Story Arc Contacts Won't Start Arc

[The Chairman]

Hello,

 

I have a Level 11 Scrapper with two contacts: Wes Schnabel and Athena Currie. According to ParagonWiki, these contacts give out the The Bonefire Plot and Clockwork Captive story arcs respectively in the 10-14 level range. I have completed three missions for Wes and two for Athena, and neither will initiate their respective arcs. Wes actually just passed me off to another contact and will not give me anymore missions.

 

Was a change made to which contacts give out which arcs? Did the level ranges get changed?

[Riverdusk]

Wes Schnabel has been bugged for a while now, you can do a search on his name and you'll see the threads on it.

 

Athena should be working fine.  When you actually get arcs is often random and you'll sometimes have to do a lot of their non-arc missions before they'll start the arc.  

[The Chairman]

Thank you! Disappointing, but at least I know now. I'll give Athena a few more tries. This is the first time I have had to do more than one non-arc mission prior to starting the arc, so I was quite confused.

[Mister Mass]

I have had characters not be able to get the Bonefire Plot out of the appropriate contacts at the proper level range.  But I have had no problems with getting the Clockwork Captive story arc going.

 

I try to do all of the story arcs & badge missions while in the appropriate level band, & level lock until I do so.  
 

There are several reasons why you may have issues with this.  The first is to make sure you did not outlevel the arc.  For older content like these, locking at levels ending in 4 or 9 is usually correct.

 

The second reason comes down to patience.  Each contact has a dozen or so missions, including hunts, that it can randomly offer you. So if you are unlucky, you may have to play through most or almost all of their other missions before you get offered the first mission of the story arc.  Contacts now are coded to offer you a choice of missions - with a hunt the top choice & a door mission the lower choice.  Keep choosing the lower mission until you finally get the first mission of the story arc (which now helpfully has an open book icon & the name of the story arc) & you can finally get started.

 

It is worth noting that once you start the arc, you don’t have to stay in the level band in order to continue it.  You can continue to level & do more missions in the arc as you go, although the story arc mission levels will be capped by the story arc level band.

 

But this can lead to the third reason that you can’t start a story arc - there is a cap to how many story arcs you can have open simultaneously.  If you have reached that cap, the contact can’t offer the story arc to you until you complete one of your open story arcs.  Note that only major story arcs suffer this limitation - mini-story arcs do not count against the limit & appear to have no limits at all.  Zone arcs like in the Hollows or Striga are mini-arcs.  The major story arcs are identifiable by the blue bookmark on their icon.

 

So if you are still struggling to get your story arcs open, checking through your old contacts to see if they have open book icons with blue bookmarks & then completing those arcs may help.

[Eva Destruction]

Since the missions are offered mostly randomly until you start the arc, you can keep abandoning the non-arc missions until you get the arc, if you don't want to play through them.  Most contacts make you do at least one non-arc mission first though.

[ghost404]

Might have finally found a fix for this.   I was so upset when I encountered this bug that at level 13 that I went to Wes and kept clicking on his dialog box (not sure what you call this it's the text space next to the picture), which sometimes would show you his contact status and sometimes would tell me he would have tasks for me but no mission link would show up.   Eventually as I was double clicking, the words Bonfire in blue came up in his dialog box and the complete or abandon mission link showed up.   From there I was able to contact him normally and complete his main story arc.   Prior to this I had completed all the non-main story arc quests at level 9 for Wes, until he said the next mission requires security level 10 (not sure if that made a difference as well).   I can't guarantee that this will work for everyone (there might have be more conditions that I just happened to fufill with this toon, other than just the double clicking) and I'm not too sure what I was doing myself until the words bonfire appeared.   Just wanted to share whatever info I could.    

[Aironfaar]

On 7/27/2020 at 8:40 PM, ghost404 said:

Might have finally found a fix for this.   I was so upset when I encountered this bug that at level 13 that I went to Wes and kept clicking on his dialog box (not sure what you call this it's the text space next to the picture), which sometimes would show you his contact status and sometimes would tell me he would have tasks for me but no mission link would show up.   Eventually as I was double clicking, the words Bonfire in blue came up in his dialog box and the complete or abandon mission link showed up.   From there I was able to contact him normally and complete his main story arc.   Prior to this I had completed all the non-main story arc quests at level 9 for Wes, until he said the next mission requires security level 10 (not sure if that made a difference as well).   I can't guarantee that this will work for everyone (there might have be more conditions that I just happened to fufill with this toon, other than just the double clicking) and I'm not too sure what I was doing myself until the words bonfire appeared.   Just wanted to share whatever info I could.    

I'm sorry for necroing this thread, but I'm just too happy about this and feel like it needs confirmation: While this sounds like black gaming sorcery from the 90s and early 2000s internet, it works! You need to go to Wes Schnabel personally (just calling him didn't work for me, anyway) and click somewhere into the black space underneath his "I got a job for you" text. Might need to move around the cursor a bit while you do so until you hit the right spot, which might even fall into the text area for some (haven't tried, could be a resolution or mission window size thing after all), but it's there. Once you hit it, you're led into the part of the dialogue you'd get to had you clicked "Ask about available missions" on any non-bugged contact.

 

Since you double-clicked, you probably skipped that part and immediately got into the dialogue part after accepting the mission.

 

That said, I can now go on 100%ing contacts now instead of having to delete and recreate characters that get assigned Wes Schnabel.

THANK YOU!

[Marshal_General]

Try redside where you can be in a duo and have a contact give you random missions each with each person getting them in different order making you do each mission twice. We have also had it where one gets the story arc and the other gets 2 or 3 random missions before getting the arc.

[UltraAlt]

4 hours ago, Aironfaar said:

That said, I can now go on 100%ing contacts now instead of having to delete and recreate characters that get assigned Wes Schnabel.

THANK YOU!

 

why were  you deleting characters that have Wes Schabel as a contact?

 

Even if you don't have/can't get missions from them, there are most probably other contacts that you can reach by going to the nav bar, clicking on contacts, and click on "find contact". It is unlikely that you do not have a contact on this list or one that is already active that you don't have missions for.

 

There are times when you have to level up before you can get missions from a contact or for them to tell you to go talk to another contact.

In this case,  you can alway street sweep (fight enemies on the street) or talk to a detective on the hero side (or the related newspaper contact on the villian side and some whatsajig on the Praetorian side).

 

Talking to a detective unlocks a police scanner that will show up at the top of your contacts window. You can only get scanner missions in non-hazard zones that are of an appropriate level. Once you have done 3 (I think it's 3 maybe 4) scanner missions, then you will get a safeguard mission to protect a bank that comes with side missions. 

The villain newspaper missions work the same way ...I'm not sure about the Praetorian stuff.

 

You can also try to join a level appropriate taskforce.

It looks like you are on the hero side, so

DFB up to about level 20 can be of benefit ... more so below level 10

Positron 1 (Posi 1) at level 8+

etc.

 

There is always something your character can do to gain xp, even solo.

you have 1000 slots per server. There is never a good reason to delete a character. just move them off the front page if you decide you don't want to play that character at the moment.

Edited July 5, 2022 by UltraAlt

[Ukase]

On 6/4/2020 at 2:51 PM, The Chairman said:

Hello,

 

I have a Level 11 Scrapper with two contacts: Wes Schnabel and Athena Currie. According to ParagonWiki, these contacts give out the The Bonefire Plot and Clockwork Captive story arcs respectively in the 10-14 level range. I have completed three missions for Wes and two for Athena, and neither will initiate their respective arcs. Wes actually just passed me off to another contact and will not give me anymore missions.

 

Was a change made to which contacts give out which arcs? Did the level ranges get changed?

I've had similar issues on occasion with various contacts. The key for me has been to either auto-complete the first mission, or just complete it myself, and then if I don't get the arc next, I'll abandon and re-try until I do get the arc. That usually works for me. I can't think of a time that it hasn't worked. 

[ScrewlooseCohh]

On 7/5/2022 at 9:38 PM, Marshal_General said:

Try redside where you can be in a duo and have a contact give you random missions each with each person getting them in different order making you do each mission twice. We have also had it where one gets the story arc and the other gets 2 or 3 random missions before getting the arc.

 

This is the same for Blueside.

 

One of my friends gets 1000% more enjoyment from doing arcs at the same time as  the rest of the team, even if it is a duo, and trying to get to that first Arc mission can mean doing 4 or 5 missions for each character in the team.  So in practice it jut never happens.