dugfromthearth

the devs have already said that letting squishies get so much defense was a mistake. They haven't nerfed it yet. Apparently you are begging them to do it.

Aprosaath - in large part because I was recreating that armor piece by piece in my mind looking at it.

Lousy Day was great too

they were all good

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Am I the only one who thinks that the 15 minutes of playing the mission should be more interesting? And I don't mean clicking on 8 blinkies instead of 1. I mean having dialog inside them, or a series of steps to accomplish a goal?


The problem with bad ideas is they sound like good ideas until you think about them.

What you're asking for here is basically chained objectives. The primary effect of chained objectives is to make the player run all over hell's half acre to try to find where the new target has spawned. This loses its appeal very quickly, as in usually the first time you see it. If we could position objectives or at least get them to spawn in the right freaking regions this might not be so bad. That would, of course, depend on Architects to actually place the new objectives in such a way as to preserve some kind of narrative flow and not deliberately make the player run over the map four times, which some twits would do anyway.

I don't know if you've played my missions (they're on the page linked in my sig) but I do try to provide an ample amount of text and story. This gets complaints too, from people who don't want to have to read anything.

A lot of things people ask for are things that might work great in a dedicated adventure game but would rapidly lose their appeal in an MMO. Making the player solve a mini-game logic puzzle to get a Clue sounds like a great idea until the 20th time you have to do it. Then you're going to want to put your fist through the monitor every time you see one.

In short, things are the way they are for reasons, even if those reasons aren't immediately apparent, and if you're not enjoying the game it may simply be time for you to move on.

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I have played Asheron's Call - an MMO. And it had puzzles in the missions. From finding keys and levers, to answering questions, to mazes, and all sorts of things. It can and has been done and done well.

I agree that running back and forth on a map looking for a blinkie can be bad - especially if that blinkie did not exist before.

This is an MMO - emphasis on massive. There are players who like farming - killing the same demons on the same map over and over. There are roleplayers who stand in a park in game and roleplay. There are all sorts of players.

Given that MA has thousands of mission arcs written by thousands of players, claiming any sort of monolithic reason for content being a certain way is a bit silly.

There are farming arcs, challenge arcs, story focused arcs - it seems reasonable to think that out of a hundred thousand people playing the game, there would be interest in other varieties as well.

nope

it has been suggested that a writer's comments section in the missions would be cool for notes after the mission.

I can't wait for I15 - just to be able to search for missions my level.

Everything else I'm okay with. But clicking through lvl 40+ missions on my lvl 20 gets to me.

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yep.

instead of relying on 2 or 3 missions to tell the story - put it into 1 mission.

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There's a small problem with that. It can make the mission seem a lot longer than it is advertised.

I did one that was 'medium' with not a lot of info. Figured I'd take a chance. First it was a Kill All coupled with a Destroy 5 altars. Okay, got it. But when that was done, it was 'track down boss', which wouldnt' be so bad but the map was pretty twisty turning (it was a CoH one), so I finally find boss and down her. Then pops up "destroy 5 portals", and these are of course scattered in the mission.

At that point my 45 minutes for a medium mission was looking like an hour and half and I just quit.

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it is easy to chain a bunch of objectives - it is tough to do it well.

we may just need better tools to make it work properly

basically custom critters are not lowbie friendly.

Do not include anything tougher than Boss in a lowbie mission.

and arcs are either lowbie friendly or they are not. I've run a few that claimed to be lowbie friendly and then found an EB in the final mission (downgraded to Boss) that I couldn't beat.

If a lowbie cannot comfortably do the entire arc, it is not lowbie friendly

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given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.

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I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.

I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).

I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.

If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).

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I don't like boring missions, but I'm not very fond of people who make new topics about stuff they already said earlier either.

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really? Why not?

Are there too many new, never discussed before topics that mine might bury them?

I play MA and see arcs with 5 stars, or do Freakalympics which gets rave reviews from players - and they are dull and tedious.

They are what I call bookend missions. Someone writes a nice intro and a nice conclusion - and in between you grind through standard spawns until you reach the boss/rescue/glowie and then end the mission. You get 2 minutes of nice text to read between every 15 minutes of pure grindfest.

Am I the only one who thinks that the 15 minutes of playing the mission should be more interesting? And I don't mean clicking on 8 blinkies instead of 1. I mean having dialog inside them, or a series of steps to accomplish a goal?

I like combat in CoX, but grinding through 20 spawns that have no flavor or purpose other than to be a bump in the road is not my idea of a good mission - No matter how amazing the text I read at the start was.

yep.

instead of relying on 2 or 3 missions to tell the story - put it into 1 mission.

if there are decoys, don't put any nav text for the decoys
just name them the same thing.

then it will show that they are looking for only one blinkie, but they won't know which one

or just immobilizing.

rings of fire and the mobs can't reach you, and a controller is totally safe.

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Or, have it be automatic like it is in the AE

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yeah - are there people who are thinking "I really hope I can buy a +1 enhancement"

I can see wanting a +2 to combine with if you can save some money. But really +3 is what you want

post the text here

I just bought my first enhancements in AE.

It was a lvl 14 tanker and I didn't want to buy them - since I'd buy 15's that would get old fast. But he just didn't do enough damage and was having trouble hitting.

It turned out that in AE they sell you +3 enhancements automatically - so at lvl 14 he bought lvl 17 enhancements. That was so great.

I'd love to see this in the regular stores.

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Can't you just put a Hellion vest and bandanna on a demon and that's that?

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try it and show us what you get.

it isn't possible to do.

which sucks

in most MA missions I've tried with my blaster - range is a defense

most of the mobs are primarily melee, and they do far less at range. I find immobilize is really useful.

the occassional actual ranged attacker is usually quite a surprise.

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I've been looking for generic "Rogue Isles Villains" too, I'd like to pepper my arcs with them here or there since they're part of the canon, but we don't see them too often. I'd be sad if they were forever stuck in bank missions.

However, I think I know why you won't see them - being as most (if not all) of them are Bosses, it'd be very easy for them to be exploited as a farm resource. Just set up a regular defeat all mish with "Generic Heroes" and "Rogue Isles Villains" as the regular units, and ....

EDIT: The blueside version of these guys are "Paragon Heroes"

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I've seen an arc with the Atlas Park bank robber - so he at least exists in MA (although maybe he just remade him)

CoX RP features

Number of RP zones - 1
number of pvp zones - 4(?)
number of pve zones - a lot
number of RP task forces - 0
number of pve task forces - a lot
xp reward for rp - none
ticket reward for rp - none
merit reward for rp - none
badges for rp - none

I would say that the evidence indicates that RP is almost entirely ignored by the devs. PvE is dominant, followed by PvP - when was the last patch with a significant RP update?

When players earn Nukes and Shivans by RPing missions in RP zones, and earn XP from RPing and get some sort of tickets/merits/influence from RPing - they you will start to have some tiny shred of an argument.

AEr's - people who now only play AE missions

my latest is a norse "epic"

the contact is a tablet with an epic written on it (I have not done it in any sort of verse). There is no intro - you just read this epic, your name is in it, and the missions are part of it.

The text in the missions by the NPC's is not epic yet - I need to research a bit more for that.

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here is Dr. Clockwork, I have 2 versions in mind for him, a assault rife blaster with devices, or a robotic mm. the assualt rife will be powered by steam, with all the bells and whistles . the robotic mm, just fits
here is his look http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/f...rClockwork.jpg

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very nice

I think a macer with a wrench might do fine as steampunk

looks cool - nice pose and such