scale down to lvl 30 and no further would become desireable for any flashback level, because you wouldn't exemplar, everthing else would scale up.   And sets that only scale up to lvl 30, or get a long hard look and probably converted or tossed.

Now, if they can get keep the Auto-Exemplar and STILL allow you to invite people?

Then I'm all for it. 

 

But I do think the Exemplaring aspect of Ouro has to stay.

[SeraphimKensai]

1 hour ago, r0y said:

...or REMOVE LEVELS completely from missions/arcs/tf's, etc.  Make it all SCALABLE, which is also a massive code-change undertaking, but would be cool.  I think Guild Wars 2 did this with their zones.  Other games, too (SWTOR, etc).

Other CoH servers have already done such a thing so it's not impossible.

[SurfD]

17 hours ago, MsSmart said:

Hi:

 

     From time to time, I want to finish an Arc I already commenced but outgrew and thus can not finish the story. Ideally there should be no restriction to go back to a contact and do their missions and even get new contacts to get their missions too, I think at one time that was a feature that for some reason went away.

 

<snip>

 

    Often, when I do these arcs, is as a side thing, not a main effort. So finding myself trapped in a long arc with out a means to save it for later is very annoying. I would be doing a 12 mission arc, and after 4, I see an ITF looking for members, I need the exp more than anything but here I am stuck. Do I abandon the TF and lose all my work, or give up on the very important opportunity? The issue is why must I be forced into this decision?

Not entirely sure I am parsing this correctly, but what you seem to be asking for is the capability to "pick up an arc in the middle after abandoning it" through Ouroboros flashbacks, and to be honest, I am not sure that is even possible without potentially breaking a lot of stuff.

 

Under normal circumstances (picking up an arc from a contact), you can "pause" the arc at any time, because the game tracks what arcs / contacts you currently are running on a per character basis.   If you are half way through World Wide Red and decide to bail out of one of the missions to join a TF or do a different mission, you don't lose the arc, because it is an "active" mission string that the game is tracking related to your character.  Even if you change sides half way through an arc, that database of "contact interactions/mission flags" is still there for each character, and when you change sides again, it just picks back up where you left off.

 

Task forces are coded completely differently though.  I'm not 100% sure how the game handles a task force, but the task force isn't "owned" by any given character.  It's more like temporary container that holds the progress of the group.  If you leave the task force, that's it:  you are done.  Because the TF isn't recording/tracking info about your character specifically at all.  All "progress" you made is lost and you need to re-start from the beginning.  There is no way for you to just start up a task force half way through and "pick up where you left off".   Likewise, if the temporary container that is the task force is ever empty at any point (Ie, everyone leaves), then it is just gone, and can not be recovered.

 

Since ALL Ouro flashbacks (even the single mission ones) are done using the Task Force engine code, what you are asking for would basically be impossible in regards to Ouro unless someone was willing to overhaul the ENTIRE task force engine code.   The only possible solution without doing a complete, massive overhaul of the way Ouro handles missions entirely would be to break every arc down into a full list of individual missions, and allow selecting individual missions from an Arc anywhere in the string (basically allowing you to chose your starting point anywhere along an arc), and that would be horribly exploitable.  Why do you think that Ouro only lists "the Arc" in it's entirety as a single point of entry?  Why do all 4 parts of Heather Townshends arc over 15 minutes for the reward, when you could chose to start directly on part 4 and get the reward in 1/5th the time?   Unless there was some way to flag check that every mission in the arc had been completed before handing out the rewards, people would just fire up the last mission for easy Merits / Incarnate components, etc.

 

The only way to realistically achieve what you are asking would be to directly change Contacts themselves, so that you could get the Arc from a Contact any time (even after you had outleveled them), as then the Arc would be being handled by the Contact Mission system, rather than the Ouro/TF mission system, and would behave like any normal mission or Arc string.  Making it impossible to out level contacts is something a number of us have discussed in other threads, but the usual answer we get is "Just use Ouro", which obviously suffers from the issues you have already pointed out.

Edited May 16, 2020 by SurfD

[Gulbasaur]

15 hours ago, MTeague said:

Auto-scaling may have issues when the enemies in question only exist in certain level ranges though. 

Interestingly, Thunderspy did it by creating enemies that filled in the gaps. I'm not saying that's best way to do it, but it's what they did and it has effectively delevelled all content.

 

Personally, I'd prefer if we could walk up to contacts and they scaled us down accordingly and the ability to invite people to join you would be great.

[Duloth]

The one place where being able to get missions regardless of level, and it auto-scaling, is the most useful? Praetoria. Playing all of the Resistance or Loyalist arcs(and most of them are good enough for you to want to) would get you past 20 by a longshot.  

[Doc_Scorpion]

6 hours ago, Duloth said:

The one place where being able to get missions regardless of level, and it auto-scaling, is the most useful? Praetoria. Playing all of the Resistance or Loyalist arcs(and most of them are good enough for you to want to) would get you past 20 by a longshot.  

 

There's a reason why XP locks were invented.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

Sadly the entire flashback system is built on top of the TF system so I am not sure they can do what your asking for here. However Ill be honest and at least with the example you use I have a hard time  understanding your main issue. The main reason to run either a story arc or TF is the reward merits. Now yes an ITF can also be popular for leveling, but well leveling is so fast and easy your basically stressing over at most an hour or two of play time on hitting cap for a toon in the grand scheme of things.

 

I mean you should be playing what you enjoy doing first and foremost, so if you want to do a solo story arc run( or are forced to due to lack of willing bodies) then do so, if you want to do a team thing, but dont want to build the team yourself( or fail to garner interest for the task you want to do) and have to join another team doing something else, then do that.

 

I mean sure I guess the idea of being able to pause progress is appealing, but what about those who first time through while leveling find themselves struggling and actually need to over level the content still due to build or whatever? If Contacts always auto level you, or you can never out level a mish, you take that option away, one as old as RPGs and grinding out random encounters before a boss fight to over power it abit.

 

Now on the topic of the die a of removing levels from mobs all together, and instead their power sets being based on the zone they are ins threat level, and using a system like we use for giant monsters for at least all out side mobs I am all for. For in door mishes to Im not so sure about. In door content is after all supposed to be personalized to the party leader, so I dont see the need for the same over haul for it.

 

I mean the feature to re run all content basically for good rewards forever and basically have our own custom daily routine etc taht in most other mmo is a strict small sub set of content played for xp per min etc till one goes mad. here we get to pick anything once we cap. I get that yeah sometimes your locked in something, see something else you wish to run but just are not free to. Yet that is no different then being on one tf, and seeing another you maybe want or need more, but quitting a tf mid to join another is pretty poor playmanship so well most of us would just shrug say darn and keep on keeping on because in the end it doesnt really matter what content we are doing, we are still playing,.

 

In the end, you can only do as you want, and what makes you happiest in game. Most TFs can be soloed. XP comes so damn fast you dont really need to stress missing out on a run or something.

[Emperor Cole]

11 hours ago, Duloth said:

The one place where being able to get missions regardless of level, and it auto-scaling, is the most useful? Praetoria. Playing all of the Resistance or Loyalist arcs(and most of them are good enough for you to want to) would get you past 20 by a longshot.  

 

[Parabola]

On 5/16/2020 at 9:50 AM, Gulbasaur said:

Personally, I'd prefer if we could walk up to contacts and they scaled us down accordingly and the ability to invite people to join you would be great.

I was thinking exactly this the other day. Allow all contacts below your level to be talked to with the level range of each mission clearly marked. If you take a mission you are auto exemped down to the appropriate level. If you are leading a team the entire team follows suit.

 

It would open up a huge amount of content to pugs without having to create anything new (although of course I've no idea how mechanically complicated it might be). The flashback system is only really usable solo due to the tf mechanics and there are only so many radio missions I can stand!