1. Testing a battle inside of the Foundry results in incredibly easy mobs that almost instantly die. This makes combat preview unreliable.
2. Our away teams now disappear almost instantly. If #1 wasn't a problem, this NEW problem would make combat preview impossible.
3. Because of the new rewards system, we cannot test our maps post-publish unless testing takes longer than 20 mins. Otherwise, simply testing post-publish (because it's now impossible to test pre-publish) condemns our maps to not qualify for rewards.


There are many other bugs. Basically, we can't test play our missions. The preview mode has become: "Is that object where you meant to put it?" It's not useful for anything else.

Please fix.

Um, can't you playtest your missions live by simply not finishing the message (add an impossible final objective, if necessary) and dropping it?

I'm pretty sure folks have said that dropped missions don't count toward runtime, and the length indicator of my first mission seems to support that (since I blitzed to the end several times and dropped it, and it's in the 30-60 min range)

Sure there are some lengthy and annoying workarounds where we do the majority of combat testing post-publish while being incredibly careful not to doom our own play-times. But my point is basically: this is supposed to be built into the Foundry. It isn't working as intended. When we click "Play," we are not really playing our missions at all. We're looking to see if we need to adjust a y value.

I have to agree, it's currently very bad. While there are ways to test, not being able to do a preliminary balance in preview is extremely frustrating.

Having to publish a test mission which goes straight to the fight part, switch characters, load the mission, test it, then switch characters, reload the test mission, make changes, publish, switch characters...etc.

Then finally it's right, and now I have to go back to the real mission and re-do the entire encounter, because I couldn't use the real mission or otherwise I'd have had to run through the whole damn mission every time. Then it's on to the next encounter, rinse and repeat.

Or I can think of a few other ways to attempt to test. But the fact is it's all really a hassle, for something that used to be quite easy.

Granted, I always would have to do a final (or usually several) real tests at the end, but they were just for fine tuning, not to see whether the fight balance is even close to being right.

Nagorak, when did this become the case? My experience is kind of skewed because it was like a year after the foundry launched when I really started to make missions with combat. Even then, I don't remember mobs being so easy to kill in the foundry and being so different post-publish. Which update suddenly turned our testing mobs into unreliable test dummies?

I haven't finished my first mission yet, but I have been wondering how you do go about play-testing them before you publish. I can see enemy spawns when I play-test it but my foundry character is a level 1 newbie and all the spawns are adjusted to her level.

Is it possible to change the level/rank of your foundry character? Lets say I want to play-test it at Commander rank, or Rear Admiral, or something like that?

Even then, I would want to change her ship and gear from the default Miranda class and standard issue stuff.

It might be easier if I could just import a copy of my main char from Holodeck. Is this possible?

No, you are stuck with that toon. After two years, my foundry toon is still an ensign.

Which is a pain in the Riker

After all I am creating missions for CAPTAINS not the Tea boy

I mentioned this in the thread for "Finding Lascaux" but I thought it would bear mentioning here too.

It took somewhere between 25 to 28 plays for my mission to become rewards-eligible. This is a 60-minute mission, based on what most players are telling me. I had one or two author play-throughs on the mission where I played it really fast. And it took a HUGE number of other play-throughs to compensate for this.

Honestly, if not for the very kind reviews I received from some friends and fleetmates, that may have interested other players, I don't think my mission would've ever gotten off the ground.

This is NOT how it should be. This needs to be fixed so that all authors can benefit, not just those who have a nice fleet.

Foundry characters can gain experience and gain levels that way. But it's kinda timeconsuming and not easy....