Lazarus

Yeah, cause level 1-15 don't already fly by as it is.

Nope. A LOT of arcs got DCed in closed beta and were already there when open beta started. Very few got added during open beta and far as I can tell none of those were transferred over when i14 went live. At the time they were supposed to be testing the DC feature for bugs and as such pohsyb was handing them out to closed beta testers like candy. Remember the uproar that started in open beta when TwoFlower had 7 DC arcs? That incident may be why pohsyb doesn't deal with Dev Choice anymore.

How did pohsyb find out about all those arcs he DC'ed? He went into the Beta Testers channel and just asked for arcs to DC. I don't recall any Devs coming into channels like MA Arc Finders (I've seen pohsyb lurk there and a lot of the reviewers inhabit that channel) and ask anyone to recommend an arc.

Now it's been months since i14 went live and they could only find three arcs "worthy" of Dev Choice during that time? Though now that the associated badge is gone from the game it seems that a lot of people stopped caring about getting it.

That's what I said to him too.

Unfortunately for those fans of his thread, TerminusEst13 ditched us all for Champions.

So the Devs claimed, but the last couple arcs to get Dev Choiced since i14 closed beta were ones that never showed up on the forums, at least not here. I remember a thread popping up right after one where no one from this forum could remember having ever heard of that arc.

It's becoming par for the course now after the last issue. Remember how many complaints there were about the Reichsman TF/SFs in issue 15 and how they trampled all over canon? Then it was admitted that the Dev who wrote them not only was ignorant of much of the game lore and apparently nobody checked over it to catch these things before it went into Beta and ended up going live?

What the heck is going on with the developers these days?

This is a game, there is much more to a story arc than just story. You appear to have much more in common with Venture than you think: you both view story arcs as fanfiction rather than a game module. Story should not compromise gameplay and gameplay should not compromise the story either.

Maybe you two will get your wish and AE will become a ghost town where you can sit around and be smug at each other.

Now what the hell do my reviews have to do with this and how was anyone to know that you were talking about that and not this conversation? If anyone needs to learn how to communicate, it's you.

You're right, the AE buildings were effectively empty for most of closed beta. Most of Issue 16 is the Power Spectrum and the SRSLY/4XP system. Aside from a few UI enhancements, AE didn't get anything worth testing until this XP nerfing appeared in the last week of closed beta.

How 'bout I refresh your memory.

Hello Pot, this is Kettle calling to tell you that you're black.

They agree in that I expect a critter who is tougher than a stock critter should certainly not be giving LESS reward. Standard is definitely not worth only 75% and a Hard foe who has access to powers like Rage should definitely be worth more than 100%. An Extreme foe with mag 10-16 mezz protection is certainly not worth only 100% either.

Now I'm not sure which is worse in the "only my opinion matters" department, you or Venture.

I find this line of thought funny yet sad.

Do you think that the farmers are actually going to delete their farms and stop clogging up the search results? They're going to be either farming stock critters like they always have been (making this whole nerf bloody pointless) or leave AE entirely and use the new license to farm difficulty system on the usual farming mission. Story arcs don't expire, take a look at how many broken and unmaintained arcs there are in the system. Do you really think someone is going to go through the database and delete all those farms?

Then there is the issue that once people realize that custom critters give so much less XP when balanced in a remotely fair way, they'll either avoid arcs that list Custom Groups entirely or simply abandon AE. Then there are those who don't know what's going on and will simply 1-star those arcs for having poor XP. It's not just XP that is reduced by this, influence and tickets are reduced as well.

I've said it for the record before, even I don't want to play arcs if the XP is crap or non-existent. I don't care how good the story is, I only have so much time to play and I like to see my characters level up at a decent pace while doing so. People want good story AND good rewards. They're also getting tired of idiots who think that the two are mutually exclusive.

This is just plain and utter nonsense. The whole big XP penalty thing for all-boss groups is more than enough to kill most AE farming. This whole poorly conceived XP scaling is just a kick in the teeth to those who weren't farming it to begin with. Anyone who agrees with this system is friggin' naive as all hell and just as stupid as the Dev who came up with it.

If the Devs didn't want us to use many Customs then there would be a hard limit in the MA editor rather than just a memory limit, which easily allows you to fit 17 customs into a 4 mission arc without sacrificing much in terms of clues and setpiece details.

Customs were hardly being farmed at all to begin with. It was Rikti Comm Officers, then Hami Mitos, then Freakshow, etc... This change is not going to do [censored] to stop farming and only hurts story arcs unnecessarily.

You're not the only one who feels like they've had a bait and switch pulled on them.

MA is the only thing that drew me back into this game after issue 13. If this crap goes live then I'll be taking down my arcs as I head out the door. They can take all of Issue 16 and shove it, I don't care about all the power recoloring stuff anyways.

So you're happy that a custom critter has to have at least 5 times as many powers as your average stock critter to give the same amount of XP?

We need a straitjacket over here.

Contact: No, you can't have my cell phone number yet. In fact, I dropped my cell phone into the Sewers earlier today. Go down there and beat up 50 Rikti, I'm sure the last one will have the phone.

Except the funny thing is that on my last Citadel run, while the bases were at the same door and all Council maps the actual layout was totally different.

Says you!*

* Ok, so they're not technically lizards.

Well the ******* forum ate my reply and I can't be bothered to retype out all of my counterpoints again. All I'll say is "way to miss the point" several times and leave it at that. Apparently you're not the target audience for this arc anyway.

Screw it, I have the time and am annoyed enough.

1) Complaining about grammar is meaningless without examples of what was wrong. If this is another case of whining about speech mannerisms and claiming that fictional characters should all speak perfect English despite most people not doing so in reality, then we're already done here.

2) Lack of common theme because there was too much variety in powers? Variety is a major part of their theme! They're essentially a group of min/maxers. Would you rather have had the original issue 13 beta version where everyone had Energy Aura and did lethal damage? I suppose that would have been common enough for you.

3) If you expected tons of bosses who a single player (and most AE players are solo anyway) would never see then you picked the wrong arc. The point of this group is to do what most canon groups fail at, and that is to provide a large variety of minions and lieutenants. If you just wanted to see the same couple minions over and over so you could have a different boss in every spawn then just go fight some Tsoo.

4) Sorry you didn't like mission 3, usually that is the one I get the most positive comments on. People seemed to like seeing the critters exhibiting some personality as they explore human culture in their downtime and show how the minions aren't taking this whole endeavor very seriously since the player is the only thing that really poses a threat to them in this story.

5) Not the first time I've heard that the fourth mission map is big. Sorry, but the Devs still haven't put the smaller version of that map into MA and it's also the most linear Rikti map available that has a portal chamber in it. All other Rikti maps are bloody mazes.

Nope, no one ever gets to fight Tub Ci. But villains can get him as an ally.

Actually, you do get to fight the Petrovic brothers but they just don't stand out from the rest of the Bone Daddies. They're Marrowsnap and Marrowdrinker.

The Tsoo don't really need help on that, they already have over a dozen different bosses with different looks and powers. The problem is that they don't spread them over enough of the level range and some bosses don't spawn as often as others.

Very good point. Except for an mid-level, easy to miss one-shot mission where a bunch of CoT captured some of them you never get to see non-hostile PPs and they don't help you in that mission either.

I like the idea of that. Already a while back someone even tried to rewrite the entire Positron TF in only five missions using MA. I don't remember if that arc is still up.

I also want to see them get back to doing a zone revamp every issue or every other issue. We got the Faultline revamp, the Rikti Crash Site overhaul, the Hollows revamp, and then they just stopped. Striga still needs a hospital and Dark Astoria is long overdue for some zone contacts and a TF/Trial to give some actual closure to the whole Banished Pantheon thing.

Seriously, I never intend to run Mercedes Sheldon again. Whoever wrote those arcs should be whipped.

It's because the interface only shows the averages as rounded up or down but it still sorts them without the rounding. As such I have a 4-star arc with 148 ratings that is several pages behind other 4-star arcs with only a few dozen ratings.

/unsigned

Even in a single-player game like Fallout 3 that has such annoyances in the DC area where I can save, quit, and reload later I'll still use fast-travel all the time once I uncover the metro locations just to avoid all the tedious running and maze navigating. Once is more than enough.

It's especially nonsense in that game as those rubble piles are not nearly so high to be unclimbable, just adding fake length to the game.

That doesn't excuse numerous situations where you need to cross the city to talk to some old contact whom you have the cell phone number for, especially when they have nothing physical to give you. In fact, if the new contact apparently knows them so well then THEY can call them!

Really, you can't find anything but farms in MA's search?
* Select Rating 4-stars and/or 5-stars
* Select Status "Looking for Feedback" or "Final"
* Select Lengths greater than "Very Short"
* Maybe choose some keywords, such as "Solo-Friendly"

Any of those will filter out the vast majority of farms, the people who write those don't set so many details. Learn to actually use the search beyond the default "Find Everything!" settings.