SFMA tag - Story Focused Mission Arc

[GamerKate]

One of the things I was quietly proud of on Live was inventing the SFMA tag for MAuthors to add to their arc descriptions to Male it easier for story hounds like myself find story-based arcs among the oodles of farms clogging up the AE.

 

I’m glad to see the tag still used by some

Authors, but for new players, maybe they havent heard of it.

 

So if you have a story arc, stick SFMA in the description somewhere, and a simple search for that will allow players to find your arcs easier :)

 

MCM

[_NOPE_]

<3

 

After I get PK to 50 again, I intend to spend a LOT of time in Mission Architect. This is good to know.

[Eva Destruction]

Heh, I used it in my arc description because it's just the same description I used on live.  I'd forgotten what it stood for but I did remember all the AE forum people were using it, so I left it in.

[sykoholic001]

I always wondered what that meant. Wish I had known back when the game was "live". I quit visiting AE because it had become a farm fest.  :(

[Sabertalon]

I always wondered what that meant. Wish I had known back when the game was "live". I quit visiting AE because it had become a farm fest.  :(

 

That's why this is definitely something we should be using because it's becoming a farm fest again. I think there were only something like seven or so Dev Choice missions in AE last night and about two thirds of the remaining missions up were farms. This makes it a lot easier to find actual content.

[GamerKate]

I can’t stand farming arcs personally, but they are still content and if there’s an easy way to segregate them from the narrative arcs in the AE then good luck to them and the players who like them, is my stance. CoH is a big umbrella :)

 

MCM

[Eva Destruction]

The downside is that story creators who don't frequent the forums don't know about it.  So any missions they make will be lost among the farms.

 

What we need is an in-game way to filter out the farms.  Filtering out "short" and "very short" arcs gets most of them, but it also filters out story-focused single-mission arcs.  We need a better in-game search in general, but that's the really big issue.

[GamerKate]

Yeah, if there was a simple ‘is your arc meant for farming?’ query in the system for every arc, and arcs were then split into two tabs in the search, Farm and Story, everyone would benefit.

 

Every few times a session when i’m In game, I broadcast a brief heads up about what’s SFMA means, hopefully the word can spread at least a bit.

 

MCM

[Zaphir]

Yeah, we were just talking about this in the discord server the other day -- forums and stuff are nice and all, but most players / creators won't read them. IMO the main issue is that there are basically two Mission Architects:

• One is used for farming. A *lot* of people use the system for this, and honestly I have no problem with it. They want arcs with a lot of rewards and efficiency. There are many different subtypes (solo farm, group farm, xp/inf farm, ticket farm... many optimized for certain builds), so there's a lot of arcs in the system. Besides, farmers want variety too!
  
• One is used for stories and other activities (combat challenges, humor, SG events, roleplaying, what have you). Unfortunately the text-heavy nature of story arcs doesn't always lend itself well to play in large groups, so these are frequently played solo.
  

The playerbase for the two does intersect sometimes, but for the most part, those looking for farms dislike inefficient story-driven things (my favorite story arc has a mission with basically zero combat / xp!), and may even downvote them... and vice versa, perhaps.

 

But I think the two groups can totally coexist, as long as each could browse the things THEY want from the Architect. I 100% agree with what MCM said -- have two separate AE/MA databases (maybe even give the ones in the 'farm' DB 10% more rewards or something) and have players select which one they'd like to browse. With the source code, I believe something like this could be possible... eventually. :P

[GamerKate]

I think it could even be simpler to implement than that - if they simply added a paragraph to the  default empty field that’s used for the description of an arc like eg his:

 

“Write your description of your arc here instead of this text. This is what players will see when they browse the published missions in the AE. If your arc is intended for farming, put ‘[FARM]’ in the description, and if it is a non-farm story-bases arc, include ‘[sTORY]’ in the description. That way, players can search for ‘FARM’ or ‘STORY’ and they’ll see the kind of arcs they want, and your arc will find the right audience!’

 

Both types of arc-writer will then have to read it and delete it all to write their own description, and both types will be aware of the tags (the devs could decide on different tags ofc, in case someone has “Ace Reporter Scoop Malloy needs help with a big story!” or “omg hero, here’s a humungously complicated intricate mystery unfolding on Old MacDonald’s farm!” etc lol).

 

Then we’d need some way to inform players who don’t create to search in that manner. Is there some suitable text field that could be tweaked for this?

 

MCM

[ceaars]

Or just a mutually exclusive tag: farm/story for both arcs and the search function.  One *has* to be selected, and you only see missions with the same flag selected.

 

You'll never remove people who downvote out of sheer spite (although the anonymity of the internet helps contribute to this - I've always been a proponent of 'if you want to rate, you have to be willing to go on record as what your rating is' ... that's a side effect of my job, where I literally rate people for a living, but that's tempered by the fact that those ratings are NOT anonymous)...

 

...but a system like that will at least minimize "honest" people poorly rating a story when they wanted a farm, or poorly rating a farm when they wanted a story.

[Eva Destruction]

You absolutely could get rid of the spite down-votes if you had to complete an arc before you rated it.  The original intent behind letting players rate an arc they hadn't completed was to allow players to downvote unplayable arcs.  In practice, this led to everything being stuck in 4-star purgatory because as soon as you got to 5 stars you'd get a bunch of 1-star votes the same day.