FredrikSvanberg

Here's the link to Venture's review for "The Doctor Returns": Click me

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Isn't mounting discrimination against mutants expressly mentioned as a cause of young mutants banding together under the Outcast's banner, hence the name?

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It's not exactly explicit. A few contacts mention various things like Outcasts running around in Boomtown pretending to be heroes but actually just extorting people by handing out "fines" for silly crimes like jaywalking. Frostfire himself started out by trying to be a hero but made a few mistakes and became a villain. I'm building on these ideas and decided that a few Outcasts were going to the Rogue Isles to make a name for themselves as heroes, or to prove that "mutants can be heroes too". Tunguska and some of his friends had good intentions but their methods were flawed. Their followers weren't all in it for the heroism either.

Oh, and thanks to Venture for the review. I know there are a few errors in it like the bad faction "all enemy groups", but I can't seem to fix it. I've already tried a few times but it doesn't work. I'm going to try again when i15 hits.

Desdemona's voice is another problem. I was going for "foreign", possibly "latin american", but a few people have interpreted it as russian and in one case ukrainian. Desdemona doesn't speak like that in the game but then again she gets all of one sentence in her own voice and the rest of her dialogue is standard broker-speak. She was much worse before, I've toned it down a lot and I considered removing it entirely, but some people who's judgement I trust have told me that her voice makes her a lot more interesting.

Sounds like fun. I've made a few changes to #1152 "The Doctor Returns" since Venture's review (he gave it three stars). Maybe you'll like it better. Personally I think that it deserves five stars, a hall-of-fame and dev's choice, of course, so it's current status is clearly undeserved. Please rectify!

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How could Spanky Rabinowitz (sp?) grow up on the streets of an island that did not exist at the time?



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There was an accidental mixup of a prophylactic and a time machine.

They have referenced bugs before. One is even commemorated on a plaque.

Probably a reference to a bug that causes these things to happen.

I wanna know what Arcanatime is. Is it the same as clobbering time, but for geeks?

Cheesus! It's steam-powered, not shooting steam. There's a highly advanced steam engine within the staff that drives the cog-wheel at the top, which produces electricity. The electricity is clearly visible ffs! The electricity fuels a force field generator which produces the force blast.

Now to play devil's advocate:

Steam power doesn't necessarily mean high temperature or burning coal.

A nuclear reactor is a steam engine, as people have already pointed out.

A steam engine doesn't have to power a mechanical machine. It could be used to create electricity to run things like computers, electromagnets, etc.

If the internal pressure of the machine could be maintained below normal atmospheric pressure, the temperature to boil the fluid would be reduced as well. The fluid doesn't have to be water, it could be something that boils at a much lower temperature.

All this combined with advanced materials and production methods could push the idea of a "steam-powered" automaton from ridiculous to plausible. It would of course be an extremely inefficient way to build a robot but Nemesis is nothing if not overly complicated.

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Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if you can imagine it, there's a way to do it, and that's served me pretty well so far. Sadly, a great many people these days have awfully stifled imaginations.


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The rule of cool can make up for many flaws, but for the sake of this argument I think we had to leave that rule behind a long time ago. If we didn't, we would have to accept everything as long as it's "cool". Clearly some of us don't.

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Oh, and while we're at ridiculous enemy groups - doesn't it dawn on people that most of the established villain groups in Paragon City have a good element of 'WTH' to them? IMO, the top of the list there are still Carnies. And yeah, just look at Olantern's list.


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The carnies might look silly and sometimes act silly but their core premise is serious business.

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Realistically speaking, most of this game's enemies just give me the notion of 'that's just weird' when they just show up out of nowhere in new missions as the player progresses through the game - something I even made fun of in a MA arc of mine by hanging a lampshade on some space pirates.


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Where else are they supposed to show up out of? Are we supposed to get a briefing of every new enemy group that appears before we go on the mission that introduces them, or are we supposed to enjoy the unravelling of a mystery?

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Does the often-silly nature of the game's enemies mean I don't have fun fighting them? Absolutely not. They're silly, they're fun, and for a game set in a comic book universe, I wouldn't have them any other way.

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I don't like silly enemies. I avoid Croatoa as much as possible for this reason. Unfortunately the existence of Croatoa with the tuatha and the fir bolg and the goddamned red caps, the clockwork, Freaks (I love Freaks but people think they are silly and write them as silly), Nemesis and even The 5th/Council, seems to have made the impression on people that this is a silly game about a silly world where silly villains bumble along their ridiculous plots and purely by accident get stopped by silly heroes.

If our enemies are ridiculous and unbelievable, our characters become ridiculous and unbelievable, because our characters are forced to take the silly enemies seriously. This makes them look like idiots.

Just saying that it's a steam-powered difference engine doesn't make it any more believeable. It makes just as much if not more sense to claim that Nemesis has invented a steam-powered quantum computer.

What are the other ten or so methods of time-travel?

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is there a hidden plot in the MArc system that crey is useing to get the power information from both heros and villans?, and if so wil this be the key idea behind how the powers will be mix and matchible for "Goeing Rogue"

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The plot isn't hidden, it's blatantly spelled out in the introduction to MA missions. (Play my arc, #1152, "The Doctor Returns" for more and funnier information).

It won't be the key idea behind how powers will be mix and matchable for "Goeing Rogue" (sic) because Going Rogue won't have that feature.

Woot! I'm numbah one, I'm numbah one!

Poison Mastery, preferably with summoned bees.

Pyre Mastery. Martial Artists mix well with fireballs.

Wow. So much fail in such a small space. Kudos, Mister_Wonder.

These are a lot more detailed than the current globs of molten wax we've got to put up with. I hope they can make a lot more like these.

I use the hazard zones as they are already. I wish villains had hazard zones. I don't want them to change the spawn sizes or anything that affects my solo street sweeping fun. If they can be changed while preserving that, no problem.

Ok, typing this up as I go along:


Kin Tut doesn't seem to take the Circle of Thorn seriously as enemies, but he doesn't dare go by himself because he's a Defender? What does this say about him? I suggest that you rewrite it so he doesn't seem to think that the Circle is a bad joke, or that he doesn't downplay his own abilities. Perhaps he should just be busy with something only he can do, such as guarding the gate to hell that resides in one of his other artefacts, which prevents him from running around looking for non-magical items.

I clicked him again before going in and he says that he pays me well? The mission is set to heroic. Of course there might be heroes who get paid but this seems unusually mercenary. If it was a neutral arc I wouldn't have been bothered by it, but here it just seems out of place.

First mission: A blue cave map?!!? This is probably the first time I've seen anyone use these in the Mission Architect - everyone loves that they can avoid them now. What's wrong with you? Even though you didn't use one of the really annoying maps, It still took forever to find the glowie in a mostly empty cave. The spawns are really few and far between.

Second mission: The custom enemies seemed easy enough for my pimped-out level 50 scrapper.

Third mission: Kin Tut's lab is being invaded. Isn't he guarding it? He certainly wasn't in the mission with me. Perhaps you should put Kin Tut as an ally in mission 2 so his absence allows Kaison to invade his lab undisturbed. Oops, stealth timed mission. You should probably mention that the mission will be timed somewhere in the introduction.

Fourth mission: Now he's got time to join me? Ok... and he's just a lieutenant? I see why he doesn't dare to go on missions himself. He also failed to follow me around the very next corner where the boss who was no problem in mission 2 suddenly killed me without breaking a sweat. Weird.

Some patrol calls Kin Tut a "pansy". I don't know if this is some kind of inappropriate slur. Perhaps they can call him a wimp. True enough, he dies about halfway through the mission just by standing too close to all the enemies with damage auras. Since he doesn't stay at range despite having no melee attacks I'm sure he'll die every time someone plays this. I hope I don't need him to fight the boss.

I didn't. The boss quoted from "Dialogue for evil geniuses" part 1A while I destroyed him and the ambushes he spawned. I only died after the real fight because Unstoppable ended and I still had a few robots left to kill. Again, I don't know how well balanced these things are against something that isn't a level 50 scrapper with bells and whistles on. Oh yeah, I had to use Unstoppable in order to attack, because all the electric auras drained my endurance completely.

I just noticed that one of the objectives is wrong: "Detroy the generator". This is the only error I've found.

Debriefing: What the hell? If the contact really wants my help in the future he probably shouldn't tell me that he's going to tip off Malta to come and take over the laboratory we just cleared out just to slow down the return of his own arch-enemy. Siding with Malta makes this guy a villain, as far as I'm concerned. Either remove that part or mark the story as neutral/villainous.


General: The story was standard and straightforward without surprises; not necessarily a bad thing, it just doesn't make it very memorable and I'm not inclined to add a star for the story. I'm a little confused to why the Circle of Thorns would do what the rival wanted, even if he paid them - they aren't mercenaries after all. If they were sent to steal a specific non-magical artefact from Kin Tut, why didn't they steal everything else in his warehouse that wasn't nailed down while they were at it?

No, they will just offer you the hunt missions they have to offer. They won't offer endless hunts.

If only nobody in the game world was unaware of all the meta-game stuff we think they aren't aware of...

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Maybe she's in Nome...

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Hawaii, if I remember correctly. Honolulu, to be specific.

[/ QUOTE ]Man, she's even in the right time zone for this friend.

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What? But I'm not in Hawaii?

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If there is a rating system -- any player rating system -- in place, there will be high raters and low raters. Nothing one can do about that. What do you propose they do to change it?

Not everybody who gives us low ratings is griefing. They may pretty well hate our arcs, while others may love them.

However, if you get comments saying that they low-starred you because they don't like you on the forums, report them. That is harassment as well as griefing. It's not allowed by the rules.

But there is nothing programmatically that can be done about this. Programs can't gage the intent behind the button-pushing, they can only recognize what buttons are pushed and record it accordingly.

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Set a flag somewhere to only allow rating if any of the following criteria has been fulfilled:

* At least one mission in the arc has been completed.

* The player has died at least once.

* The player has spent X amount of time inside a mission.

That should cover all the bases. It might not stop all the griefers but it would definitely slow them down.

Cheesus! I hope that was deliberate.

I had the name before. They laughed at it back then too. As I recall /you/ laughed at it!