Mission Architect and the Beta version

Mission Architect was formally announced on 8/26/08 in a post by Matt Miller, Lead Developer and hereafter referred to by his forum persona, Positron. Mission Architect (MA) was said to allow players to "make their own story arcs using a customized version of the tool used by our mission writers, in some cases rivaling our own internal tools in ease-of-use."

In that same post, he also went on to say, "I should probably take this moment to talk about what the Mission Architect is not meant for. It is not meant for 'easy leveling' or 'badging' or 'farming'. Those are things that we specifically wanted the Mission Architect NOT to do."

On 9/25/08, Positron made another post on the official boards that indicated that they would be including the ability to include "custom characters" in the MA due to customer feedback.

He also announced a new feature, called a "Leveling Pact", which would enable two characters to be "pacted" and gain experience points (XP) at the same rate, even if one of the two characters was offline. The stated goal for this was so that both characters would, "allow you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not."

Positron provided additional information on the upcoming features in a post on 11/05/08, wherein he provided further information on Level Pacting, "Characters that are level 5 and under can form a permanent bond that will evenly split all XP they ever earn, keeping them in perfect level sync their entire careers (unless they decide to break the Pact)."

Positron responded to questions regarding announced MA badges. Badges in City of Heroes are generally earned as an in-game representation symbol of events a specific character has achieved. There is a significant number of players who attempt to collect as many badges as they can, but for some of the more difficult to earn badges, they resort to an activity known as "farming". There appears to be no definitive definition of farming, but it's generally understood to involve performing a repetitive task in a short amount of time, for a given goal such as badges, experience points (XP), or in-game money. Due to the high requirements of some badges, farming is the only method a player could reasonably certain high-requirement badges, in less than a few years.

Positron acknowledges this in a post made on 2/28/09, when he remarks, "That said there are a lot of badges available to earn in Mission Architect. A good chunk of them are only in "test mode", so if you REALLY just want to farm those badges, you don't need to publish the mission (actually you CAN'T publish the mission) in order to earn it."

Thus, some interpreted his statement to reflect an understanding that "farming", such as for badges occurs and may even be necessary, albeit for some badges.

In the same post, he also expresses confidence that most exploits the City of Heroes staff could imagine made using the MA system were addressed when he stated, "Now, I am not going to say we've covered EVERY edge case, but we've covered every edge case we could think up. Suffice it to say that if you have read everything here and have a 'great idea on how to break the system', chances are we've thought of it and made it impossible."

He also pointed out an increased ability to determine possible exploits being used, "We've added a TON more datamining hooks exclusively for Mission Architect as well, so we can easily see spikes in aberrant behavior. Spikes point us to exploits, which points us to log files, which reveal the identities of exploiters. So if you find a really big exploit in the system, I'd encourage you to PM me or another Dev and try to get your Bug Hunter badge, as the alternative is not pretty."

He later defines an exploit in the following post, "If your personal moral compass flip flops or even wavers a little while doing something in the game that is obvious to you is not intended behavior, it's probably an exploit."

Closed Beta testing began, which offered a chance to test out various systems to be included in a future software update (referred to as an "Issue") prior to its live release. Reports from former Beta testers indicate that the City of Heroes staff were warned of several possible exploits, of which many were corrected during the Beta testing period or soon after the Issue 14, which contained MA, was released. However, several were not addressed.