CoX – More Mission Architect Stiff

This time it’s Hero 1’s turn:

An Arc being placed in Dev Choice is not how additional content is unlocked for Architects. That’s handled through straight peer review. The better your Arcs, the more stuff you get to put in missions. The amount of stuff we lock on unlock is something we’re going to tweak as time goes on.

So your access to the editor, to make new mssions, becomes more robust and rich as you get whuffie from other players? Hmmm. On the one hand, cool. On the other hand, subject (it would seem) to a lot of abuse.

Dev Choice missions unlock full XP and Influence for an Arc.

Good.

Zombie Man pointed this out, but I feel it needs to be mentioned again. Voting is per account, not character. So, even if everyone in your SG group gives you five stars on an Arc, you still have the other hundred thousand plus players to balance it out.

True enough — but how many votes will it take for a mission to get whatever it is that you get? 

And, to be honest, I’d just as soon not start a new industry in people saying, “Hey, can you vote for my Story Arc?” on Broadcast, or in missions, or whatever.

Players are rewarded for playing, creating and rating Arcs.

Okay, that’s interesting — rewards for playing (beyond XP and inf?), creating (beyond better editing tools?), and rating Arcs? So there’s an incentive to play a lot of player-generated content and rate it (can you only rate it at mission completion?).

Players will be able to publish somewhere around half a dozen or so Arcs up to our Arc server. An Arc is anywhere from one to five missions.

Okay, useful numbers.

There are a number of different categories that created content will fall into.

• Quickplay, displays the highest rated content you haven’t played.
• Dev Choice, displays content that the devs feel best reflects what the Mission Architect can be.
• Hall of Fame, the best of the best voted entirely by the players.

Content that reaches the Hall of Fame level, and potentially even the Dev Choice section, will unlock additional Arc slots for those creators. This is an incentive to create content that the players and the devs enjoy.

Though that does raise the issue of how people find new content in the first place, as visibility of content rises as visibility of content rises.

At any point you can “unpublish” your Arc to free up an additional slot. Arcs that have reached the Hall of Fame or Dev Choice level will be locked, but you’ll have a new slot to create another super cool Arc.

Cut scenes will not be open at launch. As Positron says, “I wouldn’t wish that system on anyone.”

Fair enough.

Stories picked as Dev Choice, will not become canon in our game. If and I mean IF that ever were to happen, it would have to be a pretty big deal.

 I will be interested to see the disclaimers around this system (presumably all content created belongs to the Company).

Players will be able to place multiple objectives within a single mission (boss, defeat, rescue, pet, ambush, etc.). They’ll also be able to weave characters and story through out multiple missions in a single arc. They can even create multiple arcs that build upon each other. Hopefully, for most this is seen as something more than just the simple police/radio missions.

It sounds like it will, indeed, be more — or can be.

And now for the big one. Allowing players to add in their own characters is an obvious direction to take this feature. We’d be stupid not to give it to you guys. It is however non trivial to do so, especially when we start allowing those characters to use player picked powers. So, know that you will be able to do this. It just might not be at the launch of the feature.

Good enough. From what’s already described, there seem to be plenty of possibilities.

In the end, please know that the Mission Architect is designed to allow creative people to tell their stories, while also rewarding those who play these stories. This is the goal we push towards. In the end, it will never be everything to everyone, but it will hopefully be more than enough to more than a few.

Sounds pretty good to me!