Texas Justice

In an arc I recently ran, and really enjoyed, I walked into a one room map posing as a Biker bar.

Gang War erupted all over the place.

Of course, being a blaster, my immediate first reaction was TROW FIRE!!!!

So of course, I popped off a Fire Ball and went to town.

Had a rollicking good time and enjoyed every second of it.

Of course, talking with another player in tells I was told that since she was stealthed when she went in she just sat back and watched the Mayhem commence.

Yeah, I had my Cloaking Device on when I went into the mission. Hitting Hover instead of Fire Ball would have given me a really nice view of the carnage that ensued.

But that is not the way of the true Blaster.

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I think it only applies to the recent Booster Packs, but don't quote me.

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QFT












Yeah, it was fun dressing down the Best Buy clerk, but the guy shouldn't have ever let anything like that spill out of his mouth in the first place. The best part was the female employee laying him out like a baby on a diaper changing station and watching him slink away all red faced to the very section she said he had any knowledge of.

Besides, she was kind of hot, and I think he may have suddenly realized he no longer had any chance at ever being more than a co-worker.

I believe, though I could be wrong, that the second item is a bug they are trying to work out with the mission objectives.

As for the first, did you put this Civillian into a Custom Group? If so, is it by chance the same group as the Minotaurs are in?

What are each of the settings (every field name and setting may be useful in finding the cause of the problem and possibly a quick solution)? Heck, give as much detail about the names of your custom groups and anything else in the mission. If you want to keep some mystery or not give too many details, refer to the custom groups as CustomA, CustomB, and similar, but make sure you are consistent if you use a replacement term like that.

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stabbity stab stab stab


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That is my line.

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You were taking too long. Stabbity stab stab stab's need to be delivered in a timely manner to the offense.

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I won't know about the Magic pack parts for a while. I'm going to hope that the local Wal-Mart has the Architect Edition when I stop in at lunch tomorrow. If it does, I'll try to check tomorrow night, if not it will have to wait until I get a chance to drive the 30 miles to the closest Game Stop then get back home and apply the codes.

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Well, the local Wal-Mart let me down by not getting any copies of the game in.



However, I had other things come up and had to make the 30 mile drive anyway, so I stopped to see what I could find.

Best Buy surprisingly got 10 copies of the Architect Edition in. I bought 2 (1 is for a friend that is wanting to try the game on her Mac) and they had 4 left. I was asking one of the clerks if they stocked the PlayNC Time Cards, and he replied "No, we only stock for WoW and LoTRO because no one plays those other games. I play WoW and that CoH game sucks bad." My response? "Really? Why is it then that a new retail edition of the game was released yesterday, you received 10 copies, and will have only 4 left after I buy these? And since when did WoW ever allow you to create your own missions that ANYONE that plays the game can play? It sucks? I guess that must be why this thing is almost flying off your shelves and all of the WoW space is still jammed full?" One of the other employees overheard this and started laughing at him. She told me "Don't mind him, he's an idiot. The only games he knows anything about are the pre-teen games for the consoles. You know, things like the Barbie games, Nicktoons, the Disney Princess games, stuff like that. We keep him away from the real games because he's too stupid to know what's good and what isn't." She and I shared a laugh as he stormed off toward the console games section again, so all was good.

Anyway, the 2 GameStop stores each had received 1 copy of the game, both still in stock. They told me they get very few PC game people coming into the store so they don't even get to carry the game time cards except for WoW, and they seldom sell those. They did have one City of Villains 60 Day time card in stock that they've had for as long as they can remember.

The Wal-Mart in that city hadn't gotten any of the AE editions either, and it's a much higher volume store than the one where I live. The clerks looked at me like I was crazy when I asked about it since they'd never heard anything about the game. Yeah, WoW and LoTRO slots full, nothing else of any consequence on their shelves.

The local Target had mostly empty shelves and aisles (including a noted lack of customers). The employee I finally was able to find for Electronics said they'd never even gotten in any of the time cards or gift cards or whatever it was that most Target stores got a while back. He heard of them from people at other stores, and had plenty of people asking for them, but they weren't sent any from their warehouse. They were told that they were too low volume of a store to put them in.

A sad commentary on my little part of the world, I know. But, it's home, so I'm happy with it. Besides, it's a short drive (in Texas terms at least) for me to get to Austin, Corpus Christi, San Antonio of Houston. I can deal with it.

Besides, now I've got my AE edition and can use it to get the Magic pack. I've already got the Cyborg pack so it will fill my spaces. No Wedding Pack. Weddings and marriage are scary. I'll stay away from that one still I think.

I'm not sure I could come close to answering your question, so I won't try.

What I CAN do is ask a few questions of you that might give others that read the thread an idea of what may alleviate the problems.

What size monitor do you have?

What is your Screen Resolution set to for (most likely) Windows?

What is your resolution set to in the game itself?

Are you running in Windowed mode?

The answers to these questions would likely give others a good shot at helping you solve the problems.

Good luck, the creation side of things is a lot more fun than I expected it to be (for me).

Set the surrounding Enemy to Single. I forget the exact wording of the setting name, but you want Single as your choice. This will make your Ally stand there waiting for you.

Unfortunately, due to map spawn placement points, you can't guarantee he'll be the first thing you come across.

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With the box version, I get a month of game time, a version of the game with all the patches so far to make reinstallations easier in case my hard drive and backups fail, and a pretty new box to go along with the other City of Heroes boxes I have.

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And a savings of five bucks off the booster pack. It's probably the smartest way.

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EDIT: And where are you seeing this online version? It isn't showing in the online store yet.

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I think I saw a thread that they were flooded with people trying to buy it earlier (but I'm too lazy and old-man brain-addled to remember exactly where). They might have borked the NCStore.

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It's the new Magic Costume pack that is jamming up the store. The Architect Edition isn't listing on the store site at all.

And by jamming up the store, it's the purchasing and applying process that are jammed up, not the ability to see what the store is selling.

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Take your cash to a grocery store/kmart/walmart/target and buy an Amex/MC/Visa gift card and use it to buy the online versions. It's cheaper that way too as you only have to pay $9.99 instead of $19.99 for the Architect version.

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What you fail to understand is that I WANT the Architect Edition, not just a silly code.

Besides, I have plenty of Credit Cards that work perfectly well for purchases. No need to rip myself off buying cards like the ones you mention.

With the box version, I get a month of game time, a version of the game with all the patches so far to make reinstallations easier in case my hard drive and backups fail, and a pretty new box to go along with the other City of Heroes boxes I have.

EDIT: And where are you seeing this online version? It isn't showing in the online store yet.

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Found by playing with the search function for a little bit.

Total searchable arcs: over 20,000
Arc IDs: well over 60,000
over 2/3 of all published arcs are being unpublished for one reason or another.

Arcs with "Smurf" in the title or description: 5
Arcs with "Cullen" (Twilight) in the title or description: 3
Arcs with "Where's Waldo" in the title or description: 3
Arcs with "Snork" in the title or description: 0
Arcs with "Jedi": 0
Arcs with "Buffy": 1


List your own fun searches, remember the search function isn't the best, so it's sometimes hard to find a good search term to find only what you want. Like "Oz" comes up with lots of partial word matches.

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There are at least 6000 missions with Jedi in the title. They just use a Mind Trick to not allow you to see them in the Searches.

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I haven't checked, but I doubt it yet. The Cyborg pack stuff wasn't in there.

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I could have sworn I saw the Cyborg pieces there. I know that after buying the Aura pack that I had the Eyes lasers and A.C.C.A. HUD available.

Maybe I saw the Cyborg parts after buying the Costume pack. I just can't remember now.

I won't know about the Magic pack parts for a while. I'm going to hope that the local Wal-Mart has the Architect Edition when I stop in at lunch tomorrow. If it does, I'll try to check tomorrow night, if not it will have to wait until I get a chance to drive the 30 miles to the closest Game Stop then get back home and apply the codes.

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I have also. Someone also told me that auras really suck up the space, as well.

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I have not been able to do auras on my characters, except the combat aura. How do you access the rest of the auras?

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Purchase the Aura pack from the Ticket Vendor. It should be one of the items in the purchasable Costume section.

stabbity stab stab stab

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I had that issue untill I got ALL of the unlockable costume stuff. Now it only happens every once in a while and seems to correct it well.

<>
JJ

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Did that. And the 'correct' option makes it look nothing like my costume. I r a sad panda.

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Unfortunately, some of the costume items are no longer in the game, are renamed, or just moved into a different spot and the Tailor screen can't figure out what it is.

What I did with TJ was to use the Attempt to Fix button, then go through and manually correct the settings.

Unfortunately, some of the face options and masks have gone so I can't get things "exactly" as they were when I started.

Also, it's a bit difficult to remember exactly what I selected almost 5 years ago in some cases.

Once I get it looking like I want it, then I save the costume (often with a slightly different name) and then use that one unless I want to start with my base model.

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Oh, that's easy. Don't edit it in the saved unpublished arc, edit in the published arc (Under "My Creations/My Published Arcs" I think it's called, buttons should be there to do so). Do not "unpublish", do the "republish". It retains the ratings.

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It's NOT that easy. I had done these steps exactly, and the arc wound up there twice, with the unedited one with a new number.

I'm not worried about the ratings going away if I unpublish, edit, then republish. I'm not doing this for the ratings, just a frun mission. However, having it there twice with two different versions and numbers is a bit of an irritant to me.

Since I'd already advertised the ID # to a few friends, I didn't want to unpublish/edit/republish and then have to send them the new ID.

Ah well. Maybe someday it will all work itself out.

Thanks for trying to help though. It's appreciated even though it wasn't a working solution.

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It really doesn't matter what order you create the objectives in...

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Unless they've fixed it, it does. Tons of people getting those "objective loop" errors when they don't put them in the right order.

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Odd. I haven't run into that and I put my objectives in rather willy nilly in at least one mission.

Is it possible that the Objective Loop is caused by setting the triggers into a loop accidentally? That would seem to make more sense to me.

Anyway, I'll take back my comment until it can be confirmed to be correct. If it turns out I'm wrong, I'll make my apology now.

Mea Culpa

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I have to disagree with the original poster, I may only test my arcs once and fix any of the outstanding bugs before publishing but I have add my vote for the badges. You get a lot just by testing your own arcs, and as to those who publish half baked arcs to get tickets to unlock content I say this:

Why not play someone elses arc? You get tickets from those too and help support the system as a whole if you rate and/or comment on them. The only purpose of playing your own Arcs solo, that I can see, would be to rate your own work and I find that unethical. Granted no one's taken a look at mine other than the exploiters who want me to rate there's yet and a single vote could help, but that isn't for me to make.

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For the bolded part above, I'll make this comment. Apparently the Devs think it is unethical as well. You cannot rate an arc you created.

When I started looking at needing tickets for some things in my arc, my first thought was to go run some arcs created by other players. I started looking at Very Short arcs that were by people I knew or knew of from the game and the forums.

I think I had the tickets I needed after the third arc, so I just went and finished my arc then. It got me some badge credit, the tickets I needed, and got some goodies for the arc creators as well. Win/Win. At that point, I bought what I needed for my missions and wen't back to editing my arc and testing/re-editing/testing/re-editing/testing ad nauseum.

Once I was finally satisfied with it, and had gained several Virtual Badges in the process, I published it then ran it live.

Of course, at that point I found an error so I hit the Edit button and made a minor correction. Now I need to figure out how to get rid of the duplicate arc with the same name and wrong data. Oddly enough, the incorrect one has a newer ID number. I would have thought the edited version would get the new number, but I guess it makes sense to the programmers somehow.

I'm definitely going to have to look for more information on how to correctly Edit a published arc without changing the Arc number or getting a duplicate Arc with the same name but a different number.

Not a problem. I believe Studio B is mentioned during the different Introductory AE missions, but I could be mistaken.

If you stand in an AE building looking at the Holographic Contacts and the Data Stream, edge to the left a bit so you are seeing about half Data Stream and half the wall/understairway area beside it. That thin brown door is the entrance to Studio B. Also, if you turn a bit to the left, you will see the doors to, I think, the Medical Bays where you rez if defeated in an AE mission.

Well, this is how it is on Heroes at least. I would assume the layout is the same for Heroes and Villains.

NO powers work in Studio B, and I think I've seen a maximum of 4 people in there at one time.

Maybe in the future we'll get an option to add an AE computer interface to our SG Bases, but it will likely be a while. I'm almost afraid to find out what the requirements to unlock it will be, or what Ultra Rare salvage will be needed to craft it.

And welcome back to the game.

Once you have your different objectives set, you can use the Completion of those objectives as triggers for another event or objective.

I don't recall the exact title of the section, but it's easy to see it if you start with your second or third objective and start looking at all of the settings boxes and drop downs.

At least I think that is what you are asking for.

It really doesn't matter what order you create the objectives in, it matters on where on the map it is placed and what triggers, if any, are set.

This will likely be my only contribution through the Mission Architect, as I don't really consider myself a good story writer. I ramble too much.

Title: A Day with the South Texas Knights.
Arc ID: 42969 (somehow that number seems to make me happy)
Creator’s Global Name: @Texas Justice

Difficulty Level: It seemed fairly easy to me as a 50, and likely medium on the 15. Then again, the 15 is a pre-ED tank that I seldom play and could really stand to burn a freespec on.

Synopsis – Texas Toast and his pals are tearing up the South Texas Knights SG Base, planting malware on the computers, and destroying pr0n ... er ... data. Yeah ... that's it ... data.
Mission 1 Contains Boss, Ally, Defeat All Enemies.
Mission 2 Contains Boss, Collection, Ally, Defeat All Enemies.
Mission 3 Contains Boss (EB), Ally

Number of EB/AVS – 1 EB to fight, 1 EB as an Ally

Story Type – Humor ... strictly for fun.

Mission Count: 3 - all on Medium size Maps.

Estimated Time to Play: I really don't know. I only played it in testing mode with two characters. One was a 50 and one was a 15.

Note – This is purely an ego-stroking arc that will let people team with Texas Justice, Eyes of Texas (non-Hami Raid costume), and other alts of mine while fighting my villains. People comment occaisionally that they never get to team with me except for Hami Raids, Ship Raids, and very rare instances when I'm trying to help someone else level up on a 2XP weekend or during some event. Now you can team with TJ all you want, or don't want as the case may be.

It is intended to be humorous and light-hearted, even though it turned out to be longer than I planned. I also only tested it solo, of course, and have no idea how it will scale with teams.

I'm not doing this for the ratings or feedback, just to indulge myself a bit and play around with the new features.

I hope that you at least have a bit of fun with it.

I know I had fun (and frustration) making it.

True, it would be nice to have an access console in the SG Base.

In the meantime, you can go to Studio B which is much quieter since all powers are suppressed.

Also, it gets you away from the masses trying to play the missions while you are creating your own.

And, you don't have to have all the badges to get into it. Just look for the small door under the stairs to the left of the MA Contact holograms.

EDIT: Another thing to try is to go to less populated zones to access the MA. Atlas is a nightmare since that is where the initial contact is. And I'd assume that whatever zone the Villain contact is in is very over-crowded as well.

Try Faultline or Brickstown maybe. Possibly Independence Port. I've been working out of Founders Falls for a few days and it hasn't been bad, but it's getting busier. Villain side you'll have to experiment for yourself. Or just try finding whatever zone has the least people in the AE building.

Set one of the goals as Defeat All Enemies under Basic Goals. Then you can select the condition for the Boss Fight as Completed: Defeat All Enemies.

There is a field called RewardText. Somehow it has too many characters. Likely it is because you had extra spaces in it or a paragraph spacing and the HTML tag it entered caused it to exceed the maximum length of the field.

I had a similar error come up last night and it took a bit to track it down. It was due to a paragraph spacing being translated to HTML and exceeding the limits.

What I would do in your case is to go through any field that has anything to do with a Reward, click in the box and see what the numbers at the upper right of the box say. You will likely find one that is something like (102/100) or similar. Just pare down the text a bit so it is under the maximum character length for the field.

You might also want to open the .STORYARC file for the mission using Notepad or another text editor and use the Find feature of that text editor to search for RewardText. This should let you see what the line of text is to find it easier using the MA Editor. On a default PC installation of the game, I believe the path to that file is C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\Missions and the file is named however you saved it. For example, if you named it FREEM when you saved it, the name of the file is FREEM.storyarc in that folder. If you haven't saved it with a name yet, there will be a autosave.storyarc file if you have enabled the auto save feature. If you haven't yet enabled the Auto Save feature, I'd recommend doing so as soon as possible. And remember, save often, save again, save, save, save. It's a hard lesson to learn, but well worth it.

If I knew exactly which fields were named what, I'd be able to give a better starting point. Maybe in a month or two I'll get it all figured out, if I keep messing with the MA. Maybe someone that knows the fields better will answer Soon™ and give you a better idea of exactly where to look.

Good luck.

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This is an awesome set I plan to buy ASAP. Keep up the awesome, Jay!

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2 possible fixes for the robes (that i'm sure won't work but maybe will help inspire?):
1: Instead of a single robe that covers the entire body, perhaps it should be split up among multiple body parts, so to have a full wizzard robe one would have to select a robe option for chest, arms, bottoms and feet individually, that way the robe could "stretch" around each individual body part like skirts and kilts do.
2: If that doesn't work... What about a split robe, asian style where the robe is closed at the chest but open at the sides of the legs? Kinda like wearing 2 trenchcoats or capes one backwards. There could even be 2 variants, one starting at the shoulders and one at the waist.

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A Waist Cape? Are you serious? The Devs would have to be out of their minds to implement a costume piece and call it a Waist Cape.

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Forgive me if this is too obvious, but if they look that bad, why not simply prohibit certain ATs or power sets from taking them?

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Let me clarify something here, because everyone’s taking Posi’s joke about Martial Arts a bit too literally. The only animations that robes look okay with are the basically the ones where you stand around fully upright. So the idle animations, a handful of powers, and a number of emotes. They get trashed pretty quickly the second you go into even a basic combat stance, much less something as extreme as taking a knee to rest. There are numerous core animations (animations that are shared between all player characters) that would be problematic with attempting to add full length robes to our current player model skeletons. That's before even getting into specific powersets or ATs.

This is not a limitation because of Martial Arts. It’s an issue with all player characters.

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So why can't you guys just make a special set of animations for anyone in a rob, such that anyone who takes a robe costume piece never moves their legs more than with small steps. I mean, you'd only have to make special versions of what, 80 or 90 percent of the animations? That doesn't seem so bad...

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You have to factor in not only power animations across all the sets, but also the flight animations, combat flight animations, jump animations, combat jumping animations, emotes, damage reaction animations, mez animations, and probably more that I'm not consciously aware of.

And that's just on the basic male model. Then you have to get in to custom animations for the females and the males.

We have people that can probably do the math and explain it faster than I can think of all the possible new animations that would have to be created.

Frankly, I'd much rather have the Animator(s) and Costume folks working on something a bit less stressful and time consuming. I'm sure they haven't been just sitting around twiddling their thumbs of late, so I'm sure BAB and Co. will have something to amaze us with Soon™.

Oh look, someone already beat me to the math.














Yes, I read the humor in your post. I hope you weren't offended by my humorous take on it.

I smell a long deceased equine somewhere anyway.