Vermain

It's probably another anti-farming tool to prevent people from making missions that are completely filled with bosses and no minions surrounding them, which makes them easy pickings.

1) Go to your Published Arcs tab.

2) Click on the one you want to edit - there should be an "Edit" button where the Play and Unpublish buttons are.

3) Go and edit it to your heart's content.

4) Press the "Save" button when you're done. This will republish the arc, along with any changes you've made.

You can add creatures from base enemy groups to your custom groups. Just go to the Group Editor, select the option to display All Characters, click on the Nictus group from the dropdown box, and then double click to add the things you want to your custom group boxes on the right.

I heard that it might not be possible to put in base bosses from custom groups, though. I haven't tested it myself so it's something you'll likely have to fiddle with.

Include clues, but don't make them vital to understanding the story. Have them along as vignettes for extra information. If you want them to contain important plot stuff, ensure that the information is also delivered via the contact dialog or something similar so that the player isn't left going "huh???" at a development because they didn't end up reading the clue.

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Maybe it's just because I'm used to having some ability to blitz missions [teleport, freebird, stealth, PFF], but short of using a kill-all or escort, that's always going to be the case.

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Yeah, I suppose if you're a Stalker or using Stealth or SS it doesn't matter too much. I just find that it's much easier to be at least somewhat linear when going through a mission if it's in a more compact space, like the office buildings or Cimeroran caves. This is likely just unconscious bias, though.

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By default search doesn't show you arcs you've rated already. So you may want to take that out. That's how I "lost" it.

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Yep, I'm really stupid.

I think they're talking about Footsteps Initiative. Strangely, it seems like it's been removed. I can't find it using search.

The reason they only use player powersets is, most likely, because it would be way, way too easy to make mobs that are insanely easy to farm if you could give them just Generic Pistol Attacks or whatever.

Some good powersets for normal minion attacks that I've found:

-Dual Blades. For whatever reason, DB tends to miss a lot and isn't insanely damaging.

-Dark Blast. Minions have this odd tendency to only try and use Gloom, for the most part, which makes them easily manageable.

-Sonic Attack. Though it can be dangerous in conjunction with other minion attacks, the Sonic blasts are generally horribly weak and don't cause many issues.

-Archery. Fully lethal damage ranged attacks. Very easy to overcome.

-Spines. The slow effects can be a bit tough, but, overall, not highly damaging.

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*They're long, and even if they're not they feel like they are.
*They're awful for kill-all missions, as enemies tend to work their way in between cargo containers, making them very difficult to find.
*Other mission objectives also sometimes spawn in hidden-away locations. They can also spawn on top of cargo containers.
*They're dull and boring.

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All of these things. My biggest problem with them is that, even on non-kill-all missions, it's way too easy to just hop/fly through all of the spawns and get to the end, which makes the whole thing feel very anticlimactic.

Barring getting a Dev's Choice, you're not going to be able to maintain a 5-star rating. It's the simple fact behind a completely subjective system like this, especially where a single 1 vote can dynamite a rating so terribly. I've yet to see a single non-Dev's Choice arc that's managed to stay on the front page with 5 stars for more than a few days. Don't take it as a slam against the quality of your work or anything, it's just that the rating system is so utterly wonky and star ratings, on a whole, don't work well for a system like this.

I frankly look more closely for 4-star rated arcs, because those ones have usually been played repeatedly and fine-tuned because of how many people have gone and played them, rather than just friends of the author.

I think defeat alls have their purposes, but they really, really should be restricted to fairly small, fairly linear maps, like tech maps. I still have occasional nightmares about trying to do those Defeat All missions on the ship map.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/postl...Board=villains

That forum is probably a better place to put this.

I know some outdoor maps can be used for it, but I believe it requires some sort of exit object, aside from the glowy red square. A map with a truck or whatever should work.

A Tangle in Time (ID: 2622) is a great deal of fun and has a very creative storyline behind it. It really should get more exposure.

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It's quite obvious really-- there are several rewards attached to getting people to play your arcs-- badges, tickets, and the possibility of HoF. What is one of the best ways to get people to play your arcs? Get on the front page. But getting lots of 5 star ratings isn't enough to do this, because there are pages upon pages of 5 star arcs. So, how do you get on the front page?

Get everyone else off of it.

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Was it someone in this thread who suggested a rating system where you can either choose to "recommend" a mission or not? I think that would be a vastly preferable system to what we have now. It's generally just a matter of time until an arc gets on the front page and is then hit with a 1 vote that sends it to page 258. It seems to encourage hostility.

Personal experience, but I found that something like Katana (or any weapon melee powerset)/Radiation Emission works quite well together for a Boss character. The constant recasting of the Radiation powers helps to dampen the normally overwhelming damage a custom Boss can put out.

The AI is a bit wonky as far as melee characters go, for whatever reason. What limited personal experience I've had seems to indicate that giving them Flight alleviates it somewhat, although that might just be the placebo effect. If you want to ensure that your companion is entirely reliable, giving them a ranged attack set might be best.

To be fair, I haven't run across that many blow-my-socks-off missions in AE that I absolutely have to run. I've had a few like Footsteps Initiative or Tangle in Time which were good to run, but, for the most part, they're not ones I would do repeatedly over and over, and actually finding more than a handful of good ones with the current interface is an enormous challenge. Not being able to sort by number of votes casts hamstrings this a lot.

Twoflower put it well. If you want to add more information, ensure it's relevant to either A) understanding why the bad guys are doing what they're doing, or B) making you hate them more. Relentless fluff is okay, but leave that for people to actively pursue outside of actually playing the game. Writing an extremely elaborate history and background for the mysterious Cajun Elves is fine, but if it's in a gameplay setting, you should really just be giving a few lines about them and their stats.

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hmm. Is there somewhere I can see said virtual tickets? Or are they just a badge counter? In otherwords can I spend virtual tickets?

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They're just for the badge. There's no way to spend them.

Personal experience, but I've found that around 8-10 custom mobs is about the limit. It also depends on how wordy your thing is, and how many objectives you have. For example, I've made two arcs with 8 custom characters each, by now. One's fairly wordy and has a lot of objectives, the other's fairly simple and doesn't have as much writing. One's at about 85%, the other's at 90%~. I could probably fit in one more guy on the first arc, but not the second.

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Why not publish a filler, and then keep republishing it? Description could be "work in progress, grabbing the fourth slot while I can."

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That could probably work. I'd like to see this solved or answered in one way or another, though, because having to use such a duct-tape solution for the spot disappearing is somewhat ludicrous.

I'd also still like to see, as mentioned, some sort of Hall of Fame section for any and all arcs that ever manage to reach it. If they're honestly and truly terrible and were upvoted by some massive outside exodus, I'd imagine it would be easy enough to police, considering how very few arcs will actually ever get to that stage.

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Any arc that deserves HoF will keep it regardless of what happens. If HoF can be lost to bad ratings, HoF arcs that achieve that rank through means other than deserving the status will drop off the list.

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See, I have a very hard time imagining any mission that doesn't "deserve" HoF status getting it, barring some kind of massive outside exodus to bump up the vote or something. Even the "well done" (I use the term lightly) farming missions generally don't get above 100 or so.

I randomly picked a Tech map for the final mission in an arc I had made and made it so that, after you accessed a computer terminal, a boss would spawn somewhere else on the map that you had to fight. It ended up that the boss would always spawn in the same room that the computer was in, so I was able to make a neat little "ambush" scenario.

Just get friends/SG members to vote-bump it up. There's really nothing sinister about doing that because, really, anyone who's gotten a mission with more than about 10 ratings probably got it because they asked their friends to help to get theirs noticed. With the number of arcs out there already (I think it's already in the tens of thousands by now, isn't it?), it's inevitable that a lot are going to get lost in the shuffle unless you try to bring yours to the front.

Alternately, just put your arc name/ID in your sig. It helps to expose it a bit and there's probably at least a few nice people on these forums who wouldn't mind bumping it up.