FredrikSvanberg

Personally I love it just for the animation.

Meh, they're about the same: easy-mode or easy-mode ultra.

For some maps, until they fix them.

My lowbie villain arc "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friends" (#114284) needs more plays and exposure. It's for level 15-20 so it should be in the neighbourhood of your characters, hopefully.

Ok, if they weren't in the beginning of the war I suppose you should keep them out of that mission, but then I suggest you switch the map to something with not so many circus tents

It's ok if that's the way you want the mission to be, with the clue giving us the death of these characters in detail. Personally I just think it worked fine without that clue to spell it all out for us. Just the keepsakes found on or near their bodies were enough to provoke thoughts of their deaths which will in most cases be better than anything anyone can write. The reader's imagination is often better than anything a writer can come up with. It just needs a nudge in the right direction.

I have now replayed the first arc and played the second arc for the first time. The retro Vanguard look great and don't outshine my character and walk all over the Rikti anymore, so that's great.

The second arc is much more fun because it seems to be more about what my character does. Even if I'm still helping the Solus collective at least it feels like I'm making a difference - even in the cases where I fail. The first mission felt like it would be impossible for my character to prevent failure, in the third mission I don't even know what caused the failure - possibly the death of an ally.

I don't mind failable missions though.

The real gem in this arc is the second mission: a huge map filled with huge spawns of Rikti, all for me! The people I rescue don't even want to follow me since they have important business to do elsewhere, which suits me fine. I can deal with a few hundred or thousand Rikti on my very angry own. Only one thing would make this mission better; Carnies fighting the Rikti, as canon tells us they were doing during the war. It would also help explain the carnie tents in the far end of the map. It would be cool to have carnie allies for once.

Now I'm going to start the last mission and I hope it's even half as awesome as the second mission. This is approaching five stars.

Ok, the last mission was probably the best use of the demolished Atlas map I've seen so far. I flew around looking for enemies and allies, beating up the few Rikti patrols I could find. I was starting to get irritated about the lack of enemies to slaughter, and the hidden allies, until I saw the glowies. Then I realized what was going on. A few ambushes later it was all over, and the Solus collective had played out its role with unexpected professionalism. Just one thing didn't sit right with me: the end of mission clue which detailed what had actually happened. I would have been perfectly happy to imagine the ends of these npcs myself.

I don't care if there are some flaws in the writing or that the massive number of objectives in each mission initially made me stagger. This was high quality fun in my book. Five stars and I'm prepared to play it again with many of my characters.

Ok, I'll post here so you don't miss me when you get around to handing out the prizes.

Five stars. My only complaint was that this was a "simulation" and not "real". I would have loved making some of my characters members in this organisation for real.

I might wonder but not to the point where I wish I had a semi-functional store window to check it with.

I say all or nothing.

If we could conduct our business from anywhere using a phone, like modern people, then sure.

What you suggests wouldn't be useful to me at all.

The scale of fun goes up quite a bit from 2 to 3 stars I mean what I said, I was disappointed that it was over. I would have liked at least a fourth mission to find out that Wheeler was the one who called the cops on me (I still don't know quite why he did that, I still had half the ransom money and he wouldn't get more by getting rid of me) and possibly to fight Police Woman again. One journalist I met swore that someone would come and kick my [censored] because I wouldn't give her an interview or something, I would like to see that happen. The celebrity could return as a hero and try to stop me in the last mission after having been released and forced to register. Lots of stuff could be done with this arc and I felt like it was finished too soon. One or two more missions of the same quality would have made this a 4-star arc to me.

I played these as a level 31 dominator.

AVs pose a particular problems for dominators (and controllers I suppose) because they depend so much on mezzing their opponents and AVs (or EBs downgraded from AVs) are more or less immune while they are protected by their "purple triangles". EBs are almost worse because they have even higher status protection than normal bosses even when their triangles aren't "up". This means that I had to rely on my less than stellar damage, and the healing lieutenant.

There were more allies on the map, that's great. If I had been more engaged in the story that would have helped. I didn't so much ragequit as meh-quit. I simply resigned to the fact that a dominator was not the right thing to use to solo the arc. I don't blame you for this and this fight had very little impact on my final score.

I don't think I can explain my reasoning about the middle missions any better. Maybe they should be more about securing certain weapons which would make Germany a super-power before the US could develop them. Stealing the secret of the atomic bomb from the US and making sure that the German bomb is finished first to use it on an American city in order to force a surrender would probably make for a better focus for these missions. It could also explain why Statesman is missing in the last mission: he was last seen trying to stop the nuke from going off. That's just a suggestion of course, and I don't imagine that you are going to change your arc this drastically.





As for the super-powered journalists I think you could have made the journalists themselves non-powered, like the ones in the last mission, and instead of photographers and cameramen blasting us with their powers the journalists would simply be followed by well-arme bodyguards to protect them from us villains. It might be that you and I just have different ideas of how common superpowers really are in this world.

Celebrity Kidnapping was much more fun. I was almost disappointed that it was over so soon, I expected some of the people introduced in the last mission to come back. On the other hand we can all use short arcs now and then.

I was almost overwhelmed by all the ambushes a few times, and the super-powered journalists both surprised and confused me. I know it's a world of supers sometimes but having super-powered journalists who are so common that they don't even get individual heroic aliases.... it doesn't seem right.

Three stars.

I started by playing Axis and Allies. Everything went smooth until I was faced with Maiden Justice. I'm a dominator. Oh well, maybe this ally will help. I confuse the soldier next to her and start to whittle her down. When Maiden Justice healed herself for 1500 points of damage I was prepared to quit. Then her purple triangles dropped and I managed to mez her for a moment. As soon as they got up she almost one-shotted me. Then she started running. I followed and was killed by a shuriken.

Since this is the last mission and I've read how the story ends in other reviews, I don't bother trying to finish it. I wasn't particularly impressed with the arc, maybe because I'm not a history buff and don't know much about the people or battles mentioned. I actually enjoyed going back in time to kill Hitler and take his place, but only because the character I play has the power to drain memories and make himself look like other people - it's something he could possibly pull off.

The second and third missions were rather forgettable, and frankly unbelievable. I don't believe that the death of a few generals and some troop transports could change these events as much as your narrator casually describes. I don't believe that my villain would leave the safety of Berlin to accomplish these things, since he would have made sure that they didn't happen in the first place. He's not Hitler after all, and he's got your narrator's knowledge of the events to warn and guide him.

One problem is that there is no sense of a war going on. This is perhaps a limitation of the MA itself but then that's the problem: you have chosen to tell a story in a medium which is unsuitable for the kind of story you want.

I kept thinking that I wasn't participating in the actual events but in a play or puppet show depicting the events described to us by a narrator: "Here we see the new führer crush the soviet generals, sieg heil!" all while a bunch of puppets on strings flail about on a stage. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a kid in the background of a mission, dressed as a tree and waving at his parents in the audience.

This was probably your first arc so you probably didn't know how to use the MA to its fullest potential. A few battles in mission 2 and 3 would have helped setting the scene. I think I noticed the one-sided results of some battles in mission 3 but the map is so big that they were over long before I came anywhere near them. I think that these kinds of events, on this scale, aren't suited for the MA or even the CoH mission structure to depict. It would have been better if you had us go and do small-scale crimes which would have large-scale effects, instead of going directly for the large-scale event.

There's not a lot of writing in the arc, and what is there is rather bland. Schadenfreude sounds like a narrator and not a person. Do we even get an explanation for who she is? There is a Schadenfreude in the new 5th Column SF but he doesn't look like this, and I'm not sure if they are supposed to be the same person.

The custom soldiers are probably authentic-looking. It sort of breaks the illusion when soviet infantry starts pulling rocks out of the ground to throw at me but I suspect that's a recent change that you can't do much about, without simply changing their powersets to something less "super". I'd recommend that even if it makes all the soldiers basically the same. The same goes for the american troops throwing shuriken all over the place. Perhaps you can do something with re-colored stock units like Axis Amerika troopers.

I wanted to give this three stars because it had a lot of potential but in the end I had to settle for two.




If I dare put my own arcs up for review after this, they are #1152 and #114284. Feel free to do one or both. I'm going to play Celebrity Kidnapping now and I suspect that it will get a much better review from me.

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Just as an FYI, I did play this arc with a Dominator when I reveiwed it. "Jiggles" was a handful especially with an empty Domination bar but I did have one of the Spectral Daemon Lords as an Ally. I took him down without a death.

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I played it as a level 7 dominator yesterday. I died once against Jiggles. If I had had domination up I probably wouldn't have died. The rest of the arc was no problem. The arc might be hard for certain ATs but it's not impossible.

I played this arc after "Why We Fight" and just as I suspected Venture is much better when writing serious stuff. Five stars. I'm prepared to play this arc more than once, which I hardly ever do.

I'm playing the arc right now with my level 23 dominator.

After clicking on a checkpoint in mission one I'm ambushed by level 29 enemies.

I think you should do something about that level range, but now I'm convinced that you should make the entire arc 30+ instead.

Switching to a higher-level character to try the rest.


Act 2:

I never saw any Nemesis in this mission, but the debriefing says I did.

Act 3:

I concur with the poster above.

Act 4:

I was prepared to quit as soon as I loaded the mission. I slogged through and wish I had saved myself the trouble. There was nothing funny in this one.

Final verdict:

There is some good writing here but it's wasted on this dubiously humorous drivel. You should make a real Arachnos propaganda arc instead. By the end I wasn't sure who I was supposed to be laughing at - but I wasn't laughing so it's a moot point.

Two stars.

I'll go check out some of your serious stuff now.

One reason people might not play the new SF is because it's bugged and almost impossible to complete.

Hilarious is not the word I would use but I get the idea.

Without having played the arc (yet) I already think you should have limited it to the 20-29 range. I'll give it a go after work.

Level 5. By then you've finished your initial contact's missions (and if you're new to the game that's probably what you'll do first unless you get sucked into a farm somehow). You will have been sent off to your secondary contact and maybe a few will actually go and explore the other zones before getting sucked into a farm.

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... plus the negative mini-review that followed yours in this thread (which could have also garnered 1 or 2 stars)

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For the record I gave it 3 stars when I came back to finish it. Going by the titles for the ratings, 2 stars is "mediocre" and 3 stars is "good". I didn't think this was mediocre and by the end I was actually going to try the sequel but when I entered the number for it that I copied from the end dialogue nothing showed up. It was getting late so I didn't bother looking further.

If my mini-review seemed negative it's probably because I was specifically looking for and pointing out things that I thought you could improve upon.

Just for the heck of it I'm playing this arc.

I never bothered with going to the SOLUS site to read up on the people in the arc. I don't think it would have made me care about them more since they seem more like cameos walking on stage and saying their catch-phrase than anything else. Some of them are quite annoying in a manner familiar to anyone playing villain-side: they talk down to me and make it seem like my presence doesn't really matter, or is actually a hindrance.

Vanguard didn't exist in the way they appear in the game today back when this arc is supposed to take place. Having them show up in missions with full Impervium armor and talsorian weapons and everything else we hate about them seems wrong. Not only that but the stupidly overpowered npc Vanguard slaughter everything and makes this supposed crisis seem like a shoplifting spree. Perhaps they could be replaced by recolored and renamed weaklings like Axis Amerika troops, changed to appear like UN troops or US Army or something.

Similarly, although I can't be entirely sure here, the Rikti hardsuits didn't show up until the second rikti invasion.

I've been called away to play an LGTF so I'll have to finish this up later.

Thank you for your review.

I was indeed trying to make Desdemona sound like english was her second language. I guess I succeeded. Whether this is "proper characterization" or not is another matter. Her real in-game voice isn't heard enough to make much of an impression really.

Outcasts are a fun bunch. Sure, they are acting all hard and gangsta in Paragon City, but those are the ones who want to be hard and gangsta. These Outcasts are trying to get away from all that and prove to the world or at least themselves that they too can be heroes. They don't have to act tough anymore. You are the first to complain about their non-gangsta attitude though.

I will try to locate those typos and fix them.

As for the mechanics: I've played it and completed it with all kinds of characters. I think I even managed to pull it off as a level 8 blaster once, auto-skd up to 15 of course. I'm levelling up a new dominator and will give it a shot with that character too once I get closer to level 10 or so. At that level I play at difficulty setting 1 and I can't remember Jiggles giving me much problem. If I turned him into a regular shivan boss he wouldn't be a challenge at all to a team. Nowadays I suppose nothing short of an AV or entire maps filled with AVs is a challenge to MA teams, but I still live in the world of game balance and reasonable challenges so I don't care about that.

The third mission's objective is vague because I really want people to do some fighting and work for it. An outdoor map is tempting to just stealth through looking for whatever they have to kill or click. This is a relatively small map so it isn't really asking too much to let the players join a few battles and find the objective the fun way. I wouldn't do something like this and use the flooded Boomtown map, like the devs might have done back in the bad old days of mission design. I might have a way or two to make Teremex stand out more, and I'll consider using those.

Thanks again. One more question though: what could I do to bring this up to a 4 or 5 rating in your opinion?

Nice. Even more reason to run ITFs and kill everything on every map.

As annoying as these things are, the "track record" is in fact pretty good considering how much actually works as intended compared to the relatively few bugs.

The arc ID on the last one is wrong, it should be 81043.