Smurch

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I'd at least tone him/her down to a Boss level. No matter how strong this person is, to keep it balanced.

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This. At LEAST Boss Level. I can't tell you how ridiculous it is when I play an arc and rescue an Elite Boss ally who proceeds to finish the mission all by himself :-/

Yeah thanks for bringing me along as a spectator to watching your character do the mission for me. Really, I didn't want to play or anything anyways.

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Making an arc based on your character instead of the good of the arc is a major cause of bad arcs.

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I do believe most professional writers would disagree with your views. A great story is made by great characters.

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Yup, my upcoming arc, "The Revenge of Mary-Sue" will show everyone exactly how incredibly awesome my character is. I fully expect everyone to be so floored by the sheer awesomeness of my character that it probably be both Hall of Fame AND Dev's Choice. Because my character is JUST THAT COOL, and hey, I should know, cuz I made them, and I know they're just so awesome that no one will EVER defeat them. They'll be too busy being awed at how great my character is, and then they won't even see the big one-shot attack coming!

Don't worry tho, I've included an ally who is almost as cool as my character. He can pretty much complete the whole mission himself, but you get to watch these two totally cool characters fight. Man, you gotta admit that'll be pretty sweet.

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I have Steam already. And, obviously, CoX. Any idea if there will be a way to link the two together, so my friends can see when I'm playing?

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You can already do that by adding a non-steam game via the games tab, games pull down menu in STEAM. I've been doing it since January with mine and it shows me as "In non-steam game: City of Villains"

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I just had my boss say, "Ah, back to the old hospital. It's not like I haven't seen its insides before." It would be nice if they could teleport away at a given health level (I would like it even better if they could kill some allies and cause them to respawn stronger, but that's another story )

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If by allies, you mean guys they got to beat up, you can do that. You just need to have another boss fight, with a tougher version of that boss spawn as an objective when the first boss is killed.

Like "Beat Megaman" who is a boss on, say, standard, then if you defeat him, it spawns "Beat Megaman" which is a boss on extreme, etc.

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Yeah, the MA souvenirs are stored in a folder in your CoH directory, like your missions and custom mobs. On the other hand, it makes them very easy to dispose of, or just keep the ones you like.

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You can also delete them in game, by right clicking them in the window.

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To quote someone else here on the forums:

"It's like stream of consciousness without the consciousness."

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and

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I read it as: Okay, devs' balls in your court

God I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

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LOL! (in real life)

'Course, it wouldn't hurt for the devs to interact with the playerbase and let them know that the devs know the difference between people and missions that pursue XP and those that break the rules. Because a lot of *players* and *posters* either don't think the devs see the difference or don't think that there *is* a difference.

C'mon devs, it's time to settle this simple matter with a few short words from you.

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Here you go, direct from Positron:

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I should probably take this moment to talk about what the Mission Architect is not meant for. It is not meant for “easy leveling” or “badging” or “farming”. Those are things that we specifically wanted the Mission Architect NOT to do. This may be a disappointment to some, I know. The goal was to give creative minds an outlet to tell the stories they have in their heads. We didn’t want the system clogged with Farm missions, so actually finding someone’s story that they lovingly crafted became more a chore than it was worth.

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This Mission Architect primary purpose is for telling stories. We do not want people to spend days making a great story only to find it shuffled into a list of missions with titles like "Get your Rikti Monkey badge here", "10 badges in 5 minutes", "Down on the AV Farm", etc. etc.

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I tend to agree with these opinions . . .
With a major exception.

As the OP mentioned, . . . small maps. Banks, Casinos, pawn shops, etc.

I think heist size should usually be Defeat All.

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Yes, as long as the map isn't too big, if it's a nice small map (even larger than heist size... but not larger than small) the defeat all is fine. But I do not want to roam the labrithine halls of a large map, or run all over a huge outdoor map for an hour to find the one guy hidden behind a ramp somewhere. That's just annoying.

Smallish maps, defeat all is fine. Larger than that, then no.

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there is a quote from Gogol "if there is a gun hanging on the wall in act 1 it should go off in act 3".

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I agree you can over do it. If every minion and every person mentions him - it would be bad. That's why I don't agree with Gogol.

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FYI, the quote isn't actually from Gogol (although he may have quoted the reference himself). There's some variations of the quote, but all of them originate from Anton Chekhov and was "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

The concept, that anything introduced into the story should be used later or else it shouldn't have been focused on in the first place, is now commonly referred to as "Chekhov's Gun".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

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It's been what, two weeks? It's still shiny and new. Wait a while before you sing the doom song, yes?

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That is a win comment.

And to the OP... Quit being a cry baby. If you don't wanna do MA missions put it in your search comment. I can barely find MA teams at the moment on Virtue/Freedom/Justice/Victory/Champion, but I get tons of newspaper mission invites. (partially because all the farmers have their teams full constantly).


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I call BS on the part about virtue having more regular content team recruitment than MA recruitment. I see very little other than AE team spamming in broadcast on Virtue in every MA zone, and get nothing but AE team invites, most of them farms. The regular "lft" or "non-MA team" are rare by comparison.

Now I agree that we need to wait for things to shake out before we start yelling DOOOOOM!, but to claim that there are more paper mission teams looking for people than AE teams on Virtue is just plainly a false statement.

Finding MA teams on virtue is much, much easier than paper mission teams, across the board.

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Read the EULA and you will probably figure it out.

No Drug references

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Does Superadine count?
How about Council Super Soldier Serum?
How about Shift?

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I only skimmed the thread so I hope I'm not being unhelpful, but have you checked the villain group boss three is set to spawn alongside? By default it should set itself to 'same as boss' but more often than not it doesn't and won't let you forward without selecting a villain group directly. At least in my experience.

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I manually set all of the enemy groups for boss spawns to Custom, and selected the custom groups containing the specific boss for each spawn. That forces them to spawn with whatever's in their custom groups, instead of the "general" critters you select for the map (which is what happens when i leave it at "same as boss"). Solo or in a Heroic duo, or even a duo at the second difficulty level, this works fine, the bosses spawn just one boss and one to four of the underlings I've assigned to their custom groups.

Some of the spawns are working for duos above the second difficulty level. I suspect that might be a result of the level ranges of the underlings. Meaning, if they don't go above 50, they won't spawn when the team starts encountering level 51+ bosses. If that's correct, then I should only see this problem on that Boss #3 spawn, because the underling I assigned to his custom group only goes up to 50. If that is the case, I can work around it, I've got a couple of other options for things I can spawn with him (i have a little flexibility with this particular boss, due to the powers i selected for him. there is one minion i can use, if i have to, but i also located the same underling with a level range up to 54, so i may be able to swap that in and fix this completely... still don't know if it'll work on large teams, though).

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Yeah the only way I've found around this issue, unfortunately, is to make the unique boss an EB so that they aren't spawned whenever the MA says "Need to put a boss here".

I much prefer using the number pad keybinds method:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...n=0&page=0

I can't imagine playing an MM without these! I love the level of control over my pets that I have with this option, from issuing orders to all pets at once to giving specific orders to just one pet.

I've been in team situations, for example, where a secondary battle was occuring outside where the main fight was going on and I was easily able to send one or two pets to assist the secondary battle while keeping the rest directly on me to fight the main group. I can put my pets EXACTLY where I want them without fear of them running wild, and I can quickly rope them in if I do send them off to prevent them from aggroing random groups.

The granular nature of the keybinds really maximizes your tactical options when deploying your pets as an MM.

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Not really a bad mechanism, although Mayhem and Safeguard missions have been pretty difficult depending on AT.

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They're actually pretty easy solo or with a duo. With a big team, however, it just becomes ridiculously hard. A duo is about perfect for Mayhem/Safeguard, but solo is fun too.

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I thought the OP said NOT to pimp your own arcs.

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I did, with the full knowledge that it was inevitable that some would. You can't possibly ask for arc suggestions and not have several arc creators pop up to pimp their arcs, even if you ask that they don't. As a result, I'm giving more credence to arcs that are not the posters' own.

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There's a lot of arcs in the MA that aren't farms, though...

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but not many GOOD ones. At least not in comparison to the amount of really, really bad ones out there.

That said, thank you so much for the suggestions everyone. I plan to check out many of these arcs over the next several days. Keep the suggestions coming!

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I've been collecting ways to trick and aggrevate the stupid casual Arc runner. No reason in particular, but here are some fun ways to invoke a RAGE QUIT!!!!1:


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Fixed that for you.
Because I'd probably have quit and 1-starred the arc right after entering the first mission.

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Then I'd say mission accomplished! Does that make you casual or stupid casual?

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Mission accomplished? No "RAGE QUIT" here, just a thin sigh and a "ok time to go find a GOOD mission instead" thought. If you think that's a win... well then enjoy your "win". You convinced someone your arcs are worthless, had them laugh at your weak attempt at the MA, and made them sure they should ignore anything under your global. Good job buddy!

I never get stressed out by a game. I have enough real life stress. When I enter a stupid mission by mistake, I leave as soon as I discover my mistake so I can go about enjoying my time in the game.

Is "APATHY QUIT!" a meme yet?

And not sure what you mean by "casual" but I am assuming from the context it means "non-farmer". Because I am anything but casual with any aspect of this game... but I have better things to do with my time than farm.

It seems that the MA is filled - positively packed to capacity - with "Farm map!" and "Farm teh Freaks!" maps. The little that remains with very few exceptions seems to be either weak stories with poor or poorly executed ideas parsed with bad grammar and atrocious spelling, or a series of "OMG LOOK AT HOW TOUGH MY CUSTOM DOODS ARE! I MADE EVERYTHING ON EXTREME!!!!1111!!1!1!" arcs. And given that the rating system makes no discernment for WHY an arc was rated is it was, finding an arc I enjoy is becoming harder and harder as I think I've already played the three good missions in the entire thing.

So in the interest of finding reasonably balanced, interesting arcs with a decent story, I am soliciting suggestions. I would like to hear about good arcs that you have played and rated well that are NOT YOURS. I know everyone is sure their arc is the Next Great American Novel, but I'd like to hear from an unbiased third party, please!

Also, I think we can skip Dev's Choice arcs... they're already on everyone's radar.

So with that said, what good MA story arcs have you enjoyed recently?

A few things to include:

Name of the Arc?
Morality?
Brief Synopsis?
What did you like about it?

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I've been collecting ways to trick and aggrevate the stupid casual Arc runner. No reason in particular, but here are some fun ways to invoke a RAGE QUIT!!!!1:


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Fixed that for you.
Because I'd probably have quit and 1-starred the arc right after entering the first mission.

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It's not the powers that are annoying. It's the people who misuse them.

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Which is why I made this guide, to help the people use them better. Isn't that what all guides are for? I'm not telling people to skip these powers. Why would someone make a guide if they didn't think it would help people?

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In that case, be sure to include All Master Mind Pets.
If you're in a different room than your pets, while your team is fighting in yet another room... you're doing something wrong. And when they start getting murdered because they wandered off on their own to the wrong room, don't recall them and the three spawns they aggroed to the rest of your team who is busy with a spawn of their own.

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I vote it's a server problem.

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Actually I suspect it's a network issue in the data center that hosts the servers. If it was a server problem, we'd see more entire zones or servers crashing dead and booting people off. However, if their network throughput is saturated or simply has some excess latency, then when there's alot of data flying around, things can slow to a crawl, packets dropped, and lag results.

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Crap is banned on the radio, according to the fcc. Same with any word that emulates it. Kinda super weak, but there you go. Blame the fcc.

The irony is that the term comparing usually a female person with a female dog is perfectly ok for radio.

[/ QUOTE ]I hear my DJs say "crap" all the time. Must be listening to a different radio than you.

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It's not specifically banned. The FCC uses a rule of "Community Standards" when considering if something is an obscenity or not, and with few exceptions, this is not a rigid list. This is why we've seen a loosening of some content in television and radio, especially after hours, in recent years, because community standards are changing.

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<QR>

Phoenix is a mythical creature that's been around for a LONG time, since the Egyptian times. It's also the name of a city and various sporting groups. Kinda hard to call that one "copyrighted."

Gambit, however, is a little more of a clear cut case. It's a word, no special history applied to it. A chess tactic, a sacrifice to obtain a better position. Pretty much able to be copyrighted as a name for somebody, but not as a word.

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Names can't be copyrighted. No single word can be copyrighted. Words can be trademarked when used for a specific purpose, like as a name for a super powered character, for instance, but that's not copyright and entirely different rules apply.

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Now when will they admit the mistake that is i13 PvP?

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Someone mentioned a third kind of character that could wander back and forth from blue to red side; would this new "class" be like the 'grey side'?

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From the marketing release, I expect it will be called "Rogue". "let their actions determine their hero, villain or rogue identities"

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Seriously (again), for side switching; If it meant that:
1) its one way
2) only available at level 50
3) have to start over from level 1 ( a] thematically to prove youre serious and to gain the 'trust' of the hero community' and b] to give you a chance to earn badges that you cant get any other way but form low levels)


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None of this sounds likely from the marketing release. From what they say, it sounds like changing sides is a process, you will need to undergo certain kinds of missions to move your moral compass to permit you to switch sides. So, I expect it will be available from level 1 (the release said specifically all new characters start neutral) and from there on in you can switch sides as often as you can manage to push your moral compass the right direction.

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I discussed with Jack and Poz what to do, and we had a plan back then. We knew it would someday be possible for a villain to turn into a hero or vice versa

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Neither. It's not exactly a secret. Positron mentioned in an interview around the time of issue 7 that the "going rogue" system was being developed. http://coh.gamergy.de/files/issues/7...hp?language=en

Further, this past summer, NC Soft announced the Going Rogue system as being something upcoming for the game.
http://www.brighthub.com/video-games...cles/5156.aspx


So very.. very.. excited. *renews subscription*

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Methinks this was either an oopsy or a very sly move to get around marketing... either way, rumors are SO going to run rampant now.

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It's not exactly a secret. Positron mentioned in an interview around the time of issue 7 that the "going rogue" system was being developed. http://coh.gamergy.de/files/issues/7...hp?language=en

Further, this past summer, NC Soft announced the Going Rogue system as being something upcoming for the game.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/cityo...amp;pid=536558


1.) New high level Space Station Zones (PVE, PVP, & Co-op)
2.) Characters that do not wish to change sides are rewarded by becoming exemplary heroes or villains, and earning rewards not available any other way
3.) Heroes and villains who go to the other side can also act as Double-Agents
4.) Character Creator 2.0 includes Powers Customization, allowing players to customize not only the character, but also the actual look of its powers
5.) Players undertake missions that define their character's morality and steer them in a more heroic or villainous direction
6.) By switching sides (going from good to bad or bad to good), players can access content "on the other side" (heroes can experience villain zones and content, and villains can experience hero zones and content)
7.) Completely new low-level player experience/zones for new characters in which new characters do not begin a hero or villain, rather become one or the other through early gameplay
8.) New Spy Archetype, Power Sets & Costumes
9.) Universal Enhancement Slots - at level 50, these enhance powers to the character, essentially bringing them to a hypothetical "Level 60" once they have earned all ten slots

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Working elevators and multiple floors.
Windowscapes: moon, undersea, stars, maybe even lava.
Working doors, even if they're only roll-up doors, that we can lock.
An "arena" room where SG-mates can PvP with each other.
An influence bank.
A tailor station.
NPCs to staff the base with.
A real store to sell stuff at that doesn't require 5 million points of healing.
A Wentworth's/Black Market station.


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All of these would be high on my list. Functional items especially, like tailor and black market. And NPC staff is KEY for me. I'd also like to see:

Arbiter/trainer
Mission Architect station
Arena Kiosks

Come on Devs, give us a reason to go to our bases other than to drop off enhancements or pilage the storage. Help us make our bases living, breathing places full of things to do!