BackFire

Tell me someone has a link to the sing sang song movie trailer MP3!

Lesbian Hellions are a long-running CoH meme. Right up there with Jerk Hackers and Deth Kicking.

CB, I hope you don't think I'm harping on your arc because I'm not. I think it's a great concept and has a lot of potential.

I can see what you're trying to do with the arc...it's just not doing that yet.

Forgot to add:

I ran this on a lvl 23 Fire/Energy Melee Blaster with very little trouble. I think there was only 1 boss the entire arc so it was really easy. I was expecting at least 1 end boss per mission, but it was always an Lt.

If there is a level range that Hellions and Council overlap, set the entire arc to that range so there is no jump between missions. I've found that a significant portion of the playerbase will down-rate your arc if it jumps in levels.

Okay, as the founder of the Friends of Old Kings Row, I regularly check up and play arcs which feature KR. So I was excited to see what story you were adding to my beloved zone and took care in keeping detailed notes. I hope they help you turn this into a powerful arc!

Short & Sweet: It's a good concept and has the potential to be a very touching story, but it's unfinished, has a huge plot hole, and needs a major edit.

Here's the notes I took as I ran thru:

Contact

Nice look, but it would be nice if he had a bio since he is an unheard of character.

Mission 1

Your basic setup needs work. You need to answer the basic question of "why?" Why is the contact so concerned that the kids missed school for 1 day? And why does he feel it's reason enough to call in a super hero? It sounds more like a reason to call their parents. (note: after playing the arc, it's apparent you also need to answer why he'd need the hero if Emancipator is going to show up, too!) This would also be a good time to involve the player character...why are his/her special talents needed to find them? Because they're familiar with Kings Row? Because the contact has a previous relation with the hero? Did he hear about the player from his relative on the force? Get the player involved.

Clean up your mission objectives by using the plural names ie. "X Students to Rescue" Be sure to make the single objective names different so the last one switches to the proper student.

After freeing the Emancipator he says, "Thanks, Back-Fire! I think I could have taken them, but I'm glad you're here. Let's find those kids." How does Emancipator know I'm there looking for the kids? How do I even know he's a hero, since there's no data on him? Add a bit more to the dialogue like, "I was here looking for some lost students...oh! You're looking for them, too? I think they're up ahead, let's find 'em!"

Okay, why would I let these kids go when I already figure they're involved with Hellions? That just makes no sense.

Mission 2

The set-up needs to tie into the plot. Again, why is the player uniquely needed for this job as opposed to say, firemen? At this point the player is becoming an errand boy. Give the player a motivation to help the contact. Is there something in the community center that's relevant to the earlier mission? The player may want to help put out the fire before any clues get lost.

You need a warning that the mission is timed in the mission text so the player knows before accepting. I'd suggest you highlight it in red or orange. This can be in character or out of character at the end of the contact's dialogue.

Again, clean up the objectives in the Nav bar so it's not so cluttered. There's no need to say "Defeat all enemies in the end room." "Defeat kidnapper and crew" works just as well.

Is a clue really needed for each of the rescues? Just include clues that are pertinent to the plot or serve as red herrings. Every rescue doesn't need one if it doesn't add to the story, esp when the clue just parrots what the rescue dialogue says.

No mention of meeting the mysterious Emancipator twice in a row at the end or in the clues? I guessed in mission 1 that the contact is actually the Emancipator. The M2 Emancipator clue, return text of Mission 2, and set up for Mission 3 would be a good place to work of bit of this mystery and maybe toss in a red herring or 2 to keep the player guessing who this mysterious hero actually is.

Mission 3

In the set up, why is he asking why the President was there? The pres has been arrested and (hopefully) questioned...if not by the cops then by me (he was the end boss of the previous mission.) If he hasn't talked, there better be a good reason. After finding the pres to be a baddie, wouldn't the police immediately haul in the other council members? Them 'going missing' again just doesn't work at this point. They would be under super-tight scrutiny so you need to find a different reason for them to be where they are and why I would want to investigate. He ends the mission dialogue with "I need to know what's going on here." Again, make this about the player, not the contact. Give the player motivation to continue, they're heroes, not errand boys.

In the send-off Doug reveals he is the Emancipator. It's beyond anti-climatic since there's been no real set up for the reveal. This is a huge missed chance at adding another level of depth to the story and a fun mystery for the player to try and solve. There could be a whole plot thread dedicated to "who is the Emancipator" that is worked thru the clues of rescued hostages and the contact's dialogue. Also, how do you explain how he would teleport if he's defeated in a previous mission? Maybe he found a med teleporter? Or has a relative that helped him get one?

Doug's 'busy' txt says, "I'm on the inside. Come on in." No, he's not. He's standing in front of me. Try something along the lines of him needing to get his costume or equipment and he'll meet up with the player at the Substation.

Add a pop-up when you enter the mission explaining why you're underground at the substation.

Again, clean up the Nav window objectives so it's not 6 lines long.

It's all a Council plot, eh? 5th Column would work much better as they're seen as more radical. The Council are the watered-down mercenary types. 5th Column are Nazis. I guess you're going for the play on words with Student "Council" but I still feel it's better suited for 5th Column.

The President says, "Now we shall watch Kings Row burn, everyone will blame those mongrels who live there!" Uh...[list]
1- how is he free?
2- nobody will blame anybody except him, as he was already caught for the crime in the previous mission.
3- In order for his plan to have any chance of success he'd have to have placed some kind of evidence that cast blame onto some already hated group in the Row. No evidence has been established.[list]
Huge plot hole here.

Mission 4

So I'm supposed to believe some off scene character conveniently hacks into a computer and gets the name & location of the mastermind just like that?!? Why not have the President drop the name and location after defeating him? Or maybe he spills his guts at the police station between missions? Or each of the Student Council members have a clue that, when all put together, lead us to the mastermind? Having Samuel hack the info is just too easy, and again, it doesn't involve the player character.

The Busy text says I can't reach Doug's cellphone, but, again, I'm standing right in front of him. Unless he's suddenly developed astral or illusionary powers this needs to be changed.

Again, change the "Defeat all in end room" Nav bar text to something less meta-game.

Why does the Striga Isle Pres say his eulogy in a clue instead of dialogue? Same with PCHS Pres?

Add search text to the body bag objective...maybe "You search a fallen hero" or "How long has this hero laid here?" or "You check Emancipator's vitals" or such. Some kind of clue as to what I actually searched would be nice. I'm guessing that's supposed to be Emancipator's body but you ran out of room on your file size. His Broken Chain would be a nice clue to drop.

President needs to be set so that he is not included in normal spawns. You can do this in your custom enemy group window by right-clicking on his name in the list. He keeps showing up all over the map as an Lt. You may want to do this with the rest of your group as they may show up for larger hero parties. Now that I know this is a potential problem, that probably explains why I defeated the Pres in M2 but he's still loose in M3 and beyond. This needs an immediate fix. Your custom group should have at least 1 of each class (minion, lt., boss) which is included in a generic mob spawn. Each named boss should be set so they do not spawn in normal groups.

Archon spawned as an Lt, not a boss. Is this intended? I was set at +0,x0, No AV, so that should give me bosses still. Ahhh...he spawns as a boss when he turns into a Wolf.

Archon has the generic bio. As the mastermind of the whole arc, he's deserving of a unique background. (file size issue?)

Holy ambush from hades!!! Add some dialogue to the Archon to warn the player of incoming ambushes as he's being defeated. (file size?) Ow.

I'm guessing, by the lack of dialogue in the final mission, that you ran out of file space for your arc. Deleting unneccessary clues from the previous missions will go a long way towards fixing this problem. But remember, you are going to eat up a bunch more by filling out your custom group.

When exiting, a pop-up should say something to the effect of "it's sad for the loss of a promising young hero, you should return his broken chain to his body." This makes going back to him and having him visible, even tho he's dead, make sense.

Make the souvenir a letter from Rosa instead of the chain.

On a final note:

The hateful dialogue might need some toning down. Find a way to make it hateful, but not so hurtful. I found what they said a bit too disturbing, even tho is was written to illustrate their hate. I think it can be done in a subtler manner.

You have a good start on a story with a lot of potential. I'd love to run thru it again once you've had time to revise.

Sweet, a new Kings Row arc!

I'll que this up for tonight

Arc ID: 21391
Name: Enter the Father Hat Gang
Heroic, lvl 14+, Parody

Now with penguins!!

Awesome! The Crey Comet will be sure to have his boots polished for this one!

*Browses thread*

Yep. I'm obviously not on Triumph too much.

Tho, this is quickly becoming one of my Top 3 favorite alt servers. So, what's the best global channel to add for TFs/Badges?

No mention of Vanguard yet?

Flash! Flash! Stun! Drain!!

Hello hospital.

See also: PPD Ghosts.

Not a big deal, if we have more than 8 show up we simply split into multiple teams

Okay, I totally didn't understand any of the above, but if you're still looking for the MA SuperTeam we meet regularly on Tuesdays, Saturdays & Sundays and randomly in-between.

Keep an eye on this thread for weekly updates.

This Weeks Schedule:

Tuesday 6:00pm EST - High Roller (Highest roll of the dice gets to choice an arc for us to play)

Saturday Noon EST - Open Teaming

Sunday Noon EST - Open Teaming

All levels are welcome, as are Heroes & Villains. We meet in the RWZ AE so both sides can co-op.

Hah! Only 4 trays? Try 7:

• Tray 1: main attacks/vet team tp/base tp/pocket D tp/Ourobouros portal/nuke
• Tray 2: secondary attacks/buffs/powers set to keybinds/reveal
• Tray 3: heals & buffs/targetted AoEs ie. caltrops & rain of fire/travel power/sprint/rest
• Tray 4: toggles/buff pet/non combat pet/sprints with Unbounded Leap +Stealth/temp power toggles
• Tray 5: self destruct/temp attack powers/mission tp
• Tray 6: tarot card buff/brawl/inherent temp attack/KoA costume/non-essential temp powers
• Tray 7: walk/jump pack/accolades/temp travel powers

I can't thank the devs enough for adding in the Save/Load Options features!

A side benefit of catching this season's flu was getting to ditch work for a day and actually join up with the MA Super Team on a Tuesday

First up was:
The Wentworth's Thanksgiving Day Parade by @Djinniman Arc ID: 347683

The concept, alone, was genius and from the opening mission dialogue we all knew we were in for a fun arc!

The author does a fantastic job of creating a setting that fits perfectly into Paragon City and brings it alive with little details that long-time players can really appreciate. The humor is firmly tongue-in-cheek, and the story progresses at a good pace with good logic.

The heavy use of existing enemy groups helps give the arc a credible feel of being in continuity, the important characters are given proper bios and the recoloring/bio for the band members is a pure stroke of genius!

The only drawbacks were objective overload and the conclusion.

The objectives all made sense and had good payoffs, but when you zone into the mission and the objective bar is bleeding over your map it's a bit intimidating.

As for the conclusion, the final boss' dialogue leads the player to believe that someone else has orchestrated the entire plot, but it's left dangling whether it was a larger plan or not. This was a huge missed opportunity to put a nice twist on the whole story and wrap it up with a big finale. And without the twist, the plot seems kind of silly for the mastermind involved.

4.5 Stars rounded up to 5. Tack on 1 more mission filled with Hamidon Mitos colored as float balloons and you've got a solid 5!!

You can't just have 1 serving for Thanksgiving, so we filled up our plate with:
Xhanksgiving at Grandma's by @Electra Creed Arc ID: 347649

This was just a plain, silly arc with custom Thanksgiving themed groups and a few existing mobs that fit the theme. It wasn't a very deep plot with layers of details, but it was fun in the 'summer popcorn flick' sense.

If you like to spend your Thanksgiving smashing pumpkins and beating the stuffing out of turkeys, this arc would be a good filler between pie and football game.

Note to the author: there is a feature in MA that lets you set bosses so they don't spawn in regular mobs. When you're on the custom enemy group list in the MA, right click the name of the enemy you don't want to spawn and set it so they don't spawn in normal groups (I don't recall the exact wording off hand.) This would be a welcome fix for your Turkeys.

Also, lots of potential for added humor if you fill out the bios of your custom groups.

3.25 Stars with a dollop of whipped cream to make it 4.

These holiday themed arcs are very inspiring and I look forward to seeing what people come up with for Xmas and New Year's!

If this was a copy/paste of the mission description text then I'll point out your typos so far:

Another fun day with the MA crew! We had a good turnout and a nice mix of Heroes & Villains. Only a couple team wipes and 1 farm map we had to drop, but all-in-all a good time, as usual!

First up was X8: Monster Mayhem by @Stygian Arc ID: 312167

This was an interesting mish-mash of Hamlet and the classic Universal Studios Monsters (Frankenstein, Werewolf, etc.) The costumes were great, as were the bios, but the Hamlet references & storytelling method made the whole thing feel out of sync.

Maybe if I was more of a fan of Hamlet, and could recall the story and quotes from memory, I would have enjoyed the arc more. But I read Hamlet waaaay back in high school and promptly forgot it after the test.

Also I never understood the connection between Universal's Monsters and Hamlet. It's just such a random mix, I didn't get it. I guess he was going for the "play within a play" plot device but it really just added another layer of complexity that made the whole story tougher to follow.

The arc also didn't utilize clues or NPC dialogue to reveal the story. Pretty much everything you get is from the wall-o-text the contact gives you. This makes it hard to keep track of what's happened and why you're doing each mission. Instead of revealing or experiencing the story, it's dumped on you in huge chunks that you forget as you wade thru mobs and mobs of classic monsters.

In the end, you could tell the author put a lot of effort into the arc and I bet if I was up on my Shakespeare I'd have been impressed with his knowledge of Hamlet and re-telling. But I'm not, so I wasn't.

Would a rose by any other name smell so sweet? Not quite, but it didn't stink. 3.5 out of 5 stars (rounded up to 4 for effort)

Next up was a game of Russian Roulette where we plugged in "Romance" - "Save the world" - "Custom Characters" and hit Random.

What we got was Rose of the Lawn Ninja ID# 318268

We were a bit excited by the name as it sounded very creative...unfortunately after reading the mission text, which had more typos than you could fit in one paragraph, we quickly realized the title was a typo, too. It should have been "Rise" of the lawn ninja.

And apparently Lawn Ninjas are massive groups of minions (no Lts or Bosses), without bios, on an outdoor farming map, spouting off more typos.

Stupid farms are stupid so we dropped this one like a bad habit.

Then someone got the bright idea of doing a new twist to Roulette: we'd search for arcs containing the NAME "Roulette!"

Thus, we loaded up Russian Roulette by @Cassie Arc ID: 109404

This arc was a fun find! Well formatted text, good dialogue (that was in character,) an interesting custom enemy (complete with bios,) ...oh! and we got to beat up Ruskies!! How cool is that!

The story was probably more complicated than it needed to be and I had some issues with how it claimed to fit in CoH canon, but it was still a solid arc and it progressed logically from mission to mission. My favorite detail was the ID clue found in mission 4! A very creative and effective use of the name, class, & level strings in MA to give the player a personal stake in the outcome of the arc.

In the end I gave it a solid 4. If it kept it's focus more on the Ruskie plot and didn't jump around as much it would have easily been a 5.

Oh, and WARNING: this arc is not for the solo-inclined. The enemy group is Mastermind heavy and can quickly become a challenge for even a full group if they're not paying attention. That was the other reason it got kicked down to a 4 in my book.

So, 2 out of 3? Not a bad day at AE if you ask me! Hope to see more of ya next week!

Did Lupin the 3rd ever make the list? TV series & movies.

Other than that, put some +1's next to:

• Azumanga Daioh
  Melancholy of Harumi Suzukiya
  Genshiken
  Gundam UC (movies I-III)
  Gundam 0083 Stardust Memories
  Gundam Wing

Actually, that was just Babbage's clockwork vet pet.