So hypothetically redesign it then. What's the perfect system that allows every mission to get the plays it deserves? Not being sarcastic. I'm really asking. Let's brainstorm.
Make writing farming, exploiting, accolade-grinding, and other missions of that ilk a bannable offense. You write one, you get warned once to take it down, then you lose your Foundry slots. Based on statistics gathered by Kirkfat in another thread, that's 3/4 of the story-writers' problem gone in one fell swoop. Hey, here's a free mission hook for anyone who's interested: "Admiral Bobo Gets Dishonorably Discharged".
Alternate suggestion: Give story missions their own tab on the list. Bobo does not qualify.
Remove or revamp the weighting system. Thanks to massive pimping by me, "Bait and Switch" has acquired a grand total of sixteen reviews. Two-thirds of them are five stars and not one of the others is below four. And yet because of the counterproductive bull**** that is the weighting system its actual rating is something like 3.5 which puts me well below the top 50.
Make mission tagging something the author does. Question: Who at Cryptic was drunk at the meeting where they decided how the tagging system would work? Have they never uploaded a video to YouTube or written a blog entry? This is a basic common sense feature of tagging systems. As it is, getting tags has the same problem as getting plays at all.
Take Spotlights out of the regular list. They've already got their own tab on the Foundry dialog. They don't need to be hogging Top 50 slots from the hoi polloi.
Retitle the "Top Rated" tab "Top 50".
Folks are always complaining in other forums about lack of content. Cryptic, if you want us to keep making content for you for free, give us the support we need to make doing it worthwhile.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Here's another two ideas I thought of a couple minutes ago:
-- Give out tiered accolades and titles for posting reviews of enough different Foundry missions. This attracts a potentially new group of players: the accolade hunters. Make the requirement for the top tier greater than 50 missions, please.
"New title unlocked: Foundry Supporter"
-- An idea suggested in the comments section of an article on Neverwinter: Allow Foundry authors to choose mission rewards from a list. There's way more than enough Cryptic-created sources of dilithium in the game to meet daily limits (I've got something like 70,000 unrefined dil wasting memory in my account), so let us give out other stuff like fleet marks, blue loot, or latinum.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Not to beat this to death, but another thing I've long favored is campaign support (something Neverwinter already has). As part of this, campaigns and missions within those campaigns should be made separately searchable from standalone missions. Giving campaigns their own dedicated search queue would make both campaign and standalone missions easier to find, as they would no longer get in each other's way in custom search results.
Make writing farming, exploiting, accolade-grinding, and other missions of that ilk a bannable offense. You write one, you get warned once to take it down, then you lose your Foundry slots. Based on statistics gathered by Kirkfat in another thread, that's 3/4 of the story-writers' problem gone in one fell swoop. Hey, here's a free mission hook for anyone who's interested: "Admiral Bobo Gets Dishonorably Discharged".
Alternate suggestion: Give story missions their own tab on the list. Bobo does not qualify.
Remove or revamp the weighting system. Thanks to massive pimping by me, "Bait and Switch" has acquired a grand total of sixteen reviews. Two-thirds of them are five stars and not one of the others is below four. And yet because of the counterproductive bull**** that is the weighting system its actual rating is something like 3.5 which puts me well below the top 50.
Make mission tagging something the author does. Question: Who at Cryptic was drunk at the meeting where they decided how the tagging system would work? Have they never uploaded a video to YouTube or written a blog entry? This is a basic common sense feature of tagging systems. As it is, getting tags has the same problem as getting plays at all.
Take Spotlights out of the regular list. They've already got their own tab on the Foundry dialog. They don't need to be hogging Top 50 slots from the hoi polloi.
Retitle the "Top Rated" tab "Top 50".
Folks are always complaining in other forums about lack of content. Cryptic, if you want us to keep making content for you for free, give us the support we need to make doing it worthwhile.
I agree with most of your rant here. I have had the same experience as you with my mission publish except it was worsened by a bug that held it back from qualifying for rewards! They need to start going easier on us authors, it's a tough job. I don't want to attack the grinder authors I think there is a place for learning the too lset and experimenting. I feel it is up to Cryptic decide if they are to be banned or for a method of allowing them to coexist with the story missions.That said Cryptic has explicitly stated the intention of the foundry is to create story missions and story missions are really being hurt in the current climate.
I also really like Pax's idea.
A TIME TO SEARCH: ENTER MY FOUNDRY MISSION at the RISA SYSTEM Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
Make writing farming, exploiting, accolade-grinding, and other missions of that ilk a bannable offense. You write one, you get warned once to take it down, then you lose your Foundry slots. Based on statistics gathered by Kirkfat in another thread, that's 3/4 of the story-writers' problem gone in one fell swoop. Hey, here's a free mission hook for anyone who's interested: "Admiral Bobo Gets Dishonorably Discharged".
They need to stay, and never be a bannable offense. I never played one, and never plan to play one of them, but they are part of the game. They exist for a reason, and a lot of player will only play those, and never play the others. They doesn't care about them.
Except for the exploit missions, obviously.
They just need to keep working on filters, so they are on a separate filter, which is the best for both side of the community.
I've been hesitant to respond to this thread because what I'm going to say is just negative, but the truth is the OP is right, there's no point for a new author to make missions. An established author might have enough of a following to get a new mission played. Even that isn't guaranteed, but a new author has basically no chance. I'm sorry to have to say it, but it's the truth.
I see a lot of good suggestions of things that would fix the problem, and frankly many of them would not be much work for Cryptic to implement (#1 removing the weighted ratings as it was a bad idea from the start). Unfortunately, at this point I really don't see that Cryptic cares at all to try to fix the Foundry. I also am not sure if they even understand the sad state the Foundry is currently in.
My honest feeling is that in another six months or a year the Foundry is basically going to be dead unless things are turned around, and I don't think Cryptic even sees there's a problem.
If I had to guess, I'd say Cryptic probably regrets even making the Foundry at this point as it's just a distraction that doesn't fit in with the new F2P game mechanics at all. It's unfortunate but I think that is the most realistic explanation for the state the Foundry has been left in.
They need to stay, and never be a bannable offense. I never played one, and never plan to play one of them, but they are part of the game. They exist for a reason, and a lot of player will only play those, and never play the others. They doesn't care about them.
Except for the exploit missions, obviously.
They just need to keep working on filters, so they are on a separate filter, which is the best for both side of the community.
As for everything else you said, I agree.
Honestly, with the current situation the Foundry is dying a slow death. If all or most of the story authors leave then they can just go ahead and shut the Foundry down. I don't really give a damn at that point. So, all this stuff about how grinders should be allowed, etc, the fact is that if all we're going to get are grinders, I say go ahead and pull the plug.
The fact is the tool set was designed for making stories, and if that's not the reality about what it's used for, then what is the point? It's not even worth supporting if all it's going to be about is putting 25 mobs on a map and blowing them up.
I'm not saying that removing grinders is the best strategy. I think having a separate tab for story missions would be better. But if that's not going to happen...
I'm gonna have to agree with the people saying its not worth authoring. I saw someone asked the question a few months ago and refrained from answering but this time I'm jumping in.
The Foundry is Cryptic's next PvP system. Look how long the pvp community has waited for pvp updates. Forever. They haven't gotten a single thing since launch. The pvp community is pretty much gone. Foundry has been lucky its gotten just a bit of attention and the community has held it together for this long. Its however in the same boat as pvp. Its so sad to listen and watch podcasts from the launch of the foundry to see how well it was doing, with the exception of grinders and exploits, and then see it go downhill ever since Season 4. The foundry had a short golden age and started to slowly die. Why? Because Cryptic released it as a beta version. It wasn't ready to go out yet. That would have been fine but look at it. We're still in Beta after all this time with very little changes to what you would expect overall. I laughed when listening to those old podcasts when they said Foundry would change this game forever and become a huge part of it. It did for those months up till season 4, then poof. Its no this thing probably half the player base knows of and Cryptic has let if fall apart.
Anytime they do try and fix the situation its obviously rushed as the tagging system which is obvious its not going to work. As long as we've got 50 missions only showing those other missions aren't going to even get played. How are they even going to get tagged so people can find them? Its a backwards system that won't help authors who aren't in that fifty. It will sure help BoBo though. I mean, I've got 34 decent missions out there and I've done plenty of plugging for them and they've gotten barely any plays since December with this new search and rating. Since LoR downtime I think the most reviews I saw on one mission was 4... 4!!!
If I don't feel making a mission is worth it with all the plugging I've done and attention my missions got in the past, how am I supposed to tell a new author that its worth making a mission. There's no way you can just get people to play your mission by making it. You're going to have to do some plugging to get attention but even still I doubt you'll get many plays.
I was going to give Cryptic until S9 to fix foundry before deciding my future with the toolset, but that decision has come early due to many other reasons. It's quite obvious Cryptic will never truly be able to fix the foundry. It brings no money in. Unless they find a way to bring in money with this thing, they aren't going to invest more into. And how are they even going to make money off of it when the majority of the playerbase doesn't even like the foundry as its so badly put together. Even those who might have spent some money buying art assets probably wouldn't now as they're mission isn't going to get played.
So in the end if your fine with you and maybe some friends playing your mission its worth authoring, as long as your fine checking in all the time to make sure Cryptic didn't break your mission. Otherwise if you do want to try to get plays for your mission and your a story author, you might as well open up Word and write it there to post on a fan fic site.
About the only shot a new author has is to get a spotlight. As authors we can help the community by playing more story missions and reviewing content that is brand spanking new. The only way the foundry can thrive is if we build less and play more.
A TIME TO SEARCH: ENTER MY FOUNDRY MISSION at the RISA SYSTEM Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
I brought up this idea some time ago, and I still think it would be a good solution:
Missions of The Day/Hour
First of all, introduce multiple ratings,
Combat/Grind and Story. Then, each day, or even each hour, select missions randomly.
4 missions with grind rating 3.5+
4 missions with story rating 3.5+
4 missions with average rating 4+
4 missions from all
4 missions published within 1 week (new)
These missions would get drops and dil once. Others do not, except for spotlights.
With this, everyone would have a fair chance for plays. If your mission is very good, you will have 3x or 4x chance for plays, because the machine may select it into any of first 4 categories.
From that 24 missions, you ought find one or two interesting. If not, just check back in a couple of hours.
Also, I would introduce auto withdraw. If a mission has both rating type below 3 for 14 days (counting from last publish), then the system would withdraw it. The author may publish it again anytime, of course. This would remove the hello world missions and the real crappy ones, abandoned long ago.
I stopped messing with the foundry more than a year ago. I realized that there is no demand for stories in this game. The whole structure of the game draws and holds grinder players only. Those who like stories leave mid way of the "storyline" leveling and never return. No matter how you dress up the KILL 5 THINGS mission, they suck.
The foundry has minimal retention value for story players because for every good mission, there are 20 TRIBBLE ones. So, again, you spend most of your time with Kill 20 things BS. At the end of the day, only grinders stay and they don't need story missions.
I brought up this idea some time ago, and I still think it would be a good solution:
Missions of The Day/Hour
First of all, introduce multiple ratings,
Combat/Grind and Story. Then, each day, or even each hour, select missions randomly.
4 missions with grind rating 3.5+
4 missions with story rating 3.5+
4 missions with average rating 4+
4 missions from all
4 missions published within 1 week (new)
These missions would get drops and dil once. Others do not, except for spotlights.
With this, everyone would have a fair chance for plays. If your mission is very good, you will have 3x or 4x chance for plays, because the machine may select it into any of first 4 categories.
From that 24 missions, you ought find one or two interesting. If not, just check back in a couple of hours.
Also, I would introduce auto withdraw. If a mission has both rating type below 3 for 14 days (counting from last publish), then the system would withdraw it. The author may publish it again anytime, of course. This would remove the hello world missions and the real crappy ones, abandoned long ago.
A ranomly or otherwise selected spotlight of the day would be a great idea. The problem is Cryptic puts so little salaried time towards the foundry that ideas like this never get implemented. I had a very bad feeling when the new search interface was added and almost a year later it is killing us an nothing will likely be done about it unless it costs cryptic money.
Edit: Has anybody contacted Brandon about doing a daily spotlight feature?
A TIME TO SEARCH: ENTER MY FOUNDRY MISSION at the RISA SYSTEM Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
To answer the question in the thread title, "why bother writing new missions for the Foundry," it's because a handful of Foundry authors are the only ones putting any worthwhile content into this game anymore. Pride yourselves on the fact that you're writing better stories than the people who are paid to write stories.
But I concede the point that it's hard to find anything new on there...I've played Avenging Resolution already but it's one of the first things I see each and every time I open the Foundry tab, right along with First Cause, Then Effect. Both good missions, but I've played them already. Time for something else to get pushed to the front of the line.
Then there's the grinders....the less said about them, the better.
Many years ago, City of Heroes premiered Mission Architect, which allowed players to created their own stories and publish them for everyone to play. The software was intuitive, fast, and easy to learn, and a person could knock out missions very quickly. This was going to usher in a new era of storytelling in the game.....
From then until the day the CoH lights were finally turned off, the Devs spent all their MA time chasing exploits and nerfing powers to stop farming and grinding. "Stories" were replaced with fast grindable farms.
When I first heard about the Foundry, years later, I wondered how Cryptic planned to avoid all the problems CoH had had. Apparently, they didn't.
I've been surprised at how user-unfriendly, complicated, and bug-ridden the Foundry system is. I've created several missions, and would like to do a lot more, but I keep finding myself spending less time being creative and more time fighting the software.
There may be 5 ways to have a character in a mission walk across a room. But if the software suddenly decides for itself that it doesn't want that a character to walk across the room, there's absolutely no way the author can make that happen. Why? Nobody seems to know; it just happens sometimes.
Maybe you create a mission and test it 3 times, then publish it and run it through 4 more times, and everything is great. But, on the 5th playthrough, the mission suddenly doesn't work anymore. Why? Again, nobody knows. It's incredibly frustrating.
I'm not a programmer by trade. I just want to come up with cool Star Trek stories. I'm not trained to identify/fix/reprogram computer code bugs, nor am I so inclined.
So, long story short: The Foundry is a great idea that is implemented terribly in STO. Even if it was overhauled and implemented well, the Devs would still be stuck with the problems of exploiters, farmers, and grinders -- I don't think there's a way around that. I'm not too hopeful for any big improvements in the short or long term, unfortunately.
If there was a "next" button, would people use it? In the old days how many people scrolled down past the first 50 missions on the list?
I would.
I did so in the CoH Mission Architect regularly, because I wanted to play more than just the "most popular" missions. With all the weakness of the MA search system, it was far easier to find a greater variety of missions there than in the Foundry.
Make writing farming, exploiting, accolade-grinding, and other missions of that ilk a bannable offense. You write one, you get warned once to take it down, then you lose your Foundry slots. Based on statistics gathered by Kirkfat in another thread, that's 3/4 of the story-writers' problem gone in one fell swoop. Hey, here's a free mission hook for anyone who's interested: "Admiral Bobo Gets Dishonorably Discharged".
Oh hell no, lol. Every time I played that mission, I'd be in tears I was laughing so hard. If it wasn't for the spoofical funny as hell dialogue, I'd have MAYBE played it twice and forgotten about it But where else do you see ship admirals screaming at each other, about how their pets can hit the little red buttons better?
And oh yeah, getting to call someone "Admiral Kitty"!
And if you read the dialogue, I think the author was actually poking fun at all the grinders out there, that run the same easy-mode missions over & over just to get loot. Just my take on that part, lol
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
butcher suspect, "What'd you hit me with?"
Temperance Brennan, "A building"
Make writing farming, exploiting, accolade-grinding, and other missions of that ilk a bannable offense. You write one, you get warned once to take it down, then you lose your Foundry slots. Based on statistics gathered by Kirkfat in another thread, that's 3/4 of the story-writers' problem gone in one fell swoop. Hey, here's a free mission hook for anyone who's interested: "Admiral Bobo Gets Dishonorably Discharged".
Alternate suggestion: Give story missions their own tab on the list. Bobo does not qualify.
Remove or revamp the weighting system. Thanks to massive pimping by me, "Bait and Switch" has acquired a grand total of sixteen reviews. Two-thirds of them are five stars and not one of the others is below four. And yet because of the counterproductive bull**** that is the weighting system its actual rating is something like 3.5 which puts me well below the top 50.
Make mission tagging something the author does. Question: Who at Cryptic was drunk at the meeting where they decided how the tagging system would work? Have they never uploaded a video to YouTube or written a blog entry? This is a basic common sense feature of tagging systems. As it is, getting tags has the same problem as getting plays at all.
Take Spotlights out of the regular list. They've already got their own tab on the Foundry dialog. They don't need to be hogging Top 50 slots from the hoi polloi.
Retitle the "Top Rated" tab "Top 50".
Folks are always complaining in other forums about lack of content. Cryptic, if you want us to keep making content for you for free, give us the support we need to make doing it worthwhile.
Point #1 on that list was mostly an imagine spot. The serious suggestion there was giving story missions their own tab.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
If you write a mission that serves a useful purpose, you're going to have to beat people off with a stick just to STOP them from playing it, and certainly you and all your friends will want to play it as often as possible. If you write pretentious drivel that serves no useful purpose, it will, rightly so, languish in the dustbin of obscurity. I see nothing wrong with this.
I'm gonna have to agree with the people saying its not worth authoring. I saw someone asked the question a few months ago and refrained from answering but this time I'm jumping in.
The Foundry is Cryptic's next PvP system. Look how long the pvp community has waited for pvp updates. Forever. They haven't gotten a single thing since launch. The pvp community is pretty much gone. Foundry has been lucky its gotten just a bit of attention and the community has held it together for this long. Its however in the same boat as pvp. Its so sad to listen and watch podcasts from the launch of the foundry to see how well it was doing, with the exception of grinders and exploits, and then see it go downhill ever since Season 4. The foundry had a short golden age and started to slowly die. Why? Because Cryptic released it as a beta version. It wasn't ready to go out yet. That would have been fine but look at it. We're still in Beta after all this time with very little changes to what you would expect overall. I laughed when listening to those old podcasts when they said Foundry would change this game forever and become a huge part of it. It did for those months up till season 4, then poof. Its no this thing probably half the player base knows of and Cryptic has let if fall apart.
Anytime they do try and fix the situation its obviously rushed as the tagging system which is obvious its not going to work. As long as we've got 50 missions only showing those other missions aren't going to even get played. How are they even going to get tagged so people can find them? Its a backwards system that won't help authors who aren't in that fifty. It will sure help BoBo though. I mean, I've got 34 decent missions out there and I've done plenty of plugging for them and they've gotten barely any plays since December with this new search and rating. Since LoR downtime I think the most reviews I saw on one mission was 4... 4!!!
If I don't feel making a mission is worth it with all the plugging I've done and attention my missions got in the past, how am I supposed to tell a new author that its worth making a mission. There's no way you can just get people to play your mission by making it. You're going to have to do some plugging to get attention but even still I doubt you'll get many plays.
I was going to give Cryptic until S9 to fix foundry before deciding my future with the toolset, but that decision has come early due to many other reasons. It's quite obvious Cryptic will never truly be able to fix the foundry. It brings no money in. Unless they find a way to bring in money with this thing, they aren't going to invest more into. And how are they even going to make money off of it when the majority of the playerbase doesn't even like the foundry as its so badly put together. Even those who might have spent some money buying art assets probably wouldn't now as they're mission isn't going to get played.
So in the end if your fine with you and maybe some friends playing your mission its worth authoring, as long as your fine checking in all the time to make sure Cryptic didn't break your mission. Otherwise if you do want to try to get plays for your mission and your a story author, you might as well open up Word and write it there to post on a fan fic site.
Very well stated.
As I have said before, if you are a new author, even a skilled and talented one,
you are screwed to try to get your mission played with any consistancy if at all.
With the "brilliant" Dumb-a## rating system they have now, where you once had
a chance to get seen and played with a new mission is now totally wiped out!
I imagine we are missing out on a lot of good story missions that are out there.
But look at the good news, we can play loot-o-matic missions until we are
fu##ing blue in the face. They are so easy to find, how can we miss em??
ABI-Artificial Borg Intelligence by Duke-of-Rock Available on Holodeck
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Also play Spawn of Medusa - The 5 Part series
by Duke-of-Rock Available on Holodeck
As I have said before, if you are a new author, even a skilled and talented one,
you are screwed to try to get your mission played with any consistancy if at all.
With the "brilliant" Dumb-a## rating system they have now, where you once had
a chance to get seen and played with a new mission is now totally wiped out!
I imagine we are missing out on a lot of good story missions that are out there.
But look at the good news, we can play loot-o-matic missions until we are
fu##ing blue in the face. They are so easy to find, how can we miss em??
This is the very reason we need to have new missions stand out on their own on somewhat equal footing as Spotlights and established missions.
If you write a mission that serves a useful purpose, you're going to have to beat people off with a stick just to STOP them from playing it, and certainly you and all your friends will want to play it as often as possible. If you write pretentious drivel that serves no useful purpose, it will, rightly so, languish in the dustbin of obscurity. I see nothing wrong with this.
#1: The problems we're discussing in this thread apply to any new farm missions that get written as well. They can't get plays either, not that they deserve them.
#2: You're a Philistine who wouldn't know a good story or pretentious drivel if either one of them did the hula naked in your front yard.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
Alternate suggestion: Give story missions their own tab on the list. Bobo does not qualify.
Folks are always complaining in other forums about lack of content. Cryptic, if you want us to keep making content for you for free, give us the support we need to make doing it worthwhile.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
-- Give out tiered accolades and titles for posting reviews of enough different Foundry missions. This attracts a potentially new group of players: the accolade hunters. Make the requirement for the top tier greater than 50 missions, please.
"New title unlocked: Foundry Supporter"
-- An idea suggested in the comments section of an article on Neverwinter: Allow Foundry authors to choose mission rewards from a list. There's way more than enough Cryptic-created sources of dilithium in the game to meet daily limits (I've got something like 70,000 unrefined dil wasting memory in my account), so let us give out other stuff like fleet marks, blue loot, or latinum.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
I agree with most of your rant here. I have had the same experience as you with my mission publish except it was worsened by a bug that held it back from qualifying for rewards! They need to start going easier on us authors, it's a tough job. I don't want to attack the grinder authors I think there is a place for learning the too lset and experimenting. I feel it is up to Cryptic decide if they are to be banned or for a method of allowing them to coexist with the story missions.That said Cryptic has explicitly stated the intention of the foundry is to create story missions and story missions are really being hurt in the current climate.
I also really like Pax's idea.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
Except for the exploit missions, obviously.
They just need to keep working on filters, so they are on a separate filter, which is the best for both side of the community.
As for everything else you said, I agree.
I see a lot of good suggestions of things that would fix the problem, and frankly many of them would not be much work for Cryptic to implement (#1 removing the weighted ratings as it was a bad idea from the start). Unfortunately, at this point I really don't see that Cryptic cares at all to try to fix the Foundry. I also am not sure if they even understand the sad state the Foundry is currently in.
My honest feeling is that in another six months or a year the Foundry is basically going to be dead unless things are turned around, and I don't think Cryptic even sees there's a problem.
If I had to guess, I'd say Cryptic probably regrets even making the Foundry at this point as it's just a distraction that doesn't fit in with the new F2P game mechanics at all. It's unfortunate but I think that is the most realistic explanation for the state the Foundry has been left in.
Honestly, with the current situation the Foundry is dying a slow death. If all or most of the story authors leave then they can just go ahead and shut the Foundry down. I don't really give a damn at that point. So, all this stuff about how grinders should be allowed, etc, the fact is that if all we're going to get are grinders, I say go ahead and pull the plug.
The fact is the tool set was designed for making stories, and if that's not the reality about what it's used for, then what is the point? It's not even worth supporting if all it's going to be about is putting 25 mobs on a map and blowing them up.
I'm not saying that removing grinders is the best strategy. I think having a separate tab for story missions would be better. But if that's not going to happen...
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
The Foundry is Cryptic's next PvP system. Look how long the pvp community has waited for pvp updates. Forever. They haven't gotten a single thing since launch. The pvp community is pretty much gone. Foundry has been lucky its gotten just a bit of attention and the community has held it together for this long. Its however in the same boat as pvp. Its so sad to listen and watch podcasts from the launch of the foundry to see how well it was doing, with the exception of grinders and exploits, and then see it go downhill ever since Season 4. The foundry had a short golden age and started to slowly die. Why? Because Cryptic released it as a beta version. It wasn't ready to go out yet. That would have been fine but look at it. We're still in Beta after all this time with very little changes to what you would expect overall. I laughed when listening to those old podcasts when they said Foundry would change this game forever and become a huge part of it. It did for those months up till season 4, then poof. Its no this thing probably half the player base knows of and Cryptic has let if fall apart.
Anytime they do try and fix the situation its obviously rushed as the tagging system which is obvious its not going to work. As long as we've got 50 missions only showing those other missions aren't going to even get played. How are they even going to get tagged so people can find them? Its a backwards system that won't help authors who aren't in that fifty. It will sure help BoBo though. I mean, I've got 34 decent missions out there and I've done plenty of plugging for them and they've gotten barely any plays since December with this new search and rating. Since LoR downtime I think the most reviews I saw on one mission was 4... 4!!!
If I don't feel making a mission is worth it with all the plugging I've done and attention my missions got in the past, how am I supposed to tell a new author that its worth making a mission. There's no way you can just get people to play your mission by making it. You're going to have to do some plugging to get attention but even still I doubt you'll get many plays.
I was going to give Cryptic until S9 to fix foundry before deciding my future with the toolset, but that decision has come early due to many other reasons. It's quite obvious Cryptic will never truly be able to fix the foundry. It brings no money in. Unless they find a way to bring in money with this thing, they aren't going to invest more into. And how are they even going to make money off of it when the majority of the playerbase doesn't even like the foundry as its so badly put together. Even those who might have spent some money buying art assets probably wouldn't now as they're mission isn't going to get played.
So in the end if your fine with you and maybe some friends playing your mission its worth authoring, as long as your fine checking in all the time to make sure Cryptic didn't break your mission. Otherwise if you do want to try to get plays for your mission and your a story author, you might as well open up Word and write it there to post on a fan fic site.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
Missions of The Day/Hour
First of all, introduce multiple ratings,
Combat/Grind and Story. Then, each day, or even each hour, select missions randomly.
4 missions with grind rating 3.5+
4 missions with story rating 3.5+
4 missions with average rating 4+
4 missions from all
4 missions published within 1 week (new)
These missions would get drops and dil once. Others do not, except for spotlights.
With this, everyone would have a fair chance for plays. If your mission is very good, you will have 3x or 4x chance for plays, because the machine may select it into any of first 4 categories.
From that 24 missions, you ought find one or two interesting. If not, just check back in a couple of hours.
Also, I would introduce auto withdraw. If a mission has both rating type below 3 for 14 days (counting from last publish), then the system would withdraw it. The author may publish it again anytime, of course. This would remove the hello world missions and the real crappy ones, abandoned long ago.
I stopped messing with the foundry more than a year ago. I realized that there is no demand for stories in this game. The whole structure of the game draws and holds grinder players only. Those who like stories leave mid way of the "storyline" leveling and never return. No matter how you dress up the KILL 5 THINGS mission, they suck.
The foundry has minimal retention value for story players because for every good mission, there are 20 TRIBBLE ones. So, again, you spend most of your time with Kill 20 things BS. At the end of the day, only grinders stay and they don't need story missions.
A ranomly or otherwise selected spotlight of the day would be a great idea. The problem is Cryptic puts so little salaried time towards the foundry that ideas like this never get implemented. I had a very bad feeling when the new search interface was added and almost a year later it is killing us an nothing will likely be done about it unless it costs cryptic money.
Edit: Has anybody contacted Brandon about doing a daily spotlight feature?
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
But I concede the point that it's hard to find anything new on there...I've played Avenging Resolution already but it's one of the first things I see each and every time I open the Foundry tab, right along with First Cause, Then Effect. Both good missions, but I've played them already. Time for something else to get pushed to the front of the line.
Then there's the grinders....the less said about them, the better.
From then until the day the CoH lights were finally turned off, the Devs spent all their MA time chasing exploits and nerfing powers to stop farming and grinding. "Stories" were replaced with fast grindable farms.
When I first heard about the Foundry, years later, I wondered how Cryptic planned to avoid all the problems CoH had had. Apparently, they didn't.
I've been surprised at how user-unfriendly, complicated, and bug-ridden the Foundry system is. I've created several missions, and would like to do a lot more, but I keep finding myself spending less time being creative and more time fighting the software.
There may be 5 ways to have a character in a mission walk across a room. But if the software suddenly decides for itself that it doesn't want that a character to walk across the room, there's absolutely no way the author can make that happen. Why? Nobody seems to know; it just happens sometimes.
Maybe you create a mission and test it 3 times, then publish it and run it through 4 more times, and everything is great. But, on the 5th playthrough, the mission suddenly doesn't work anymore. Why? Again, nobody knows. It's incredibly frustrating.
I'm not a programmer by trade. I just want to come up with cool Star Trek stories. I'm not trained to identify/fix/reprogram computer code bugs, nor am I so inclined.
So, long story short: The Foundry is a great idea that is implemented terribly in STO. Even if it was overhauled and implemented well, the Devs would still be stuck with the problems of exploiters, farmers, and grinders -- I don't think there's a way around that. I'm not too hopeful for any big improvements in the short or long term, unfortunately.
I would.
I did so in the CoH Mission Architect regularly, because I wanted to play more than just the "most popular" missions. With all the weakness of the MA search system, it was far easier to find a greater variety of missions there than in the Foundry.
lol, me:D:cool::cool:
butcher suspect, "What'd you hit me with?"
Temperance Brennan, "A building"
Oh hell no, lol. Every time I played that mission, I'd be in tears I was laughing so hard. If it wasn't for the spoofical funny as hell dialogue, I'd have MAYBE played it twice and forgotten about it But where else do you see ship admirals screaming at each other, about how their pets can hit the little red buttons better?
And oh yeah, getting to call someone "Admiral Kitty"!
And if you read the dialogue, I think the author was actually poking fun at all the grinders out there, that run the same easy-mode missions over & over just to get loot. Just my take on that part, lol
butcher suspect, "What'd you hit me with?"
Temperance Brennan, "A building"
Do not make accolade missions a bannable offense.
Point #1 on that list was mostly an imagine spot. The serious suggestion there was giving story missions their own tab.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
For what it's worth I used the heck out of that next button. I did not complain when it vanished only because I figured somebody else would.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
They need to make tabs for everything and the majority of our problems will be fixed.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Very well stated.
As I have said before, if you are a new author, even a skilled and talented one,
you are screwed to try to get your mission played with any consistancy if at all.
With the "brilliant" Dumb-a## rating system they have now, where you once had
a chance to get seen and played with a new mission is now totally wiped out!
I imagine we are missing out on a lot of good story missions that are out there.
But look at the good news, we can play loot-o-matic missions until we are
fu##ing blue in the face. They are so easy to find, how can we miss em??
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
by Duke-of-Rock Available on Holodeck
This is the very reason we need to have new missions stand out on their own on somewhat equal footing as Spotlights and established missions.
Again, this interface http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=943411 would go a long way toward opening up all missions - especially new ones that should..and need to...get lots of exposure.
The Duke is absolutely right - the current system is killing the Foundry.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
#1: The problems we're discussing in this thread apply to any new farm missions that get written as well. They can't get plays either, not that they deserve them.
#2: You're a Philistine who wouldn't know a good story or pretentious drivel if either one of them did the hula naked in your front yard.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/