Saturday Livestream: City of Heroes' mission architect [Updated!]

What's a guild? I think we use supergroups in CoH.

Anyway, Mission Architect is a great tool which is not used as much as it should be. I enjoy the system but the devs invested way too much time and effort into the product. It is a fun feature but when you consider the efforts, time and manpower put into...it is a disappointment. A big one.

Outside of MA and a few other features, we tend to get the the same old stuff in a different wrapper with CoH. It's too bad. I don't know if it's the shortcomings of the dev team or their budget issues. The devs rarely ever tell you what's really going on behind the scenes.

Anyway, I guess this MA event is just another attempt at breathing life into something that faded away a while back. It's still used but not often (unless players sneak in farms, of course!).

Nice that Livestream is back

Yes, obviously the devs care about MA. They have a large investment in it. It was supposed to a BIG deal. It wasn't and isn't. The devs tried to make a huge add to the game and, in a way, it was. Sadly the players aren't all over it like expected. Like I said before, too many resources and too much time was spent on MA. Some players see it as a failure. We were made to wait a very long time for this feature and it wasn't worth it - in my opinion.

I shudder to think about how many other features could have been added instead of MA. Perhaps the devs should really poll the players a bit more about features. They content added is almost as repetitive as the mission maps in this game. Hell, I would have taken an issue that gave us 50 new mission maps over the MA at this point (by new maps I mean exciting, different and new environments - not a variety of caves, offices, cave bases, variations of the same base).

I have left the game again and when i19 drops I will take a look. This is the only MMO I play. They aren't my thing but I like the supers. This game could be so much more but it isn't quite there...not sure it ever will be.

I think the COH devs can be very proud of the AE system. It certainly allowed you to do more than I expected on release (and I'm not referring to exploits and farms.)

When I've taken the time to look through the stories that are available, I've found a lot of player-made content that was thematic and interesting for this character or that character. I've found my share of crap, but even if AE stories were running at Sturgeon Law's levels of crap, that means there are thousands of good stories.

In retrospect, AE was a huge misstep for the game. So many developer hours poured into a system that saw a huge player drop-off not long after its release.

Deamodand: that "player drop-off" you mentioned was -new- players who got to 50 in a few hours then got bored and left. And yes, there were a few people who left in disgust due to the abundance of clueless PLed 50s running around. So there wasn't a huge net loss of players. Plus, Going Rouge brought back a LOT of players. There were days after launch when even the least populated servers were almost full. It's calmed down a bit now, but you still see the more popular servers at high load during peak times, where before they rarely reached that point. Even the less populated servers have a higher load than they used to.

The biggest mis-step with AE was allowing it to give full XP. This allowed everyone to make simple, effective farming missions, and then beyond that, to make blatantly exploitative missions. Seeing as these are the majority of the missions in the database, it drives away people who want actual stories to play through. (Note that i said FULL XP was the problem. If AE gave half XP, it'd still be worthwhile to run for normal missions but untenable for farming or exploitation)

Someone mentioned nerfs. I don't think it's a "nerf" to require that groups have bosses and LTs for full XP, or that critters HAVE to have attack powers. Making a group full of easily defeatable critters who can't hit back doesn't fall within ANY game's standard risk vs reward ratio and SHOULDN'T be allowed. It's less of a nerf and more "putting things back the way they SHOULD be"

I wish they would cut the XP gains. That said, I run farms. I leveled 10 50s the old fashioned way and there are some stretches of content I'd rather skip. I'm really not sure what is going on with this game though, I'm seeing red servers on random weeknights. Did the Xpac really do that well?