An open invitation...

[ZamuelNow]

There is an event going on, the Mission Architect Sunday Special, that cycles the shards playing story based (non farm) AE missions.  It has completed a cycle and you're invited to the next run.  Yes, you.  You're invited.

 

The planned times for the next rotation look to be:

• Indomitable is the 1st Sunday of every month
• Excelsior is June 15, 2025
• Everlasting is July 20, 2025
• Torchbearer is August 17, 2025
• Reunion is September 21, 2025
• Victory is October 19, 2025

2PM EST in the Rikti War Zone (unless otherwise announced).

 

But...I know not everyone plays stories in AE. There are plenty of valid reasons why.  Even I get frustrated with things concerning Mission Architect.  So my question for those who don't is, why don't you play AE?  And I ask in a general curiosity--not as some weird gotcha.

[Ukase]

On 5/30/2025 at 10:09 PM, ZamuelNow said:

why don't you play AE

The reason I don't is because the xp is 1/2 of that in the wild, and if I do an AE story arc, I get no reward merits. CoH is and will always be a loot based game. Granted, I don't really need the inf that merits bring, but if I'm going to mash my attack buttons for a period of time, I might as well get something for my trouble. 

I've encountered the occasional "good enough" mission in AE. But that doesn't really butter my bread, so to speak. 

If the XP was the same, and it gave reward merits, or a badge, then I'm happy to spend the energy running it. AE is so bad that you don't even get credit for various badges in there, like inf badges. It's just a bad place to play, unless you're just looking to PL an alt, or subsidize your next alt. 

And for those that might suggest I not be so mercenary and enjoy a story - I have a bookshelf in my home. I have tons of books I can read if I want a story. Story is nice, but it's not really why I play. I play to see the effects and what my character can do for the most part. 

[Snarky]

Edited Monday at 01:14 AM by Snarky

[Clave Dark 5]

14 minutes ago, Ukase said:

It's just a bad [I think he meant "unrewarding" here - me] place to play, unless you're just looking to PL an alt, or subsidize your next alt. 

 I have a bookshelf in my home. I have tons of books I can read if I want a story. Story is nice, but it's not really why I play. I play to see the effects and what my character can do for the most part. 

To the first part: perfect example of the broken nature of AE - it was nerfed to prevent power leveling, but only enough so that the only thing it's good for is power leveling (oh, and I suppose some story telling).  Stupid, stupid choice.  Make tickets worth something, enough that you could play for those and get some decent return on your time, or something.  Maybe make Dev Choice arcs given merits, and keep designating new Dev Choice arcs.  Anything.  C'mon devs at least try, jeez.  Clearly they're not interested.

 

To the second part, well, I could say the same thing about any other game, movie, play, etc.  These are stories people you might know are telling, and stories about this shared universe we all apparently enjoy.  But yeah, you are a loot-focused player, and this clearly is the game the devs make now for players like you.  Thank you for presenting your case as soundly as you have to help make this clear.

[Ukase]

8 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

These are stories people you might know are telling

To this part, I'll say - if they ask me to check out their arc, I will, and if they ask me to rate, I will give 5 stars because why not? Unless it's really bad. But to play it ad nauseum to level my characters? Nah. 

 

And you're 100% correct. AE is a fantastic tool that could be used to take some of the burden off the volunteer staff. But, there's a ton I don't know. Imagine having to review each and every story made before you could authorize it to give merits or badges. I think that's where things would bottleneck. But again, there's tons I don't know. Do they even use a system like Mission Architect to create things like the Aeon SF? No idea. 

[srmalloy]

14 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

To the first part: perfect example of the broken nature of AE - it was nerfed to prevent power leveling, but only enough so that the only thing it's good for is power leveling (oh, and I suppose some story telling).  Stupid, stupid choice.  Make tickets worth something, enough that you could play for those and get some decent return on your time, or something.

I have always thought that the way AE was set up was inherently broken. Take inf rewards -- influence/infamy/information is a currency based on your reputation in the game world based on what you've done. Crawling into your electronic navel and defeating thousands of virtual opponents may teach you how to use your abilities better, but if you go into the AE building at level 1 and don't come out until you're 50, the people around you have no clue about who you are, and don't know anything you've done to base a reputation on. Doing AE missions should earn you XP and tickets, but not inf. The ticket drop rate can be adjusted to make farming AE more or less remunerative from trading in tickets for recipes/components and selling them, but that's an internal arrangement with Aeon Entertainment to attract people to their services. Nothing you do in AE should make you a more well-known/respected/feared character outside of the AE building.

 

I know this is a hugely unpopular opinion, and it's been way too long since AE was implemented for there to be any reasonable expectation that it's going to change, but the Paragon Studios staff could have done a number of things to make AE farming less attractive for sidestepping the ordinary leveling route and earning millions of inf. The whacks with the nerf bat that it got did not, in my opinion, address some of the central broken issues around its design.

[El D]

44 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

I have always thought that the way AE was set up was inherently broken. Take inf rewards -- influence/infamy/information is a currency based on your reputation in the game world based on what you've done. Crawling into your electronic navel and defeating thousands of virtual opponents may teach you how to use your abilities better, but if you go into the AE building at level 1 and don't come out until you're 50, the people around you have no clue about who you are, and don't know anything you've done to base a reputation on. Doing AE missions should earn you XP and tickets, but not inf. The ticket drop rate can be adjusted to make farming AE more or less remunerative from trading in tickets for recipes/components and selling them, but that's an internal arrangement with Aeon Entertainment to attract people to their services. Nothing you do in AE should make you a more well-known/respected/feared character outside of the AE building.

 

I know this is a hugely unpopular opinion, and it's been way too long since AE was implemented for there to be any reasonable expectation that it's going to change, but the Paragon Studios staff could have done a number of things to make AE farming less attractive for sidestepping the ordinary leveling route and earning millions of inf. The whacks with the nerf bat that it got did not, in my opinion, address some of the central broken issues around its design.

 

Much as I agree that AE needed stricter handling many years before now to curb it being the end-all be-all fast track, the devs (on Live and now on HC) were never going to cut inf from it. Inf is the game's standard currency. That is its primary function and whatever meta reasoning was given for the name scheme is irrelevant to that. Especially in-regard to design choices and game economy. Deliberately denying players access to the game's standard currency because they chose to engage in a certain type of content would be pouring gasoline on the forums while handing every player a flamethrower (and that'd be on-top of the mountains of vitriol that forumites were already tossing around about AE choices). It's also just a bad precedent to establish. That's not 'we're encouraging players to play the game the right way,' that's 'we don't value this specific content or the time players spend on it as much as other areas of the game.' The whole thing about inf is that since it's the base currency it's incredibly easy to earn across all areas of gameplay. Making AE the single exception to that, even with a 'separate but equal' alternate reward scheme (which itself would be a whole new thing to have to balance and re-balance around), would be adding an unnecessary problem to what was already one of the biggest tangles the game has (and still has) to deal with.

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, El D said:

Deliberately denying players access to the game's standard currency because they chose to engage in a certain type of content would be pouring gasoline on the forums while handing every player a flamethrower

To make it work, it would have had to be done as part of the initial rollout of AE; once it had been established as a thing in-game on the live servers, the devs were stuck with playing catch-up to scrub out all of the riskless exploits the players found, and the ways the players worked around things like the attempt at using a filter on chat to hide any chat message with 'farm' in it (I remember in particular the "meow missions" as one widespread euphemism as the playerbase stayed ahead of the devs' censorship). It's far too late to fix it now, no matter how much I think it should have been implemented differently.

[skoryy]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

I have always thought that the way AE was set up was inherently broken.

 

AE was always going to be broken no matter how the rewards were given. Farms existed even before AE. Once the meta route to easy rewards is found, that would always be the way.

 

The Skinner Box model itself has been broken for a long while now.  Its why Guild Wars 2 gave up on vertical progression and FFXIV ties it to the main story quest.  Give people a pellet dispenserr, and they'll find a way to jam the dispenser open.

[Clave Dark 5]

23 hours ago, Ukase said:

And you're 100% correct. AE is a fantastic tool that could be used to take some of the burden off the volunteer staff. But, there's a ton I don't know. Imagine having to review each and every story made before you could authorize it to give merits or badges. I think that's where things would bottleneck. But again, there's tons I don't know. Do they even use a system like Mission Architect to create things like the Aeon SF? No idea. 

I've no idea how devs make new stories, I doubt they're the same system at all.  Making use of the AE/making the AE usable for players isn't about relieving a burden or anything, but just like encouraging people to play the game - like costumes, why bother with them except to just encourage people to play?  AE just shouldn't be seen as a "level your character" tool is the point, yes.

 

Devs don't have to review every story ever made, the small, small group of people who enjoy writing stuff for the AE often post about their own and others' works, you can just work from there alone.  The current game runners used to have a member who took the time to run some AE works and award Devs Choice (they even hosted a story contest for Christmas-themed stories once), but that dev had to step away for personal reasons. 

 

Nothing since.

[Ukase]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Nothing since.

I wonder if a player could fill that role in that specific capacity. I mean, it's an all volunteer staff, of players, right? If an AE content creator were to invest some time, maybe that could work out. 

[golstat2003]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

I've no idea how devs make new stories, I doubt they're the same system at all.  Making use of the AE/making the AE usable for players isn't about relieving a burden or anything, but just like encouraging people to play the game - like costumes, why bother with them except to just encourage people to play?  AE just shouldn't be seen as a "level your character" tool is the point, yes.

 

Devs don't have to review every story ever made, the small, small group of people who enjoy writing stuff for the AE often post about their own and others' works, you can just work from there alone.  The current game runners used to have a member who took the time to run some AE works and award Devs Choice (they even hosted a story contest for Christmas-themed stories once), but that dev had to step away for personal reasons. 

 

Nothing since.

 

I doubt they will find anyone to replace that person. That seems like a very boring and thankless job.

 

If you could make stories in AE and link them to the doors in the outer world to create new door missions, then I and many others might be more interested.

 

Right now AE feels too much like a simulation where you just go read fan fic.

[lemming]

4 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

I've no idea how devs make new stories, I doubt they're the same system at all. 

From what I remember, AE was designed by a completely different third party team with not much in common with the rest of the game system.

 

Wonder if removing the max tickets from arc would make that selection a little more attractive.

[ZamuelNow]

On 6/15/2025 at 9:08 PM, Ukase said:

The reason I don't is because the xp is 1/2 of that in the wild, and if I do an AE story arc, I get no reward merits. CoH is and will always be a loot based game. Granted, I don't really need the inf that merits bring, but if I'm going to mash my attack buttons for a period of time, I might as well get something for my trouble. 

I've encountered the occasional "good enough" mission in AE. But that doesn't really butter my bread, so to speak. 

If the XP was the same, and it gave reward merits, or a badge, then I'm happy to spend the energy running it. AE is so bad that you don't even get credit for various badges in there, like inf badges. It's just a bad place to play, unless you're just looking to PL an alt, or subsidize your next alt. 

And for those that might suggest I not be so mercenary and enjoy a story - I have a bookshelf in my home. I have tons of books I can read if I want a story. Story is nice, but it's not really why I play. I play to see the effects and what my character can do for the most part. 

 

Fair enough.  I lean more towards story during play but AE has admitted hurdles to its presentation of that story.  Otherwise common sense badges not getting credit is one of the headaches to the changes to AE in I15.  I mean, maps with lava and such don't do damage anymore due to exploits.  We are just now in Issue 28 Page 2 getting a map that can do damage.  As much as I like AE, I could rant all day.  Still, thanks for the response.  Assumed no one would after weeks started to pass.

 

One thing I might have a slightly different view than some is regular leveling in AE should be allowed.  People had made lists of arcs by level and more than one person made regular posts showing their progress leveling.  It creates a different feel for someone who's tried most/all of the game's content.  But that loops back around to how people enjoy experiencing content.