Eva Destruction

I liked fighting Recluse, I felt it was an appropriate conclusion to the story. However I agree that the Bane Spider summon didn't fit the setting. I think the ideal solution would be to make him a custom, if you can find the space.

Replacing him with Black Scorpion would detract from the impact of the story. For one thing, in a Rogue Isles analogue, the patrons should be on par with each other. For another, he's been set up as the "big dumb brute" of Arachnos, which makes it hard to take his analogue seriously as the leader who takes the Spider Clan into a new era of dominance over Perogan.

1: Disguised farms. Arcs that I report for inappropriate content or blatant copyright infringement.
2: Very little effort made. The customs don't have bios, your missions consist of a single objective each, there are no clues, text fields aren't properly filled in, and there is little story to speak of. Or, you made a bit of effort but have no concept of well-designed gameplay: needless defeat alls on large maps, long escorts, unbalanced customs, etc.
3: Some effort was made. Despite this effort, either the arc is average, or has something really wrong with it: major canon issues if the arc is canon-related, balance issues, major plot issues, or just not enough to text to tell the story properly. Also, no arc that is easy, easy, easy, easy....then in the final mission hits you with an Extreme/Extreme AV surrounded by bosses with all-boss ambushes, or some other player-killer will ever get more than three stars from me. Even if I beat it. It's a jerk move.
4: It was a good arc, and worth my time. However there is something that prevents it from being a 5-star arc. Minor balance issues, minor gameplay issues. Missing clues, missing text, missing dialogue. Some unclear plot development. NPC behavior, dialogue, costumes, powersets are a bit off. The pacing is a bit off. The map selection could be better. Usually a combination of several of these minor things, that keep the arc from being 5-stars. Usually I will leave feedback about the things I had issue with. Or, it could be an arc that just didn't grab me. It was well-done, just not memorable enough to be 5-stars.
5-stars: An excellent arc. One I'm glad I played. There might be one or two little things wrong with it, but not enough to drop it below 4.5 stars (I round up). Recommended.

Edit: The Rule of Funny allows humorous arcs quite a bit of leeway, especially where canon accuracy is concerned. Also, I usually to dock a star for gratuitous overpowered allies. The only reason you should ever include an EB ally is if the story requires a canon character who only exists as an EB.

I will second the idea of soloable "epic" content, completely outside the regular contact progression. That way people who are capable of completing it can choose to do so, and those who are not, can avoid it completely. New content should be divided into "challenging" and "not-so challenging" to accomodate different playstyles, rather than ramping up the difficulty of everything. A player should be able to go from 1-50, running regular content, NOT papers, without ever encountering an AV, if they know which contacts to avoid. AVs have gone from Task Force and high-end content, to being everywhere. Seriously devs, enough AVs. There are more interesting ways to challenge a team than throwing a bag of hit points at them. (This wish may or may not have something to do with the Dominator I recently rolled. Or maybe with all the trips to Bloody Bay my Corruptor had to make on the road from 40-50)

With the existence of Ouroboros there is NO reason why existing game content can't evolve. The old content can still be available through Ouroboros.

And let's not forget that until you get to max level and spend hours upon hours every night grinding the same content over and over again until you can finally collect all the pieces of the Uber Awesome Make All The Noobs Wish They Were As Cool As You Armor of Pwnage +Infinity, none of this mass-produced armor will actually match.

There are ways to fail a mission, but they rely on bugs that will (hopefully) get fixed.

Timed missions will auto-fail when a captive reaches the door. So making the "wrong" answer a captive is one way to go about doing it, for now, as long as the captive is obvious and easily avoidable by a character without stealth.

The most interesting "choose your own ending" I have ever seen is in an arc called "The Beating Heart of Astoria." The player has complete control over whether to succeed or fail.

I have also seen the "wrong answer spawns massive ambush" tactic used in an arc based on riddles. The problem with using this, is that the wrong answer ambush would have to be EXTREME (as in, probably multiple Elite Boss with the settings cranked up extreme) or some Scrapper will go in, outrun the ambush, or if the timer is long enough deliberately trigger it for bonus xp and tickets. The arc I played handled it by exemping the player to level 10 or so, which was solved the "outrun or defeat the ambush" problem but introduced an additional problem of having to search a large outdoor map in a short timeframe with no travel power, except the very slow raptor pack, and not everyone has one of those.

I was not aware you could have more than one of a certain enhancement in a power until my blaster was well into the teens.

I had Burst slotted 1 acc, 1 dam, 1 rech, 1 end, 1 range...
I didn't know what an immobilize was, so I used Ring of Fire for damage. I couldn't understand why the fire ring wasn't showing up around Ogres' and Calibans' feet, but they were still taking damage.

Then there was the time I did the Vahz wasting disease arc. I ran into Dr. Vahz, saw that it said "Archvillain" (this was long before they would scale down to EBs for soloers) and thought, hmmm, I better eat some reds before I try to fight him. It did not end well.

Um, well, I have an Ice/MM blaster who used to be a lab assistant at Crey, until her mentor quit, so they decided she was untrustworthy and expendable and started experimenting on her. She eventually escaped, but as a result of the experiments her body is falling apart, so she is trapped in the cryogenic suit her mentor built for her to keep her from degenerating further.

My Illusion/Empath controller, although not a tragic story in and of herself, is born of tragedy. She is a manifestation of the hopes and dreams of the victims of evil. She takes the nightmares born of trauma away from the innocent and gives them back to the people who caused them.

Most of my heroes' backstories are more along the lines of "bad guys ticked me off, I am going to fight them," than "bad guys traumatized me, I am going to make sure they don't do it to anyone else." My villains tend to simply be bad, amoral or selfish people, or more criminal than truly villainous, rather than being turned evil by some tragic past.

If your custom group contains bosses that are not set to "do not auto-spawn" they will appear in normal spawns for teams. A soloer will only get them in battles set to "hard," and occasionally in random spawns on difficulty 2 or 4.

If you want a solo player to encounter your bosses, you can place them as optional objectives. That is the only way to guarantee that a soloer will have them spawn.

Ok so your villain isn't interested in preventing villainy, and your hero isn't interested in getting paid. It sounds to me like the "preventing villainy" motivation is in place for the hero, and the "getting paid" is for the villain.

It is entirely possible to have an arc for both villains and heroes, without forcing villains into heroics to save the world (which is, after all, where they keep all their stuff). The easy way is to have an arc where you stop the bad guys, but there is the potential for profit, either a contact who offers to pay you or mission objectives consisting of, for example cool stuff you can either give back to the proper owners or keep for yourself, hostages you can set free or hold for ransom, etc.

Aside from that, there are "investigation" type arcs, where the motivation is curiosity. Humorous arcs can transcend morality. Arcs involving "co-op" groups, such as the Vanguard, the Midnight Squad, and Cimerora can easily be made neutral, although in many cases it would be villains playing hero. There are also the "grey" morality arcs, which are designed to be suitable for an anti-hero or anti-villain (and should probably be labelled as such, to avoid comments along the lines of "Heroes don't kill")

I guess people missed the point....

My "optimized team" consisted of me. Solo. Since people who have gotten good at optimizing rewards all have their favorite team configuration for doing it, I figured I would use the team configuration that routinely nets me the highest rewards: solo. The people I tend to team with aren't all about optimizing rewards. Furthermore, I don't consider myself to have uber 1337 skillz, or an optimum build, or bazillions of inf to burn. I'm not going to be soloing 8-man spawns anytime soon.

You keep saying "most" farming teams. As if the people who discover the best "rewards/risk and time spent" ratios belong to the masses that make up "most" farming teams. As if the people who regularly successfully complete these missions belong to "most."

"Most" farming teams (the kind who stand around yelling for a healer, have a bunch of useless lowbies and doorsitters, and people who don't know what half their powers do) would get slaughtered doing regular content on Invincible too. People who drag these n00bs (yes I said it. N00bs. Defined as people who don't know how to play at a level of reasonable competence and have no intention of trying to learn.) on their "challenge" missions are contributing to the problem.

Another problem with #4, is that it would be an additional pain for people who don't mind SKing or EXing to play an arc. They'd have to switch zones every time they decided to play an arc that was in a different level range. And how would it handle arcs with uneven level ranges, for the very few that have an actual good reason for it?

1: Define what constitutes a "normal" mission, then we'll talk about XP limits.

2: That would be a pain. It would punish authors for setting their level ranges responsibly (instead of trying to make everything 1-54), and we don't need any more incentive for people to set everything to 1-54 "to get more plays." From the player's perspective, it would limit the number of arcs you can play. A lot of story-focused arcs are limited to a fairly narrow range, simply because the enemies used are limited.

3: No. Limiting storytelling tools is never a good idea.

4: No. I hated all the farmer lag in PI back when they farmed portal missions. Again, this would punish non-farmers by forcing them into laggy zones from level 40 onwards. Lowbies at least have the option of starting in Galaxy instead of Atlas, even though everybody stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this. Teenage villains are, admittedly, out of luck. What we need is to have an Atlas Park 2 and a Cap Au Diable 2 on every server, all the time. Then I can point and laugh at all the people who will inevitably go to 1 all the time and complain about the lag.

You're on the rails regardless. The very nature of the contact system guarantees that. Arcs that have your character figure things out from clues rather than have an omniscient contact tell you where to go are a Good Thing IMO.

But as Hydrophidian pointed out, it's all about attitude. The difference between the Hardcases and the Vernon Von Gruns of the world is immense.

Your fire/ice might want to consider picking up Ice Patch. While it's a PbAoE with a fairly long activation time, it can be useful in corner-pulling.

Another thing you can do is choose an enemy group that your blasters do well against (Warriors are pretty weak at range, for instance) and search for that group. Also, stick to arcs of your level. Higher-level enemies have more HP, higher resistances, and higher damage, which can be brutal for a blaster that doesn't have the high-end powers, slots, IO sets and mitigation tools to handle it.

Yes, that is the inherent problem with villainous arcs. You have to make some assumptions about the player's character. Different villains have different goals; one might want to take over the world, while another might think that's too much work, and just want to amass as much wealth as possible.

If your description gives some indication of what the player character is trying to accomplish in the arc, I think that would be enough for most players to decide if the arc is suitable for their villain.

The assumption that villains use computers is a pretty safe one to make, since we're constantly stealing stuff off other people's computers. As for using a minion as a contact, you could use a general suck-up, someone who is afraid of you, or someone who wants to be your minion and is trying to prove his usefulness. Then leave it up to the player what they do with the contact once the arc is over.

Freaks don't really have a gap. They go up to 40 in Crey's Folly, then there are the 40-45 ones in the Bile mission from Tina. Before i15 you could use the group as a whole all the way up to 54, but you couldn't select individual Freaks as objectives above 45, except for Quantums and Noise Tanks. With i15, we got the 40-54 individual Freaks. They have always existed in-game, in some of the Portal Corp missions.

If it depends on the number of players in the area, then why do you get practically no bosses when hunting Marcones or Masks solo....but as soon as you invite a teammate, even if they are on the other side of the zone, bosses start appearing?

And when a soloer enters the area, the number of bosses spawning actually goes down, even though there are more people in the area?

I don't farm, so answer me this: Do any of these "challenging" all boss missions have a variety of enemies with debuffs, controls, exotic damage types, armors, or any powers beyond the bare minimum of what they're forced to have? And how many of the really popular ones let you set your difficulty, so you can determine what level of "challenge" you want to attempt, rather than automatically being forced to face +2s or +4s?

New zones. Seriously. Croatoa and Cimerora feel tacked-on, with no relevance to the game world as a whole. Faultline, The Rikti War Zone and Striga (but only because of the Khelds) at least fit into the overall world. I would prefer new villain story zones that are extensions of little-used parts of the existing villain zones...a magic-themed zone that is relevant to Nerva for example, or revamps of existing zones.

PvP, because I don't do it.

Fancy graphics. I'll end up having to turn them off anyway. Same goes for weather.

Masterminds, Khelds. I don't play them. I don't really play VEATS, Controllers, Defenders, Tanks or Stalkers either, so I'm pretty meh about them as well.

Having a team DOES affect outdoor spawns. You get more bosses with a team, no question about it. Even a duo will get more Fake Nems in PI, Marcone Bosses in Port Oakes, Banished Pantheon masks in Talos...in fact for certain badges, such as Tracer, having a team that is too large can be detrimental, as you will get bosses spawning instead of the Lts you need.

As for who it spawns for, probably whoever is closest when that spawn point decides to populate itself. If you're merrily hunting masks or Fakes with a teammate, and a soloer enters the area, they will start causing useless solo spawns.

As for setting a team to count as more than 8 people, I don't see what reason they would have to allow that, as all it would do is benefit farmers. Spawn sizes generally hit a certain point and don't get any bigger after that. We'll be getting the option to have higher level enemies, so that should cover people who think Invincible content is too easy.

Yeah, about that...as far as I know it drops the critter to the maximum level of the mission. So if he's going to attack you, and the mission is intended to have a wide level range...you can see where this is going.

If he's Family, it should be pretty easy to make a custom, assuming you have room.

"Back" on this map has no meaning, last I checked. Some outdoor maps say they have a front, middle and back, but they don't.

Finding the escort is the same as finding the captive. You have to save the guy regardless, it's important to the story.

As for him getting killed, I'm pretty sure civilian escorts can't be killed. The mission is intended to be failable, hence the timer (which it currently can't have, due to the guy being a captive and that stupid bug), but not intended to be easily failed, hence the timer being an hour.