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Larkinor Missions Submissions
Larkinor Missions Submissions
Larkinor Missions Submissions
As some of you are aware, just over a year ago i began a scheme to allow players to create missions, have them tested by myself, and then have the better ones submitted to the developer for inclusion into the game.

I am sorry to say that during the last 10 months i have not received a single submission from those involved. With that in mind i have decided to close this facility.

The lack or submissions, and lack of interest in the project can only lead me to assume that it was not wanted and so i see no reason to continue it.

Not to be mean...

But were any of the submissions ever included in the game?  What would the point of making missions be if they were never incorporated into the game...

Pyratic
well, since i received a grand total of ZERO submissions, i think that pretty much answers the question doesnt it.

Several missions created by players prior to me beginning this project were included in the game. Cinder created a mission that is currently one of the pub missions.
One of the reasons that missions were not submitted is that several of us had issues with the tool actually saving the work we did.

I made several attempts to get it to work but when I came back to continue drafting the work I had done was gone.  While I can understand user error I know after doing it once that I saved it multiple times only to have it gone.

If we could somehow get the tool fixed I have 3 missions drafted that I could put in and have evaluated.  But I do not want to waste time if I cannot get it to save.
If the developer called for it I'm sure people would submit them. Crafting a well thought out mission would take time.
Or did that already happen and I missed the whole thing?
Where is the thread pertaining to such an offer? I would have gone for it had i seen it.
I'm not sure there was ever an offer to create missions directly but there were a few of us that had access to a forum and to a tool to create missions.

Pyratic
Ah...That's what I mean. If it's not sanctioned by the developer interest would not be great. Perhaps we could e-mail the developer to express interest in a "mission competition". 

Make the missions available to play, vote for a favorite, that sort of thing. Prizes could be a "your choice" item.
as a member of the former 'mission team'... i have to echo pyra's concerns.  i developped two missions almost to completion within the first month that the team was created, and then due to the limitations of the mission tool, was not able to test most of what i had 'written'.  i had numerous questions answered by you, veriac, on msn, but still had many more (okay, so i probably was aiming to create much tougher missions than were needed, but that's because i like challenges).

anyway, because so many of us 'writers' were having problems with the tool, we basically gave up on finishing anything because it was such a hassle.  we were willing to spend time creating missions, but we weren't willing to waste time redoing our work multiple times.

and to add to that, i believe at least one or two of the writers offered to help update the (or write a new) mission tool program.  but their offer was declined, since the current tool made it easy to import the missions into testing and then into the game.  though i can't help but think that people who offered to help rewrite the tool would be able to keep that quality in it.

so to summarize... if there is no effort to make a user-friendly program for us, i am in support of shutting down the mission writing.  however, i would prefer it be updated, and then i'm sure that from the former 8 member team, we could have 10-20 missions submitted within the first month (based on the partial ones we have already started)... and then more on a regular basis as we were originally supposed to do.  the two major updates i suggest are that the program doesn't randomly freeze or close or in some other way make us loose all our work since we've last saved, and that it would allow us to test our entire mission (and not have certain features that it doesn't support).

--jason

ps... d, the offer for mission creaters probably happened when you were taking your break from larki.  and missedme, sorry, but you missed the option to join the team last year and missed the point of v's post.
oops... echoing jag's concern, not pyra's :p (yay for no edit button)
--jason
To be honest, I don't really find the editor difficult, even highly complicated missions could be done(I initially did mission 52 in the editor besides translating it), only perhaps the testing. It's only the fact that I too, only see the problem of no reinforcement, or the lack of the equity theory (outputs are in accordance to inputs). It's not the fact players aren't willing to do missions, and despite what's been said here earlier, not even the fact that the editor is unusable(it can easily be tought and "played around with" by more advanced designers for testing), it's more of that there's very little positive reinforcement in actually seeing the fruit of what we've done so far. Take my case for instance. I'd work much harder at translating if I saw my previous work in the game by now. I guess the situation is the same with other players.
it is true... the tool is usable.  just not user-friendly, and the worst part was that i couldn't test whether or not the few complicated things i wanted to implement were working or not.
it doesn't help though that many of us lost data frequently because it doesn't always save properly and sometimes freezes.
--jason
Veriac, I think what Nicram is trying to say is that he put together mission 52 a LONG time ago and is wondering where it is! Don't try to pull wool over our eyes. 
I refuse to bite on that hook.  I've got two pretty good hand-in-hand theories of what your real purpose was in posting this message, and it has nothing to do with informing us of something we already knew.

While I appreciate your initial effort to try and spearhead this project on behalf of the players, this issue should have remained in our fading memories.

Sandy

Mission 52 was submitted to the developer about 3 days after i received it. I have no control over what happens after it has been submitted. 

Like I said, that really is the point. Why dont we work on getting the developer interested first?
The developer probably isnt very interested because the game loses more players than it gains. it's rare to see more than 40 people logged on anymore. However this is due mostly to the lack of continual development. So people leave cause there's very little development, leading to less development, leading to more people leaving and less people joining...see the cycle here?
Whilst i understand that some people were having problems with the tool, the facility to ask for help either from me, the other members of the team, or from the developer himself was available within the specially created section of the forum.

The last such request for help was posted in December of last year....