Judgement_Dave

Gratz DW!

Alternate Costumes for Allies/Bosses/Escorts/Contacts

Originally posted by Damz... whichever Damz it was at the time - think it was Noobbuster!

When your selecting a SINGLE npc, there are sometimes multiple outfits that character has. On the right hand side where the npc animates, if it has multiple cossies there is a small white arrow. Click it to get the next cossie!

Example:

On pets > soldiers = 3 difference costumes iirc.

MA may be 'TF mode' but you can invite midway!

There's still some people get confused about this, but then the messages given by the system aren't clear!

Even though MA arcs are similar to TFs in that you can't contact usual contacts they are different regarding inviting members to the team. You can invite new team members midway through a MA arc.

So even if that arc suddenly springs multiple AVs on you, you can call in reinforcements!

Architect HTML tags and Text Substitutiion Variables

Many text fields let you select some text and right-click to set options like italics, bold or text colour. But you can enter these in the text (and that should give you some benefits like access to any colour rather than choosing from a short list) and that also lets you succesfully use these in some fields that do not have th epopup menu options (though some text fields do not interperet the HTML an dvariables - it's trial & error if you want to go off piste)...

This isn't exhaustive but:

* In most text entry boxes (e.g. the mission introduction) highlight some text and you can right click and get the formatting options in a popup menu.

These options tend, IIRC, to not show all possible settings, but give an idea of what you can enter manually. e.g. IIRC there are only about 8 colours shown in th emenu, but you can enter any 3-byte RGB triplet in hexadecimal.


* Color can be set by <color #rrggbb>text to colour</color> where rrggbb is the hexadecimal red,green and blue components of the colour.

* It looks like you can use <scale d.d>text to resize</scale> where d.d is the numerical sizing factor, with 1.0 being normal default. Less than 1 is smaller than default, greater than 1 is bigger.

* <i></i> can be used for italics.

* <b></b> can be used for bold.

* <br> for break. Not checked if it's happy with <br/>...

* AFAIK the text substitution variables appear to be:
$name - the character name (e.g. Judgement Dave)
$class - the character AT (e.g. blaster)
$origin - the characters origin (e.g. technology)
$level - the characters level, although I'm unsure if this is security level or combat level
$supergroup - the characters SG/VG (e.g. The Redeemed)

$target - can be used by some mobs IIRC to refer to their targetted entity - this may not always be what you expect it to be, and it's better to avoid using this in MA arc dialog

$himher - 'him' if it's a male/large character and 'her' if it's female
$heshe - 'he' if it's a male/large character and 'she' if it's female
$hisher - 'his' if it's a male/large character and 'her' if it's female



* I suspect that many special character codes (  & > < etc) can be used, but the client seemed to get confused when I was using <mock tag> to get angled brackets in my Handyman arc for mock tags - it showed fine when I entered it, but tended to mess up upon reloading it and replaced the < > with <> and then tried treating the whole thing (with text between the symbols) as a tag. In the end I used square brackets for my text mock tags...

Didn't spot an existing tips & Tricks thread in the Mission Architect section of the boards, so... here goes.

Trying to start this off by gathering together some of the beta help snippets, tips & tricks before they get purged. If someone else posted the tip originally I'll give credit, but let me know if you object and want it removing.

Well it happened yet again...

Must have been sometime between 22:00 last night and 09:30 this morning - put it back up as per usual.

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That's funny, my arc work perfectly fine even with <br> tags.

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AFAIK It's just the critter/character creator that has this problem.

Pressing return to get a new line seems to get converted internally to <br> - and the critter/character creator is throwing a hissy fit at this. This happened about a week ago iirc - and when the patch that altered this behaviour went in any characters with line breaks in the descriptions became invalid and needed editing to remove the line breaks/<br> tags before they were valid again.

Many other MA text fields (such as mission introduction or clue text) are fine with various HTML tags (such as <br&gt.

I'll be a little late tonight - a phonecall interrupted the Wipeout tournament I was playing with mrs JD... How late I'll be depends upon how many speedpads I can hit!

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What Dave? Could you speak up? That horse is mighty high and I'm having trouble hearing you...

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I fitted microphones and speakers on it's hooves though...

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Asking for them to be removed is going a bit too far I think and whiffs a bit of censorship... and like LONDONER said: did you really expect any thing different?

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I have never said that they should be removed.

I used the phrase 'if we remove' several times in the OP - but merely to show what would be left 'if' these arcs were removed, not to state that they should be removed by some form of standards monitor.

I'd much rather that the real dross wasn't published in the first place. I'm more for self-censorship rather than imposing standards.

But...
But...

You do get the mission intro text, it appears in the missions menu (under the compass/navbar). Just open that and click on 'more' and you see the entire intro text with the sendoff text appended to the bottom.

What you do not see (unless you are team leader/solo) is the text you are given upon return to contact. This should be available to the entire team - especially as the final mission return dialog cannot be repeated anywhere else other than in the souvenir...

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Yes there will undoubtedly be some people who rate to grief, but is it commonplace?


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Even putting aside the whining from players who clearly overate thier own creative ability, it does seem to be reletively common, yes.

There is an incentive for players to gank an arc, and no reason for them not to, other than to trust people to be honest. And we know, when you collect together a large number of people, then you are bound to get a few bad apples. Currently, it takes maybe a minute to 1 star an arc, so one person could gank hundreds in a session.

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If that is so, then I'm hoping the GMs use a timebased ban on offending accounts...

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Currently, the rating system is compleatly broken, and is going to have to be changed. In the meantime, I suggest we ignore it when searching for arcs to play.

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Gadzooks man! That'd be like trying to use teh intehwebz without google et al!

Though probably true at the moment...

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As for the arcs being part of the CoX universe, I believe that the Dev's choice award is meant to be part of that but that may well be a hard accolade to achieve. I will be watching to see how things develop.

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No - Dev's Choice is exactly what it says on the can. It's an arc that one or more developers thought was great, or fun, or innovative, or... just something that made a dev go 'Wow! This should be recognised'.

Back when HoF and DC were announced (in some intervoiew or other IIRC) it was stated that there was a 3rd level of recognition above dev's choice. This may be the 'guest author' thing, but we don't know.

Most supposition seems to be that it may this 3rd level that elevates an arc to become part of canon (possibly complete with being moved to a normal door). But, as I say, it's all supposition.

AFAIK no official word has been received regarding either the 3rd tier or promotion-to-canon.

Gratz! Hope you have a great Cakeday, Sing

You do realise that zero stars (so no rating) effectively does not get shown by the system?

The number next to the star rating is the number of ratings (not the number of plays).

In effect giving no stars to absolute rubbish and 1 star to a barely comprehensible story damages the public rating of the better arc but does not alter the rating of the rubbish arc.

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You are not the only one getting gank starred Bovine. Seems it happens quite often if I may believe our oversees friends.

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Ok... I very quickly stopped reading the US I've been 'gank-rated' threads as most may be without substance.

Yes there will undoubtedly be some people who rate to grief, but is it commonplace?

Given that people are 'sort-of' encouraged to give a rating, and that they should be rating honestly it could easily just be people with different expectations/standards who truly didn't like your arc...

What you may see as clever misison intros and dialogue, others may see as overlong, self-indulgent waffle.

What you see on your scrapper as a challenging arc with interesting mobs the poor defender found to be an impossible arc with hideously overpowered custom gankmobs.

What you may see as an interesting series of notes hinting at the explanation for the mystery and far better than an obvious in-your-face hollywoord-style-made-for-sub-50-IQs explanation, the player read and just went 'What? Don't get that...'

And don't get me started on the way that your mob dialog wittily parodied episode 6 of 'The Prisoner' and was a clever homage that any TV or SciFi buff would love... the poor player was only born in 1995 - they've never even heard of 'The Prisoner' - it added zip for them.


I think that many may well be rating things that I in all honesty couldn't rate as I wasn't anything like the target audience:
* In RL I hate pork pies - I'd never give a rating or critique of one as I know I hate them and the best pork pie in the world would be unfairly judged by my tastes. But I'm not the target audience - pie makers make pies for people who like/want pies.
* Ingame I probably wouldn't rate farms or uberleet-skilltests because I don't think that I'm the target audience. I would comment and possibly rate them (and rate them low) if there was no indication that these were farms/skilltests and I entered them expecting a 'normal' mission...

As I said: people are being sort-of encouraged to rate arcs... so many will rate an arc whether it was designed for them or not. The old horses for courses thing.

A low rating may not be a gank-vote.

I'm sure that you all realise that I'm mainly playing devils advocate, there are some great dev created arcs (and if I didn't think so then maybe I've been playing the wrong game the past 3 years).

But whilst all these mentioned arcs are very good to excellent... I'm still not certain that they'd make the Hall of Fame if people voted on them with the same voting patterns and expectations that they are applying to player created MA arcs.

Just now I feel that if the great dev arcs were submitted they'd still get people marking them down. Maybe we should look at the comments being posted in feedback to the devs:

Tech Naylor - WHY U PUT DOOR THERE? (yes we don't have this in MA, but if we did get to place doors you can bet you'd never gain points for door placement, but would easily lose a point or more with some people if you stuck the door in an outlying spot).

Westin Phipps - too evil. I play to be vilainous, not a vilain. (I love this arc - but I bet some people would mark it down for being too villainous... conversely some people would mark down most of the CoV arcs for not being villainous enough for feeling like a lackey rather than 'your-own-villain').

Faultline arcs - too hard to solo - too many AVs. Did the authors just create and throw in AVs because they could?

Faultline arcs - too easy for me - too many allies made bosses trivial. Did the authors just create and throw in Allies because they could?

Efficiency Expert arc - wth? Why the time limits???

And if we treated the dev-created standard mobs as custom, most of them have pretty poor info that isn't anyway near as good as many custom mobs used for new groups... And the named bosses often don't have unique info (in fact it sometimes appears to be for the wrong mob type iirc). In a player created arc I would find this lazy and potentially detrimental to the score.

And the people marking down straight away for spelling mistakes and poor grammar should see the number of typos I've /bugged in the past on dev arcs - and I've never noticed a single one get altered. (iirc there's still errors on the 'info' for Hero-1s cape in the CoH cape mission and in Statesman's own info in IP[/i]) So, according to some peoples previously stated guidelines for their ratings, those arcs would lose 1 point due to language imperfections.

And using current standards of ratings, it wouldn't surprise me if some dev arcs/missions got marked down for: repeated hunts, being too long, being too farmable, not being farmable enough, being too hard, being too easy, featuring rikti/CoT/council in a cave, etc etc

So I come back to this: These are great arcs, but I still believe that if people voted on them with the same voting patterns and expectations that they are applying to player created MA arcs then they would not make it into the Hall of Fame.

Peoples voting is expecting (pretty-much) perfection for a 5, and given different expectations and standards no single arc can ever be perfect to all - and I believe they'll find it very hard to 'be perfect-enough' to enough people without being crud to too many people to scupper any hopes of HoF.


BTW - it is interesting to note how virtually all suggested arcs are CoV (with the notable exception of the new Faultline arcs).

I wonder if this may be related to the other problem I've seen where a custom mob is dissapearing from my other published arc.

Just thinking that maybe my arc is being marked as invalid if my defeat boss objective in Handyman is hitting problems when accessed from Zukunft or Vigilance (or any other server - it may not be a langauge-related bug as much as a server -related bug for all we know). Being an objective, the boss can't be dropped so invalidates the arc...

Whereas the mob who keeps vanishing from my other arc is 1 of 2 mobs in a group that is used as a pool group for battles, it is never referenced as a single, named mob. So if any server has problems with it maybe it drops the mob as invalid, but the group and mission stay valid as there is still one mob left in the group.


Just my musings... can't really test it from our end, but if support do actually look at the bug report I referenced this thread in it so I may as well record my musings.

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And I don't see why we shouldn't compare amateurs to professional devs. Doing the same level of content of say, a paper mish is something I can whip out in 5 minutes. When it comes to writing out a decent plot, we're pretty much on equal ground. The devs don't have any particular 'edge' to make them write more interesting arcs than what we could come up with ourselves.

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In the same way that a professional pilot has no edge over any other able-bodied adult.

They have years of practice and presumably have organised reviews and feedback. Hell the seminars, books, courses on creative writing possibly helped a little too...

Mind you they also have the ability to step outside limits imposed on us by the MA, so they do have additional tricks that we don't have.

The devs have no innate advantage at coming up with a story, just as a pilot has no innate advantage at navigation or flying, but in both cases years of training and practice, an organised support network and access to advanced tools ought to give them the upper hand.

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Any of the hero side Task forces for one :P

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I doubt that.

I was talking arcs not TFs/SFs/trials - and in the linked thread I stated that 3 or 4 of these might make it.

But I seriously doubt that 'Any of CoH TFs' would...

Positron and SSTF1 are still pretty much hated as far as I can tell. It's just the badges/TFC and the boost to the merit reward that bribes people into doing them.

I hear some people curse Synapse and Citadel as nearly as boring as Posi...

There are good trials and TFs/SFs - but even with these there are some duffers.

Have a Happy Cakeday, Zortel

In another thread, I stated the following:
I do not believe that any pre-I14 dev-created arc would rate well enough to surpass the Hall of Fame criteria if people voted on them with the same voting patterns and expectations that they are applying to player created MA arcs.

You can check the other thread for why I say this, it's mainly down to the HoF criteria but also partly down to people's voting patterns.

So I didn't want to derail the thread in the MA section, but want to ask:

Am I wrong?
If so - which dev-created arcs would make it?

Please tell me so we can see if anyone disagrees with suggested HoF dev-arcs... we don't need many to dislike an arc to stop it being HoF...

And btw don't be fooled by apparent high ratings for the new faultline arcs - you'll notice that they may rate highly but only have a few ratings... I'm pretty sure that War Witch made the arcs then got the other 14 devs to vote them up.

I pointed out how ridiculous the HoF requirements were with a couple of examples of voting distributions at the start of March (here)

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Big example...
1500 people vote as follows:
100 1 star
200 2 stars
300 3 stars
400 4 stars
500 5 stars
The mean average would be c. 3.666 (=5500/1500). Rounded up that's 4.

So we'd have 900 people who rated it 4 or 5 out of 5 and they aren't enough to overide 300 who thought it less than average (if 3 is considered average).

So how many people would need to vote 5 stars just to move this arc into HoF territory?

Turns out that if an extra 500 voted, and all gave 5 stars, the mean average would just hit 4.0, so still not quite enough... so that'd give us the following distribution (which only hits a 4.0 mean):
2000 people voted as follows:
100 1 star
200 2 stars
300 3 stars
400 4 stars
1000 5 stars


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Effectively, for HoF considerations, a single vote of 1 cancels out 3 votes of 5 (1x1 + 3x5 = 4x4). SO effectively 3 people can love something and all it takes is one person (potentially with unrealistic expectations or griefing) to completely negate the favourable votes.

Now, given this, I don't think many people would call me cynical if I state the following:

I do not believe that any pre-I14 dev-created arc would rate well enough to surpass the Hall of Fame criteria if people voted on them with the same voting patterns and expectations that they are applying to player created MA arcs.

I think it's possible that 3 or 4 TFs/SFs/Trials might make it. But even that's not a definite.

Before you shout me down on this: Remember that it takes relatively few dissenting voices to rate something low to drop the mean average to <= 4. Do you know any arc that virtually everyone loves?


BTW - as an aside on this, if you rate average as being equivalent to dev-created arcs then what you are saying is that the 'average' score can only be attained by amateurs who manage to do the same level of content as the professional game developers.

I actually believe that the level of most dev arcs should be more like a 4 rating.. a 3 should be a solid amateur arc.

BTW2 - marking 3 as being the same level as dev-arcs would really help stop the devs getting to HoF standards.

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One of the names might (if you squint and apply spam logic to it) possibily be that of someone who did indeed want to (and I quote, with better spelling) "show me what really happens on the farm", but the other one would not in any reality be the name of a porn star.

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It's good to boggle my mind occasionally - gives it a spring clean.

So the server may be punishing my arc for appealing to our mainland European friends... gah.


Good find Ashuroa.

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There is an incentive for unscrupulous players to rate low, simply to push thier own efforts higher up the list.

Rubbish arcs getting 5s is probably mostly due to friends/SG collusion.

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Or even just mutual backslapping in teams... which makes more sense if a team get together to do each others arcs and you're low down the order... do you rate honestly and risk immediate retribution when your arc comes up?

I'd say 'yes' you rate honestly or not at all - but I've met 'people' and I don't usually think of 'integrity' and 'honesty' as two of their strongest points.


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It's not what you know, it's who you know...

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And as about the only people I know ingame these days (hey - all the oldies left it seems) all seem to frequent the forums as well that probably plays against me!

I guess the internal monologue goes a little like: arc by JD? The forum JD? Pillock. Where's that 1 rating...