Doctor_Gemini

I've got four characters here so far and will likely fill out my slots in a couple months. I don't call any server home, I just invade them all...

Arc #271637: Welcome to M.A.G.I., by @Doctor Gemini. Looking for plays but feedback is always appreciated. Best if begun with a level 1 or 2, though it is set for level 1 to 10.

I ended up buying $100 worth of points and spending about 1/3rd of it. Actually bought both extra enhancement trays, even though I think they are incredibly overpriced (Paragon got the advantage of first day euphoria, they won't see me buying anything else overpriced). I did manage to have the self control not to buy the costume slots, which given that we already have 5, are not overpriced, but ridiculously priced.

Then I logged back into the game and found I had enough tokens to fill out the 8th tier and get 2 of the 3 Celestial pieces, so I had to buy another $15 worth of points to get that last token.

Since everyone there already has a home server it should be the "Vacation Home" server.

I finally got the names of two characters I created as a kid, Magicman (who I had to misspell on other servers), and Brainstormer (who I had to make Psystormer on other servers). Yaaaaaaaa!!

Sadly, got there too late for any of the good names I had thought up for my Grav/Time 'troller.

That's all the characters I've made there so far. Probably by the time I figure out my concept for a beam rifle character my first pick of names will be gone, but, oh well, I'm not going to name squat.

Wow, I haven't even run close to half your arcs yet. The ones I have done have been great, going to have to get on the remaining old ones.

I'm enjoying reading about your experiences, seebs. You've got me wanting to do this myself now.

How many people would be interested in trying this out again?
I'd be in on it. I've only one arc, so not much to get plays on, but I do enjoy giving feedback.

Should I offer prizes to those who play/rate multiple arcs?
I'd hate to see people having to be bribed to play. For authors, the prize is having the opportunity to get more plays for your arc. For non-authors (or one-shot authors like me) the prize is finding more arcs to play. Besides, in this game, what can you really offer that is of any consequence?

How should I organize the arcs that want plays?
I'd suggest putting more than one arc out there per week, perhaps three, or perhaps a list of arcs for each month. That way, the author is not sitting out the week, and people like me, who really dislike certain types of arcs, have a choice of what to play without sitting out a week.

If weekly, first week, arcs chosen from among those who join whom you know will continue, at least for awhile, even after their arc gets played. Every arc on the list played by an author gets that author's arc 1 "point" for the random roll among arcs picked for the next week. These points would cumulate until the arc gets picked.

At this point, would a thread like this be asking for griefers?
Any act of putting your arc out there for the attention of others is a risk. I don't see this being any more attractive. You're not asking for random 5-starring of arcs. Just to 5-star the arc if you like it.

At this point, would it be wrong to ask for 5 stars or no rating at all?
I don't think so. Most story writers seem to agree the ratings system is broken. I give an arc 5-stars or nothing because it's not a rating system, it's a way to say "thanks for the entertainment, here's 25 tickets for your trouble".

I don't see a problem with basically saying that the position of the Club is that we don't want to participate in a broken ratings system, but we also are not telling you how to decide if an arc should get 5-stars or not. That's not the same as the club blindly 5-starring an arc just because it belongs to a club member.

I think worrying about ratings is fairly pointless right now. Currently, unless a player is aware of, and willing, to use the threads in this section, or an off-site source, to find story arcs to play, odds are they won't find any before hitting their frustration threshold.

That is what the devs have to fix first if they want to protect the authors. It's also what most angers me with the devs and keeps me from bothering taking time away from plotting for my long-running FRPG campaign to write more arcs. They already have searchable tags. How many man hours could it possibly be to add one that says "story-based arc"?

The fact is, though, unless there is a wave of actual story players, the devs are not going to create a new ratings system that costs them any time. I'd say the best we could hope for would be a change to displaying the median rating of an arc, rather than the average. That would at least require greater numbers to attack.

Gratz, PW. It's good to see an arc that is on my personal top 10 list make dev choice.

This increased for me starting last week. I was only ever getting hit by it once in a while, maybe once a week. Now, I've no idea which threads have new posts since it logs me out every minute and a half.

And Dumpleberry, no, we cannot confine posts to a single thread because its pretty clear it's being ignored. Let's see how much it's ignored when we can get 50 or so active threads going at once.

The MEU's problem will be numbers. A single legion outnumbers them 5 to 1. Taking one legion out...possible. Taking out two at once? Unlikely. Three or more? No chance.

While legionnaires will die in droves, the Marines have no means of keeping the Roman army from simply engulfing their position. Once they're being attacked from all sides by such a large number, they will eventually be overwhelmed. Roman Legionnaires are not likely to break and run simply because they are taking heavy losses.

While the Marines can choose a position to prevent that, they have no means of forcing the Romans, who are not tactically stupid, to engage them in that position. The Marines, on the other hand, do not have the option of maneuvering until they can get the battlefield they want, as they have no supply lines. Eventually they have to engage or leave.

Ya know, I know you all are frustrated, I've been ratings bombed twice myself for saying the wrong things in the forum. However, the fact is you were not attacked by FARMERS. You were attacked by some jackhole who, even if he is a part of the farming community, attacked you as a member of the jackhole community, therefore striking back at farmers is simply attacking innocent people.

Let me take you all on a trip down memory lane.
*cue flashback music and wavy video*

Remember way back when the air was clean and the skies were blue and MA was fresh and new and wonderful? Everyone was making story arcs and lots and lots of people were playing them. Few arcs except story arcs were on the first pages, heading toward the coveted Hall of Fame spot.

Oops, look, a story arc is falling off the first page into oblivion. Poor story arc. What happened? Oh yeah, it was 0-rated by a gang of....STORY ARC WRITERS! Eliminating the competition. Now, does that mean the story arc writer community is a bunch of evil bastages who should be randomly 1-starred or does it mean that, when story arcs were popular, there were a bunch of jackholes in the community?

The fact is that Positron stating that AE was not intended for farming in some buried thread from before AE was released does not mean farms are not valid AE content. Only those of us who were here then. and who were paying attention, even have any way to know about Posi's statement. Nowhere in the game, nor even in the release notes with their extensive write up of AE, is farming mentioned in any way. As it stands right now, a farm arc is just as valid of AE content as a Story arc, a challenge arc, an origin story for an SG or author's character, etc. There is only one type of arc that is not valid, one that makes use of exploits. That is covered in the EULA.

I'm not a fan of farms in the AE, but facts are facts. If you're going to judge farms as if they were stories (at least, the ones that make it clear they are farms as I've seen more than a few try to fool me into thinking they're story arcs until I start them up), then I have to assume you'd judge clearly marked challenge arcs, or clearly marked "this is an arc for my SG, probably won't make sense if you're not a member" arcs as if they were story arcs.

The enemies of the story writing community are not farmers, they are the devs. The devs chose to give us no means whatsoever to separate stories from farms, not to mention numerous other issues that discourage most of us from bothering to write anymore. Because of this, those who would play stories are pretty much locked out of the system, and authors are frustrated out of it.

So, at most, if it was not one person with multiple accounts, 4 people attacked you and several others. What are the odds, given the hundreds of farm arc writers, that any of the arcs you've targeted belong to those 4?

Independence Day was just a stupid movie, not a bad one. Just like Abrahms Star Trek

Though Arcana already stole my top two picks, I'm amazed the 2 Matrix sequels have not gravitated into this thread yet.

Zwil did say something about them being powered by unicorns. Paragon must keep running out of virgins.