Redeeming AE

[SwitchFade]

23 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

As far as I know, the real issue with porting AE stories out to the game world proper is that the formats are completely different. I remember reading somewhere that regular missions are built as something completely off the wall... Excel docs, maybe?... While AE uses something absolutely incompatible. 

This. AE porting is not easy. They must be be rebuilt in normal content.

[arcane]

19 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

Not even a little.

I used to be one of the richer players in the game from marketeering.
And there were several people, prominent farmers as well as marketeers who could buy and sell me multiple times over.

There is most certainly some lack of clarity here, whether it be the definition of exaggeration or the definition of a trillion that is causing the confusion.

[SwitchFade]

AE was, on launch, leveraged as a zerging platform for xp and inf. It was implemented terribly and never fixed. Everyone who is against making it what it should be, are using it for these purposes and screams loudly to let it stay the way it is, i.e.  rushing platform.

 

AE should have more features added to allow more creative mission construction.

 

AE should never give higher rewards than normal content. Farm away, but a lvl 50 PI mission and AE should be no different in terms of XP and inf.

 

AE should not be the first thing new players see when the log into Atlas. Once they have exposure to normal game mechanics and content, sure, let people PL and farm, but from day one of finding the game? This just sets a poor standard.

 

So, improve AE tools, pin AE rewards to regular lvl 50 missions from other zones and remove AE from atlas and KR. Why? Experienced players can still walk over to any other zone and dual-box afkfarm Zerg to their heart's content, but newbies get the real show.

 

Do that and AE would truly be about fun, real, diverse player created content. Do that and new players will get to experience the core game AND farmers can still farm.

[SwitchFade]

23 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

Let me just say, first.  I have all the respect in the world for the guys at Paragon.  I'm prepared to love them unconditionally for the rest of forever for giving us this game.

That being said...

If the devs didn't know, FROM THE OUTSET, that AE was going to be used for EXACTLY this, even with all their "safeguards", they were asleep at the wheel.
They approached it "creatively", rather than "mathematically".

And we had some DAMN fine mathematicians in the community who could calculate out maximum rewards for minimum effort.

And in the end when you're running regular content and you've got a few million saved up.
Meanwhile an AE Farmer farmer is running a farm with several TRILLION in the bank?

That kind of imbalance only persists for so long before people do the calculations themselves.

 

I posted, on live, the exact math and massive economic crash that would happen, it was exactly as hyper describes. I also posted very clearly how it would warp all other context and be abused, sucking in all new players and they would never see most of the game, which happened as well. From the outset I was very pointedly vocal and had much explicit and clear data that this would be the outcome.

[Hyperstrike]

11 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

There is most certainly some lack of clarity here, whether it be the definition of exaggeration or the definition of a trillion that is causing the confusion.

Trillion, as in 1,000,000,000,000.

I was just short of 100B before close and liquidated it all for prestige for my SG base.  I think I wound up #13 in total prestige for the Protector server.

[cranebump]

The issues with AE aren’t with AE as much as they are people issues. If there’s an exploit, it will be exploited. That said, baking in a partition between story and farm arcs would be a nice start. There’s a lot of actual care and work put into some of the story arcs, and it would be nice to easily find them. I suppose someone might want to throw a farm under story, though, for the life of me, I can’t understand why. 

Edited July 26, 2020 by cranebump

[Eva Destruction]

1 hour ago, cranebump said:

The issues with AE aren’t with AE as much as they are people issues. If there’s an exploit, it will be exploited. That said, baking in a partition between story and farm arcs would be a nice start. There’s a lot of actual care and work put into some of the story arcs, and it would be nice to easily find them. I suppose someone might want to throw a farm under story, though, for the life of me, I can’t understand why. 

If you search any of the existing tags you will find farms upon farms.  Canon-related?  Farms.  Complex mechanics?  Farms.  Romance?  Nothing says "I love you" like endless ambushes on the meteor map, apparently.  I don't get it either, but I also don't get why someone needs to make yet another fire farm when there are already eleventy billion of them they could use.

[Darmian]

Right now, apart from the nice little Vig/Rogue arcs we got last year the only new content, as in story, is created by us. Now (beware, ego rising!), I've written a 45 episode/mission canon related series and I'm happy with it. If it was good enough to drop into the game ("good" = subjective, and a bit of work I know, maybe some tweaking since I had AE limitations the Devs/GMs don't have, and I'm not even talking about the different way in-world missions are coded.) then take it away! And I'm damn sure I'm not the only AE author who will say that.

I also treat AE SFMA as "real" missions, but quite a lot don't. And that's a big issue in a game that, through no fault of a hard working volunteer team of Devs and GMs, pretty much doesn't have new "real" content. I love this game. But it's going to need more than my nostalgia to keep me here another year. And sadly I don't think I'm alone in that.

Edited July 26, 2020 by Darmian

[mechahamham]

As someone who has written a lot of computer code to transform data types, the idea of translating the xml generated by Mission Architect into csv generated by MS Excel is not really that intimidating.

 

You need the following: a reasonably complete description of the comma separated value structure of a mission file and a library to extract information from the XML file based on tag names and data id (there are lots of these, many of VERY high quality). Translating XML to serial data like CSV and vice-versa is an 'old' problem, relatively speaking, and there have been a LOT of tools written to facilitate it.

 

However, my understanding is that a tool like this already existed as part of Paragon's arsenal of mission-creation software, and that the AE editor was built in tandem with a 'Dev' editor with the same kind of features, but with dev-level control, and that the newer mission writers at Paragon were using it to create missions rather than a spreadsheet editor.

 

Maybe we didn't get that tool as part of what the SCORE developers received. If we have any documentation at all as to how csv missions are structured, this is something that wouldn't take a serious amount of time, even starting from no existing code.

[cranebump]

Speaking of AE, I just completed the first working draft of this:

 

My latest entry (which still needs some tweaks):

 

The Omnibus Project (ID: 31128)

 After the fall of Section-41,* Manticore calls in his markers, putting you on the case involving "Omnibus," a mysterious new player on the Paragon scene.

Alignment: Heroic

Lvl: 25-30

Custom enemies.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This arc ultimately reveals the reason for the missing 7-year "gap" between the live shutdown and the restoration on Homecoming.

 

 

*as detailed in "Friends & Lovers," and "Data Games."

[EmmySky]

I think we need to consider quality.  When I dive into a story arc in AE and find incomplete sentence structure, misspelled words and weak story if there is any at all, it is disheartening.  There are so many on there and the creators are so proud and announce it and I jump in and think, well bless his heart, English is hard.

 

We definitely need a better way to find quality stories amidst the flood of garbage.  I think farms should be a seperate computer or something because even picking the stories from the farms is hard.  And why are farm builders listing theirs as stories?  Gotta address that somehow.

 

I think that right now, all of this is a thought game, we gotta brainstorm viable ideas that the devs may take seriously enough to implement but any expectation of it being done anytime soon, just put that out of mind entirely.  There are so many things they are asked for and are working on.

 

I have never tried to write an AE arc so I am unfamiliar with the workings of it, the technicalities.  Before tags saying cannon or sci-fi or romance, how about a flag system for farm or story.  Out in AE where you have many computers to choose an arc, have some green (story) and some red (farm) so basically you have two databases and the creator has to choose which database its in when they create the arc.  When a non story is found in the story database it gets moved or deleted with an email to the creator about why.

 

I like the idea of using zone doors instead of the AE glowy light but there are mixed reviews on the difficulties of implementation on that.  Maybe someone with their own private server can test it using the actual spaghetti code to see what breaks.  

 

I think there are a lot of good ideas and a lot of possibilities.  Keep up the brainstorm!

[MTeague]

23 minutes ago, EmmySky said:

I think we need to consider quality.  When I dive into a story arc in AE and find incomplete sentence structure, misspelled words and weak story if there is any at all, it is disheartening.  There are so many on there and the creators are so proud and announce it and I jump in and think, well bless his heart, English is hard.

Well.... i mean yea.  But not everyone is going to jump into a story creation tool and produce a Ray Bradbury quality short story right off the bat.  Writing a story and having every character in it behave in a logical way that makes sense for that character and carrying the reader / player to a final goal is a lot harder than it sounds.  I'll give people props for trying.  I'd like it if they cleaned things up with a grammar checker / proofread things three or five times before posting.  But they're at least getting their feet wet making missions.  A lot of people don't.

[Nyghtmaire]

2 minutes ago, MTeague said:

I'd like it if they cleaned things up with a grammar checker / proofread things three or five times before posting.

“Dang, I’ve proofread this [item] too many times,” said no one, ever.

[Darmian]

1 hour ago, Nyghtmaire said:

“Dang, I’ve proofread this [item] too many times,” said no one, ever.

Exactly. I edit for a living and I STILL find typos that your eye just doesn't see first time round. So either leave some space before publishing and go over it again or get a friend in to test it and take notes.

[cranebump]

3 minutes ago, Darmian said:

Exactly. I edit for a living and I STILL find typos that your eye just doesn't see first time round. So either leave some space before publishing and go over it again or get a friend in to test it and take notes.

Same. Multiple edits and what do I find? Typos! Just today I found "give" spelled "gvie." ARRRRRG! It's a rough beast, especially if you've formatted everything and don't have character space to easily correct.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

Ill be honest I dont see a great need for some kind of change. I mean sure it would be nice if AE could reward like normal content, but there is no real way to do that without a revamp to rewards that makes them dynamic and based on actual risk vs character, and thus rewards more to weaker characters tackling content that is actually risky for them.

 

Until then, AE does more than any other MMO ever did when it comes to giving us endless content. Being able to create custom story arcs to share our characters personal adventures with friends is a hell of a powerful tool for the role play faction which CoH has always had an atypically high population of among MMO.

[Darmian]

2 hours ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

Ill be honest I dont see a great need for some kind of change. I mean sure it would be nice if AE could reward like normal content, but there is no real way to do that without a revamp to rewards that makes them dynamic and based on actual risk vs character, and thus rewards more to weaker characters tackling content that is actually risky for them.

 

Until then, AE does more than any other MMO ever did when it comes to giving us endless content. Being able to create custom story arcs to share our characters personal adventures with friends is a hell of a powerful tool for the role play faction which CoH has always had an atypically high population of among MMO.

As someone who isn't a member of the roleplay faction, and frankly I think I'm part of the majority when it comes to that, however atypical the numbers are on COH,  I still want new "real" content. Sharing personal adventures with friends IS a hell of a tool and I enjoy that. I spent a chunk of my life as a dedicated tabletop GM for RPGs and I get a kick out of it. But we would not even be having this discussion if we were getting actual in-world content. And we're not getting it. We know why. I'm not laying blame but it's still a fact. 

But we're a volunteer community here, not just volunteer Devs/GMs, so I think there is an onus on us (ha!) to fill that gap ourselves. Us asking that the best (subjective obviously) of what we do find a way into the actual game isn't entirely unreasonable. 

There's plenty there I could phrase better, I am thinking on the fly here to some extent. Bear with me.

Edited July 26, 2020 by Darmian

[Eva Destruction]

2 hours ago, Darmian said:

Exactly. I edit for a living and I STILL find typos that your eye just doesn't see first time round. So either leave some space before publishing and go over it again or get a friend in to test it and take notes.

We're all so reliant on spellcheckers these days that nobody knows how to spell anymore.  Yes, that includes me.  Getting a friend to test is hard.  There used to be quite a few active reviewers in the AE community who would helpfully point out all your typos and spelling errors, but nothing like that started up on HC.  Maybe it would be a good idea to start up an editor exchange, an "I'll edit yours if you edit mine" kinda deal.

[Darmian]

1 minute ago, Eva Destruction said:

We're all so reliant on spellcheckers these days that nobody knows how to spell anymore.  Yes, that includes me.  Getting a friend to test is hard.  There used to be quite a few active reviewers in the AE community who would helpfully point out all your typos and spelling errors, but nothing like that started up on HC.  Maybe it would be a good idea to start up an editor exchange, an "I'll edit yours if you edit mine" kinda deal.

I'll do that if someone wants to hit me up via @Darmian. But the usual caveats of my job apply: don't get annoyed if you're corrected 🙂

[Seed22]

24 minutes ago, Darmian said:

I'll do that if someone wants to hit me up via @Darmian. But the usual caveats of my job apply: don't get annoyed if you're corrected 🙂

I'd love for you to take a look at my arcs honestly. seems like a lot of fun! 🙂

[Darmian]

26 minutes ago, Seed22 said:

I'd love for you to take a look at my arcs honestly. seems like a lot of fun! 🙂

Then mail me the arc ids if you have them published. I'm on Reunion so frankly I'm not available time wise to create a character on a different shard to come with anyone on a test run away from "home". Sorry.

That last bit is aimed at everyone as opposed to just you, Seed22!

Edited July 26, 2020 by Darmian

[Without_Pause]

This wouldn't be easy, but run events based on AE missions and arcs worth rewarding. Have that content give normal rewards. Make event related badges. Give AE content creators rewards(badges) as well. Until people have a genuine incentive to play in AE they won't unless it is to farm.

[Seed22]

17 hours ago, Darmian said:

Then mail me the arc ids if you have them published. I'm on Reunion so frankly I'm not available time wise to create a character on a different shard to come with anyone on a test run away from "home". Sorry.

That last bit is aimed at everyone as opposed to just you, Seed22!

No problemo! I'll have to log in to get the IDs! Fair warning, I am trying to learn how to be better at creative/recreational writing, so I apologize in advance :)(Grammer should be fine, just...learning how to story I guess 😄)

[ImpousVileTerror]

eh . . . maybe my perspective is skewed, but after looking at the AE mission files and the core game mission files . . . someone with more time or more skill could probably program a parser to convert one to the other.  They both have really clear, straight-forward formatting.  The syntax is different, but it's not a severe difference.

Just saying . . . it's not outside the realm of possibility, especially considering how talented some of the members of this community are.  If someone wanted to chew on that project in their free time, I could see it getting completed in a year or two based on the quality of work and the challenge associated with many of the other coding projects picked up by people like @malonkey1, @The Philotic Knight, or @RubyRed.

[Twisted Toon]

20 hours ago, Eva Destruction said:

We're all so reliant on spellcheckers these days that nobody knows how to spell anymore.  Yes, that includes me.  Getting a friend to test is hard.  There used to be quite a few active reviewers in the AE community who would helpfully point out all your typos and spelling errors, but nothing like that started up on HC.  Maybe it would be a good idea to start up an editor exchange, an "I'll edit yours if you edit mine" kinda deal.

Hay, eye ken speel gud wen aye wunt two.

 

Of course, spelling like ^ that takes me about three times as long.