Venture

Why on earth would anyone want camp villainy, or camp anything, in the game?

Nothing is stopping you from making your own.

Of course, unless your last name is Coppola or Spielberg it won't be nearly as awesome as DR's.

It's computationally impossible. It would be tantamount to solving something called the halting problem, which is proven (in the mathematical sense) to be unsolvable.

You could come up with a heuristic (as opposed to an algorithm) that could guess whether or not an arc would be abusive, with varying degrees of accuracy, but that has its own problems, left as an exercise for the reader. You could implement some (it would pretty much have to be) real-time data mining that tracks arc plays and rewards earned, adjusting the "cost" of the arc according to how productive it is in use, but I'm guessing the devs don't have those kinds of resources available or they'd be in use now to catch abusive arcs on the fly. Even if they do, exploiters don't leave their arcs up anyway (they publish, play and delete) which thwarts any kind of evaluation over time strategy. You could implement a digital signature for every arc so the system could see if the same arc was being republished, but that's countered by changing non-essential text on every republish. You could try signing only the essential details (mobs, maps, a few others maybe) but that's countered by throwing in some "noise" (changing mobs that won't affect the exploitive value of the arc). Whatever you do here you'll always be at least a step behind the exploiters.

Yeah, it probably kept the game from going under.

But they were the ones everyone wanted to leave, so nothing of value was lost.

EQ came out way before Trammell. UO's PvP changes were yet another case of closing the barn door after the cows have left, graduated college, moved to other cities, got jobs, etc.

It already is. The idea of the bulk of the player base flocking to player-developed content has fallen flat on its backside. Too many people found the system to be full of vapid farms and/or poorly-written stories. They're not coming back for another try. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and AE's first impression was not a good one.

I think arcs that haven't been played or accessed by their creators for 90 days straight should be deleted.

This determination could not be made by any automated system, at least not a priori, and would have to be the product of a human actually vetting the arc. Leaving aside the fact that they don't have the staff for that, at that point you'd be better off just kicking the farms out anyway.

And we're probably going to keep advocating it, so if it bothers you I suggest you stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud.

Nothing is "settled". Everything is on the table. If Ultima Online could get elective PvP after its lead dev practically screamed at me on Usenet for a year that it was utterly impossible for the game to work with elective PvP, then there is still time for City's devs to come to their senses and realize this fire-fighting strategy they've been using has failed and will continue to fail. Constantly repatching AE to fight the latest exploit has not and will not stop the exploiters. It has and will continue to torque off the legitimate authors.

They can also cease to exist. Everything in an MMO is provisional.

They thought that it could not be done.
Some even said they knew it.
BUT HE DARED TO ATTEMPT WHAT THEY SAID COULD NOT BE DONE...

...AND HE COULDN'T BLOODY DO IT!

-- Benny Hill

As for the rest (TL;DR), the simple fact is that this is not a world-building game, nor can it be made into one. That's the kind of decision you have to make at the start. This means no, you can't be Dr. Doom, or even Dr. Doom Lite. You are not going to take over the world, or any appreciable part of it. Neither, on the heroic side, are you going to put an end to all villainy, user in a new golden age, etc., and your Reed Richards knockoff is going to be just as useless as the original.

Asking that we not have to deal with Contacts like Darla Mavis, never mind Hard Case, is one thing, but the simple fact of the matter is that this game is predicated on the players performing tasks at the behest of NPCs. Either limit your character conceptions accordingly, which frankly is not all that hard, or accept that this game doesn't deliver what you want and move on.

Or a mercenary.

Some villains.

The game can't allow you to do as you please. It's not possible. Even a game driven by player initiative as opposed to Contacts won't let you do anything other than mess around inside a defined framework. You need to adjust your expectations -- make characters that work within what CoV actually is, not the game you wish you were playing -- or accept that CoV doesn't do what you want (and likely never will) and move on.

Play "Two Households Alike" (#126582) and "The Christmas We Get" (#356477) and then call me heartless.

That cut scene is a cheap reach for the heartstrings. You want a canon heroic sacrifice done right? Two words: Sefu Tendaji. What we got in this arc was strictly amateur night, the equivalent of the grade-Z horror movie Spring Loaded Cat trick.

Yes.

Fixed.

As demos of the new technology the new arcs are fine; as stories, not so much.

Oh, rapture.

Eh, I only have a GT240 (which I just got today...about the best I could do without buying a new power supply). Limits the damage.

The vast majority of the customs I've seen are none of these three, never mind all of them.

Do you seriously expect to make friends on the internet?

But not if you could only place them as details.

The only way not to would be not to play other peoples' arcs.

Actually, as far as MA is concerned, not only do the poor uses of custom critters far outweigh the good, custom critters enabled people to not merely shoot themselves in the head, but everyone else too. Or maybe you hadn't noticed that it was abuse of customs that resulted in the current Patch From Hell?

For that matter, haven't about 90% of the problems with MA boiled down to abuse of customs?

To mangle Arbiter Fabulous, that is woefully inadequate "because I have to play your arcs".

I've reviewed over 150 arcs. I haven't seen a single one that would have been improved in any meaningful sense by adding more custom mobs. I have seen lots that would probably have benefited had the architect forgone using a custom faction and used a stock one instead. Stock factions are better balanced, have better diversity both in terms of number of mob designs and the abilities of individual mobs, and come with a pre-packaged background that is already familiar to the players.

There are two points here that everyone is going to hate but they're completely true. The first is that the custom critter editor was not designed for the creation of entire factions even if that was the intent (if it was, it failed); it was designed to create characters similar to players. The problem is mobs aren't similar to players. The editor will only produce things graphically that look like players, not mobs, which is not what you want when you're building an army as opposed to an individual. This goes for powers as well. You're limited to powers players can actually have and you can only choose two sets, not mix and match across the entire list (which would really screw balance if you could). Nor can you tune those powers aside from assigning mob rank. Look at how many mobs in the game this is not true of. You are hard-pressed to duplicate something as basic as a 5th/Council Boss in the editor. You can't even try to make a Zeus Titan. The simple truth is the system is best used to design individual characters, or at best a unit type to be added to a stock faction.

The other truth people don't want to accept is that providing more choices is not inherently good. If you provide the average user with the choice to shoot himself in the head he probably will. Then he'll blame you for providing the choice, and he'd be right. More choices are better when the new choices have the effect of providing more improved outcomes than worse ones. This isn't one of those changes. Adding more custom mobs isn't going to improve anyone's arcs, and there's nothing else to do with the space, so there's just nothing to get excited about here.