Arcanaville

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The problem is there is no set rule about farming. There is a rule against exploits, and we all agree they should be removed once identified and verified. No matter where you set the bar, people like me will ride that line as hard and as fast as humanly possible.

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Technically, there is one actual rule about farming: customer support (GMs) are allowed to remove missions believed to be farming missions from the architect system. So if you want to be very technical, the rule is farming is allowed if it's undetected and unreported.


One other point about rules. Our office's internet feed currently operates under a soft-cap. We pay for a specific level of bandwidth, but the circuit isn't capped to that level: we can use more temporarily. There is no specific set rule on how much we can exceed that level by, or for how long. And we burst over it all the time. But so long as our bursts aren't "excessive" we aren't required to purchase higher levels of bandwidth.

If I were to tell our provider "look, you tell me what my limit is, and I will ride that level right up to the limit: don't give me any of this 'reasonable' crap" they'd be happy to oblige by setting a hard cap for me and me alone.


I sometimes feel the same should be done in this case: everyone that explicitly asks for a hard cap defined by the devs should get one applied to them and them alone. Everyone else that can deal with reasonable judgement-defined limits should operate under those instead. It would seem to me this explicitly falls under the general principle of givng players what they want, within the limits of the game design. The people that want hard limits get them. The people that are ok with soft limits gets those instead.

That certainly satisfies every game-balance design rule I can think of.

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My point is that no game designer would hold themselves to that limitation

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Chess is calling
Tennis is calling
Golf is calling
Monopoly is calling
SPI has their entire line of games calling
Avalon Hill is calling

Well you get the picture.

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None of the first four even have reward systems within the same context as the ones being discussed, so they are completely inapplicable. If that is the best you can come up with, I'm afraid that's not good enough to warrant a calculated response. My original response stands. Now, if you manage to dig up the designer of Chess and he tells you he would design a reward system in an MMO without the exercise of judgement, then let me know.

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However, I'll bet anything if someone figured out how to earn 100 merits per minute, the devs would drop a hammer on that activity even if the averages for that activity were fine. But I can't say what the lower limit is: that's where judgement comes in.



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Yes that was my point though no judgment needed. Just tell people what the acceptable limits are. Then instead of punishing content punish rewards.

Currently what we have are the equivalent of unpublished speed limits with random penalties and group retaliation. You did 51 in a 40 zone, we are going to burn your cul de sac to the ground and build a mini mall.

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I understand your point, which is that in your opinion everything should just be precisely defined. My point is that no game designer would hold themselves to that limitation, and the merit system is an example of that. You quoted the merit system first, and implied that it was a system where judgement isn't used. I'm saying it is used. Simply stating that its not necessary isn't an argument, its simply redeclaring your position. The merit system doesn't actually support your position, which is why I question your mentioning it.

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I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. The merit system is actually one of the things I was specifically thinking about when I made the statement above: the merit awards are based on averages, not maximum limits. There is no penalty or enforcement of a merit per minute maximum earning limit. If you run TFs faster than average, you'll earn merits faster than average.

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Why have judgement come into play at all ? The call is made initially at what is the acceptable earning rate for a mission, if its avg is too high it has a deflator factor in its earnings rate. after that it can escalate as needed.

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Reread; asked and answered in the section you clipped off the quote:

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However, I'll bet anything if someone figured out how to earn 100 merits per minute, the devs would drop a hammer on that activity even if the averages for that activity were fine. But I can't say what the lower limit is: that's where judgement comes in.

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Whether a mission is outside the realm of "reasonable levels of rewards is a judgement call. And while there are a lot of people around here who believe that the job of a good game developer is to be a robotic decision emitter, all actual game designers would disagree. And I use the word "all" specifically, because I believe a game designer that actually stated that a reward system could be managed without the exercise of judgement would be lying. That would fall under the category of "I'd like to see them try it."


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We actually have such a sytem for tfs already where its 1 merit / 3.5 minutes

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I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. The merit system is actually one of the things I was specifically thinking about when I made the statement above: the merit awards are based on averages, not maximum limits. There is no penalty or enforcement of a merit per minute maximum earning limit. If you run TFs faster than average, you'll earn merits faster than average.

However, I'll bet anything if someone figured out how to earn 100 merits per minute, the devs would drop a hammer on that activity even if the averages for that activity were fine. But I can't say what the lower limit is: that's where judgement comes in.

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Go ahead, try and tell me SR isn't overpowered

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SR is not overpowered. Its one-dimensionality means that migrating it to tankers is problematic because of the archetype scaling modifiers. But those were and are always broken as to intent: a band-aid for archetype scaling that didn't do what it was supposed to do even in their canonical situation: Invuln. The "75% rule" was dead on arrival as the 75% resistance cap and 90% resistance cap (which Invuln could reach for scrappers and tankers when those caps were put in) represents a 250% difference in survivability. Similarly, the 75% rule for modifiers means SR for tankers would be about 400% of the strength of SR for scrappers without modification. All you've proven is the modifiers don't always work right, which was known back in I2 (also, I did the SR to tankers calculation when powerset proliferation was first announced).

Ignoring endurance effects, for SR to have similar numerical mitigation as Electric, it would have to have about 20% defense. That's ridiculously low. Invuln has almost as much damage mitigation to psionic with slotted Dull Pain. In fact a good way to look at this assertion is that 20% defense, or 41% resistance (which Electric has to most types) is very close to just running perma-DP and nothing else at all, especially factoring in the heal.

Dark Melee has arguably far more damage mitigation in its non-damaging effects as that.

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As for wasting my time... well, we know for a fact that some changes are effectively influencing whether or not a storyarc can be published in that some that go slightly over the limit do become arcs that can be published. I'm sorry if that runs contrary to a thread you posted

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In what way does that contradict anything I said? Its been so long ago, let me look it up:

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while some things that shrink the file will also shrink memory footprint, other things definitely will not

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What I'm trying to explain to you is that this statement:

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The only rational explanation is that 100k was an estimate they gave based on some level of trial and error with the system, since it corresponds directly to nothing we can measure.

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is wrong. The 100k limit is the memory limit, not some trial and error guesswork. It has always been 100,000 bytes of internal memory taken up by the data structures of the missions, period. As a result, some things can be reduced in the local files, and some things can't. Things in the local files that can't reasonably be reduced in size by compression trickery are generally things that are stored locally in a completely different format than they are stored in memory, such as costume color data. Other things, like text fields can theoretically be reduced in direct proportion from the local file and memory.

This means its possible by actual testing to confirm which things are worth even attempting to compress simply by testing missions with that data to determine if changes to those data elements actually have an impact on the actual memory consumption of the mission, rather than guessing randomly. I know its possible because I have a list of all of them.

Anyway, good luck with your utility.

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That's a nonsensical statement, Arcanaville - what is the point of TELLING us that the maximum size is 100k if that doesn't correspond to anything we can measure ourselves?

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The meter is the thing that allows us to "measure for ourselves" and I did extensive tests during beta that confirm beyond any shadow of a doubt that at the time of testing the mission limit was 100,000 bytes, and those bytes were bytes of content as the MA measures content not the file size on disk. Adding 1000 asci characters to a text field increases mission size by exactly 1.00%, factoring out tag-expansion.

Beyond that, while some things that shrink the file will also shrink memory footprint, other things definitely will not - colors for example are "written out" in the mission file but clearly stored in the MA in packed format, because there is no size difference between 0,0,0 and 255,255,255 - conclusively proven by direct testing. So if your sole measure of your tool's optimization is the actual local file size without careful MA in-game testing, I'm afraid you'll pursue highly unprofitable lines of attack.

But its your time to spend. I'm only advising you of the reality of the system implementation.


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Given that approach they might as well say the maximum size is "100%" on the little meter

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Uh...

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The 100k thing is actually misleading in that even without reduction, some files over 100k still show as less than 100% while some that are under (as we've seen) show as over.

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It might be misleading, but its not intended to be nor does it claim to be the local file size. Local file size is independent from internal mission arc size. Many things affect mission size and local file size in a completely different way. My mythbusting thread unfortunately got eaten, but one of the things I discovered is that the recommendation to set unused costume parts to black is worthless: it doesn't decrease mission size (at least, it did not at the time I tested). It does dramatically reduce local file size, but that doesn't help the author.

Also, the 100k limit is actually 100,000 bytes, not 100k.

I'll take a look at IGOR to see what it does; some of the things it does (like stripping or reducing file references) might help, and then again it might not.

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When I read this, my first thought was that someone could easily think that is what happened with my second arc, Simple Times. It originally had 4 missions, with 4 different villain groups. Now it has 5 missions, with 4 villain groups. Plus a custom group. So just looking at the description in the MA would not be very promising.

But in reality, I planned the entire story arc, although I did swap a couple of groups for level reasons. And some excellent feedback caused some re-writing to put in the second mission, using one of the groups a second time.

I don't know about being really skilled but the feedback I have received so far has been pretty positive. So the only way to really know if it is JABOSTH is to start it up and play.

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JABOSTH doesn't imply lack of planning or even foresight. It actually (in my opinion) represents a lack of priority in having the missions be primarily about a singular line of thought. The number of groups used isn't a strong forward indicator in my opinion, although it tends to be a stronger reverse correlator (not all arcs with many villain groups turn out to be JABOSTH but a lot of JABOSTH end up having a lot of different groups or massive use of customs).

I haven't played the arc being referenced, so I have no opinion about that specifically.

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'lo, all.

I have a question regarding custom enemy groups.

You see, I had an idea for what I think would be an awesome arc. However, to pull it off, each mission would need its own set of enemies. That's at least 3 enemies a group, and one group for each mission. Five missions... a minimum of 15 custom enemies.

And that's the minimum. On a couple of these groups, I'd prefer to have four or even 5 kinds of enemies.

However, then I remember that a single group of enemies (that, admittedly, had 8 general enemies, and 2 unique enemies) took up around 60% of the available arc space...

So, would it be feasible to make this? Or would I not have any space for actual missions after I added 5 different custom enemy groups...

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Approximately 6.5% of your mission space per critter, minus text descriptions. Also, things like the color of costume elements do not affect the memory size of your critters even if they change the size of your local files (disproved), but adding custom costume elements themselves (capes, tails, custom weapons, etc) can increase the size of custom critters somewhat.

15 would be extremely difficult if not impossible to squeeze into a single mission arc, factoring in the space required to construct the actual missions themselves. 16 is I believe impossible altogether.

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One might think that some time prior to this game becoming 5 years old, the Devs might have developed some maximum number of, say, xp/hour that they are willing to allow. Maybe they had some number in mind during the design phase.

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And they've changed their minds more than once: XP smoothing was an example of them changing their minds. The problem, of course, is when they change their minds upward, they are heroes. WHen they change their minds downward, they have a riot. Because the devs don't actually have the "right" to change their minds as the game or circumstances surrounding the game change, or just because they change their attitude towards rewards in general, they cannot allow their decision-making to be exposed to ratcheting.

Plus, you're assuming there is in fact a singular number, such that *anything* under that number is ok. It might be that if occasionally it happens that a few players hit N XP/hour, that's not a problem, but if everyone hits N-1 XP/hour, all the time, that's bad. What you want is some sort of expression of the entire decision-space of all permutations of all possible reward rates as a function of time and across player population, and what the devs would decide under those circumstances. That's simply not possible to express reasonably, even if the devs could express it to themselves.

A lot of dev-decisions are at least partially governed by consensus - even *allowing* ANY rewards in the MA missions was such a decision: Positron said so himself (and its not publicly known which side Positron himself was on). Because they are consensus decisions, just the question of who is working for NC/Paragon Studios at the time is potentially relevant to that decision at that moment in time.

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Wow I cant believe that folks are having issues with the time thing......

its starts at 11 am which is in the morning and before noon....have folks forgotten that (not am) and that 12 AM is in fact MIDNIGHT? The event will last from (not noon), thus giving us 13 HOURS and NOT ONE HOUR! Come on folks seriously........

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Not everyone is on the east coast. The people on the west coast are going to see this end at 9pm their time, just a few hours after they come home that night.

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It can be worse. For me, this will start at 5am my time, and end at 6pm my time. Technically speaking, I'll be able to see the first couple of hours of it, assuming I wake up early enough. There is practically zero chance of seeing any part of the end of it, unless my office burns to the ground at lunch and I head home early.

At best, I might pop my head in during the day from my laptop, but if CHAOS includes zone events, I'm very likely to be seeing the Powerpoint version of it.

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I have a question about the reviews, from Venture, or other... this may be answered somewhere in the thread, that I missed, but, how does one avoid the sin of "just a bunch of stuff that happened?" Does that basically mean that the events don't seem connected to each other? Does that mean what initiated them was uninteresting? I'd like to avoid this because it SEEMS bad but I don't know how it's defined.


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As so often happens on these boards, Arcanaville had a great answer a few pages back in this post.

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I should point out that whether something is sufficiently well connected and has a sufficiently strong point is at least partially subjective, so its impossible to guarantee avoiding this problem in the mind of any one particular reviewer.

However, one thing I *can* recommend to avoid the charge of "just a bunch of things that happen" is to not actually *make* just a bunch of things that happen.

One thing I'm noticing in the arcs I play is that in some cases, it seems pretty obvious that the author essentially wrote a bunch of different missions, with whatever maps they thought would be cool, whatever bosses they thought would be cool, and whatever objectives they thought would be cool. Then they attempted to sprinkle "plot-dust" on them, to try to connect them.

For example: mission one is in Orenbega fighting demons. Mission two is in ruined Atlas Park, fighting 5th Column. Why? Because in mission one the boss says he was sent to invade our dimension from an alternate reality in which I guess the 5th Column are planetary arsonists.

The contact gives no clue the story is heading in this direction, and for that matter the contact doesn't give much of *any* reason for going to Orenbega in the first place. The contact is just a device to send you to mission one, and the boss in mission one (specifically, his dialog) is just a device to get you to mission two.

It was (it seems to me) to be *implemented* as just a bunch of stuff that happens, that someone then tried to solder together. If nothing else, try to avoid doing that because it has a tendancy of being often obvious.


Two questions I think the author should ask themselves while reviewing their mission arcs:

1. When the contact says "Accept my mission" pretend to be the player and say "and if I don't?" If you don't have a good reply, something's wrong.

2. When the contact says "Accept my mission" pretend to be the player and say "what's the point?" If you don't have a good answer, same thing.


Lastly, it helps if everyone in the mission arc is actually participating in the same story. If the mission arc is about recruiting the player to stop the latest bunch of Nemesis plots, and one of them has a Nemesis LT poisoning the special burrito sauce at El Mexicano, and then the next one sends you to stop the bombing of Atlas Park, well it might make sense to you, but its likely to be perceived as a random bunch of things strung together, even if there exists a plot device to connect the events together.

A *really* skilled author can make something that initially *appears* to be a random bunch of stuff that later *is* connected in ways that make perfect sense in retrospect. But this is by no means easy, or likely to strike all readers equally validly. If you fail, you'll probably fail directly into the deepest hole of JABOSTH.

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We need to be explicitly told. The only ones who would disagree are just the people who are RP snobs and don't like people playing this as a game in the first place.

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And people who believe there are no such complete set of explicit rules, and publishing an incomplete one would only increase the justification in gaming those rules.

Whether a mission is outside the realm of "reasonable levels of rewards[/i] is a judgement call. And while there are a lot of people around here who believe that the job of a good game developer is to be a robotic decision emitter, all actual game designers would disagree. And I use the word "all" specifically, because I believe a game designer that actually stated that a reward system could be managed without the exercise of judgement would be lying. That would fall under the category of "I'd like to see them try it."

The only rule I can think of that actually encapsulates the devs' intends fairly accurately is an impossible to precisely enforce one: missions in which one of the intents of the author was to generate a higher level of rewards for some controllable set of circumstances outside the range of the normal statistical range of rewards defined for the dev-created game, or missions which do not meet that requirement but by happenstance have a design that is exploitable and being exploited by players to provide the same statistical advantage are subject to removal.

Now, if you're looking for actual numbers, you aren't getting them. Very likely, ever. The devs would be brain-dead to publicize them.

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Synopsis: The Rikti are kidnapping kheldians. They're up to something that should probably be stopped.

This arc feels to me like it needs polish somewhere, but I can't figure out where.

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Well, I would probably start by asking why a heroic mission would be somewhat ambivalent about whether kidnappings should be stopped or not.


I should mention that all of my arcs are free for any reviewer that wants to sharpen swords to review, if they so choose (I'm always looking for feedback). Just keep in mind that the Scrapper Challenge mission is just a bunch of stuff that happens to kill you; Bug Hunt is a vengeance story: mine against the devs for bugging my arcs so many times in closed beta; and Secret Weapons is the arc I actually wrote a serious story for (which is why its both amusing to me and disturbing at the same time that it has a slightly lower rating than the one with the talking mito and the lunatic boss fight).

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Is it me, or are /Ninjutsu using allies just... not using it at all?

[edit]...and not Forgeing me, huh?

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Is it the *only* ally, or are there others?

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it wouldn't hurt for the devs to interact with the playerbase and let them know that the devs know the difference between people and missions that pursue XP and those that break the rules.

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Yeah, it would. Because everyone who currently thinks they can't tell the difference, or believe if the devs act in a way contrary to their desires it must be due to lack of understanding, won't be convinced by anything the devs say. But it will open them to the additional charge that silence equals acquiesence or agreement with whoever calls them out.

Which is why calling them out is explicitly against the forum rules, by the way. To ensure dev silence cannot be interpreted as anything other than nothing.

I don't need the devs to tell me they are aware of the difference between extended play and reward exploit any more than I need them to notify me on a regular basis they are aware of the day of the week or the color of the sky. Perhaps my willingness to skip the stupid questions allows me to get the smarter ones answered at a higher rate than average.

I doubt the devs are going to pull the plug on XP in the MA any time soon. That decision was not made trivially in the first place. But even if they did, it would not be due to their lack of understanding of the facts, but rather a disagreement over their significance.

I'm my opinion, if you're going to have a "Big Bad" in your arc, the story should naturally lead to him. I think a major problem with some of the arcs I've played is that they have "lets top this" feel to them where the author seems to want to keep eclipsing his own creations. Mission one has a Big Bad, then you find out that Mission two has an Even Bigger Bad, and then Mission three is laughing about the silly punks claiming to be bosses because here's the Actual Big Bad. Of course, mission four basically belittles that Big Bad, because it has the Real Big Bad.

Its ok to have escalating difficulty, in fact that's a good technique for keeping players interested. But you don't want to undermine yourself. You don't want to oversell your boss fights, but you don't want to trivialize them as a set of Matryoshka dolls either. The Big Bad can have a lieutenant you have to fight first, but it should (normally) be obvious he is the appetizer to the main course.

You can surprise players by giving them a Big Boss and then showing him to be a front for an even bigger boss. But you have to do that carefully, and you can't do it often.

This is assuming the player is even reading your story, which some are and some aren't.


The way I addressed this in my Secret Weapons arc is I created a boss that the player had to fight to get information on the big bad, then fight a Lt of the big bad while investigating him, and then actually send the player to confront the big bad. At all times the player knows they are heading somewhere, and very early on they know who they are ultimately after.

The arc I'm working on now takes a completely different approach to this issue. In that arc, I introduce three different "bads" but the story eventually gets to a point where you really only fight one of them. The other two become secondary by process of elimination. So again the player already knows where its all going to go basically, just not specifically.

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In general, I agree with your post, but it can be difficult to do as you suggest without making the player feel that they are unconnected to the events of the plot.

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The players are on a railroad: that's unavoidable. So its literally impossible for them to be able to actually "affect" the story in that sense, except in only minor ways. The only things you can do is tap into the fact that the players will want to actually complete missions, and making sure the decision to complete the mission is always something the story encourages, or tap into storytelling modes where players are less the trigger for major events, and more of an important witness to major events.

A player can be important because he and he alone can defeat the Big Bad, or because she and she alone exposes the truth about the Big Secret. That's a question of story telling technique.

By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.

The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.

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1) Is a missions difficulty based off of the mission diff slider or is it set within the architect system?

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Mission holder difficulty. Although there is a setting within the MA where individual missions in an arc can have "sliding difficulty" where the difficulty can ramp upward from the front to the back of the mission. But that would be centered on the leader's difficulty setting regardless.


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2) How does one go about only allowing for a glowing end the mission as opposed to having to clear the stage?

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When you create missions you designate which objectives are required for mission complete, and which ones are not. To make a mission a "Defeat all" or a "Defeat everything in last room" explicitly requires adding those objectives. Also, all missions require having at least one required objective, or the mission will generate an error and be unplayable.


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3) Does adding more AV/Boss/EB's increase mission bonuses and tickets awarded?

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No, except insofar as tickets are awarded for defeating things: the more things you defeat the more tickets you can earn (ticket are awarded randomly, with each defeat potentially worth a certain amount of tickets per defeat, much like random drops except tickets drop much more frequently). At the end of each mission, you get a ticket bonus based on the number of tickets you earned during play for defeats.


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4) Is there an award for doing long arcs versus single missions?

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The end of mission bonus increases slightly for missions deeper in an arc than earlier in the arc, although the difference is small.


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5) Is there a delay when a mission is edited to the time its published/republished or is it just server dependent?

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You have to explicitly publish missions: they do not automatically update when you edit them. When you do, missions are typically published (or republished if you are editing an already published mission) within a minute or two. Server load can affect this.

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So, how do you make a story that isn't JABOSTH without taking away a player's control of their character or making assumptions that will probably be wrong at least half of the time?

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My interpretation:


Just a bunch of stuff that happens:

Mission one: please help me get my cat out of a tree.

Mission two: what, my cat has DE crystals on it? find out why the DE want my cat.

Mission three: The DE are being ordered to experiment on cats by the Rikti? Find the Rikti leader and defeat him.

Problem: sure, there's a thread to it, as in "hanging by."


A bunch of stuff that happens for a reason, but reason uses the idiot ball:

Mission one: My research lab appears to have been broken into, but strangely the only thing stolen was not any of my research subjects, but my pet cat. This is strange, I need you to investigate.

Mission two: The trail led to a cave with the DE? That's odd. Let me see that device you recovered. This appears to be Rikti in design. My research involved the immune system of the Rikti, but how does my cat fit in? Find the Rikti responsible and learn what they are up to.

Mission three: The Rikti leader believed my research was a biological weapons lab? He apparently was going to try to plant a monitoring device on my cat.

Problem: The Rikti hired the DE to steal a cat?


A bunch of stuff that happens for a reason, tries to avoid stupidville:

Mission one: I was conducting research on the DE, while I was gone one of them apparently broke out of its cage and for some reason stole my cat. Investigate the DE, and if you can recover my cat.

Mission two: You traced the DE to a cave with Rikti? So it seems the DE didn't break out on its own: the Rikti stole it and my cat. But why? Seek out the leader of this Rikti group and find out what they are after.

Mission three: The Rikti thought my research could be used to make a biological weapon against the Rikti? And they were going to plant a monitoring device on my cat to observe me? That's really strange.

Problem: its still a stupid plot, but at least it makes some sort of logic, and doesn't involve completely ludicrous acts of insanity.

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You think it would help to describe your mission in Rikti?

Classification: Nemesis Plot. Assistance: Required. Threat: Planetary; Political Control. Sentient Life Cessation Probability: 94.37%. Difficulty: Extreme. Archvillain: Detected.

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You win a cookie for that.

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Cookie: Appreciated. Expression of nom: triplicate.

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Re: 200+ years - I don't play every arc. Many arcs don't have a good description in the search window, which is my second criteria to see if I want to play it. First criteria being the title of course.


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Any plan to increase the size of the description? Even 500 characters instead of 300 would make a huge difference. Or maybe some additional settings to describe difficulty? I'm having a hard time writing an interesting description of the story of the mission, while also providing information about what they can expect from the gameplay/difficulty.

I suppose I could stop trying so hard to use complete sentences.

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You think it would help to describe your mission in Rikti?

Classification: Nemesis Plot. Assistance: Required. Threat: Planetary; Political Control. Sentient Life Cessation Probability: 94.37%. Difficulty: Extreme. Archvillain: Detected.

Arcana Author Journal 01: Intro and Plot

This is not a guide to writing good mission arcs. I'm certainly not the final arbiter on what a good mission arc even is. Its more of a journal explaining how I wrote mine, and how I approached the process of writing and publishing my mission arcs. I'm not 100% certain what the best way to organize my thoughts are, so in the absence of a solid organizing principle I'm going to roughly follow the order I actually did things, except when I decide it will make more sense to deviate from that. In other words, I'm basically going to do whatever I feel like doing, and let the chips fall where they may.

So, I'm starting at the beginning. And the beginning for me was: what should I write about.

There are lots of different angles people have taken and are taking in picking a topic. One of them is to pick an established canon character and write a story about him or her. City of Heroes/City of Villains has a wide range of colorful characters suitable for writing stories about. Some are practically written for MA missions: Dr. Aeon for example is quirky, flamboyant, and egomaniacal. He's a very easy launchpad into practically any story you want to tell. One of the early missions I ran during closed beta was an early version of The Butterfly Effect which is now a dev choice arc. This arc used Aeon in more than one way to clever effect (in my opinion).

(Note: my general rule here is going to be that unless I get permission to do so, I'm not mentioning anyone's arcs except my own in these articles, except for Dev Choice arcs which I feel I can safely mention for both good and bad since they have essentially become dev-publicized anyway).

Conversely, some players take the opposite approach. They see a CoX character that is heavily underused in their opinion and decide to flesh that character out more. Both of these options have pros and cons associated with them. If you decide to pick out an especially noteworthy character like Aeon to write about, you stand a pretty good chance of being just one of many people all thinking the same thing. There are only so many Nemesis plots that can be interesting before you practically have to be Hemmingway to make one noteworthy. Conversely, if you pick a relatively underutilized character, you might have a different problem: with little material to go on, it can be difficult to write that character in a way that will match the impressions of the other players. Unless the character is literally a tabula rasa, everyone may have their own impressions of the character you might collide with in your own writing.

Most people I think decide to write based on something that they feel strongly about, or have thought about for a long time. And no subject is nearer and dearer to players hearts than their own characters. This is probably the easiest thing for players to write about, and simultaneously the hardest thing for players to write about well.


I think people should write about what they want to write about. However, if I were to make a recommendation in this area, I would suggest that unless you have a lot of experience in creative writing and have been seriously critiqued on it you should consider writing something else first and saving you characters for the second or third arc you write. The pitfalls here are legion:

<ul type="square">[*]You'll want to say more about your characters than the story requires, or desires. Soon you'll have tons of exposition explaining how Cosmic Defenderman was sent to Earth by the Elder God of Tapioca to rid the world of the Circle of Thorns, why the Tsoo hate him so, how he helped overthrow the 5th Column, the cat he saved from a tree last week, and what he last ate for lunch.
[*]You'll also have the opposite problem: you'll presume players either know or care about critical elements about your characters that aren't remotely clear in the story. They'll be trying to save Atlas Park from a Malta bombing, and out of nowhere they'll be rescuing Cosmic Defenderman, who everyone knows is the most powerful defender of Atlas Park and arch enemy of the Malta. How will we know this? Because the Malta guarding him will say "you won't stop us this time Cosmic Defenderman!" They may also be bowing to him when they do.
[*]Probably most importantly, you'll have to figure out a way for any of this to be remotely interesting to the actual players playing the mission. If you don't make it important, it will seem trivial. But if you force the issue too strongly, you'll end up in Mary Sue territory with everyone trying too hard to explain to you just how important Cosmic Defenderman is.[/list]The problem is you'll care too much and that will color your judgement.


And yet, that's basically the problem I set forth for myself. I have an origin story in my head for my first alt: Lady Arcana. The basic outline of that story is that she was an experiment conducted during the Rikti War by a Crey weapons research program. Basically, she's a product of illegal research during the war. But I needed a way to use that basic story in a way that wasn't too self-important, where the player would be the focus of the story and not my own character.

I quickly decided that the one thing that *wouldn't* happen was a time travel mission to see my character's own origin. I'm not saying all such missions are bad: I'm saying I think its too difficult to make good enough. And time travel itself gets into very dangerous territory: it all happened before already: why tamper with it in the first place?

So I decided that rather than tell my character's origin directly, I would tell a story about someone trying to reproduce my character's origin in the present day. That way, no time travel, and better yet no problems with my character being too important to the story. The motivation I could give the players was stopping a crime from happening, rather than being focused on my character specifically.

In the end, I ended up with a story outline that used something near and dear to my heart - my main alt's origin story - and yet crafted a story that was not about her, but rather about a criminal conducting illegal research. I was able to connect that story to canon by connecting it to the Rikti War, but in a way that wasn't likely to collide with existing canon (who *knows* how many funky things happened during the Rikti War no one knows about yet). And I had a basic plot: a way to connect everything together so that the events were not disconnected. An investigation can lead to all sorts of places with a lot of latitude, so as long as the storyline was reasonably linear, it wouldn't be (as Venture puts it) "just a bunch of stuff that happens."

So, I had my story (this became the arc Secret Weapons). All I had to do now was craft it.

My next step was designing some of the custom critters I was going to use in this arc, so I'm going to discuss custom critters next. That topic might be long: I'm still not sure if that should be one article or two yet. I'm also not sure how often I'm going to write these, but I'm hoping as time permits I get at least one per week if not quicker. Also, this was just plot selection: I'm going to return to this topic again when I talk about scripting which is (to me) a totally different thing.


Did I get it right? Did I get it wrong? Play Arc 9172: Secret Weapons and let me know in-game or in this thread just exactly what's right and what's wrong with my plot. Be as harsh as you like: I can take it. This incredibly transparent arc advertisement is brought to you by the letters S and W, and the numbers 9, 1, 7, and 2.