Yeah... I did the lighting deal as well... Jack-of-all-trades and the One Man Army. Kinda funny we have that in common... The idea is to listen and make up your own mind and find a solution.
The goal is to get the product properly presented in a consistent manner... Nothing worse then a continuous TRIBBLE twister that is changing everything all the time. If it's right, chill out and catch your Cues... consistently performing runs rings around hit & miss...
At least with this media we can refine and re-write as needed... in a live scenario there are no do-overs... you either get it right the first time or you have failed. Good artists will listen to their engineers because it is all about team work and pulling off a moment in time that cannot be repeated.
These lessons have served me well my entire life and translate into any situation. I try to inspire as well as deliver the "Goods" in a consistent manner that provides confidence and the ability to trust and just perform with out worrying about things outside our own responsibilities.
The "difficulty" situation at the moment relies on using our own judgment and finding other authors we can rely on to deliver an accurate and helpful review so that we can find out what works and what doesn't.
We as authors need to stick together and help each other overcome our difficulties and find some common ground to help improve everyone's product.
Yeah... I did the lighting deal as well... Jack-of-all-trades and the One Man Army. Kinda funny we have that in common... The idea is to listen and make up your own mind and find a solution.
The goal is to get the product properly presented in a consistent manner... Nothing worse then a continuous TRIBBLE twister that is changing everything all the time. If it's right, chill out and catch your Cues... consistently performing runs rings around hit & miss...
At least with this media we can refine and re-write as needed... in a live scenario there are no do-overs... you either get it right the first time or you have failed. Good artists will listen to their engineers because it is all about team work and pulling off a moment in time that cannot be repeated.
These lessons have served me well my entire life and translate into any situation. I try to inspire as well as deliver the "Goods" in a consistent manner that provides confidence and the ability to trust and just perform with out worrying about things outside our own responsibilities.
The "difficulty" situation at the moment relies on using our own judgment and finding other authors we can rely on to deliver an accurate and helpful review so that we can find out what works and what doesn't.
We as authors need to stick together and help each other overcome our difficulties and find some common ground to help improve everyone's product.
Which is why I waited so long before making a thread on my mission, and was very selective of who I sent PMs to, asking if they would test and give feedback. Speaking of which, have you given any of my latest updates a try Napoleon? Although its been a day and a half since I logged and checked for feedback, I just thought I might ask. This is going to be the last update for a couple of weeks, cos I have just over a gig left before my mobile internet resets.
Like it or not, the difficulty slider is a part of this game, and many people use it. That being the case, when people try to make their missions challenging and then someone plays that mission on a higher difficulty setting, that mission may be impossible to complete. Right or wrong, this will result in bad ratings. So how can the Foundry community address this issue before the system goes live?
Simple...playtest at the various ratings - and also pay attention to any feedback you consider valid. Issue resolved.
Let me further add to that:
Lots of people I know that play STO play it at either advanced or elite because normal is laughable as a difficulty. If you do what i did on my mission and try for a fun mission with a similar enemy difficulty of STFs, put a warning up in the description. The last thing you want is your players walking into a really tough mission unprepared, because that will give bad ratings unnecessarily.
I just finished another editing run through all 6 of my missions with a complete re-vamp of dialogue and some other tweaks and edits... I still have to play test them all with my VA... takes me around 3 hours to do them all...
I had been using a lot of capitalized words to add emphasis to certain words I thought were important, but I've decided that in the interest of promoting good grammar and spelling that I should stick with a traditional approach that doesn't set off people's Grammar TRIBBLE Peeves. This required an entire re-write of all 6 missions dialogue but gave me the chance to find some more typos and I think my missions are ultimately better for it.
I also got rid of some unusual animations that I personally enjoyed, but perhaps were a distraction from the issues at hand. Some of them I kept to break up the tension and some of them have a place in the plot. Sometimes some humor can set the stage for a change of scenery or break the tension before entering combat.. such as the mooning of enemies in Braveheart.
I'm going to get back to running other author's missions soon and I'll post up my usual helpful observations. Perhaps I'll make some detailed notes and shoot them over in a P.M. because the review section is very short and specifics are hard to communicate in a small way.
On a Side note... all six of my episodes are now in the Community Authored Tab even though 3 have never been reviewed... 13 reviews for the first one, 2 for the 2nd and 1 for the 3rd.
it's kind of discouraging that no one except myself has enjoyed the whole 6-part epic, but patience is called for here.
There also appear to be double entries for several of them even though I withdrew them before republish yesterday... the mission descriptions show the text that I added so they should all be fine no matter which one is tried.
I'm hoping the difficulty is appropriate and the only really difficult one is the last episode with Captain level ground encounters... I added an appropriate warning... but would recommend all of them be tried at normal difficulty.
It would be nice if some one... anyone... would do a complete run of all six missions... but that's asking a lot...
I just finished another editing run through all 6 of my missions with a complete re-vamp of dialogue and some other tweaks and edits... I still have to play test them all with my VA... takes me around 3 hours to do them all...
I had been using a lot of capitalized words to add emphasis to certain words I thought were important, but I've decided that in the interest of promoting good grammar and spelling that I should stick with a traditional approach that doesn't set off people's Grammar TRIBBLE Peeves. This required an entire re-write of all 6 missions dialogue but gave me the chance to find some more typos and I think my missions are ultimately better for it.
I also got rid of some unusual animations that I personally enjoyed, but perhaps were a distraction from the issues at hand. Some of them I kept to break up the tension and some of them have a place in the plot. Sometimes some humor can set the stage for a change of scenery or break the tension before entering combat.. such as the mooning of enemies in Braveheart.
I'm going to get back to running other author's missions soon and I'll post up my usual helpful observations. Perhaps I'll make some detailed notes and shoot them over in a P.M. because the review section is very short and specifics are hard to communicate in a small way.
On a Side note... all six of my episodes are now in the Community Authored Tab even though 3 have never been reviewed... 13 reviews for the first one, 2 for the 2nd and 1 for the 3rd.
it's kind of discouraging that no one except myself has enjoyed the whole 6-part epic, but patience is called for here.
There also appear to be double entries for several of them even though I withdrew them before republish yesterday... the mission descriptions show the text that I added so they should all be fine no matter which one is tried.
I'm hoping the difficulty is appropriate and the only really difficult one is the last episode with Captain level ground encounters... I added an appropriate warning... but would recommend all of them be tried at normal difficulty.
It would be nice if some one... anyone... would do a complete run of all six missions... but that's asking a lot...
If its any consolation, when I get my cable internet back, I will give it a run through, but I need more work to pay off my $500 remaining debt to my ISP, so try not to hold out too long for me please. I just was thankful that I paid for my lifers back in August last year, or I would have stopped playing in november
I hear you... it's all good... I'm a patient person and besides... I have a years worth of bookeeping work to do... LOL
The entertainment industry in Australia is in the worst recession I have ever seen, because people just aren't buying tickets. These days they tend to prefer home entertainment.
I retired from the business 5 years ago.. it's tough here too.. my pay got cut in half and it just wasn't worth it anymore... I'm now a humble handyman and still un-employed... at least I lived to tell the tale and got to see the world with my friends...
I figured a Big Amp Rack would roll off the truck and crush me unloading by myself a 5 a.m. Then my friend who managed a big facility was rolling up the last cable and stepped off the back of the stage... his wife found him knocked out hours later when he did not come home... I didn't have anyone to come looking for me... it was a wake up call for sure..
At least I retired at age 39 and my house, 2 cars and boat are all paid for.
I retired from the business 5 years ago.. it's tough here too.. my pay got cut in half and it just wasn't worth it anymore... I'm now a humble handyman and still un-employed... at least I lived to tell the tale and got to see the world with my friends...
I figured a Big Amp Rack would roll off the truck and crush me unloading by myself a 5 a.m. Then my friend who managed a big facility was rolling up the last cable and stepped off the back of the stage... his wife found him knocked out hours later when he did not come home... I didn't have anyone to come looking for me... it was a wake up call for sure..
At least I retired at age 39 and my house, 2 cars and boat are all paid for.
yeah, when there is work- the pay is more than good, but its the down times that suck. I am only doing this right now so that I can free up my week from regular work so I can undertake study to get into the career I want: i have most of the knowledge, but in Australia, you only really get noticed with formal qualifications
I promise to never make a player kill more than 6 groups of mobs on a single map without NPC help.
I promise to make mobs that the player kills by himself be far apart so that there's very little chance of doublepulling.
I promise to always mention what types of combat are in the mission in the initial briefing.
I promise to only use ground boss fights once per mission or in areas that the player is told to avoid.
I promise to keep a large space between the first group of mobs and respawn points so the player never gets ganked.
I promise to always mark down missions which violate any of the above by one star for each violation.
Aside:
On rating:
Missions start with 5/5 stars. For each thing the author does wrong, -1 star.
I promise to never make a player kill more than 6 groups of mobs on a single map without NPC help.
I promise to make mobs that the player kills by himself be far apart so that there's very little chance of doublepulling.
I promise to always mention what types of combat are in the mission in the initial briefing.
I promise to only use ground boss fights once per mission or in areas that the player is told to avoid.
I promise to keep a large space between the first group of mobs and respawn points so the player never gets ganked.
I promise to always mark down missions which violate any of the above by one star for each violation.
Aside:
On rating:
Missions start with 5/5 stars. For each thing the author does wrong, -1 star.
im not too sure I agree with your opinion on AI difficulty there. In my own mission, i found the cmd klingon enemy npc squads will make mincemeat out of their Federation counterparts. And this is me using say tier 1 Klingons vs tier 1 Federation. Dem swordmasters are just too much, so after about 25 attempts to fix it or so- i pretty much fluked the right balance on the succeed or nuke stage of my patience
The difficulty problems with the Klingon captain group is very severe... I used them anyway, once... hopefully these issues will be addressed... they can be defeated but they tend to wipe a party extremely fast. That's just the way it is...
If you read the mission objective it's clear that some Klings are coming when you hit the"Answer Klingon Challenge" button. There is an infinite amount of time to prepare and the respawn point is close enough, but out of line of sight so players that have a team wipe can regroup and finish them off.
In this manner I've tried to give the players a "fighting chance" but I would think that anything other than Normal difficulty would be suicidal... I've been putting off testing it on advanced and elite... it kind of scares me just thinking about it because I know that on normal I get whacked. Keep in mind I don't carry a healer or use shield charges and I'm a Tac...
I just gave up on a mission and here is why. It started decently, I was curious about the plot, seemed to have a good enough story to see it through to the end.
The second map was a fed facility , with fed groups around every corner.
After a half hour slog through the map of repetitive pressing of buttons patiently waiting for my neck pinch to be off cooldown to stop engineering mobs from shield recharging faster than warp speed I get to what I am now praying is the missions ending.
Nope, off we go to a huge underground cave filled with...you guessed it endless groups of unavoidable mobs that either make me respawn non stop or are impossible to interrupt or stop from healing.
after one hour and forty five minutes i just gave up.
Was the mission hard?
it was pointless.
I get that people want to instill a sense of difficulty, but you also have to be aware of the limitations of the game. There are certain things that are just not fun about ground comabt, and one of them is the fact that no matter how good as a player you are, its just a drawn out numbers game.
Drawing it out further doesn't make your mission more difficult, it just makes it more irritating.
Ok... i finally manned-up and did my final mission on advanced difficulty... I guess out of the 8 Captain level ground battles I wiped out about 12 times... 8 of them a complete team wipe... I don't carry a healer and don't use shield charges, so that is not really that bad considering the Capt. level klings have multiple sword-masters and a Dahar master...
Over all I would consider it Very Challenging and not over the top... but maybe I can convince some poor idiot to spend 3 hours doing all 6 of my missions so I can get some idea if the story has some "feel" to it.
But I guess this is getting old and the time is getting late... I'm a patient person and maybe some lonely soul will have pity on me and play all 6 episodes I created and post up the awesomeness that I've made for us.
Yes they are all at the same location but not simultaneously... it is a challenge part where the player answers 8 individual Captain Level challenges.
When they are ready to begin the players hit the "Answer Challenge" button and the first Captain group beams into the center of the arena. There is as much time to prepare as needed, if you need to wait in between challenges for timers to reset you can do this for as long as you need to... you can setup your BO's ahead of the enemy beam in and be prepared...
I just gave up on a mission and here is why. It started decently, I was curious about the plot, seemed to have a good enough story to see it through to the end.
The second map was a fed facility , with fed groups around every corner.
After a half hour slog through the map of repetitive pressing of buttons patiently waiting for my neck pinch to be off cooldown to stop engineering mobs from shield recharging faster than warp speed I get to what I am now praying is the missions ending.
Nope, off we go to a huge underground cave filled with...you guessed it endless groups of unavoidable mobs that either make me respawn non stop or are impossible to interrupt or stop from healing.
after one hour and forty five minutes i just gave up.
Was the mission hard?
it was pointless.
I get that people want to instill a sense of difficulty, but you also have to be aware of the limitations of the game. There are certain things that are just not fun about ground comabt, and one of them is the fact that no matter how good as a player you are, its just a drawn out numbers game.
Drawing it out further doesn't make your mission more difficult, it just makes it more irritating.
yeah, but then again sometimes, you can find that its never difficult enough for some people.
The writer has no idea who will be playing thier missions and in the end, the players will
be the ones making the ratings.
If you want good overall ratings....your mission combat should be as difficult as an average
crypic mission......AS DIFFICULT, your free to make it as interesting as possible
If you don't care about ratings..............knock yourself out.
Hate it or love it.........that is how it works. The players rate it.....not you.
I finally got someone to review all 6 of my missions... Hooray!!
They were all less than Stellar and in fact were almost all 1 stars with some short explanations as to the why. I attempted to send a message to this person with a long and detailed explanation and a request for some clarification of the comments... only to find I was on this person's ignore list... in light of this blockage of communication - I will post my response here since it seems relative to the subject in this post regarding difficulty and how we as authors can deal with these problems. The reviewer in question will not be named by me... nor will his specific comments be reprinted here, however my responses should fill in the "context" of the reviews in question.
If you are not interested in this don't read any further Please... and accept my apology for wasting your time.
Thanks for taking the time to review my missions... it was quite an expenditure of time and I appreciate the effort.. your the only one that has endeavored to do this for me.
It seems from your review that you think all the "Mobs" are too close to each other... It might be helpful if you could give a little more detail in this area... I attempted to get them close enough to be threatening, but far enough away to run if needed in some of the encounters...
Other encounters are getting jumped period... but I tried to give fair warning in the dialogue preceding the encounter... and often times there are other groups present to draw aggro from the player, but still have a battle going on.
Granted... if you make a mistake and pull multiple ground groups you could have a very bad time in some areas, while others are simply meant to be a Nightmare environment. I don't carry a healer and ran through on advanced difficulty...
I might have gotten caught between hypos and rally cries more than a few times but my whole away team very rarely all wiped, but I'm a seasoned STF Veteran and I know how to play this game Very Well. I also tried to give fair warning through dialogue that things were going to get very nasty...
I wanted these to be difficult... no question about it. However, My VA Tac can waltz through every space encounter easily. Did you play these on Normal difficulty? I played them all on advanced and did not really have any trouble.. I'm very curious.. I run All the Borg STF's almost in my sleep and in very short times... Perhaps I've made an error with the difficulty or placement.
Regarding the Eye of the Needle that you had trouble finishing... just fly straight ahead... go through center of asteroid (Eye of Needle) and there is a Base inside of a dense debris field... the Orion Queen's vessel is inside and will show up as an Ally when you close to within about 20km. The density of the Debris was mentioned Specifically in the dialogue prior to the Map change... as well as the inability to get a clear reading... Did you miss this? Or was there a different problem?
As far as the explicit nature of some of the dialogue, this was a question I had and was concerned about it.. was there something specifically in the dialogue? or just a "feeling"?
There are numerous examples throughout StarTrek regarding specifically sexual encounters and I attempted to promote a feeling of the sexual act and the fantasy elements of the dream acts to build the tension within the story arc. The Final Act of Consummation in the end was left to the players imagination somewhat, while having to go back into space for the final battle while the Captain is supposedly doing his "thing".
The remarks concerning the appropriateness of a female captain having a "proper role" to play in this mission could be regarded as sexist and pigeon-holed into a traditional male-female relationship which has been used as plot mechanics in Star Trek episodes before... Why couldn't a Female Captain become a Queen's champion & Consort? Could you elaborate on a specific reason why?
Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm asking too much with these questions, but I would hope to make some improvements and anything you can help me with is appreciated. I'm sorry if it was too difficult...
I guess something must be wrong with me... for some reason I have no difficulty at all fighting 3 groups of ships at one time... 1 battleship 1 cruiser2 and 1 fighter2.
Is this unreasonable?
Even on advanced I've haven't had any troubles at all...
Battleships just blow up quickly with my ensign in the editor with no BO's and junk items I've picked up. No torpedoes, no abilities at all to use... No god mode required. No kill enemies needed. I'm starting to think something is wrong somewhere...
My Tac VA just blows things apart extremely fast... like 10 seconds and pop goes the battleship. Maybe I can't help but target only one shield facing... CSV takes out a group of fighters in 3 seconds or less...
Of course I have all top of the line gear, and I'm specced for all around death and destruction and I regularly sleepwalk through STF's... I might go down once in a while but only if i TRIBBLE something up...
I'm not trying to brag... I'm wondering about everyone else... Do you guys get blown up by one ship? On elite I might get accidently one-shotted on occasion but generally enemies just take a little longer.
I guess something must be wrong with me... for some reason I have no difficulty at all fighting 3 groups of ships at one time... 1 battleship 1 cruiser2 and 1 fighter2.
Is this unreasonable?
Yup.
Most players are far from optimal. Quite a few people take a bit to figure out how to use power settings well and that's mentioned in the tutorial. And of the ones that have a bit of clue, how many gun for 125 attack power instead of 135?
And the game caters to them. There's expected levels of difficulty and difficulty sliders for those that want it harder, even if ground combat hampers the effectiveness of that slider.
Battleships just blow up quickly with my ensign in the editor with no BO's and junk items I've picked up. No torpedoes, no abilities at all to use... No god mode required. No kill enemies needed. I'm starting to think something is wrong somewhere...
At that level though, you would be unlucky to lose 3% of your shielding on normal. It is just a complete, absolute, utter joke.
My Tac VA just blows things apart extremely fast... like 10 seconds and pop goes the battleship. Maybe I can't help but target only one shield facing... CSV takes out a group of fighters in 3 seconds or less...
But that is a tac, inside a tact ship, no? An engineer packs less DPS than a Sci and a Sci less than a tactical. And both sci and cruisers pack considerably less DPS than a tactical ship. Lower DPS can also mess up your attack run or give the opponent a chance to turn, thereby adding another shield facing to chew through. And that doesn't go into choice of gear and BOff abilities.
And then there's learning curve. You are trying to create things that are sort of hard for you. Where does that leave the guy who finds advanced hard? What looks like a bit of a challenge to one level of player can be an unclimbable cliff to another. They simply cannot get close enough to success to imagine they can succeed. They write it off as impossible or unfun.
Also worth noting that the one time I bothered to check, NPC hull didn't seem to scale proper on elite. Escorts, for example, are 70k in advanced, ~100k on elite at 51. Cruisers are ~100k on both. Shielding might have improved, hull didn't seem to have however.
Of course I have all top of the line gear, and I'm specced for all around death and destruction and I regularly sleepwalk through STF's... I might go down once in a while but only if i TRIBBLE something up...
I'm not trying to brag... I'm wondering about everyone else... Do you guys get blown up by one ship? On elite I might get accidently one-shotted on occasion but generally enemies just take a little longer.
Yeah, elite in space is not super hard, most of the time, primarily for the same reason you occasionally get one shotted. NPC energy weapon damage is too low, while their torp damage is higher than it should be. As such, as long as you can keep shields sufficiently high, there's not much risk. Only a sufficiently low shield facing plus a sufficiently high torp hit really puts you in danger. Same deal in normal and advanced, really, though obviously in those lower settings, it takes either more time or more mobs to get past the shields. And the torps aren't quite as deadly, of course, so the consequences of them getting through is less severe. I hope they fix that issue someday. Raise mob energy damage to make them overall a bit tougher, but lower the torp damage to make it less about damage spikes being what kills you.
Of course, then there's still certain powers that trivialize one on one combat. Targeting weapon subsystems III, for example, shuts most NPC enemies down, since they typically just keep their broadside to you. No energy weapons + no torps = no risk to you. No need to kill them in under 10s then.
That said, the key thing is there are certain things people expect from missions. And that includes typically only facing one group, occasionally 1 group + a half group or 2 groups fighting. There's the difficulty slider to take it a step beyond that.
Unless some sort of naming convention becomes adopted, say by tagging (hard) onto the name or we get the ability to tag our missions somehow so players know to expect a ramped up difficulty, you've either got to cater to that or be fine with getting low ratings.
I am the unnamed reviewer who Napoleon_BlownApart speaks of.
You[Napoleon_BlownApart]and I do not see eye to eye on much of anything. We are enemies. As such, it should come as little surprise that my ideals are in nearly perfect conflict against yours. Because of that conflict, the rules of rating I've recently adopted were quite harsh against your missions.
AA's Rules of Rating Foundry Missions (subject to change) (YMWV) [the what]:
1. All players start with a 5/5 star rating.
2. Reviewer reserves the right to award bonus stars in a purely subjective manner.
3. Mobs spawned too close to the player: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any player's spawn or respawn point. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
4. Mobs spawned too close to each other: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any other pack of hostile mobs. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
5. Too many mobs on a map: Limit of 6 groups of hostile mobs per map. One star shall be deducted for each group of hostile mobs in excess of this limit. This rule shall not be enforced when the player is provided with adequate cover from groups of friendly mobs.
6: Too many BOSS mobs on a map: Limit of 1 group of boss mobs per map. One star shall be deducted for each group of boss mobs on a map in excess of this limit. This rule shall not be enforced when the player is provided with adequate cover from groups of friendly mobs.
7: Mission not completable: The player should always have some understanding of what he or she is to accomplish on every map, and maps should have appropriate functionality to support that understanding. If the player is unable to continue the mission because of confusion relevant to this rule, five stars shall be deducted from the rating.
8: Spelling & Grammar: One star shall be deducted from the rating iff the mission's spelling or grammar mistakes are so severe that they impede the ability of the player to understand the mission's objectives. If the quality of the language used is incomprehensible, then enforce rule 7 in rule 8's stead.
9: Canonicity: Reviewer reserves the right to deduct stars in a purely subjective manner for cases of violation of Star Trek Online's canon materials (e.g., references to other sci-fi series like naming someone "Adama", or beating someone up with a lightsaber, dancing when a tricorder scan emote would better fit the scene, etc.).
10: Inappropriate content: Reviewer reserves the right to deduct stars in a purely subjective manner for cases of potential violation of the Star Trek Online Foundry's EULA. Severe cases should bypass any reviews and report the mission immediately.
Reasoning Behind the Rules [the why behind the what]:
1. Benefit of the doubt first, making people polish their missions second.
2. Ooh, shiny!
3. Some away teams require area to prepare their actions before engaging the enemy (typically, engineer-heavy away teams, although away teams of all compositions may benefit from flanking bonuses). This rule is in place to allow players to execute their chosen strategies.
4. STO does not seem to be balanced around pulling multiple groups of mobs at a time. Authors attempting to use multiple groups of mobs as a way to bypass the PLAYER's difficulty slider are removing a degree of the control provided to the player by Cryptic. Players should set the difficulty of their missions. Not authors. That is the purpose of the difficulty slider. A second issue is grouping on space maps. Groups of hostile mobs will scale up in size in space. What was a challenging 3-on-1 fight solo can become an overwhelming n-on-5.
5: 6 groups of enemy mobs is the empirical standard for a map as seen in most space combat exploration missions.
6: Boss mobs, as indicated by the tooltip, are very difficult encounters. Authors cannot predict how long players will take to complete them, if at all. Bosses are to be used sparingly.
7: Tell the player what to do at all times, and make sure the mission is made correctly to make what you have told the player to do be consistent with the actual mechanics of the mission. Use highlighters to pinpoint locations of interest at all times.
8: Just spel close enuf so that ppl kan understand what yoo mean. This rule is typically violated when a word is so badly mispelled that the author's intended word can not be dermint. (I imagine most people will prefer to enforce a stricter variant of this rule)
9: Get your damn Twilight and Battlestar Galactica references OUT of a Star Trek game! Also, pay attention to the numerous (but not exhaustive enough imo) list of emotes available for interactions and choose appropriately based on your scene. Doing a handstand when you're trying to prevent a warp core breach makes no sense.
10: Judgment calls like these are probably best left to paid Cryptic staff, but they're worth a mention.
###
And now for the other things that the above nerdgasm didn't cover:
N_BA: Other encounters are getting jumped period... but I tried to give fair warning in the dialogue preceding the encounter... and often times there are other groups present to draw aggro from the player, but still have a battle going on.
There are ways to bend rule 3, like the True Way ships flying toward you in the Traelus System (although they're probably not implementable in Foundry yet).
N_BA: I don't carry a healer and ran through on advanced difficulty...
Kalyndria@AzureAlliance, my only surviving Tribble toon since character copy is offline, is VA Sci/AdvEsc (aside: her replacement sci with better racials is already capped & geared on Holodeck, and Kalyndria is giving away free sci BO training in all captain-teachable rank 3 sci skills on ESD on Holodeck until her BO skillpoints run out). Typically runs a 4 engineer away team with all phaser turrets & a shield recharge and heals the engineers herself (BOs don't run out of plasma fires on Tribble). But she doesn't run. She sits back, tells her engineers where to set up, the engineers set up, and then she pulls the enemies into the cannonade. She pretty much destroyed your missions (on Normal), including your 8-boss meltdown. She drew a square around the boss spawn point with her engineers, set down the turrets, and healed when the fighting started. Since the mobs were spawning in the middle, at least 6 of the 11 turrets were getting flanking bonus damage at all times. Ouch. Even the Reman & Breen AoE grenades weren't enough to beat back the flanking.
But I try to think of other players who don't have 11 phaser turrets and a support drone at their beck and call. They will definitely not fare as easily, especially when you consider the limited abilities of lower level characters.
N_BA: I wanted these to be difficult... no question about it.
We come to the focal point of our disagreement which is probably the underlying reason behind my unfavorable reviews. In my opinion, players should control the difficulty of missions via the difficulty slider. In what I think your opinion is, authors should bypass the players' difficulty slider by adding additional groups of mobs in the same location to fit the difficulty of the mission to the author's preference.
N_BA: Did you miss this [ fly straight ahead... go through center of asteroid]?
Yes, I missed that completely.
N_BA: The remarks concerning the appropriateness of a female captain having a "proper role" to play in this mission could be regarded as sexist
Touche. Review edited.
N_BA: I'm sorry if it was too difficult...
I can handle it, aside from the unmarked asteroid that I couldn't find. But I worry about 5mans and low level players.
3. Mobs spawned too close to the player: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any player's spawn or respawn point. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
4. Mobs spawned too close to each other: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any other pack of hostile mobs. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
Cryptic breaks these rules occasionally - at least nowadays. They didn't use to, and we got the boring "kill 5 ships in a row" missions. Now, there are a few missions where it is easy to accidentally pull in more then one encounter, o where the two encounters will converge at your location. I don't "trust" the difficult slider to do it all, though once I start to add more then 2 full encounters, I will probably always add NPCs that will also enter the fight in some way. (I have 2 Borg missions where allies engage the Borg, and now one mission where Breen and Klingons are fighting each other and you engage both - obviously,a lot of time the enemies will spend shooting each other, not you, thus still reducing the amount of damage you take.)
But in the end, I think every player should rate how he feels about a mission, based on his own priorities.
The only bad review, IMO, is a review with no explanation and no comment. I don't know what I did wrong or right if you don't tell me. Other players don't know why the mission might be good or bad, either.
Thank you AzureAlliance... That was exactly what I needed for a response. I run 2 engineers and 2 tacs with with my VA's Tac setup and developed a similar method for the challenge section with the 8 Captain level Challenges. The solution seemed obvious after the first run and those Klingon Swordmasters made me soil my armor more than once.
In space I'm in an Excelsior Refit. So you pretty much just breezed through it as well... That leaves us with a strange dichotomy... The difficulty slider is almost totally useless and standard missions ala "Cryptic Style" are a joke... So... do we continue to make missions in the accepted style or do we try and keep the player engaged on more than just a story level? I believed the enemies were in numbers appropriate for the story and not for trying to kill players intentionally.
Why would a station be left protected by 1 ship? Especially when they know I'm coming because it is a trap? On the Ground I believed the enemies were appropriate for what the story needed. Not trying to be deliberately difficult or trying to put players in a kill zone with no where to setup or using constantly respawning groups outside of the player controlling when the encounter begins.
So that brings us to your set of standard rules for reviewing and the realistic application of those rules. Having some guidelines is helpful and I can appreciate the idea behind them, but is it fun? Does conforming to your recommended standards engage the player in the combat?
Could you give me an "Honest Review" outside of your rules? Since I'm working outside of the conventional style perhaps you could actually give me your Honest Opinion? It seems like you had no real troubles with the difficulty.
I really did not get any sense of how the flow of the mission was to you. Some of the Emotes and mission titles were done specifically on purpose to control the mood... adding Comedy or Flair to typically boring and predictable actions is a way to end a scene or break the tension. Telling the players exactly what to do does not encourage thinking or set any kind of mood.
Could you comment on the use of map elements - I spent considerable time to build some the "sets" and was curious if you enjoyed them at all.
Also, some comments on use of Foundry tools and anything you found well done or poorly done would be helpful to me. Did you have difficulty with the graphic FX overloading your video card? Did the visual FX create an appropriate mood for the mission?
Was the dialogue appropriate for the mission? Did you feel engaged or immersed in the plot? Were the dream sequences effective in promoting the "feeling" of the story? Did the use of Task forces & Intelligence Reports give you a sense of being a competent Captain that is able to plan and execute with a proper Star Trek flair?
Was the Villain used in an appropriate manner? Was there a sense of being manipulated escalated throughout the Story Arc?
I appreciate your time spent with this and feel that this discussion is relevant to all of us authors. Your statement about us being enemies seems strange and I wouldn't consider you an enemy at all. I appreciate different points of view and consider them necessary to any real conversation.
At the end of the day, the simple fact is you CAN make a mission more challenging with the slider if thats what you want, but you CANT make it any easier than the level the author makes it at. That being the case, authors need to be aware of the differing playstyles of various players and accept the fact that if they design their missions to only suit one playstyle, theyre going to get bad reviews from the people who play the others. I'm going to try to design my missions on a standard difficulty level letting people increase as they choose and let the story do the rest.
Thanks Nagus.. Hopefully we can get a "Mix" of styles for players to choose from. For me the difficulty slider only extends the time required for a mission and not the actual "difficulty". I've seen a few Dev posts stating that the abilities and AI scripting were being adapted for use in the difficulty settings instead of just hull points and damage being stepped up.
Variety is the Spice of Life and I suppose there is no real "right or wrong" way to do it. Having some more options for letting potential players know what the difficulties are really going to be and what to realistically expect would help remedy the different styles of missions and I will endeavor to give better warnings up front.
Thanks Nagus.. Hopefully we can get a "Mix" of styles for players to choose from. For me the difficulty slider only extends the time required for a mission and not the actual "difficulty". I've seen a few Dev posts stating that the abilities and AI scripting were being adapted for use in the difficulty settings instead of just hull points and damage being stepped up.
Variety is the Spice of Life and I suppose there is no real "right or wrong" way to do it. Having some more options for letting potential players know what the difficulties are really going to be and what to realistically expect would help remedy the different styles of missions and I will endeavor to give better warnings up front.
I think at some point you just have to accept that people will give you bad reviews. If you know why they give it to you, and that you did things like that because you wanted it, just accept it and move on.
If it is something you can change and want to change, do that instead.
A review cannot be objective. It has to take into account personal preferencs. I think the only "duty" of a review is that it tries to express the points where preferences and mission design matched or collided.
I also think it's best to let the players adjust the difficulty via the slider. If an author designs a mission for the 1% of the playerbase that gets through an stf with closed eyes, then only 1% of the reviews will be positive.
Comments
The goal is to get the product properly presented in a consistent manner... Nothing worse then a continuous TRIBBLE twister that is changing everything all the time. If it's right, chill out and catch your Cues... consistently performing runs rings around hit & miss...
At least with this media we can refine and re-write as needed... in a live scenario there are no do-overs... you either get it right the first time or you have failed. Good artists will listen to their engineers because it is all about team work and pulling off a moment in time that cannot be repeated.
These lessons have served me well my entire life and translate into any situation. I try to inspire as well as deliver the "Goods" in a consistent manner that provides confidence and the ability to trust and just perform with out worrying about things outside our own responsibilities.
The "difficulty" situation at the moment relies on using our own judgment and finding other authors we can rely on to deliver an accurate and helpful review so that we can find out what works and what doesn't.
We as authors need to stick together and help each other overcome our difficulties and find some common ground to help improve everyone's product.
Which is why I waited so long before making a thread on my mission, and was very selective of who I sent PMs to, asking if they would test and give feedback. Speaking of which, have you given any of my latest updates a try Napoleon? Although its been a day and a half since I logged and checked for feedback, I just thought I might ask. This is going to be the last update for a couple of weeks, cos I have just over a gig left before my mobile internet resets.
Simple...playtest at the various ratings - and also pay attention to any feedback you consider valid. Issue resolved.
Lots of people I know that play STO play it at either advanced or elite because normal is laughable as a difficulty. If you do what i did on my mission and try for a fun mission with a similar enemy difficulty of STFs, put a warning up in the description. The last thing you want is your players walking into a really tough mission unprepared, because that will give bad ratings unnecessarily.
I had been using a lot of capitalized words to add emphasis to certain words I thought were important, but I've decided that in the interest of promoting good grammar and spelling that I should stick with a traditional approach that doesn't set off people's Grammar TRIBBLE Peeves. This required an entire re-write of all 6 missions dialogue but gave me the chance to find some more typos and I think my missions are ultimately better for it.
I also got rid of some unusual animations that I personally enjoyed, but perhaps were a distraction from the issues at hand. Some of them I kept to break up the tension and some of them have a place in the plot. Sometimes some humor can set the stage for a change of scenery or break the tension before entering combat.. such as the mooning of enemies in Braveheart.
I'm going to get back to running other author's missions soon and I'll post up my usual helpful observations. Perhaps I'll make some detailed notes and shoot them over in a P.M. because the review section is very short and specifics are hard to communicate in a small way.
On a Side note... all six of my episodes are now in the Community Authored Tab even though 3 have never been reviewed... 13 reviews for the first one, 2 for the 2nd and 1 for the 3rd.
it's kind of discouraging that no one except myself has enjoyed the whole 6-part epic, but patience is called for here.
There also appear to be double entries for several of them even though I withdrew them before republish yesterday... the mission descriptions show the text that I added so they should all be fine no matter which one is tried.
I'm hoping the difficulty is appropriate and the only really difficult one is the last episode with Captain level ground encounters... I added an appropriate warning... but would recommend all of them be tried at normal difficulty.
It would be nice if some one... anyone... would do a complete run of all six missions... but that's asking a lot...
If its any consolation, when I get my cable internet back, I will give it a run through, but I need more work to pay off my $500 remaining debt to my ISP, so try not to hold out too long for me please. I just was thankful that I paid for my lifers back in August last year, or I would have stopped playing in november
I figured a Big Amp Rack would roll off the truck and crush me unloading by myself a 5 a.m. Then my friend who managed a big facility was rolling up the last cable and stepped off the back of the stage... his wife found him knocked out hours later when he did not come home... I didn't have anyone to come looking for me... it was a wake up call for sure..
At least I retired at age 39 and my house, 2 cars and boat are all paid for.
I promise to never make a player kill more than 6 groups of mobs on a single map without NPC help.
I promise to make mobs that the player kills by himself be far apart so that there's very little chance of doublepulling.
I promise to always mention what types of combat are in the mission in the initial briefing.
I promise to only use ground boss fights once per mission or in areas that the player is told to avoid.
I promise to keep a large space between the first group of mobs and respawn points so the player never gets ganked.
I promise to always mark down missions which violate any of the above by one star for each violation.
Aside:
On rating:
Missions start with 5/5 stars. For each thing the author does wrong, -1 star.
If you read the mission objective it's clear that some Klings are coming when you hit the"Answer Klingon Challenge" button. There is an infinite amount of time to prepare and the respawn point is close enough, but out of line of sight so players that have a team wipe can regroup and finish them off.
In this manner I've tried to give the players a "fighting chance" but I would think that anything other than Normal difficulty would be suicidal... I've been putting off testing it on advanced and elite... it kind of scares me just thinking about it because I know that on normal I get whacked. Keep in mind I don't carry a healer or use shield charges and I'm a Tac...
The second map was a fed facility , with fed groups around every corner.
After a half hour slog through the map of repetitive pressing of buttons patiently waiting for my neck pinch to be off cooldown to stop engineering mobs from shield recharging faster than warp speed I get to what I am now praying is the missions ending.
Nope, off we go to a huge underground cave filled with...you guessed it endless groups of unavoidable mobs that either make me respawn non stop or are impossible to interrupt or stop from healing.
after one hour and forty five minutes i just gave up.
Was the mission hard?
it was pointless.
I get that people want to instill a sense of difficulty, but you also have to be aware of the limitations of the game. There are certain things that are just not fun about ground comabt, and one of them is the fact that no matter how good as a player you are, its just a drawn out numbers game.
Drawing it out further doesn't make your mission more difficult, it just makes it more irritating.
Over all I would consider it Very Challenging and not over the top... but maybe I can convince some poor idiot to spend 3 hours doing all 6 of my missions so I can get some idea if the story has some "feel" to it.
But I guess this is getting old and the time is getting late... I'm a patient person and maybe some lonely soul will have pity on me and play all 6 episodes I created and post up the awesomeness that I've made for us.
When they are ready to begin the players hit the "Answer Challenge" button and the first Captain group beams into the center of the arena. There is as much time to prepare as needed, if you need to wait in between challenges for timers to reset you can do this for as long as you need to... you can setup your BO's ahead of the enemy beam in and be prepared...
yeah, but then again sometimes, you can find that its never difficult enough for some people.
The writer has no idea who will be playing thier missions and in the end, the players will
be the ones making the ratings.
If you want good overall ratings....your mission combat should be as difficult as an average
crypic mission......AS DIFFICULT, your free to make it as interesting as possible
If you don't care about ratings..............knock yourself out.
Hate it or love it.........that is how it works. The players rate it.....not you.
Meow
They were all less than Stellar and in fact were almost all 1 stars with some short explanations as to the why. I attempted to send a message to this person with a long and detailed explanation and a request for some clarification of the comments... only to find I was on this person's ignore list... in light of this blockage of communication - I will post my response here since it seems relative to the subject in this post regarding difficulty and how we as authors can deal with these problems. The reviewer in question will not be named by me... nor will his specific comments be reprinted here, however my responses should fill in the "context" of the reviews in question.
If you are not interested in this don't read any further Please... and accept my apology for wasting your time.
Thanks for taking the time to review my missions... it was quite an expenditure of time and I appreciate the effort.. your the only one that has endeavored to do this for me.
It seems from your review that you think all the "Mobs" are too close to each other... It might be helpful if you could give a little more detail in this area... I attempted to get them close enough to be threatening, but far enough away to run if needed in some of the encounters...
Other encounters are getting jumped period... but I tried to give fair warning in the dialogue preceding the encounter... and often times there are other groups present to draw aggro from the player, but still have a battle going on.
Granted... if you make a mistake and pull multiple ground groups you could have a very bad time in some areas, while others are simply meant to be a Nightmare environment. I don't carry a healer and ran through on advanced difficulty...
I might have gotten caught between hypos and rally cries more than a few times but my whole away team very rarely all wiped, but I'm a seasoned STF Veteran and I know how to play this game Very Well. I also tried to give fair warning through dialogue that things were going to get very nasty...
I wanted these to be difficult... no question about it. However, My VA Tac can waltz through every space encounter easily. Did you play these on Normal difficulty? I played them all on advanced and did not really have any trouble.. I'm very curious.. I run All the Borg STF's almost in my sleep and in very short times... Perhaps I've made an error with the difficulty or placement.
Regarding the Eye of the Needle that you had trouble finishing... just fly straight ahead... go through center of asteroid (Eye of Needle) and there is a Base inside of a dense debris field... the Orion Queen's vessel is inside and will show up as an Ally when you close to within about 20km. The density of the Debris was mentioned Specifically in the dialogue prior to the Map change... as well as the inability to get a clear reading... Did you miss this? Or was there a different problem?
As far as the explicit nature of some of the dialogue, this was a question I had and was concerned about it.. was there something specifically in the dialogue? or just a "feeling"?
There are numerous examples throughout StarTrek regarding specifically sexual encounters and I attempted to promote a feeling of the sexual act and the fantasy elements of the dream acts to build the tension within the story arc. The Final Act of Consummation in the end was left to the players imagination somewhat, while having to go back into space for the final battle while the Captain is supposedly doing his "thing".
The remarks concerning the appropriateness of a female captain having a "proper role" to play in this mission could be regarded as sexist and pigeon-holed into a traditional male-female relationship which has been used as plot mechanics in Star Trek episodes before... Why couldn't a Female Captain become a Queen's champion & Consort? Could you elaborate on a specific reason why?
Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm asking too much with these questions, but I would hope to make some improvements and anything you can help me with is appreciated. I'm sorry if it was too difficult...
Is this unreasonable?
Even on advanced I've haven't had any troubles at all...
Battleships just blow up quickly with my ensign in the editor with no BO's and junk items I've picked up. No torpedoes, no abilities at all to use... No god mode required. No kill enemies needed. I'm starting to think something is wrong somewhere...
My Tac VA just blows things apart extremely fast... like 10 seconds and pop goes the battleship. Maybe I can't help but target only one shield facing... CSV takes out a group of fighters in 3 seconds or less...
Of course I have all top of the line gear, and I'm specced for all around death and destruction and I regularly sleepwalk through STF's... I might go down once in a while but only if i TRIBBLE something up...
I'm not trying to brag... I'm wondering about everyone else... Do you guys get blown up by one ship? On elite I might get accidently one-shotted on occasion but generally enemies just take a little longer.
Yup.
Most players are far from optimal. Quite a few people take a bit to figure out how to use power settings well and that's mentioned in the tutorial. And of the ones that have a bit of clue, how many gun for 125 attack power instead of 135?
And the game caters to them. There's expected levels of difficulty and difficulty sliders for those that want it harder, even if ground combat hampers the effectiveness of that slider.
At that level though, you would be unlucky to lose 3% of your shielding on normal. It is just a complete, absolute, utter joke.
But that is a tac, inside a tact ship, no? An engineer packs less DPS than a Sci and a Sci less than a tactical. And both sci and cruisers pack considerably less DPS than a tactical ship. Lower DPS can also mess up your attack run or give the opponent a chance to turn, thereby adding another shield facing to chew through. And that doesn't go into choice of gear and BOff abilities.
And then there's learning curve. You are trying to create things that are sort of hard for you. Where does that leave the guy who finds advanced hard? What looks like a bit of a challenge to one level of player can be an unclimbable cliff to another. They simply cannot get close enough to success to imagine they can succeed. They write it off as impossible or unfun.
Also worth noting that the one time I bothered to check, NPC hull didn't seem to scale proper on elite. Escorts, for example, are 70k in advanced, ~100k on elite at 51. Cruisers are ~100k on both. Shielding might have improved, hull didn't seem to have however.
Yeah, elite in space is not super hard, most of the time, primarily for the same reason you occasionally get one shotted. NPC energy weapon damage is too low, while their torp damage is higher than it should be. As such, as long as you can keep shields sufficiently high, there's not much risk. Only a sufficiently low shield facing plus a sufficiently high torp hit really puts you in danger. Same deal in normal and advanced, really, though obviously in those lower settings, it takes either more time or more mobs to get past the shields. And the torps aren't quite as deadly, of course, so the consequences of them getting through is less severe. I hope they fix that issue someday. Raise mob energy damage to make them overall a bit tougher, but lower the torp damage to make it less about damage spikes being what kills you.
Of course, then there's still certain powers that trivialize one on one combat. Targeting weapon subsystems III, for example, shuts most NPC enemies down, since they typically just keep their broadside to you. No energy weapons + no torps = no risk to you. No need to kill them in under 10s then.
That said, the key thing is there are certain things people expect from missions. And that includes typically only facing one group, occasionally 1 group + a half group or 2 groups fighting. There's the difficulty slider to take it a step beyond that.
Unless some sort of naming convention becomes adopted, say by tagging (hard) onto the name or we get the ability to tag our missions somehow so players know to expect a ramped up difficulty, you've either got to cater to that or be fine with getting low ratings.
You [Napoleon_BlownApart] and I do not see eye to eye on much of anything. We are enemies. As such, it should come as little surprise that my ideals are in nearly perfect conflict against yours. Because of that conflict, the rules of rating I've recently adopted were quite harsh against your missions.
AA's Rules of Rating Foundry Missions (subject to change) (YMWV) [the what]:
1. All players start with a 5/5 star rating.
2. Reviewer reserves the right to award bonus stars in a purely subjective manner.
3. Mobs spawned too close to the player: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any player's spawn or respawn point. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
4. Mobs spawned too close to each other: No pack of hostile mobs should be within 35 meters (ground) or 15 kilometers (space) of any other pack of hostile mobs. One star shall be deducted from the rating for each pack of mobs violating this rule.
5. Too many mobs on a map: Limit of 6 groups of hostile mobs per map. One star shall be deducted for each group of hostile mobs in excess of this limit. This rule shall not be enforced when the player is provided with adequate cover from groups of friendly mobs.
6: Too many BOSS mobs on a map: Limit of 1 group of boss mobs per map. One star shall be deducted for each group of boss mobs on a map in excess of this limit. This rule shall not be enforced when the player is provided with adequate cover from groups of friendly mobs.
7: Mission not completable: The player should always have some understanding of what he or she is to accomplish on every map, and maps should have appropriate functionality to support that understanding. If the player is unable to continue the mission because of confusion relevant to this rule, five stars shall be deducted from the rating.
8: Spelling & Grammar: One star shall be deducted from the rating iff the mission's spelling or grammar mistakes are so severe that they impede the ability of the player to understand the mission's objectives. If the quality of the language used is incomprehensible, then enforce rule 7 in rule 8's stead.
9: Canonicity: Reviewer reserves the right to deduct stars in a purely subjective manner for cases of violation of Star Trek Online's canon materials (e.g., references to other sci-fi series like naming someone "Adama", or beating someone up with a lightsaber, dancing when a tricorder scan emote would better fit the scene, etc.).
10: Inappropriate content: Reviewer reserves the right to deduct stars in a purely subjective manner for cases of potential violation of the Star Trek Online Foundry's EULA. Severe cases should bypass any reviews and report the mission immediately.
Reasoning Behind the Rules [the why behind the what]:
1. Benefit of the doubt first, making people polish their missions second.
2. Ooh, shiny!
3. Some away teams require area to prepare their actions before engaging the enemy (typically, engineer-heavy away teams, although away teams of all compositions may benefit from flanking bonuses). This rule is in place to allow players to execute their chosen strategies.
4. STO does not seem to be balanced around pulling multiple groups of mobs at a time. Authors attempting to use multiple groups of mobs as a way to bypass the PLAYER's difficulty slider are removing a degree of the control provided to the player by Cryptic. Players should set the difficulty of their missions. Not authors. That is the purpose of the difficulty slider. A second issue is grouping on space maps. Groups of hostile mobs will scale up in size in space. What was a challenging 3-on-1 fight solo can become an overwhelming n-on-5.
5: 6 groups of enemy mobs is the empirical standard for a map as seen in most space combat exploration missions.
6: Boss mobs, as indicated by the tooltip, are very difficult encounters. Authors cannot predict how long players will take to complete them, if at all. Bosses are to be used sparingly.
7: Tell the player what to do at all times, and make sure the mission is made correctly to make what you have told the player to do be consistent with the actual mechanics of the mission. Use highlighters to pinpoint locations of interest at all times.
8: Just spel close enuf so that ppl kan understand what yoo mean. This rule is typically violated when a word is so badly mispelled that the author's intended word can not be dermint. (I imagine most people will prefer to enforce a stricter variant of this rule)
9: Get your damn Twilight and Battlestar Galactica references OUT of a Star Trek game! Also, pay attention to the numerous (but not exhaustive enough imo) list of emotes available for interactions and choose appropriately based on your scene. Doing a handstand when you're trying to prevent a warp core breach makes no sense.
10: Judgment calls like these are probably best left to paid Cryptic staff, but they're worth a mention.
###
And now for the other things that the above nerdgasm didn't cover:
N_BA: Other encounters are getting jumped period... but I tried to give fair warning in the dialogue preceding the encounter... and often times there are other groups present to draw aggro from the player, but still have a battle going on.
There are ways to bend rule 3, like the True Way ships flying toward you in the Traelus System (although they're probably not implementable in Foundry yet).
N_BA: I don't carry a healer and ran through on advanced difficulty...
Kalyndria@AzureAlliance, my only surviving Tribble toon since character copy is offline, is VA Sci/AdvEsc (aside: her replacement sci with better racials is already capped & geared on Holodeck, and Kalyndria is giving away free sci BO training in all captain-teachable rank 3 sci skills on ESD on Holodeck until her BO skillpoints run out). Typically runs a 4 engineer away team with all phaser turrets & a shield recharge and heals the engineers herself (BOs don't run out of plasma fires on Tribble). But she doesn't run. She sits back, tells her engineers where to set up, the engineers set up, and then she pulls the enemies into the cannonade. She pretty much destroyed your missions (on Normal), including your 8-boss meltdown. She drew a square around the boss spawn point with her engineers, set down the turrets, and healed when the fighting started. Since the mobs were spawning in the middle, at least 6 of the 11 turrets were getting flanking bonus damage at all times. Ouch. Even the Reman & Breen AoE grenades weren't enough to beat back the flanking.
But I try to think of other players who don't have 11 phaser turrets and a support drone at their beck and call. They will definitely not fare as easily, especially when you consider the limited abilities of lower level characters.
N_BA: I wanted these to be difficult... no question about it.
We come to the focal point of our disagreement which is probably the underlying reason behind my unfavorable reviews. In my opinion, players should control the difficulty of missions via the difficulty slider. In what I think your opinion is, authors should bypass the players' difficulty slider by adding additional groups of mobs in the same location to fit the difficulty of the mission to the author's preference.
N_BA: Did you miss this [ fly straight ahead... go through center of asteroid]?
Yes, I missed that completely.
N_BA: The remarks concerning the appropriateness of a female captain having a "proper role" to play in this mission could be regarded as sexist
Touche. Review edited.
N_BA: I'm sorry if it was too difficult...
I can handle it, aside from the unmarked asteroid that I couldn't find. But I worry about 5mans and low level players.
But in the end, I think every player should rate how he feels about a mission, based on his own priorities.
The only bad review, IMO, is a review with no explanation and no comment. I don't know what I did wrong or right if you don't tell me. Other players don't know why the mission might be good or bad, either.
In space I'm in an Excelsior Refit. So you pretty much just breezed through it as well... That leaves us with a strange dichotomy... The difficulty slider is almost totally useless and standard missions ala "Cryptic Style" are a joke... So... do we continue to make missions in the accepted style or do we try and keep the player engaged on more than just a story level? I believed the enemies were in numbers appropriate for the story and not for trying to kill players intentionally.
Why would a station be left protected by 1 ship? Especially when they know I'm coming because it is a trap? On the Ground I believed the enemies were appropriate for what the story needed. Not trying to be deliberately difficult or trying to put players in a kill zone with no where to setup or using constantly respawning groups outside of the player controlling when the encounter begins.
So that brings us to your set of standard rules for reviewing and the realistic application of those rules. Having some guidelines is helpful and I can appreciate the idea behind them, but is it fun? Does conforming to your recommended standards engage the player in the combat?
Could you give me an "Honest Review" outside of your rules? Since I'm working outside of the conventional style perhaps you could actually give me your Honest Opinion? It seems like you had no real troubles with the difficulty.
I really did not get any sense of how the flow of the mission was to you. Some of the Emotes and mission titles were done specifically on purpose to control the mood... adding Comedy or Flair to typically boring and predictable actions is a way to end a scene or break the tension. Telling the players exactly what to do does not encourage thinking or set any kind of mood.
Could you comment on the use of map elements - I spent considerable time to build some the "sets" and was curious if you enjoyed them at all.
Also, some comments on use of Foundry tools and anything you found well done or poorly done would be helpful to me. Did you have difficulty with the graphic FX overloading your video card? Did the visual FX create an appropriate mood for the mission?
Was the dialogue appropriate for the mission? Did you feel engaged or immersed in the plot? Were the dream sequences effective in promoting the "feeling" of the story? Did the use of Task forces & Intelligence Reports give you a sense of being a competent Captain that is able to plan and execute with a proper Star Trek flair?
Was the Villain used in an appropriate manner? Was there a sense of being manipulated escalated throughout the Story Arc?
I appreciate your time spent with this and feel that this discussion is relevant to all of us authors. Your statement about us being enemies seems strange and I wouldn't consider you an enemy at all. I appreciate different points of view and consider them necessary to any real conversation.
Variety is the Spice of Life and I suppose there is no real "right or wrong" way to do it. Having some more options for letting potential players know what the difficulties are really going to be and what to realistically expect would help remedy the different styles of missions and I will endeavor to give better warnings up front.
If it is something you can change and want to change, do that instead.
A review cannot be objective. It has to take into account personal preferencs. I think the only "duty" of a review is that it tries to express the points where preferences and mission design matched or collided.