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deathsentry2012
Posts: 149 Arc User
Was just wondering if now with the focus on new content if Cryptic will look at allowing for user created content or will that forever remain a dead issue?
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- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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All the custom mission arcs that ranked top of the list were ALL farming ones. It was used more as a farming tool rather than the intended purpose of creating custom stories. When the reward-farming aspect of MA got nerfed to heck, the MA buildings all became mostly abandoned.
As long as there's a lack of appealing-enough rewards, there's a good chance the the majority of people aren't going to bother with it, no matter how awesome you make the relevant mission / gamemode / whatever.
Now, if there's a Foundry introduced for CO and it rewards both the creator and players playing and completing the custom mission arcs with merits / questionite / EXP, then by all means I'm alright with it. If it's introduced without meaningful rewards and panders to a small niche of players just wanting to create custom missions while not caring about rewards, then I say forget about it.
Ah such obvious no nothing BS being spouted here by someone who almost certainly left CoH after AE came out because the main thing it did was open up fast leveling to those not willing to submit themselves to power leveling super groups.
It was well known since the coming of the 40+ content in CoH that the big power gamer super groups would use bridge characters to rapidly advance others and the speed records for leveling at that time where under 24 hours from creation to cap. It was entirely haters on the casuals who hated on AE.
And while on other servers it did indeed become something of a untouched aspect, on virtue it was extremely popular to be used as a way to create personal story arcs and share them with friends or even just random RPers. Not to mention creating custom clues one could link to share the story in summary to others also a huge perk among the RP community which was among the largest of the player bases on that game.
The rewards where far from terrible, not only even after the balances they put in place to lessen the appeal of creating farm missions, and one could easily start a new alt on a untouched server and use AE arcs to not only level at a fun and smooth rate while experiencing vastly different content from another character, but the rewards where more then enough to get a character on the path of being fleshed out.
While some would complain how too many 50s where being created using only old SOs or non set IOs, the fact was it was very common on Virtue any ways to meet old time on and off again players who for various reasons refused to ever learn IOs and how to make them and many would vendor even rare ones as hard as that is to imagine to those like myself who actively ran story arcs for reward merits to just buy something as simple as an LOTG global recahrge special that would sale for more then enough to help fill the coffers to buy truly rare IOs.
AE was a huge factor in CoHs long term play value as well as making alting a very enjoyable experience, and in fact is one of the main reasons I in the end like many others found alting on CO even with perks like extra character slots for capping a toon, as pointless because replaying the exact same content over and over is beyond mind numbing.
CoH had so much content even prior to AE that one could easily level alts with varying story arcs usually fitting your characters theme and concept, and after AE made it an utter breeze. Oh today I am playing a magical detective, time to find a supernatural themed mystery arc in AE etc was pretty much standard approach for most RPers I knew on Virtue.
Positron started making ban threats towards players who were using AE to fast-level their characters to 50 in a matter of 2 days, not to mention to delete those characters. Does your definition of "opening up fast levelling" also involve that? If you ask me, it seemed that the folks at Paragon sure as heck didn't see this new method of fast levelling anywhere near legitimate.
Well that's another problem, albeit being a social one, that was caused by AE's introduction. It's just another one of the few strikes against AE and the kind of implementation they carried out for such a custom content creator.
I don't know what your definition of "extremely popular" is, but farming missions that rank top of the list while the RP-focused one remained beneath them didn't have those RP missions come across as "extremely popular" to me. In fact when I returned to the game a few months after I stopped playing, specifically on Virtue, the MA building in Atlas Park on Blue side, the HUB of Blue side, was practically empty, even during prime time.
Considering that countermeasures have been implemented to shoo away ticket and EXP farmers from the AE like they were vermin, I guess the RP'ers were left to pick up the scraps, and the kind of activity I saw at the time hardly came across as "extremely popular". Yeah, okay, maybe among the RP'ers, but you know what? Not everyone was an RP'er, not even on the supposed unofficial RP server Virtue.
Still doesn't negate the fact that the disparity between the activity of AE buildings during / shortly after launch versus months later after nerfs seemed evident enough that the rewards themselves being nerfed pushed a signifcant amount of player activity way from AE.
That's probably the best way to sum up the state of CO I've read in awhile. Things are ok here, but that doesn't mean we're going to get massive updates. We'll get a few goodies, maybe a new AT and story arc to run on occasion. Which is good.
But expecting massive expansions and such isn't realistic.
*And dudes.. talk about the ultimate necro. A Mission Architect argument..just wow! Give it a rest already CoH died, let it go.
As someone who was on virtue and ran a RP SG, I didn't find that to be the case at all with AE. It was very much as stated...a way to PL/Obtain Rewards.
It's not that it's a bad idea. It's not that a few didn't use it for it's intended purpose. It's that a majority of players make it so it becomes a waste of time/money to create...it's either widely used or a ghost town.
Face it, most players are not RPers...or at least serious enough RPers to want to use it for the intended reason.
They want rewards they think are worth/worth more than the effort put into it.
The only real reward you can get from running foundry stuff is astral diamonds. Basically, like doing a daily Smash/Grab/Burst rotation mission. Enemies you fight do grant experience and gold and stuff, but it's all randomized loot (i.e. no better than average) and not the best way to level by a longshot. From an efficiency standpoint, there's absolutely no reason to do foundry missions...
And because of that, the quality of missions you see in Foundry are quite high! Because the incentive, from both a creator's perspective and a player's perspective, is not to farm levels and get to 50 by kil skuls repeatedly, it's to see and enjoy what interesting stories, map designs, and narratives the other players make. You want to get featured, so that you get ratings and occasional gifts from people who really liked your quest! You play it to take a break from the repetitive main questline and enjoy something new in the game, and maybe get a few perks and astral diamonds while you're at it.
It's very much a similar case as what I experienced in Spore: Galactic Adventures. Hell with playing the actual game in space-stage, trying to randomly get adventures to pop up while managing my intergalactic empire with one stupid ship, I was perfectly content with creating independent captains and just running the missions on their own. It's not a means to get more resources for the main game, it's supposed to be a game and adventure in of its own.
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Type in Farm and hit search.
you will get a load of xp farms plus achievement farms plus one designed to get some sort of enchants to drop
yes there are some story ones. some are very good.
there's a heck of a load of "room with the max amount of monsters allowed."
I logged in to try the 2 new classes, went to try a foundry on one and the top 10 'stories' were all farms.
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Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Is there a TOS for Foundry that specifically states that it must exclusively be used for custom mission story arcs and not as an alternative for levelling or farming?
Is the Foundry broken in a way that it can take one or two days to reach maximum level?
If the answer to both is no, then I don't really see anything wrong, especially if it offers XP as rewards for completing Foundry missions then by default it's become an alternative levelling path, very much like Grab alerts are in CO.
If it takes one or two days to reach max level through Foundry then they need to fix it, something Paragon should have done with AE early on instead of blaming the players for their blunders.
Yeah, that's a great way to release new content and then alienate a good portion of the playerbase from ever bothering with it. MMOs are primarily reward-vs-effort. Players will also always seek out the most efficient way to progress in terms of levels and rewards. Taking away any meaningful rewards from a custom content creator will potentially have it service a niche group of players when it should appeal to everyone.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
a) Last I checked, there were some stuff about exploiting mob AI and terrain (which is something certain farming maps use heavily) that could lead to a Foundry Author getting banned from using the Foundry.
b) Some of those exploit maps could let an AoE character gain an absurd amount of XP and loot with little to no danger. One style of those maps even forced Cryptic to add a limit/cooldown on how much/often you could get rewarded for certain high rank enemies. In turn, some of the farming maps added directions on how to pace your killing for maximum XP/loot per hour...
Last I really bothered with the NW Foundry was about a year ago. Mostly because it was almost impossible to get a quest noticed unless it either had a very good XP/hour ratio (and was simple to get through) or you managed to suck up to enough people that it became eligible for the daily Foundry missions (which iirc requires 20 completions with ratings and that the average time is more than 15 min). And the people doing the Foundry dailies (for Astral Diamonds) were generally not looking for stuff that had an average completion time of much more than 15-18 min. And if the average completion time dropped below 15 min? Instant non-eligibility for Foundry daily until the average climbed back above the 15 min mark.
The NW Foundry has/had a lot of good ideas, basic human nature just messed up things too much for me to find it worth my time.
Any kind of ingame platform that provides some sort of actual gameplay activity can be considered content. Farming involves gameplay activity.
You're right that I don't care if someone wants to spend their time doing nothing but farming. It's not up to me to decide how others spend their time ingame.
Yeah, this makes no sense.
Creators / authors aren't the only important target for custom content creators. Are you telling me that the players who actually play the custom content suddenly don't count?
Consider the possibility that there are people out there who don't play the game for an engaging, thought-provoking storyline as opposed to just some good ol' mindless action and be rightfully rewarded for it with effort and time spent. In fact I'm willing to bet that a significant portion of the playerbase fits into that description.
Modding is only a niche if you put in certain restrictions to make said modding content accessible to only a select portion of players. If you want a good example of modding done right, look to NWN 1. Its content creator makes it possible to create all sorts of content, be it persistent RP worlds, action-oriented power gaming or PVP. NWN 1 to this day is considered one of the best successful D&D CRPGs of all for this reason and more.
daily cap on item drops per character
terrible for leveling as you get relatively little xp
minimum time to count for rewards(somewhere around 10-15 min)
there's a cap of 960 dil you can get for a mission, so more than 30-45 minutes leads to suboptimal rewards..
and yeah, you need several plays before the mission can even be considered for rewards.
so yeah... lots of limits to make farming difficult
heh, the most interesting thing in STO is how you actually have a specific reason to do Accolade grinders. You get a tiny damage bonus vs an enemy type ounce you've defeated enough of them.
Then there was this short time window long ago where the devs accidentally added to the ground armor drop table Cardassian science duty officers. THAT made peeps do the accolade grinders like crazy! Mainly because it was (at the time) the only way to get them. This was during the lead up to Season 6, and it got fixed when season 6 was released. And of course you gained the ability to recruit Cardassians(science and otherwise) normally.
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To that end, CO's engine could be considered the beta to STO's and NW's finals. A surprising number of models, animations, and locations can actually be ported between games without much issue (i.e.: Spider enemies in Fatal Error and Steel Crusade? They're a skeleton/animation set from Neverwinter for enemies such as the deadly Phase Spiders and so forth!) But unfortunately those newer games have a lot of features that CO lacks. Namely, support prepared for the Foundry, and aforementioned graphical techniques. Inverse Kinematics is only used for one animation in the game (holding a rifle in the Munitions Tree), but if integrated further could allow for heroes to look correct when standing on sloped ground, and properly align ground vehicles.
And again Id like to ask what content released in any MMO remains super active even a month after its initial release. Hell nothing ever added to CO including Vibora bay took me more then a handful of days to devour with free form characters made to be actual heroes who knew entering a battle that they had already won as only true heroes can.
AE saw frequent use by players, and was always actively seeing new content generated by those who enjoyed doing it, and much of it was unseen by the GP because not unlike in any MMO, the clique nature many guilds develop creates a in house only grouping mentality and thus when custom RP arcs where made they often only stayed up a short while, as their main intent was for certain people to play them and once the makers knew that had happened removed them to make room for new arcs in the over all plot. I myself would take down and put up 3 new arcs each month based on my characters and super groups and the lore of the game world that they where connected to. I put them up not for anyone specific but changed them out so those who had taken notices of my global handle and creations could count on regular advancements in the plots.
Look i know alot of people. mostly power gamers hated AE because it made the things power gamers strive to be best at and keep out of the hands of the lowly unwashed masses of casuals, and alot of them either swapped to freedom server or left out right, but it was far from a fatal blow to CoHs population and in the end was a strength in the games list of aspects to rival other MMO.
And I know posi took it personal when he felt things where not used the way he wanted them to be used. And yes some tweaks got made, but it didnt make using AE worse then playing the normal game content, it was comparative and few really cared about the rewards as capping toons had become so easy since year one anyways, and earning good IOs was just a matter or earning hero merits that rare drop farming became a largely dead thing in CoH which most felt was a good thing to see in an MMO.
I did know a few true power farmers still in the final era, I knew a fire/kin troller who had been a farmer since year one, and in the last year they would say their daily earnings, just running Portal Corp maps set to max team size solo, and only keeping truly rare IO drops to keep their inv space free, would clear about 600 mil inf a day in sales on the ah and personal earnings, that was insane earning power by any standard I knew of in that game, and that was being done the entire existence of thelvl 40+ content when portal corp endless missions got added.
Now me I was casual Id take a month on average to cap a character when I bothered to roll a new toon, but I rarely felt like that I almost exclusively ran capped characters fully developed for the last 3 or so years of the games life with my days being spent running RP things or leading TFs or just hanging in the D RPing. All 3 of these aspects seemed to be popular not just with myself but many others to the point I never stopped meeting new characters and new comers to the game.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Taco also adds art assets to the Foundry when he has time.
EDIT: here's a fun thread on the subject.
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Subjective. If majority of players are satisfied with using the content creator as an alternative way of levelling and gaining rewards via repetitive intensive gameplay as opposed to focusing on an in-depth story then it isn't crap. If the "quality" truly is "crap" as you put it, then realistically people will not waste any time on it. What qualifies more as "crap quality" is if the farming involves exploitation of game mechanics to gain XP and rewards at a rate far too quick to be considered acceptable, such as getting to max level in 1 to 2 days.
Just because certain people choose to have an elitist stance on how the creator must be used according to their self-written rules that aren't in any TOS on how the creator has to be used, doesn't make farming a "net negative".
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
>
Steel Crusade is the most dev work CO has seen in a long time.
>
People are hopeful that this means more dev work is in the works.
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Clarified version of the post above: People still want a Foundry but it's unlikely to ever happen, because it would need more work than the Crusade.
...I..I don't know that that even means.
2. create foundry.
unfortunately CO is the only one out of the 3 games where step1 was not done.
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Horses used to be a prime ingredient for glue.
effort- thats where you have the max amount of easily killed mobs in a square, that don't attack until you set them off. I tried it on a level 5(yes 5) 42 mobs per group, never once killed her. discarded mission.
from forums(sorry can't do word for word); doing dungeons without using exploits is the old way of playing, now you go in and look for them as fast as possible and use them while you can.
Yep , find the most efficient method even if its cheating.
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lol yeah I know, but I don't think that is how the saying actually goes...
Yeah, the original version is about beggars being riders.
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Oh, so it's one of those Kevin Bacon things.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
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Flying ponies for everyone! I hope they sparkle. And have PB. But rainbow colored.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
Kevin Bacon is made of people.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
(That was my grandmother's version. She was pretty cool.)
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Indeed it always amazes me how the hamster types happy on the wheel cant see the side of those who simply can not play the exact same content over and over.
I see alot of the same issue over on DDO, its a great character builder, really appeals to the theory crafter types, but in the end with limited and static content, there simply is not really much fun or reason to run any bit of it more then a time or two, unless its got some specific drop in it to force you to grind it out.
The fact that I could take a completed character on COH and never run out of new things to do, even if it meant making up new adventurers of my own to play in, kept that game fun in the same way that I was able to keep playing elder scrolls 4 oblivion for years and years using mods to constantly add new areas, items, races, and spells to make the game feel ever changing.
I still to this day have not bothered with even touching skyrim, not because it looks bad at all, but because I know I still have years worth of play time on ES4 so 5 can wait a good long time for me to get to it.
Meanwhile here on CO, I have zero doubt I could roll up a new AT on a free account and devour the games entire content in a month just as I have always done every time I came back to the game in the past.
If you were hitting 50 in two days you were doing it wrong. The best farms let you hit 50 in two hours, the Mito farm was awesome for this. And characters were locked out/deleted then some of those were re-instated as Posi saw how dumb it was, especially since he was warned repeatedly in Beta...
The big problem with the RP missions is...some of them were pure awesome (The "Ghosrt Radio" comes to mind) and others were tedious ("Butterfly Effect" had almost zero action and though well written didn't hold attention for long) but the overall intent of AE was honourable.
I'd love an AE here if only so I can get to 40 quickly, and get my friends to 40 quickly.
Right now it takes 3-4 days for a 40, which is fine...but cutting that to a day or less would be much better.
See me ingame under the following secret identities:
Amelie Layclaire - Lightning and Wind (40)
Solution Five - Gadgets and Subterfuge (40)
Dodgeball Kara - Support and Ebon Ruin (40)
Relentless Pursuit - Fire and Force (35)
Rear Window - Homage - Icy Disposition (20)
Teaming with @shottymario and hoping to meet you all ingame.
The exact amount of time it took doesn't matter. The core point is that people were hitting max level at such a rate that was far from what's considered intended and it was undeniably exploitative.
Either you're playing some bizarro world versions of MMOs or you're being pretentious.
ALL MMOs are repetitive in nature and you will always run the same content over and over: Even your beloved CoX. Alternative paths to content will always eventually be explored and eventually repeated. Same goes for content additions no matter how big.
You claim to speak against people who enjoy running the same content over and over and call them "hamster types" when ironically you've already set foot on that wheel when its evident that you've played MMOs, at least both CoX and CO, for a good amount of time. Heck, when you played your favorite AE arcs more than once, you were already on that wheel. Funny that.
CoX's AE had a fixed number of variables for you to choose from when making your custom adventure. Guess what? You weren't truly making a "new" adventure every time you used the AE, you're just changing enemy types, the number of enemies you have to kill, the number of clickables you have to interact with, a new story text and a stage with the exact same kind of barriers. All of these gave the illusion that you're creating something "new" when at the end of the day it's the exact same kind of gameplay each time.
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The cap they put on the number of reward tickets you could get made getting good IO recipes a little problematic but, I preferred to trade mine for salvage anyways. I didn't get as much per sale but, made up for that in sheer volume considering that common salvage was only eight tickets per and that a healthy chunk of common salvage sold very well thanks to the number of recipes it was needed for.
As much as I'd like to see foundry put in this game, it's simply not worth it, even if they had the funding to do it. You can do some amazing things with the NW foundry and. it's mostly ignored except for farms, which is kind of silly since you can hit level cap in that game in 2-3 days without it. There are some people that do use it to create actual story arcs but, most of those are pretty low quality where either the storyline is so boring that you don't even bother reading after a short while or, the maps are buggy as hell and look like crap due to the author not being that skilled at level design. That's not to say that there aren't any good arcs on NW. It's just that a lot of people that think they're the next Kerouac are really much more like Stephanie Meyers. When you add in the fact that Cryptic would have to provide the storage to hold all the information for this player generated content that's going to be overlooked and ignored by the players, it's simply not worth it for them to add a foundry to CO.
Edit: Honestly, I think a much better solution would be for them to make all instanced content scale to the level of the character. They've already streamlined the level process on this game to a stupid degree with alerts. They just need to give us things to do one we're at level cap. Making every instance in the game scale to your level like action packs and comic series do would mean people could grind out alerts to their heart's content and then actually explore the game once they've got all their powers.
Stuff content I just want more toilets lying about. Beating a random thug to death with toilet just brings a massive smile to my face.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
That's a suggestion I can get behind. I'd also like a guy, vomiting in the corner of Caprice. Let's be honest, that's not the fanciest of clubs and, there's always someone that drank way too much every time I've gone to a club. Caprice should have some guy puking in the corner.