Venture

I've played it all but the LRSF.

Recluse is an Anti Sue: he is simultaneously a total doofus who couldn't intrigue his way out of a paper bag and loses all the time and the point around which the entire redside world revolves.

He is not even close to being an analog of Doom. At best he's an analog of Baron Strucker. Cobra Commander -- the cartoon version -- is an even better fit.

In my own defense, IIRC I was not in Closed in i14's beta (or got in very late), so by the time I got a crack at it all the heavy lifting had been done.

Fixed.

I can not count the number of times something I achieved in an MMO was made easier after I got it -- and I couldn't possibly care less.

The conclusion I draw from these numbers is that the standard for HoF is not merely too high, but laughably so. It doesn't even meet the expectations of its creators.

The loss of activity in MA is a separate issue (and IMO an unsolvable one, though that's a different rant).

Storm has -def, -resist, -tohit and a damage pet (which my Storm/Electric did not get to use on Diablo Navarra, probably the toughest AV/EB in any of my arcs, but she won anyway). The primary mitigation on Claws and EnB (at least on a Blaster or Corruptor) is not KB but "kill it first". (Diablo also snuffed it meeting the business end of my EnB/Dark Corruptor.)

If they were not support characters their "kill stuff" powers would be in the PRIMARY set. This is the point. You do things in this game by killing stuff. Characters to whom killing stuff is secondary are support characters.

Emphasis added.

Anything that does not ignore KD can be effortlessly killed by any character that took Air Superiority. Thus why I do not use EBs. If it's not supposed to be more than a speed bump there's no reason to go beyond Boss difficulty. An EB is just a more tedious bag of hit points that isn't actually more of a threat.

If you slap a status-resist power on an EB to fix that, the result is even worse than an AV from the control-AT's point of view, since the status protection will never drop. This is just another example of why the custom character editor is a failure, since it was built to create things that look like characters, which mobs are not.

As for the aforementioned contol-ATs...they are support characters and as such have no reasonable expectation of being able to solo. If you want to kill stuff on your own play something meant to kill stuff.

Oh, and I don't use "my Scrapper can solo it" as a balance metric. I do use "...but my Defender can".

As I use both a five-act length and AVs more often than not:

Five missions is not really that long, though it depends on what the missions are of course. I don't use defeat-alls (except in "Psychophage" which is bad on purpose) and two of my arcs have missions that can sometimes be resolved in less time than they take to load.

As for AVs, very often arcs need a notable foe for the big fight scene. That's no excuse to throw AVs at the player in every mission, of course, but anyone should be able to handle one AV/EB in an arc. I do have two arcs that don't use AVs, but (e.g.) "Two Households Alike" just wouldn't have the same punch if the Big Bad was a mere Boss.

...I can't watch.

Someone tell me when it's over, and the janitors have cleaned up....

If I was GMing, the visible head would be a hologram.

"Why We Fight", #253990", is my comedic entry. Others that come to mind: "Aeon's Nemesis", #161865, "Mercytown", #6017, "Teen Phalanx Forever!", #67355, "A Day in the Life of...Dr. Aeon", #1296...there are probably others I gave good ratings to, just can't think of them right now.

It doesn't work for tickets. It's a ham-handed attempt at a fix that does nothing to exploiters while capping gains for legitimate users.

It's called the Fermi method, and it's usually much more effective than you think. In this case I'm sure my estimate of how long it would take to clear the backlog is too low, as I deliberately lowballed everything else.

Then you catch zero exploiters, since exploiters won't submit their arcs for review. If you're not going to give any rewards or even just partial rewards for unreviewed arcs then every arc everyone writes will be marked Final on every publish so it will go into the queue. You're right back to having to review everything.

Automated tools won't help. Tune in to the rest of the thread. Automated tools won't catch any exploits you don't already know about, and if you know about them you can change the system to prevent their use in the first place. The arcs have to be evaluated using the Mark I Eyeball.

Show your work -- this is not at all obvious. There is no way one person can keep up with the traffic.

Except for the fact that it wouldn't have worked, sure.

Don't display any kind of aging data to anyone but the arc author. A potential griefer (which I don't seriously expect, there are better and easier ways to yank peoples' chain) would only be able to guess at which arcs to touch.

Just to clarify, I'm suggesting arcs that have not been played or accessed by their creators in 90 days (or whatever number) get purged. It shouldn't be necessary for the creator to refresh an arc if it's still getting played occasionally.

And exploiters' arcs are almost never reported, since they're only around while in use.

They'd have to know it was violently exploited, and they're never going to know. They can't tell if the same arc is being repeatedly published and deleted (previously addressed), either.

I'm still in favor of the 90-day (or even 180-day) lifespan for orphaned and unplayed arcs.

You would first have to find a way to code how to recognize "ways to complete it quicker". It is hard to see how a judging algorithm would have recognized the "unnoticed healing ally" problem that got us here if it hadn't been coded to do so in the first place.

Agreed, but the original proposal was to automate evaluation of potential reward rates directly, not "difficulty".

Further downthread....

Right, let me break this down for you.

We are rapidly closing in on 400,000 keys used. While the vast majority of those are no longer in the system (much of the turnover is due to the aforementioned "publish and perish" method used by exploiters, or idiots who publish their arcs to test them and then delete and republish), it is fair to say there are still thousands of arcs available. I don't recall the exact number that was given recently but it was on the order of tens of thousands of extant arcs, so let's go with that.

Assume there are 10,000 arcs (there are probably many more). Now assume that it "only" takes 15 minutes, on the mean, to thoroughly examine one, an estimate that based on my own experience in reviewing over 150 arcs may be charitably described as laughingly optimistic, but we'll roll with it. You're looking at 150,000 man-minutes, or 2500 man-hours, to check them all. That's 62.5 man-weeks, assuming 40-hour weeks. The last estimate I heard of Paragon Studio's staff size was on the order of 50, so if they put 10% of their staff on doing nothing but checking MA arcs they'll be done in about 3 months...and then they can get started on all the arcs that were submitted in that time.

That's using numbers that are almost certainly way too low.

How fast arcs are being added to the system is harder to estimate, because of things like the maximum number of arc slots and how willing people are to delete arcs to make room for new ones, but I think it is fair to say that we are getting on the order of hundreds of new arcs per week (proof does not fit in this margin). Every 100 new arcs would require 25 man-hours to vett with the above assumption of 15 minutes/arc. It should be clear they can't afford to put enough people on this to keep up. It's not laziness.

Yes, some people do have bad taste, and that's why we shouldn't listen to them.

I'm reminded of a story I heard about Space:1999. If you could get past the doofy science the show had some good stories in its first season. That changed in the second and last season, when Fred Freiberger was brought in to run it. Freiberger was the producer of the third and last season of Star Trek, and the (IIRC) fifth and last season of The Six Million Dollar Man. (You may notice a pattern here.) The scripts went from zero to suck instantly. (It didn't help that every single story in the second season was an obvious haircut of a Trek episode.) Freiberger, as it turns out, was of the opinion that writing for television was supposed to be bad. The more 1999's actors complained about how stupid the scripts were the more intractable he became. At one point, it is said, he literally chased a writer out of his office screaming "WHY DO YOU BRING ME WHIPPED CREAM WHEN I ASKED FOR S**T!".

That's the same vibe I'm getting here and it's completely counterproductive. The world has an overabundance of bad writing; there's no need to deliberately set out to add to it. To borrow from Chandler, if the game can be as good as "O, Wretched Man!" or "The Hammer of the World", or even "only" as good as "Kurh'Rekt Revenge" or "Iron Widow", then it can be even better. Nor is it in any way, shape or form necessary to embrace bad writing for the sake of enjoyable gameplay; the above arcs play just as well as anything else in the game.

So why ask for...sewer muck...when you could have whipped cream? Why settle for Michael Bay when you could have Christopher Nolan, or at least James Cameron?