Clave_Dark_5

Make it so!

It's been doing that since day one of new filter, it flagged the word "disaster" in one of my arc clues title.

Also, yes the file name will flag too; currently a thing I had to pester support about until they told me about that. Hopefully I can finally get my Wickerwork arc fixed.

D'oh!

I had/have working arcs but was inelligible as I won last month's contest - but yeah, the bug thing has indeed eaten up a lot of our time and concerns. :/

I'm putting up my arc "A Wake For Dead 6" (info in sig), which to some extent could be thought of as being about the debt we owe those who've laid down their lives for us, although it's not specifically about vets.

Fixed to be rid of needless generalizing insult, but my plan as well - mainly because I'm normally asleep and then getting ready for the week-end with my GF at those hours.

Or maybe Null's snuck back and is using an admin's log-in to play AE arcs! I wish I was more assiduous in keeping track of my arc plays so I could try and figure out what he rated it...

Thanks for posting that, I'd heard of Null but never knew where he came from.

Write my arc for me!

In all serious, thanks for doing this. I was originally going to make use a multiple colors for my last arc, but the arc turned out to be such work that I never got around to checking what those colors would actually look like against the backdrop of the AE building, and here you've gone and even included pictures... neat!

Any other form of Doom is failure.

That's a great idea.

I know other players have been put off the AE by the VR idea behind it (I'm on the fence myself - I don't mind it, but it seems it could have been handled in a better fashion), but I wonder how the doors set for each mish would work - would we end up with more 'enter a warehouse and end up in a tunnel' goofiness? They could code up some stuff to read what sort of map is set and then connect that to a proper door somewhere, but that sounds like it might be a lot of work. I'd love to see it happen though.

Minor quibble: the Haunted Robots are already broadcasting Wizard Machine's signal, it's what animates them; they, the radio station and the various destructibles all make up the Wizard Machine. I'll look into making that more clear as it's an important point to the metaphor I constructed this mish around.

Mish 1 and 2 are supposed to be you reading what she did while actually 'walking in her footsteps' (afterall, the players need foes to whomp). I can see I may not have made that clear enough. On the other hand, having it a bit up in the air isn't at all a bad thing in my mind - the whole arc is intended to be a cryptic form of story-telling. I'll look into it though, maybe change it, maybe not.

My bad. I changed their name and forgot to check the bio. I'll fix that, thanks for catching it. Things like this tell me just how much attention you paid and I'm very glad to see it.

Never saw that in my play-testing! I'll look into that too.

In many ways, yes.

There is no ClockWork King involved with the Haunted Robots. This was me riffing on the metaphor I built the mission around, not working with canon stuff. Confusing, isn't it?

Yep, another editing error on my part. I thought I still had a ref to that version of Valerie's name but for the life of me I couldn't find it - thanks for spotting it!

Reality does get more murky the further you go into the arc...

... very murky.

I have to admit I'd never heard of the CoT Library of Souls so I looked it up on paragonwiki. I can see the similarities, but that's obviously not what I had in mind since I'd never heard of it before, right? More riffing off the central metaphor the arc is written around.

I love stories that do that.

Zamuel mentioned he didn't get them in order either and truth be told I wasn't concerned about that when I put this together. I don't think it really matters if they come in order or not. On my play-test runs I usually got them rather out of order, you seem to ave gotten lucky.

There's an off-hand reference to this in a mission-complete to Mish 2 I think. Or maybe it was in the complete for this one, I don't recall right now.

No, I'd say you're doing pretty well! (And I like the above interpretation too.)

Very good interpretations!

That was a bit of good luck with your run - VG is a Lt. in the enemy group I set for the map, it might have been any other critter there. I so wish we could set a boss encounter right next to a glowie, I'd totally set VG there, it's very fitting.

She had a lot to want to escape from.

Again, I thank you for that careful playing. I think you're one of the best reviewers around right now.

For someone who's forte isn't this sort of story-telling, you did quite well I think.

Then it worked for you the way I wanted it to. I wanted to make this arc creepy, cryptic and something of a mental puzzle for the player to piece together from the little details and overall tone I set. The finished picture they get will probably never be 100% complete (or exactly as it was to me, which is intended), but you'll see the broader brushstrokes of the character and her life.

I'm surprised that this is the second time I've heard that about The Earth Devouring The Earth. I don't see what I did with them as being all that... well, good, but I'm glad it seems to be working for people.

I really like your interpretation there. And don't worry about the confusion.

I can appreciate what you say, but it's not what I wanted this arc to be or end up as. "Broad brushstrokes", as I said above. If I had to compare the arc to a painting for instance, this is intended to be more of an impressionistic work rather than one of photographic realism. It also shares some similarities with a dream - beholden to its own logic that sometimes is just flat out confusing to consider once you wake up.

On top of that, I'm discovering the joys of creating something that is open to some interpretation - I get to hear other people's ideas about it! I didn't just randomly throw stuff into this arc to "let you guys figure out what it means, if anything." That's a common accusation of works like this, not that you made it - you approached it with an open mind and found patterns in it, some I intended and others I might not have, but still valid readings. Everything I put in does mean something and points to something I knew about the story and Emily Yikes, but spilling the beans would lessen the experience you have with it, the way you interact with the ideas and themes.

I think that's way more fun than just another punch-up.

I imagine they choose this route because they're afraid if they're not paying attention to all the balls (just the AE ball, or whatever else thing they're currently gnawing on) then people who aren't so into that AE ball would feel slighted. So instead they sort of slight us all on everything. Except for those who want end-game content, which they've said they're going to keep pumping out every issue. :/

Three things:

1) Nice to see you again

2) Before you slam the door on the way out, please send a petition and/or PM a couple of devs and tell them why you're slamming that door.

3) The AE arc club recently played Storming Citadel and it apparently worked fine..., not that that's enough to keep you, I know.

I think it's important for players to realize that just because you can play an arc doesn't mean it wasn't affected or half-broken, ala my replaced custom foes. But, if you really do only want "100% broken and invalidated arcs", then I see your point. If any of that comment applies to my post above, that is.

Now see? THAT is what I can't figure out. Why why WHY hasn't HBO or ShowTime gone to Joss by now and said "give us a show and we promise not to cancel it"? He comes complete with a huge crowd of zombie followers who'll eat up anything he does with a spoon.

I find myself typing in the words "welcome to the game!" a fair amount.

I think since about when GR hit Ive seen a surprisingly healthy number of newbie posts in the Player Questions forum where they ask about what AT is good, how do I do X, etc. Considering that generally only a small number of players actually read the forums, I think we're doing ok on new recruits.

I play at night/early morning usually, and it's always been hard to find team at three AM on some place like Pinnacle (so now I'm on Virt and Freedom), but this hasn't noticeably changed since I started playing (not sure how long that is, check my join date over there).

Oh, except for the current "50s, 50s everywhere!" situation, but that's obviously not due to the game losing players.

You have your concerns and that's fine but I think you've chosen the wrong explanation for where they've come from.

Starting this thread was (I think) based off an idea I put forth in another thread. The idea here is to let other players know for sure what's been affected, to show off the scope of this problem (assuming enough authors post here) and to help express our unhappiness with the current situation to the devs in a more positive way than just sitting on our hands and/or calling them bad names. Plus it's probably not a bad idea to let folks know which arcs they should avoid as being unplayable (or as is the case with mine, 'not WAI as the author intended').

Some authors are really hot under the collar about this issue and really need a way to express that.

Same, but I'm more annoyed about the same thing happening in AE missions.

Yes, I like this, I like it a lot.

Say, that's pretty good! That would explain the discrepancy he gave in his age in that first ep and what with the Doctor talking about how the gangers pretty much are real people, it's not like he could just zap his back into unprogrammed flesh without a serious twinge. Still, note that the old Canton seemed to toss that idea out after the Doctor was killed and I've heard Moffat stated categorically that "yes, that was really the Doctor who died" in the first ep.

On the other hand, Moffat may just be toying with us and this ganger-Doctor may die at the end of the second half of the story.

Dang it, I hate getting caught up in fan speculation like this, but it's really hard not to at this point.

Sadly untrue. Tubbius notes in this very thread that's he's had an arc(s?) get a "negative rating" and attributes that to the bug - which might be open to debate unless the player told him specifically why they gave him the low vote. He'd have to answer that one.

But the fact a broken arc can be played is proven right there. In addition to that, I know that two of my arcs are affected but can still be played, as I've done so and heard the same another player ("I played your arc and saw such and such.").

One of these arcs plays fine except a few foes (with actual flag-inducing names, didn't even think about 'WickerWork Splinter' when I assigned that one) are replaced with a "Corrupted Critter", a renamed Hydra with a bio reading something like "Critter failed to load and melted into a mass of goo," which is sort of cute, but. The other arc plays fine and nothing's changed but when I went in to do a small cosmetic edit on a glowie placement was told I couldn't save it because of a name problem. I haven't had time to closely examine the arc to find out which name it didn't like though.