Fantastic_Foe

Thanks for posting this thread.

I've had a lot of great times in City of Heroes, and I'd like to thank all my friends who teamed with me, and all the great PUGs I've been on, and even some of the craptastic PUGs because they made for great stories.

Thanks to everyone who ran through my AE arcs, and helped me move influence to my other characters before we could mail it.

Thanks to everyone who helped me in inviting alts to my solo-SGs.

Thanks all for making CoH a great experience, and one that I'll be missing.

Best regards to all, and thumbs up.

Pat

First off, well done on doing Hollows content!

Which boss is giving you a problem? Electric Eel? Frostfire?

Best regards,

I try to always run characters through the Wheel of Destruction missions. And after I complete the finale, I don't return to the contact, but use the temp powers until they fade.

Is it essential? No. But I like spreading the rumor that a certain magical contact is dangerously ineffective at her job, and that mission arc does not disappoint.

Well, I won't be passing up free advertising!

Of the arcs in my sig, Exploding Planet and Shadow of Grime Alley have at least been looked over and played by people other than dear friends or my mom or whatever, so I feel somewhat comfortable with them.

Thanks for putting this together, I'll try to join the channel as soon as I get home.

Author: @fantastic foe (that's me)
Arcs: #200411 Exploding Planet
#144416 Shadow of Grime Alley

I like this suggestion a lot. I'll be happy to help fulfill those orders.

best regards

Thanks for bringing this arc to my attention. I am currently running a street justice scrapper through the missions, and am enjoying the experience.

Nice old school riddles indeed!

Best regards,

EGAD!

Sorry to hear that the Club's founder is not subscribed. I'm still working through arcs though...

Hooray! Thank you for running it again!

And thanks for the detailed feedback. I like what you describe in regards to the information for the Gat's mooks and gatlings, I think I'll do exactly as you say.

I'll be happy to look Virelli's clue over again, I appreciate your thoughts on that. And I'll try to shuffle the clue text.

I really like that idea.

I'll look that over.

Thanks, I thought a lot about Police Woman's notes on running the arc, especially how the killer of the Thomason couple was never found. I liked working in the original Joe Chill inspired gunman as an element.

You are totally right, I'll work on that.

Thank you again for running the arc.

Best regards,

I certainly appreciate the return business.

I'll even give you a heads up on a textual error I have to correct (real life has kept me from getting into the game recently, so the error will exist for at elast a few more days.)

Gordon Stacy, in giving some backstory on the Gat, will make some references to the other notable Kings Row detectives, Freitag and Becktrees. Sadly, I call Becktrees "Streebeck", the Dragnet character that he is based on. I'll fix that when I get a chance.

best regards

The lack of prize is now MINE!

Ran my level 50 MA/Inv scrapper, Doc Horizon, through Curiouser and Curiouser (said Alice) and with my previous runs of 2 Chicks and Cat:dinner, I have completed the Trilogy.

I liked the previous @Interface arcs, largely for the characterization of Recluse and his Arachnos team as somewhat like a group of Frat Boys. This arc was consistent with that impression.

I was a big fan of the introduction of Tarantula Becky, who had been mentioned before. Great character.

Minor nitpick, mission 1 briefing had recieved, instead of received.

I also thought that there should have been more of a mention in the Malta-heavy mission that Moonbeam Coffee was a Nemesis front. Recluse mentions it as if I had said it during the following mission briefing, and it was news to me.

I checked the clues text and didn't find it, it might have been some incidental text that I had missed from NPCs?

Anyway, I enjoyed running the arc, and the entire trilogy.

Best regards,

I appreciate the feedback and the tip. I'll try that out.

Best regards,

You are probably correct, and it's just an interface comprehension fail on my part.

I seem to remember that there used to be an option called "Single" on boss difficulty, but I was only seeing Easy, Medium, and Hard.

I'll look there again. If I find it, I'll man up and admit my error.

Thanks for the feedback

Hey, I hope people still play Grime Alley, I welcome all the feedback.

I hear you, ally. I'll have some comments about the custom thugs who support the Gat and Skulls below. You clearly are correct about my weak editing.


You're not the only one to point out that it has a mid-level feel. If I can reveal some design thoughts, my goal was to make a Batman-like mission arc for me to run my natural-origin scrappers through. At level 50, I enjoyed fighting aliens and sorcerers, but I did miss beating up on regular thugs other than street sweeping lowbies.

I wish that we had more gang war/syndicate type crime at higher levels in CoH.

I was toying with making it more of a vigilante arc, since mission three implied that you weren't welcome in the police station. But I thought I had returned the mission alignment back to Heroic (as it was originally, when the arc was first produced Going Rogue had not yet come out.)

I'll reset that to Heroic. Mission three (the police station) will be getting an overhaul, since the map won't support what I really wanted. It'll end up being more of an information gathering non-combat mission.

That's an interesting point. I'll think about that. My narrative powers are still being developed, it wasn't until I started running arcs from these threads that I saw a lot of variety and experimentation in mission briefing, debriefing, and the mission acceptance text.

I think when I first created the mission arc, we were limited on what mob levels could be put into the mission. I'd wanted this to be a mission for my high level scrapper, and the Skulls were making the mission very low. I'd wanted some Skulls on the map for flavor, so I created some customs. I'll experiment in seeing about putting actual Skulls on.

I appreciate your eye for how they look, I could use some time to craft better looking Skulls.

The bodies of the bum and the dead buttonman have always been a problem, one way or another. I wanted the fade in to have some narrative control, but it could work just as well to have you find the dead buttonman and then have Sara tell you about her encounter when the Gat killed him. I'll give that some thought.

As it is, the mission is much better now than the original design where the two bodies were required objectives.

Thanks!

I think you might have just aggroed some nearby Family. Sara doesn't spawn an ambush. The mobs guarding her will fight you, since you're a hero, they're not necessarily trying to prevent you from rescuing her, just trying to keep you from applying a beatdown on them.

Thanks again!

Well... I'd just chalk it up to coincidence. The design goal was to introduce that while the Family was hunting for someone in Kings Row called the Gat, there was an element other than just a lone gunman attacking them. I'll give this entire element some thought, I appreciate the feedback.


Laziness on my part. This was one of my first AE arcs, and it shows. I'm blind to these details when I run my own stuff, so I appreciate it being pointed out.


I can neither confirm nor deny if Batman's origin story inspired Wayne Thomason becoming the Gat after seeing his criminally connected parents gunned down by a mugger in the Grime Alley district of Kings Row.

Yes, no rescue details for police maps. I almost had it happen at a pawn shop that the police had commandeered for field operations. This mission is due for a total reworking.

I'll work on that. The entire encounter with Don Napolino needs to be reworked. I've had feedback that it was unclear what had happened in regards to the Don's daughter, why the Gat spared Napolino when he had bumped off the others (I thought the clues and Stacy's statements were enough, but I'll work on it.)

It's unfortunate (for me) that there is a faction called Mooks in the game. I'm not a huge COV player, and I've gotten some feedback asking about the Mooks. Mook is a generic term for thug, and I was just using it as a label for low end members of the Gat's Goons. (Goon was almost always the faction working for the signature villains in the Adam West Batman show.)

They're identical, mainly because when the arc was first produced, we had tighter filesize limits. The Gat's support team of henchmen and thugs will be getting a face lift soon.

You didn't tell her, right? (Thanks!)

I'll work on that. At the very least, the Gat should get support team earlier in the encounter.

I wish I could have the Gat carry only one handgun (I always imagined it as a handcannon type weapon), but the original mastermind AT (that the first incarnation of the Gat (and Goons) were based on, and the dual pistol powerset are two guns.

Fair enough. Another thing to work on. Again, I appreciate all of this feedback.

I'll be working on mission five overall. I'll not confirm or deny if the decoy aspect will be played up, or if the laughing maniacal tall skinny pale person will remain on the map. Hopefully it'll work better.


I'll work on the Arachnos connection so it's less tacked on. Since Wayne Thomason was busted out of the Zig during the infamous Destined One raid (touched on in mission three), I felt I had laid some groundwork that Recluse was now backing Thomason as the Gat, a Gat who had a new Recluse-inspired agenda.

I'll give a heads up when I've reworked the arcs, and thanks again to everyone who gave it a run.

Best regards and Happy New Year!

It does help!

I've have notes on things to work on with Shadow of Grime Alley which now includes a focus on text to seek out my errant commas.

Best regards,

Hey, thanks for the detailed review, especially the editorial commentary.

I am the King of the Comma Spliced Sentence, so I am deeply grateful when those are pointed out to me. I need to send you a boatload of influence for highlighting where I was comma-heavy, it'll help me on my next round of edits.

I'll respond more in depth later (too late for me now...), but I wanted to say I really appreciate all the feedback. I'm glad you got a kick out of the arc, and I hope to turn out a more polished version soon.

Best regards, and should I not get a chance to say it tomorrow, everyone have a Happy New Year!

From the menu option that lets you chat with a selected character, read their info, etc, there is an option to Add Note (or Edit Note if you have a note already.)

It gives you a chance to make a notation about the character, for your use. You have the option to give the player a rating, 1-5 stars (or none if you don't use that feature.)

In your Options menu, you can set the interface to always display the number of stars you've given a player, or only on mouseover, or never.

So, in a good case, you team with a person, add a note and give them a 5 star rating. If they are on with a different character, you might (depending on how you have your setup) see this unfamiliar character with a 5 star rating. You know its someone you rated highly in the past.

I like using the feature a lot.

Yes! A prize will soon be mine!

Oh NOES!

I'll be running your trilogy finale soon, since I enjoyed the first and second one so much. That will be prize enough.

Thanks for explaining the similarity of Cat...Dinner to the LRSF. I admit to have never attempted it (I have no villains...)

best regards

You are thinking of Untouchable, which you can earn for defeating 100 Family bosses.

Gangbuster is only for Marcone Family bosses. (You need 200.)

I recently discovered that I had accrued .05% that badge. It was claiming I had to crush 200 Family bosses (Marcone is not specified, but the badge does only count Marcone bosses.) I was confused since I had already beaten up Striga bosses to get Untouchable.

I also got the Bloody Hands on my hero. He keeps washing his hands like Lady Macbeth, but it's no good.

Interface,

Hey, thanks for playing Grime Alley and the kind words in your review.

The AAC members have given me great feedback, and the arc will be getting some functional tweaks as well as some changes in the final mission. I've gotten some insightful feedback on the tone of the overall arc in relation to aspects of the final missions, and I've been giving some thought on treating the final villain a bit more seriously, while still having some of my humorous homage touches.

Thanks again, I'm looking forward to running some of your arcs as well. Need to get my December contributions in.

Best regards,