Lazarus

/signed on all points

Something I'd like to see right here and now is to readjust the weights on the ratings. If we cannot go to something more sensible and less subjective like a simple Thumbs Up or Down, at least change the system so that giving an arc a 1-star doesn't wipe out the last several 5-stars that arc received. At the very least it'd make ratings griefing a lot less efficient and requiring the player to send a comment in order to give such a low rating would kill off a lot of that nonsense.

Right now giving anything less than a 5-star only further ruins the average of an arc and can even push a 5-star arc right out of that group and into the 4-star ghetto. It doesn't help either that so many people are treating this like an asian grading scale and that only "perfect" arcs can get 5-stars and are worth ever playing.

Plus the system is much more forgiving when it comes to designing minions and LTs, but when designing a Boss it can be difficult to get past 90% without resorting to some rather nasty and annoying powers, depending on the powersets chosen.

You don't have to rate the arc when you quit. Just hit finished without click the stars or click the red button in the top-right corner of the window to close it without sending a comment.

YMMV. I found Fight Club to be pretty boring after the first viewing, it's no Usual Suspects.

Not a good enough handwave. There should at least be some reasons given in the arc itself for how and why they used your DNA, right down to the point of reproducing the clothing you happen to be wearing that day. Actually, the cloning via DNA thing is ridiculous anyhow as it makes no sense for player characters who are robots, magical constructs, elemental beings, or anyone who is Science-origin (in which they would have to recreate the events that transformed you, assuming that it didn't really alter your base DNA). Something even more Sci-Fiey like a malfunctioning teleporter or quantum replication device could have covered that much better and still allow for things like the flawed clone and the nonsense of the 2nd wave in the cloning tests.

That would imply that Infernal is from one of the Shadow Worlds and not the Netherworld, since there are two Infernals.

That would also mean that there would have to be two of Lillitu as well.

We do have quite a few of these tucked away on the redside, but very few like it heroside. Even after all these years sometimes I stumble on something in St. Martial or Port Oakes that makes me go "I could have entered this building all this time and it's not used for anything? Did someone forget that they made this spot?"

Agreed. Redside I can easily tell where I am in a zone without even looking at the map, but blueside I get lost in many zones because everything looks the same. Steel Canyon is the biggest offender here.

The whole purpose of the Web is made clear in the STF though.

Exactly. As was said in another thread, one person might consider 5-stars to be the equivalent of a 100% A+ grade, while another might still consider it to be a "A" grade but for 5-stars cover the entire 90-100% range rather than the uppermost bound.

And there once again highlights the problem that ratings are subjective. I on the other hand don't see 5-stars as perfection. 5 stars would be an A grade, but an A can be anywhere from 90 to 100%. An arc can still have a few minor flaws and still be deserving of an 5 star rating.

I most vehemently concur, we really need to clear out the trash. It's a shame that some good arcs will be lost, but many of them are so broken and the authors are not around anymore to fix them anyways.

And these announcements need to sent to everyone, not just the authors of arcs. Let the non-authors know that the list is about to become much less cluttered.

Downtime for heros maybe, and some of that is going away now that heroside contacts are no longer making you do a dozen missions just to get their damn phone number. Villainside arcs are generally shorter, don't make you hop from zone to zone all the time, and the contacts have always given their number pretty freely. This travel downtime is really becoming a bit of a myth these days.

Especially if the author can't be bothered to fix the arc.

You seem to be the only one who thinks that 1000 is remotely realistic. It was hardly realistic even during the mad days when AE was brand spanking new!

That is pretty unhelpful PW. That's like telling someone having trouble moving something to just "grow stronger".

Aeon's contests haven't generated that much good will, especially when it became apparent just what sort of audience you have to write for to even stand a chance. Also the Player's Choice have the problems of 1) they were being done too often and 2) the categories kept changing so many arcs were often getting excluded due to not being eligible all of the sudden.

As for the reviewers drying up, it doesn't help that the last few months have been very busy for a lot of people (final exams for those who are students, big work projects) but also few people are trying to step up and fill the void being left either.

And their lack of action on the matter only makes things worse with every week that goes by. It will be even worse when Going Rogue goes live and people are too busy playing with the new shinies to give a damn if the nerf has been fixed.

An arc that was not a farm finally made it after how many months? And how many of those other HoFs were not only made in the first 2 months of AE but got there mostly by ratings farming?

Screw 'em. Seriously. Most of the authors of those old HoFs, and many of the original DCs as well, never touched AE again after that. How many of them are ever active in these forums, or even play the game anymore? How many of them will care, or even NOTICE?

Ok, not that bad of an idea.

There was little honor to it to begin with. We all remember how some of those HoF's got there, especially the one where the author would just go around 5-starring as many arcs as possible every day with the same comment asking you to return the favor. It was pretty damn obvious when he'd 5-star all 3 of your arcs in under a minute and send that same message 3 times.

Then the farms get reported and removed. The Devs have no excuse not to remove it when it's that visible.

Exactly.

At least 4 months now. What about all those Finalists from the 1st Architect Awards? That pretty much ended up being the silver medal where nobody remembers you at all, especially since there was no special category given or actual promotion for it. There was no point in even announcing them really.

You want to add even more processing overhead to the editor? Definitely not unless they can fix the lag and buffer problems that it already has.

Yeah, when's the last time somebody actually lost their HoF status, aside from that one farm that ended up in there?

From what I remember from i14 beta, the Devs expected there to be a LOT more HoFs than DCs, like several a month. However they extremely underestimated how many people would be making their own arcs rather than just playing them, originally they really underspecified the amount of storage that was going to be set aside for AE arcs.