BlueRaptor

You cant.
If you say you can, I'd be very excited to hear about it.

Afaik you can only spawn a boss fight and take a map with a really small back or front area (whichever you want to use) and hope it thus spawns in sight and attacks.

They were. They made a topic about it:

[url =http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=190730]Custom critters not cycling attacks[/url]

I think I only so-so get what you mean, but no, I dont want a person to pop up and give me a clue when I click a glowie, but a person to stand there and give me a clue when I click (or walk up to) the person.

Sure I can give the info in the rescue dialog as that is indeed only given when I walk to the person even if it doesnt have any guards. But that dialog is a) limited to 100 characters and b) easily lost in the chatbox spam and then hard to find again, plus c) a clue will still stay for the following missions of the arc.

You're welcome.

It would only need to (optionally) count the person as rescued and give the objective completed clue at the same time it gives the rescue dialog.

Yep. Never said it was elegant, and it doesn't make the boss 'rogue', but it works. Just tested it.
Upon entering the captive completes, the ally is spawned, and the ally betrays.

Of course the other question is if we WANT that to work. I for my case would rather at least have an option to have captives (or allies) only count as freed when you walk up to them, so you can attach a clue or mission objective to it. (Objective: "Talk to our chief". Found him: clue and new objective.)
On the other hand its neat for that large invasion battle scenario I have planned when the captives count as freed when an allied patrol rescues them too, so you dont have to find them ALL, and I can use that as timer to spawn more waves of invaders.
(thought that seems bugged, when allied patrols rescued a captive it didnt count and I couldnt rescue the captive anymore either)

... but for spawning a solo boss on a non-empty map through the back door, it works.

Sadly I haven't found a way yet to make a friendly character give you clue by 'talking to them' without defeating enemies that guard them first. That would of course be a great add-on for such a setting.

(While the rescue dialog works fine upon walking up to the unguarded hostage or ally, clues tied to that are handed out as soon as you enter the map, and they also immediately count as rescued for mission triggers. Otherwise you could have a certain person on your map give you an important mission clue and/or new objective.)

So is it true? Does someone have a link of where it is announced?

Bosses dont spawn normally, unless your difficulty setting is really high or you use them in a Boss Fight event. (just like on non-AE missions)
And even then you have to have your difficulty set to "I want to fight bosses solo".

Can it be that there were no free spawnpoints for what didnt spawn?

I had the impression that was the problem when it happened to me, as the MA doesnt seem to calculate all that precisely all that MIGHT happen (and I dont blame it for that). With me it seemed my boss didnt spawn when I didnt defeat anything on the way to him but spawned an ambush, so I thought maybe the system thinks all spawn points are occupied.
(and no, he didnt just spwan somewhere else on the map then, believe me, it was a really small and linear map.)
When I defeated things on the way to the boss it didnt happen. No idea if that WAS the problem though.

I keep reading the devs said there are not supposed to be more than three ambushes in any mission...
Is that true? And if so, why? And, please dont do that!

Ambushes are very essential for so many things, for example I have this one idea for a big invasion battle, and they can spice things up so nicely from just walking from one static mob to the next, equivalent or just-as-random one.

I also have a mission where (fortunately, fingers crossed) more than three ambushes work for now, and I wouldnt want that to change at all. Its not that they spam you, but there's starship officers calling for security if you hit them, whimpy engineers coming and complaining that you must not mess with their control terminals as you click the glowies, ... and well, ONE real ambush each when you beat up the wreckable object and during the fight with the captain.

I can see that someone could possibly 'abuse' dozens of ambushes at once, just like you can abuse about everything, but how are we supposed to tell interesting stories when we can do only the merest and most basic things?

(or are the devs afraid the MA missions will end up more exciting than the normal ones? Well spice those up a bit then. (and dont give the exit button while an ambush is running at you or you are still fighting) )

The problem is also that you cant just set a boss fight to be spawned as an ambush.
That would solve a lot of problems, and me a lot of headaches and workarounds.

Yeah, that's really annoying. (And pointless for fighting farmers. You can put in a group of surrounding minions with no powers at all, and the bosses are just as easy to fight. I dont get it... )

I dont think you can fix it, I can only suggest you make a custom group with only minions with no defensive but aggroing powers and use that as the surrounding group, and hope they are defeated by a patrol of normal enemies.

Thanks. Back were indeed switched on all that maps.
I hope they fix this and most of all TELL US when they fix it, so I can switch it back then...

Well if it wasnt for that annoying "You cannot have another trigger on something that already triggers an ambush" ...
What's that good for anyway? Devs afraid that people gonna die Anny?
Where's the difference from having them come from several whimpy bosses at 3/4, 1/2, 1/4 and 0 health for farming?

Sure you could build pretty lethal missions more easy then, but you can do so anyway. And it'd allow for a great fail option. DONT do this or that or it will sound the alarm.

I sadly had to agree that once again the strike against potential abuse was led with a counterproductive massiveness that caused almost exclusively collateral damage, but that to the extreme.

'There are some evil abusers using this one out of a many possible things down there, so lets kill the entire town' isnt a good policy to have happy citizens. Especially since as long as a single good farming method survives the evil abusers are not hurt much, but with every single removed option or zero-rewards critter a lot of formerly happy citizens are hurt.

Giving less rewards for less powers and so is a nice idea, but as it is right now, who's gonna bother playing a story arc with custom critter warning, when that means that they'll likely give no rewards or are made ultra tough in an attempt to make them give decent rewards? And by the time that gets smoothed, in issue 17 or whenever, the damage is already done.
While farmers can still farm happily, even by just making a map full of enemies that are the perfect easy prey for their powersets, or of glass scrappers and blasting them from above.

Its really a mess, and its greatly annoying that you cannot have an Ally or Captive do what you want him to. If that is done on purpose, I find it outright rude to ignore the setting we choose, and have us try and test something over and over again to find we cannot have someone stand somewhere that JUST gives you a clue. Because someone thinks ignoring the settings would be a clever way to annoy some farmers.

Seriously. If you want to disallow everything that anybody ever used for farming, you can shut down AE as a whole just as well. You cannot tell a story or do something exciting if there have to be exactly 3-minions-and-1-Ltd standard enemy spawns over the place and either exactly one non-custom boss fight or 3 collectibles in a mission period because everything else could be a farming exploit.

I also sincerely hope that they have different code for the AE missions and the normal missions so whatever they do to the AE doesnt mess up the normal play.

* 'back' placement for collectible items seems to generally end up in middle placement instead.

Well the problem is back and its worse, I cant get through to the forum anymore at all from my machine, no matter what browser, while other sites are still perfectly fine. I have to use a proxy, then it works fine. But that cant be the solution.

(Took me some time to find one that does SSL so I can log in and post.)

* allies or captives with no surrounding enemies (e.g. so you just have to FIND them) give the messages and rewards wrong:
+ The 'Rescued Dialog' spawns correctly when you find and walk up to them, but
- the 'Inactive Dialog', 'Active Dialog' and 'Completed Text' come up immediately upon entering the mission
- the Recued Clue is given immediately upon entering the mission
- the ally or captive immediately counts as rescued for the mission goals as well.
(seen on a Tech:Abandoned indoor map)

* Setting Allies to 'do nothing' doesnt work
- If they are set to 'fight defensively', or 'no combat', they follow you directly.
- If they are set to 'agressive' or 'pacifist' they remain put at first, but if you go away and return to them, it gives the 'Reaquired' dialog, spawns the 'Ally Rescued' animation again, and if you walk away then they follow you.
(seen on an ally with no enemies on Tech:Abandoned indoor map)

* Allies cannot be rescued while they receive DoT damage from area attacks
Seen with caltrops. The ally ended up in the caltrop area, and didnt move nor count as rescued until the caltrops disappeared and stopped damaging him.

Yes, same here... but when it doesnt want to load it ususally doesnt work with reload anymore either. Or, really really slow (like 6 minutes for a page, prone to have errors or only half the content)

Once it was good, and I thought it was because of the new browser installation.
But then suddenly it went bad again. Then good again. Then bad again.
(and now it works again, so I quickly post before it stops again)

When it works it works fast and smooth and without any errors, and loads almost instantly.
When it doesnt, it loads to a certain point in the firefox process bar, and then freezes there.
I tried everything. DNS flushsed, browser cache cleared, browser offline data cleared, cookies deleted, firewall deactivated. Still the same result. And the system or my connection is no different when it works from when it doesnt.

My suspicion is that you have a setting on your site too low for the time PHP requests are allowed to run before a timeout is returned.
So poor people like with my 'only' 1Mbit connection at the other end of the world can get lucky and everything runs super fine, or unlucky when the tubes are clogged for us and it takes a tad bit too long, and the page stops loading. A friend and I had similar problems with our own forum once, seeming just as random and only happening to people that lived far from the server, and raising a time-before-the-request-times-out in a php ini file fixed it indeed, the default value was been way too low. (I have to ask him where and what the exact setting was in the php.ini but I think we found out on help boards so it shouldnt be all that hard to check.)