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Foundry Files Episode 40: Purity 2: Of Thought
admiralmurphy1
Member Posts: 4 Arc User
This week we cover the recent exploit crush. Are we happy with it? Maybe... Then it's our review of Purity 2: Of Thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vZpaFFnRtM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vZpaFFnRtM
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Oh about my avatar, why thank you
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
I just find a couple of things odd about your review. I know there are particularly pathing bugs, BOFFS getting stuck in stuff ect. As you guys know it's caused by the advanced technical tricks transitioning from shuttle, custom and destructible buildings, map transitions.
You seem to focus on the bugs that is generated by these tricks (ok the floating contact is not related to this) and then after that you suggest that you would have liked to use the same tricks to remove the one map transition? It would only magnify the issues that already exist in the mission making something manageable into something that is just frustrating.
I've thought about playing that mission once, just for laughs. I have yet to actually pull the trigger on it though, and I doubt I ever will. Too many other actual story missions on my list, don'tcha know.
Re: Purity II
From what I gathered, this episode is basically a historical re-enactment of what happened as a result of the rogue admiral's interference. The real mystery is how and why you and your crew are being forced to relive it. (As for the "how", I'm guessing some kind of alien telepathic-projection technology like that seen in TNG's "The Inner Light" or Voyager's "Memorial".)
It was borderline 3-4 stars for me. I gave it 4 because the maps and effects are so well-built, though I got my BOffs stuck in a few places too.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
While it's a nuisance to be so high, it is one way to get players look at the list.
On the other hand, if we talk about other (exploit) fixes; are they as good as they're being advertised?
For example;
1hr dil award
How does this stimulate players to play more missions? I certainly wont; I have a job. Looking at my own situation I'll be searching for the fastest one so I can continue with my dailies.
Enacting fail-safe's and Time spent on static maps
Well, talk about a punch below the belt for people who used (for example) the Academy, ESD or First City NPC's as an intricate part of the story.. (Your mission has Ended from Isthisscience). Once again, if you look from a player point of view... Less reward ==> looking for a different mission.
AFK "fix"
Aww cool, no AFK'ers for STF's anymore, woohoo! <-- Well, no.. It also seemed to slip in foundry missions. I will be lucky if my reviews wil *ever* hit 100 this way.
I see this as three major hits in Foundry playability. And the fun part in this; Bobo still survived*.
*disclaimer; These are my views and my views alone, it wasn't meant to be hateful or being seen as a rant. This is what I've observed, and what my opinion is concerning these observations.
I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
I do have a criticism for you. I feel like you're engaging in naming and shaming in your videos and using this forum where the same activity would be perhaps moderated to advertise for that video. I had a similar reaction when I saw naming and shaming taking place in tweets to Branflakes twitter account in the past. When I tried to bring those to light here... well let's just say they disappeared and I had an interesting exchange or two.
This mission you are attacking, and making direct personal requests to the devs to remove is one you've given way too much power. Its usage is most likely kept situational and not a daily ritual. I myself have used it perhaps 10 times and not in many months, it bores me EC or not. Feel free to complain about exploit types all you want, but I think you are stooping low lately in your methods. The real enemy is not a foundry author in particular, or a subset of players, but rather the lack of tools for categorizing and searching.
Do you review missions that have not been submitted to you? What is the etiquette there?
Well I don't know if removing that one transition would have made the pathing issues that much worse. It seems like going all the way to avoid a single transition would have been something really cool, maybe even if it did pop up with a few extra pathing issues. However, I don't know if the pathing issues have anything related to that. The only places I encountered pathing issues was getting boffs stuck in the shuttle that appeared when I exited the interior, and all that needs to be done to fix that moving the shuttle back a bit more, and when your in the first custom building. I think the pathing might just be a bit messed up because of the close quarters inside the building.
Even still, I was very impressed with the Tech in this mission and wish I could have done something like this!
The problem is if they aren't talked about, they get ignored. This is the same for real life issues, that there's important discussions to be had. Without them, nothing changes. Does talking about exploit advertise them? Probably but if you ignore them they still aren't going to get fixed and they're only going to continue to be an issue.
This is an interesting point now. While I haven't played a foundry mission that was mostly social maps like these, that doesn't mean these don't exist out there. That does kinda suck out there for Foundry Authors trying to actually make quality content.
The foundry is the only reason I still play this game regularly. That is why I've done a podcast all this time on it, because I support the toolset for storytelling. I make no money of the show, I do it out of the love I have for the toolset. That is why I have a major gripe with exploits and grinders, especially as of late after going through the history of the toolset and seeing what caused it to decline in quality and popularity. The foundry is a much different place now than it was before Season 4, and even before this new search we've got that I find is the major issue today. Yes, the major problem isn't entirely these type of missions, but the terrible search this game has for Foundry. I think it was Kirkfat who said this first, but when looking at the foundry search, really only those fifty missions that pop up exist unless you actually know what to search for to find others. Out of those fifty in any category, the majority are poorly constructed grinders and sometimes exploits. Out of everything made in the foundry, it grinds my gears to see this at the very top of the list, which is why I tend to call out BoBo on the show. (And I've never even said the authors name, as that's not important to me. I have still no idea the name of who made the mission because I have no desire to attack the author) It's not just this mission I have an issue with, but with all exploit missions, especially those at the top of the top rated list when there's so many other great works that get ignored because of these type of missions.
At first it caught my eye because I did think it was a grinder, but through playing it this was obviously an exploit. One that for over a year like many others have been ignored as Cryptic has focused on other areas. It's funny to go back and see this being discussed on podcasts not even a month after the Foundry came out, and its even a bigger issue today. You may not use it as a daily, but this mission gets many plays and high reviews each day because of people wanting quick ECs. Meanwhile there are many missions buried by missions like this that are just asking for a few plays because they get none. As the foundry is the only thing that keeps me interested in this game, that's why I tend to make such a big deal out of this. Once I give up on the foundry, I give up on STO and the podcast. It's our great audience that supports us that keeps us going, even when we are very unhappy with the state of the foundry. I invested quite a bit into this game when the Foundry came out, and I hate to see that state its been in for all this time with no work put in to really fix it. Now I'm happy to see tweets that Foundry stuff is coming, but I'm hoping what is coming will improve things like the search. We've been told for quite some time now that foundry stuff has been coming, and the foundry has continued to decline. So until I see this changes making the foundry a better place, I'll continue to be skeptical.
Yes, in fact for awhile we didn't get any requests for sometime, so we had to go and find them. We've been getting a lot more requests recently, so when we can't find missions to play, we got to what people have sent us. Since we're getting quite a bit of mission requests now we'll probably start hitting those as priority, but missions don't have to just be submitted for us to check them out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCLnWUQyIm0
You authors, real authors, need to stick together.
I see your problem. If you're not spotlighted by Branflakes, and not in the current top 50 list, there's no in-game way for players to hear about your mission. As someone that frequently lurks around in the forums I have little trouble finding stuff but as we hear all the time, that's like 2% of the population.
I just looked at the top 50, you're not in it. I don't see Nagorak ((that's criminal imo)hello branflakes!)). I recognize about 6 or so authors in the list right now. In the hot list there may be 3 or 4 I know to be authors?
I've seen threads in here where you all get together and make lists, databases etc.
Pick one! Every member should then include at the end of his/her mission, or in the details somewhere a link to that list/website. Right now, I see Captain Revo is in the top 50 list. If at the end of his missions it said something like: "If you liked this story mission, go <here> to see a list of more great foundry authors and their projects" you could all boost each other up.
Add some sort of seal of approval to member's mission intros. We'd know going in this was a real author, with a real story making an effort. At the end of the mission we get the link and can favorite it in our browser and use for reference. I would like having that checklist myself. If a real author doesn't ask to be on the list they miss out on publicity.
All the real authors that want on the list would agree to carry that advertisement in their mission intros and maybe a reminder at the end.
We visit the site and get a searchable alphabetical author list like you might see on an art website. Clicking on the author name would bring up his/her page with a list of missions. It would be nice for each mission to have a spot for a synopsis, author's comments and suggestions, and constructive reviews from fellow authors. Keep the comments from the general playerbase here on the forums or in-game. Also if an author has a trailer, made some fancy art, or has a mission needing reviews, that could all be on his/her personal page. On the home page for this list you could make a randomizer that would suggest a mission for somebody that doesn't know where to start, further helping lesser known authors.
Are you not allowed to make a reference in a mission to a website? If it's disallowed, make a stickied thread in here in the forums with the link and reference the thread in your missions. Surely they'd let you reference the official forums. C'mon, get the Cabal rolling already.
If you get players that like story in the habit of looking for more by pointing to a list, maybe the top 50's will correct themselves. Regardless, it should help max out your views relative to the audience size. You can do this while totally ignoring all the "#dirtygrinder" stuff. You all make podcasts, why is a list hard? Is there a list outside this forum already and I don't know about it? I've scanned starbase UGC website and it has some but i'm not sure it's all-inclusive. I want a searchable author list and it's something I'd consider contributing to.
Actually, it's against the EULA to include any web URL (to the forums or otherwise) in a Foundry mission.
The same goes for a search list. If you could link to a search list out of game (which links aren't allowed) how many people would go an do that? And that also raises the question, why to we need another list when there's one already in game. Why can't that list just be fixed? The key here isn't making a new out of game list but getting Cryptic to fix the main one for the Foundry. The out of game lists help those who check them, but that isn't going to be enough, and obviously all of the podcasts trying to find missions for people isn't cutting it. In the end it really does come down to the search, which would still stink even without the grinders and exploits as you still have the issue of no tags and those 50 missions being the only existing ones. I still don't understand why they changed it when before on that list I could scroll through hundreds to the very bottom where the crappy 1 star missions were.
That would mean that 10,000 people see whats posted in the forums, leaving 90,000 in the dark about things like patch notes, bug fixes and the like. Now I think this 10% rule existed in a space before things like the twitter and the facebook, so it is possible that more exposure to these things are being given, but even conservative best case I would still say no more than 25% of the playerbase is reached this way.
What does this really mean? Well that I have to agree with the Murphy, there needs to be a better way in game for things to reach out to the player at large. The Foundry tab in the journal was the first big step in doing this, and an entire tab in that for the spotlights even more so. But the spotlight tab only contains a finite number of missions so far, and at current growth rates, will still be small compared to the number of missions that are likely deserving, yet languishing in obscurity.
There really does need to be something in game that helps to redress this. Even if its a browser interface that links to a wiki or some other database that can be used to advertise missions, display reviews or suggestions, something that helps bring up the profile of other authors.
That said, yet another pass needs to be taken at the foundry search interface itself, so that presentation of missions can be made with as little effort ON EVERYONES PART as possible, and yet all parties can be satisfied. I understand, unlike some others, that there are times that you just want to shoot things, alot... This is fine, but there needs to be a way to filter out those types of missions that you have no desire to see listed. If there was a mechanism to do this (perhaps the elusive NW tag system that I have seen mixed feedback on?) I think this would go a long way to helping alleviate many peoples issues and improve the quality of life for many Foundry users.
Of course improvements to the mechanics themselves so that things aren't as glitchy wouldn't hurt either
The weighting system is iffy. I'm honestly not sure how it works so I'll refrain from commenting on it. However, IMO there are three relatively minor things that could be done to improve things greatly.
1) Remove spotlight missions from the general mission tab. They're in the one list permanently, there isn't necessarily a need for them to take up space in the general.
2) Make it so the general mission tab is the one that comes up first when you click on the Foundry tab. This gives more visibility to non-spotlight missions, while the spotlight missions still have their own tab.
3) Simply give us an arrow at the bottom of the general list so we can go to the next 50 missions, and the next 50 missions after that and so on.
Now, I think more should be done than that in the long run, but there's a few constructive ideas for the short run.
There must be one. If it hasn't been shared it must be because it's embarrassing.
That doesn't sound like something they're gonna change.
0kay, so what if there are 1000 legitimate story missions? If the non-story to story ratio stayed constant (not sure if it would) we would need 80 or 90 pages to see them all? I would be more likely to go offsite and check a list than scroll through all that mess. I am not as likely to dig through podcast archives to get ideas though. If you had an offsite list you could allow missions that have been mentioned on podcasts to link those and in that way I may choose to connect backwards. Cross-pollinating.
Another truth is that there are enough total story missions visible to keep the average player busy for the year. So, some of the reason people aren't looking outside is they're not out of stuff to do yet. If you enjoy all aspects of the game, you might not do more than one foundry mission a week and if player churn happens every few months you may only need 20 missions from Cryptic's perspective. You may be competing with your fellow authors right now more than grinders. Even without a list, I'm aware of more author names than I've been able to get to.
I really do think a nice list offsite would be more beneficial than showing up on page 15 of the 50 per page query.
Anyhow, I really wish you would all get together and try it. You could weed out chaff better than cryptic and you could randomly promote a mission better than Cryptic otherwise the star rating will continue to dictate.
I don't know how I can help so I guess I'll just go play a mission? (this is my weekend)
I will start with the hosts' as I've never tried either of yours, then on to whomever spoke to me here. That should be a good start with Purity III in the mix also.
gl