Turgenev

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What's an obama?

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A thing that goes Obooma

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I came. I saw. I laughed.

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We'll have ta reschedule Turg fer sure.

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Preferred start times are 9-11pm EDT Saturdays for me usually. If you can make this work for next Saturday (not the coming one), I think I can swing it.

One of my fav TFs too. I'm in NYC when this is running. I MIGHT be able to make it though, I'll just be on Verizon mobile broadband at the time.

Throw me down as pending. I might take out Blackest Light (lvl 50 Warshade) for this.

Okay, here's the list of conditions for the last mish:

1. Map = City of Mu unique map.
2. Release Captive: 3 spawns, placement at front
3. Destructible Object: Obelisk, 4 spawns, placement on middle (floor spawn)
4. Spawned Boss: Bru'kh, placement at Back, triggered by Obelisk completion
5. Spawned ambush, placement in middle, triggered by captive completion
6. Custom mob patrol, 3 spawns, placement at middle

The map details:

- 3 allowed any detail type. (1 Middle, 2 Back)
- 19 allowed ambush, boss, patrol or destroy object details. (2 Front, 15 Middle, 2 Back)
- 8 allowed rescue, escort. ally, or defend object details. (1 Front, 7 Middle)
- 30 allowed wall collection items. (5 Front, 20 Middle, 5 Back)
- 31 allowed floor collection items. (5 Front, 21 Middle, 5 Back)

So, first question here is, when they say the # of X instances allowed in front/mid/back, do they mean separate conditions, or do they mean the quanitites of those conditions? For instance, I have one condition of a captive, with a quantity of 3, set to Front. Acc'd to the rules for this map, it says "1 front". Since I could place it, I'm ASSUMING it means one "front" condition, vs one "front" quantity. ...make sense?

Dunno, but I like your hooking methods.

You got my global, Umbral. I'd recommend IRON, but our schedule's a bit light in COH lately (you're welcome to join for the interim 'til you've had a taste of our playstyle, or until you've found a better SG home).

If you want a more active SG, I could probably recommend a few run by friends which might pique your interest.

Ring me for a chat about IRON, or some other options. Cheers.

KD: My arc is still loading correctly after the server reset. What's interesting is that it first seems to have broken this past Saturday afternoon... I don't think there was a reset beyond the Fri morning maintenance, yeah?

Ulli: Yeah, the editor takes the characters, and allows you to display them properly in the preview and in the mish itself...

LaserJ: The last mish is set up like this. There are two "first level" objectives: Free 3 hostages (which has a conditional ambush attached to it), and destroy 3 objects (which spawns the end boss, Bru'kh). The hostages and objects are all padded at the "Front", with the boss spawn at the "back". This is using the "City of Mu" COT map, which is of middling size, but should be able to accommodate these spawns without overlap. I HAVE noticed that the hostages will spawn all over the place, location setting be damned. The obelisks DO appear to focus their spawning towards the front of the map however.

On the one time the no-spawn bug happened to me, I make sure to kill everything on the map, front to back, and check my NPC text for any location-triggered clues on where the boss might be. Nothing; it's like he didn't spawn to the map at all, unless he spawned "outside" and fell all the way down. (It's hard to miss this boss, he's noisy and visually busy.)

I've got a tweaked file that I'll upload the next time this breaks, see if it ameliorates it. What's "nice" is that if it breaks for one person, it seems to break consistently after that, so hopefully that will give me a clue as to a date-time.

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Thank you, and lest we not forget that YOU truly are the reason we are free.


/cheers.

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/cheers redux

(Odd, I thought I posted this yesterday...)

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Interesting thing though is CO has the feeling that it is the real COH II

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I don't get this feeling at all. If anything, the engine reminds me of Tabula Rasa with tights, and I've seen all of its iterations for quite a while now, where it went from OMG AWFUL to eye-wincingly bland.

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I think I managed to "break" one of my arcs as well, when I added some custom enemies that pushed the file size up near the limit. Suddenly a triggered boss on the final mission, that had been spawning fine during testing and for about 20 plays, started refusing to spawn. The arc was still playable, but people would fail it and tell me the ending sucked. So I had to take him out.

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This correlates with my arcs too. My final boss is a triggered objective (spawns after you destroy three obelisks), and would spawn very consistently in the back room of the last map during a week of playtesting with me and other people. Publish it up, and then reports start filtering in of people being unable to find the last boss... I was able to duplicate this once, and spent over an hour scouring the map for ANY clue of where the boss was, but no dice.

What sucks here is that this is a game-level fault, not a design fault. ;( Spawned objectives that are required for completing the mission can halt arc progress if they don't spawn correctly, and all it does is make the writer look bad.

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I discovered that my previously working arc was broken by feedback from a kind soul. It just wouldn't start anymore. I went into edit & it showed no errors. The Clone map that I was using was removed and I didn't see that in any Dev generated note or post. I have since republished but the removal of the map ruined the arc.

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Sam: Those were my exact symptoms. My map selections, however, seem to be the same, and I got no validation errors in editing my arc before reposting...

Still seems to be up as well. Someone mentioned the MA server restart as being a possible issue. I'll leave the arc exactly as-is and see if anything comes up post-Tuesday servicing (should be done very soon I gather).

Also: A very math-oriented forumite (Arcanaville) has kindly reviewed my arc, and suspects that some of the errors may be occurring on the final boss's text fields, where I dropped in Chinese (Traditional) characters for effect. I left them in place for now, but if it breaks again I'll upload a version with the characters removed. I figured they were "valid" since they could copy/paste fine and display correctly in the mission (whereas some other "alternate" text, like my first choice of Hindi, would not), but if it continues to fail, maybe it's not as valid as I thought...

*looks at the single star* Huh. Wonder what I did wrong by starting this convo? o.O

Anyway... yeah, I'm hesitant to point fingers at a text reduction, since (I would think) the MA auditor would kick in and check the file for any overages when I save or republish, right?

KD: On the publishing difference between machines, yeah, I'm kinda in limbo with that one. It's with this arc: I did try wiping all content locally (critters, villaingroup, other arcs, etc) and just holding the one .storyarc file in there, and its filesize dropped to about 97% (from 104%). Now, if I do the SAME thing on my laptop, I can get it down from 99% to about 94%... so again, unsure about the discrepancy, except for looking at "file size on disk", or something else the bit-brains might know about.

I guess the first problem here is getting a verbose error message, instead of just "nothing"... am going in now to check if it's still playable. See, the thing that bugs me is that it went through a full week without failure, then suddenly it started borking over.

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Plus, imagine what would happen if all zero rating were instantly nullified/ignored/cleared from the system...

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If they were all just changed to ones, I think we'd have a few instant Hall of Famers.

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Would be a nice way to kickstart the HoF arcs, huh?

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Don't know about the "zero errors" part since it hasn't happened to my arcs, but I've come a cross a few highly-rated arcs with many plays that won't start.

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Eva: Think you can post their Arc IDs? I'm kinda making this my pet project, so I'd be interested in seeing if they show the same behavior as what my arc seems to be falling into.

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Turg, it sucks that it happens to you, there is no excuse for that kind of behavior, but at least Dev's Choice arcs are locked at 5 stars.

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Eva: They're not. The DISPLAY shows them as five stars, but behind-scenes, they retain a "real" star rating. For instance, when the "Builder" series went live, I only earned the first 4 badges; I didn't get "Master Builder", which awards for 100 ratings of an average of 4 stars or higher. That's one of the gauges I'm using.

IMO, I'd much prefer the "real" star rating to be visible in an arc at all times, because it's unrealistic to "lock" an arc at five stars. If it's a perception issue by the Devs, they should "gray out" those stars, but have the raw rating available in the mission description.

Anyway, just sharing yet another angle of ratings griefing. The conspiritorial side of me thinks all of this (the farming blitz, the over-cooked drama responses, the star cartels, etc) is an attempt to sour our COH experience in light of new games coming out. But, as usual, everyone thinks I'm insane.

*puts tinfoil hat on to protect himself from VIPER psi-troops*

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One of mine broke, because the devs removed the Burning Forest map. And I do not remember seeing it in the patch notes.

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I guess I should be more explicit... does your previously published arc break for no apparent reason? For instance, if you edit the arc, does it show no error msg's? That's what I'm experiencing here, the arc itself is valid and HAS been played publicly, but suddenly it stopped being "playable"; if I republish it, it fixes it for a short time, then it breaks again.

I'm bringing it up here because, from the small group of people who've said they're having problems, they seem to be having problems with more arcs than just mine: Published items are suddenly non-playable, but show zero errors in the mission auditor.

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Post your grief story here, and lets help the other grief victims out there to give their stories a fair shake.

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Try wearing a DC star on your arc. I'll see two teams' worth of zero-stars vote me down all in one block (I know I didn't get stars because, when logged in, I'll collect them on the spot). No commentary, no critique, just 14-16 people who decide to give you hate. My first arc's stars is averaging somewhere around 3 stars right now, by my guess. Sure, I have people who give their reasons for not liking it, and THAT's fine; but from the general flow of rankings and positive commentary, I'd assumed it would be in the 4 star range from the positive/negative critiques that I've logged.

I'd LOVE to have it where a zero and one star force commentary, but then the concern becomes whether or not you'll do "star griefing" in retaliation - who knows, the system's a great idea, if you presume all gamers are positive individuals who act for the public good. The real world, in comparison, sucks. =/

Heya:

I'm investigating an issue with my second arc (Turg Fiction: Ghost in the Machine, Act II), where the following symptoms have occurred:

1. I am able to publish the arc without error, and get dozens of players to run through it without serious technical issue.

2. Roughly a week after publishing (starting Saturday, 5/24), the arc suddenly no longer becomes playable. You can search the arc out, click "Play", but nothing happens: No error message, no "Architect Options" button in the compass window, no contact appearing on the pad.

3. I can resolve it temporarily by re-uploading the arc, where I can then log out, pick the arc with another toon, and start playing. A short time AFTER that, though, it seems to fall off AGAIN, becoming unplayable with the symptoms described in #2.

It's weird enough to happen at all the first time; it's really ticking me off that it's happening repeatedly, and from the people who've commented, it's not just my arc: Other arcs appear to be having the same problem (Gulver and AquaTiger are two players who've mentioned the bug with other arcs).

So, has anyone had this happen to their arc, or seen it happen? I'd like to get some conversation on this to see how widespread it is, and see if there's a common element to the arcs having the problem. Please share if you have any productive commentary - thanks!

This is REALLY frustrating. I re-uploaded the arc again last night. Waited 10 minutes, logged out to another toon, set it as my MA arc, and it took, started fine. More or less what I did the other night.

I got the same "can't start it, no contact shows up" issue you did, about 8 hours after I uploaded it again.

Someone mentioned this is becoming more common, but damn if I know WHY. I'm going to start a separate thread on this...

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We will run three on this comin' weekend.
12 pm pst

3 pm pst

6 pm pst


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This'll be a problem for me then: I'm in NYC on Sat and Sun. =/ Sorry, Charlie.

Okay. As of 4am, republishing the arc seems to have fixed the issue (repub'd it like five times today, but no change, but suddenly tonight it works). Gulver, give it another try?

*sinks head to desk*

Republishing ain't working. Just submitted a petition. I may need to unpub/repub this if the petition doesn't turn up anything good...

FYI: Act II is now unplayable. Try to play it, nothing happens. Last played at 5:12pm EDT on 5/23... I sure as heck didn't make any changes to it since last Friday, when I pub'd it...

Bah. I hate my work schedule. ;(

Can I request a re-run on an upcoming Saturday sometime in June?

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There is more ta defendin then h4alz ... or at least I thought so until this thread ...

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Ahem.

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You, as a mighty healzorz who thinks you are the bee's knees will sign up.

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This contest will be for YOU the healzorz ta keep us the J-Force alive through out an entire task force.

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We will record the number of deaths at the end (yours included) and the healzorz with the lowest amount wins.

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Silly me, thought you were looking for a healzorz. I'd assumed the challenge here was keeping the Bactine flowing for your rag tag fleet of miscreants. If we're free to interpret the rules for "keeping you alive" broad, then I just might be up for this.

Lemme re-read your original post and see when I can fit in, if you're still runnin' it. More to come tomorrow. I'm mildly drunk ATM.

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For some reason, I can't start Act 2. I can start any other arcs but this one, I can't start.... Weird.

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o.O

AquaTiger just said this too. GAH, frickin' arc is CURSED. Okay. I'll try a republish later tonight; I have furniture being delivered as we speak, so it won't be up 'til tonight. I'll /tell you and AquaTiger when it's up for testing again.

This was working fine yesterday... I didn't make any changes!