End of the “Meow” Mix

I’m not quote sure why Rikti Comm Officer AE Farm missions were dubbed “Meow” missions (I was hoping for Cat Girls, to be honest, go fig), but Positron has decided it’s time to put his foot down on Meows and other extreme farming. Hope you already PLed your toons to 20 …

When we created Mission Architect, the goal was to have an outlet for players to craft cool stories, using our assets, that other players could play and participate in. Other players could rate those stories and the best-of-the best would rise to the top.

While we have accomplished some of those goals with the initial launch of Mission Architect, some have found ways to abuse the system we put in place.

Not surprising in the least, of course.

We are not blind to this happening, nor did we not expect it. However, it is time to take action regarding it, so please be aware that we are about to implement a zero-tolerance stance on the extreme abuse we are seeing in the system.

It would have been nice to have heard a bit of this righteous anger before now.

One thing was made clear to me when I interacted with the players on our Anniversary. It was that you guys really don’t like the powerlevelling that is going on with MA. The constant spam of MA PL teams forming, requests for “Meow” missions, 5 star badge cartels, and the inability to find quality content in the Mission Architect listing are all things I heard complaints about over and over while I was logged in on Tuesday.

And that’s a good point. The crowds of farmers make it difficult to find any mishes to play (except for Dev Choice ones), difficult to find folks to play them with — and, at times, difficult to hang out at AE without mapserving. Comments follow.

So here is a list of things that are going to happen:

• Players that have abused the reward system egregiously may lose benefits they have gained – leading up to and perhaps including losing access to the characters power-leveled in this fashion. Hmmmm. Harsh to punish actions after the fact. “That which is not forbidden is permitted.” Set the rules and limit things going forward, fine. Data mine to figure out who’s abused this? Not so much. (And I don’t say this as someone who has much to lose).
  
• Currently, some badges are being modified, and some may be removed from the game entirely. The list of changes being made to the MA badge system is not final yet, but you will be made aware when we have a concrete plan. Expect the ticket badges to require a lot more tickets to win.
  
• Players who knowingly use an exploit when creating an arc, run the risk of having access to MA suspended, or worse- depending on the severity of the action, their account banned. That’s fine — if the list of known exploits is given, or at least described in sufficient detail to make it clear what to not do.
  
• Players who have a story arc banned for any reason, will have it continue to use up one of their publishing slots. Players will NOT be able to unpublish this slot without Customer Service’s help. This sets up a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. If an individual gets three story arcs banned, they will no longer be able to publish since their slots will all be used up with banned arcs.This lock will not take place on the first level of “complaint banning”, where an arc has received a larger number of complaints. Players will still have a chance to fix the arc. A good punishment here, and easy to implement. And now I know, I guess, that the Report button isn’t just for dirty words or something.
  • If Customer Service looks at an arc and determines it was banned in error, they will mark it as “unbannable”. At that point the arc can not be banned for any reason. The unbannable flag will reset if the player makes any changes to the arc at that point, and the arc can be banned again. Thus avoiding “griefing.”
  • Remember, publishing slots are account wide, so players will not be able to log in another character on their account and use their slots instead.
  • Players are urged to avoid using common farming terms in their story title and/or descriptions. Even if it’s a joke, DO NOT run the risk of having an arc banned and requiring Customer Support to grant you your publishing slot back. But if I want to make a Cat Girl arc, can I include “Meow”? in the title?

So, overall, a decent approach to punishment … but I remain concerned about ex post facto punishment.

Some of you have taken the stance of “how does powerlevelling hurt the game?” and “shouldn’t I be able to play the game the way that I want?” What we want to make clear is in order to keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging, we have to maintain a risk:reward ratio. This is a ratio we’ve spent years attempting to achieve. Mission Architect is not immune to this, and we are taking swift action to see that the problems players are seeing and are being exposed to are remedied.

Fair enough. It should be indicative (reviewing some of the boards on the subject) of what some folks are looking for from the game, but PLing does have impacts both on team availability, team quality, and PvP competition. It also rankles enough non-PLers to make the game overall less attractive. So I don’t mind seeing this come in. I just wish it had been swifter and more vocal earlier since I14’s release.