Eva Destruction

He really isn't. Recent writing is full of blatant inconsistencies that could have been avoided with five minutes spent on ParagonWiki, and I don't think he's run a Malta mission ever.

Talking is a Free Action.

(I'm sorry)

This "freedom" has its downside though. When you have established a clear series of events, it's hard to screw it up, so long as you do the research, and having the backstory so clear-cut forces the writers to do this research, because otherwise all the beta testers will stand up and scream, "hey, Akarist isn't a bad guy!" Whereas a vague backstory in a shared universe encourages further writers to add their own vague spin on it, which eventually leads to a muddled mess.

*cough* Fire Armor *cough*

(Electric Armor could be problematic too, but I've run into far more "I'm going to give this guy fire armor, it's gonna look SO COOL to have the EB all on fire!" mobs than ones that overuse Electric armor.)

I want to skip over cutscenes to get to more stuff to kill. If I wanted to watch a movie I'd watch a movie.
Yeah. It often does. Nothing plot-crucial should ever be contained entirely in NPC dialogue. If they say something important, they can drop a clue with a recap in case someone missed their dialogue.

Who cares? If there aren't a million cutscenes and overly complicated scripting it doesn't interfere with speed running in any way.

So run the arc solo or with someone who also wants to take the time to read the story. You only need to run it for the story once. Then you can go back to speedrunning with your friends.

Ding ding ding!!!! We have a winner!!!!

For that matter, you don't need a needlessly complex script for every encounter either. Whatever happened to the bad guy gloating about his evil plan while you fight him, then swearing vengeance as he drops? Pull the blueprints to his death ray off his corpse, describe it in a clue, get on with the mission.

At least with the Dark Astoria arcs, I have hope that they've figured out how to strike the right balance of exposition and action, scripting and straightforward fights, special maps and reskinned offices. Then again, the 1-20 Preatorian content also gets it right, so I fear the sparing use of special shinies may be due strictly to time constraints and if they could they'd make every arc a jumble of complex scripting, backtracking, and walls of text.

The engine doesn't follow the "front," "middle," and "Back" settings on outdoor maps because outdoor maps don't actually have those. It's all one area. I don't find it particularly difficult to find stuff on most outdoor maps, as long as any blinkies used are fairly large. A body bag on one of the ruined city maps would be annoying. A Rikti computer on one of the forest maps, not so much. In those cases it can be more annoying to find them on indoor maps, especially those stupid office maps that always seem to spawn the blinky in some side office that I have no reason to go into otherwise.

With outdoor maps, it's also easier to Superjump or fly around and get the objectives when you get bored of killing things.

Personally, I never use the "standard" or "hard" settings on critters, and I won't even play anything with an Extreme critter warning unless it's by an author whose work I have enjoyed in the past, or is clearly stated that I don't have to fight said Extreme critter. I use custom settings. With those, you can use any powerset you want, tweak it to an appropriate difficulty, and leave out any annoying/frustrating powers. Some powers that would fall under those categories:

Stacking debuffs, especially to-hit debuffs. This doesn't come up as much as it used to, back when AE was new and everybody wanted to show off their Evil and Kewll Dark Minions of Darkity Darkness custom group, who of course all had darkity darkness powers so you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if you had to fight more than two of them at once.

Excessive mezzing. If you give a critter the single-target hold from most Controller powersets, it will spam it. If all the minions have a ranged mez, squishies will hate your arc. Confuse and Fear are also problematic if overused.

I reserve a special place of hatred for overuse of Mastermind powersets. Death by lag.

Resistance and +HP powers on everyone just makes them take too long to die and doesn't really make them any more challenging. As do Tier 9's.

End drain.

That's just off the top of my head. Now of course, I have fought custom critters who did all of these things....and weren't frustrating at all. Of course, this is because they did all of these things so they couldn't do any one thing to excess.

Tl;dr, you really have to test it with multiple characters. And not a level 7 and a level 50. Pick a level range. Arcs with 1-54 custom groups are very frustrating because they show up every time I use the "my level" function on the search. I don't know how challenging they are because I won't play them.

Well, you do reach a mutual understanding in the villainous DA intro arc, said understanding being "I can wipe the floor with you," so that's something at least.

Wasn't the double explicitly stated to be from Praetoria in beta, before players pointed out the complete boneheadedness of introducing our Praetorian doubles right before an expansion that allows us to create them ourselves?

I did also like the general concept of Scirocco's second arc, although of course it gets -10000 points for Arbiter Daos having to tell you to do the blatantly obvious.

And I'm in complete agreement on Recluse's speech when you symbolically hand him his head. But then it allows you to start the LRSF, which hands out the Servant of Recluse badge. Another -10000 points.

Right, and that is why, in a meta context, "you have to team up to stop the world from being destroyed" is no more valid than "I want to destroy the world." You can't bring up the "if you destroy the world, or leave it, you can't play the game anymore" meta-argument without acknowledging the flip side: The world will not be destroyed, no matter what you do or don't do. Now gimme some freaking villain content already.

So Ms Liberty is still beating out Des, on whom the players seem to be split along the lines of "half mock her and half don't care."

She isn't 12. She was in her late teens in Faultline and since they've advanced the timeline, she's at least 18 by now.

She still wears a ball cap NOW. The funeral obviously takes place in the future.

Why? He's on a team with chicks. I imagine most guys would be grinning maniacally in that situation.

Ooo, I want this.