In addition to my "Ghosts of War" mission series, my fleet has asked me to make a couple of missions (one ground and one space) for them, so I've started work on them on the side. Both will be tie-ins to the main "Ghosts of War" series. The space one will basically be a multiplayer version of the epic battle near Earth Spacedock toward the end of Part V; the ground one will be on a Cardassian mining planet, referring to a diversionary act by the enemy alliance mentioned in dialogue early in Part V.

Anyway, since I've never done multiplayer missions before, I have a few questions about them that do not appear to have come up yet in this forum, so I will do the honors.

1) What are "best practices" for designing multiplayer missions in general? I presume one important one is to give each player an opportunity to signal their readiness before the mayhem commences, so I'll be doing that for both missions.

2) Is it possible (or planned for a future season) to make "private" missions for only a particular fleet? As far as I know it isn't, so for now I am developing the two missions as public ones but with dialogue shout-outs to the fleet in question.

3) How are multiplayer missions reviewed by registered reviewers before being released to the general gaming population? Can registered reviewers team up to do new missions together for reviewing, or are there even reviewer-only fleets for this purpose?

I haven't exactly made multiplayer missions, but based on my general experience with the Foundry in the game, this is what I suggest:

1) In space, be sure to reskin all the mobs, if necessary, as they will all spawn. If you don't need to reskin them, you're going to save yourself a lot of grief, however. With some groups, such as battleships, determining which mobs will spawn with different numbers of players is now basically impossible.

On the ground, be sure to put multiple groups attacking at once, as ground does not scale with players, but players are a lot more formidable than boffs. A group of 5 players will rip through a group that would give a solo player difficulty.

2) You can't make any missions private, but if you just don't put the starting location in, and put it out of the way, it will be almost impossible for anyone to find it. No one is going to fly around the galaxy looking for the starting door out of a hundred systems and other starting locations on ESD, etc. Just don't use a totally obvious one in a place where everyone happens to be (ex: panel outside transporter room at ESD). That should be sufficient to keep other people from playing it, if that's your desire. However, if you want to be sure, just have your fleet mates one star it. No one will play it if it has bad reviews.

3) Testing a mission with multiple people is almost impossible. There's no way to cause the Foundry to assume you have a larger number of players. The easiest way would be for you to publish it and then get people from your fleet to test it.

Thanks for the feedback; here are my responses:

This isn't an issue for my space mission, as the enemies will be a mix of True Way (Cardie/Jem'Hadar) and Breen. In the original battle in Part V, on which the fleet mission will be based, for story purposes I did re-skin one Cardie battleship as Jem'Hadar, but I probably won't bother doing that in the fleet mission.

This isn't a problem for me either. The first part of my mission has groups of several mobs each that are not only placed close together, but with the individual actors scattered all about, so it's basically like fighting one gi-normous mob (a la the Tholians on Nukara Prime, though again, in this case it's a mix of Cardies, Jem'Hadar and Breen). Then the second part is fighting another huge multi-mob, this time of all Devidians.

The problem there is that I need the "official" reviewers to be able to find my mission just to get the five reviews I need to go public. Then once it does go public, by the time I get around to editing the location info out of it, who's to say how many players outside my fleet will have discovered it? I wouldn't want to post a mission as public and then yank it back away, especially if it proves to be a popular one off the bat. So, if I can't make a mission private from the get-go, I'll probably just design it to be public and leave it at that. Thanks for the suggestions anyway.

Again, I need five reviews from "official" reviewers before my fleetmates or anyone else has access to it. I suppose the "official" reviewers could play the missions solo if they can't team up, but their reviews would be somewhat meaningless because they're not playing the game as intended.