Why did you build this site?
So, how does this whole thing work?
How do I submit a mission to be reviewed and rated?
How should I design and format my images to add to my mission?
How do I get my mission into the Featured Missions section?
How do I add a Featured Missions gallery image if I’ve already submitted my mission?
How do I rate a mission?
Someone has posted a rating on my mission, and I’d like to add an explanation. How do I add an “author’s comment” to my own mission?
Are you guys reviewing the missions?
How did you build this site?
What if I run into a problem with the site?
Who runs this site?
What if I have a question that isn’t listed here?

A. Mission Architect stories are awesome, but the in-game rating system just doesn’t give you enough info, IMO. So, here we are. Hopefully, this site can give you a better idea of which stories will be worth playing once… or over and over again.

A. Well, it can work a couple of ways. If you’ve created a mission and you’re looking for a place to showcase it and get some feedback, post it here. (See the Add Your Mission page for details.) If you’re looking for some new missions to try out and you’re wondering what’s new or what’s good, you’re in the right place, too; head back to the home page, find a new arc to play, give it a run, then come back and let everyone know what you think. If you don’t want to think too hard about the whole thing, you’ll find a random mission just asking to be played, just to the right over there at the top of the sidebar on every page.

A. It’s actually pretty quick and painless. Head over to the Add Your Mission page, where you’ll find a mission submission form. Just type in (or copy from the game) your mission’s information (Arc ID, Title, Description, etc.), hit Submit, and that’s it. We gather up your submission, do a quick pass for spelling and grammar, tweak a little formatting, and toss it up onto the site for all to see. We also send out a tweet to Twitter about your new mission, as well as add it to our RSS feed.

A. You can add two images to your mission, and each serves a different purpose.

The first is what we call a poster image — think of it as a movie poster or advertisement for your mission. Its purpose is to generate interest in your mission, and give players a taste of what they might experience when they decide to run your arc. We don’t place any design or content restrictions on your posters (well, okay, I guess they should be PG-13, but do I really need to say that?), but the file size can’t be any larger than 1MB. If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, look no further than the great work done by @Spiral Architect, and you’ll find many other great ones on the CoH boards as well.

The second image we accept is a gallery image — this is a special image to be used in our Featured Missions gallery on the CoHMR home page. You’ve seen it, right? That rotating section of images there at the top? That thing. Given the specific nature and design of that section, gallery images do have some specific requirements, and some design considerations should be considered, as well. First off: gallery image sizes must 670×200 pixels exactly, and no larger than 150K. That’s the easy part.

The trickier part is how to format the gallery image so it looks good. That sounds kinda dumb, but stay with me here. Our Featured Missions section pulls information from your mission — its title and description, to be precise — and superimposes it over your image on a dynamic panel that pops up from the bottom of the frame. You can see this in action by going back to the home page and moving your mouse cursor over the rotating images. Because of this, gallery images that have this information pre-baked into them tend to be too busy, redundant, and end up looking messy. Here’s an example, with my mission as guinea pig:

So, not too bad. Has all the cool info, tells people what I want them to know, right? By itself, it’s just fine. But keep in mind that players won’t always see it like this. When they want to interact with it, they’ll see it like this…

Hmmm. Not so great anymore. I have two titles, which just looks dumb, and my mission’s description is hard to read when it’s over top of the text and logo in the image. My image isn’t even that complicated; imagine if the background was much busier. Ugh.

Best advice here: approach your gallery image as a photograph; a snapshot of your mission that can stand alone without any text. This could be built from a screenshot of in-game action, or maybe a subset of a more complex poster image you’re building.

A. First off, you have to have a gallery image for the home page (read that section above for details on how to do that). But, beyond that, it’s completely subjective. The main goal for the section is to help missions that we feel aren’t getting enough attention, some additional exposure. Normally, that means we’ve run the missions, we think they’re great, and due to the flood of mission submissions, they just got buried. It happens quite a bit — through no fault of the author, a good arc gets passed by.

So, the bottom line is: if you submit a good gallery image along with your mission, you will end up in the Featured Missions section. My caveat, so please read this: that doesn’t mean you’ll immediately show up in the Featured Missions gallery as soon as you submit your arc, nor does it mean that your mission will live there forever. We rotate missions through the gallery to make sure everyone gets some extra eyeballs, and some will stay longer than others.

A. We haven’t found an easy way to automate this yet, so until we do, if you have a mission already posted here at CoHMR, go ahead and attach your image to an e-mail to admin (at) cohmissionreview dot com with “Featured Mission Image: {Your Story Arc ID here}” in the subject header. We’ll grab your gallery image and attach it to your mission.

A. Once you’ve found a mission that looks interesting, it’s usually easiest to just scribble down the Story Arc ID number, log into City of Heroes, head on over to an Architect Entertainment building, and search on that number in the Mission Architect interface to find the mission. Give it a run, then come back, click on the mission, and then scroll down to the Comments section at the bottom of the page. You’ll see four aspects that can each be voted on from 1-5 stars:

Story: How interesting is the plot line? There are enough paper and radio missions that just ask you to go beat up stuff, so how much of an improvement are you getting? Is the story compelling enough to make you want to finish the first mission and continue to the second?

Design: Are the maps well-suited to the story, enemies, and mission goals? Are custom enemies and allies well-designed or do they look like the author hit the “Random Costume” button? Are custom enemy powersets appropriate to the story?

Gameplay: How’s the pacing, and balance of combat/rescues/glowies/etc.? Are the mission objectives in multi-mission arcs varied enough to keep you interested? Hell, was it fun?

Detail: If you play enough player-built missions, you’ll run into this scenario: cool enemies, nice maps, good pacing… but trying to read the mission text is like someone sat on the keyboard. Typos, missing text descriptions on enemies, crazy formatting, etc. While the mechanics are good, the polish is nowhere to be found.

One note: We’re not trying to rate “difficulty” here. The same mission that’s impossible for a new player on his Level 13 blaster, could be a cakewalk for a 5-year veteran on her Level 35 scrapper. We do encourage reviewers to mention how easy or challenging the missions were, though.

A. If you feel you need explain, clarify, or ask for additional information on a rating, go ahead and add it as a comment attached to your mission, but don’t give it a rating. The system automatically knocks out all-zero ratings (so they don’t affect your overall score), and it keeps your comments inline with the ratings in question.

A couple quick notes, here: this hasn’t happened yet, but I like to try to nip things in the bud. CoHMR comments won’t be used to insult or denigrate a mission, the mission author, mission reviewers, or the site itself. If you don’t like a mission, it’s perfectly okay to say you didn’t like it, but keep your review constructive. Likewise, you may be unhappy with the low mission rating your mission just received, but handle it like an adult; if you have questions, ask them clearly and politely. Constructively refute if you must, but there’s no room for back-and-forth, “this mish sucks!”, “no, it doesn’t, YOU suck”, kind of junk. And in this same vein, the administrators have tools in place that pick out multiple comments coming from the same person (even if you enter different names and e-mail addresses), so please don’t try to add a bunch of 5-star ratings to your own mission to make up for a lower rating by someone else. If you do, we’ll delete them. Do it too many times, and we’ll pull your missions completely. This behavior is immature, and won’t be allowed. Suck it up, and improve your mission — that’s the way to get around a bad review.

Whew. You all are great, so I’m sure I probably didn’t need to say all that. But thanks for understanding.

A. We’re going to try to review many of the missions ourselves, yes. But that kind of follows what happens on the CoH forums, where one individual asks for missions, and then reviews them. While those singular reviews may be useful — and from the ones I’ve read, I believe they are — they’re still only one review, which isn’t exactly a giant sample size. Instead, the point of CoHMR is to encourage the entire community to review missions, which we hope will give mission authors a much richer level of feedback.

A. The site is built with WordPress, a totally kick-ass blogging/content management system. Easy to manage, and extensible with all sorts of plugins.

A. We’re always looking to make improvements and corrections. Ping us at support (at) cohmissionreview dot com, and we’ll go find the duct tape.

A. That would be me, El Furioso. That’s my global handle; you’ll find me on the forums under the same name, which matches my main hero (a Level 50 Inv/SS tanker on Infinity, my home server).  I’ve been playing City of Heroes since the original pre-launch beta back in 2004. I participated in Closed Betas for City of Villains, the Mac release of City of Heroes, and Issue 14, and won third place in a “remix the CoH music” contest back before CoV came out. I play in the awesome Repeat Offenders network on Freedom/Virtue/Justice, and as of late, I’ve been spending most of my in-game time split between working on mission ideas and trying to line up a 50 across all the archetypes.

A. Feel free to reach out to us by sending a note, either in-game (@El Furioso), on the CoH boards (PM El_Furioso), or via good ol’ standard e-mail at admin (at) cohmissionreview dot com.

And… that’s about it for now. As more Qs come in, more As will automagically appear.