Gemma_Alpha

I'm not one of the usual reviewers, but I've been checking out the arc reviews on the forums lately so I thought I'd do your arc! In general I agree that it was a good arc and really well-written!

Some of my comments: yeah, the last mission was pretty hard. Generally my kat/regen can cream anything she comes across, but I had a bit of a mishap when I was fighting the Ghost Widow analogue and Mako aggroed in the middle of it. Lucky for me, that was my only death though; Ghost Widow is kind of a tough fight for my Scrapper.

As for the proposed changes with Recluse: I agree that fighting Recluse in the arc is just cooler than fighting Black Scorpion would be. For one thing, he's just a really cool model. I had the fortune of being able to train him in to a mob of the helpful Hawk samurai, so it was an easier fight than Ghost Widow. I thought for a second, "Oh, maybe he's not going to spawn all those immersion-breaking dudes the forum was talking about," but he did do it at the last second.

I wouldn't switch for Black Scorpion for two reasons: 1, not as cool of a fight, and 2, the backstepping you have to do to make the plot work that way is a bit too much to be worth it, in an arc that already has a lot of plot in it. Just my two cents!

Some other feedback I had not related to your questions:
At the end of mission one, I don't understand why I'm taking Fujineko back to Paragon City. I haven't done this before with people from other dimensions so it sat a little wrong with me, even if you needed it for the plot.

I really liked the way objectives were arranged in the second and third mission. Having most everything in the last room of the second mission was really well thought out. The reverse structure of mission three was also cool, though leading Sayaki out was a bit of a pain in the butt because she refuses to cross fields of caltrops. (As you can imagine, there were fields of caltrops.)

I don't know what other reviewers have said, but I think Flower Knight protests just a bit too much in her dialog. I chuckled a little bit at "Praetorian ninjas and I missed it?" but then her long diatribe at the end of, I think it was mission three, made me roll my eyes at her. Like, lady, I don't have any control over this or whatever Tina said, I'm just the errand-girl, please stop complaining at ME.

Mostly it was a cool arc with great drama. The clue after mission four was particularly weighty.

I saw your thread today and thought the arc looked interesting! I've played a lot of tabletop RPGs and so I wanted to see all the different homages. I gave it a try with my level 50 scrapper, katana/regen. She is my 'main' alt and my default for soloing things that might be tricky.

I didn't have too much difficulty soloing the arc with this build. I thought the arc was pretty Ok - I gave it 4 stars. There are a few things I think I would do to make it better.

First of all, I noticed that a lot of your NPCs seem to refer to me as if I were not soloing the arc; they call me "You guys" and so-on. I would avoid this kind of thing since I think a lot of people don't do AE with teams. I don't like to do it with a team if I want to check out the story since I don't like missing text; at most I'll duo with my husband. I'd make that language more neutral throughout. I'd probably avoid calling the heroes "Champions" especially. I assumed that might've been the game system you used to run the original tabletop, but I hear tell there may be some other MMO that uses it, just sayin'.

(The rest of my comments are spoilers for people who want to do the arc so stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled.)

I got all the homages to tabletop games that you used. I got the "Shadowrun" vibe when I saw the NPC in the second mission. Unfortunately he spawned AFTER the boss did, so he wasn't actually available to help me and since he isn't in the navbar I had no idea there was help available in the mission. You might want to take a look at where your boss is spawning if you intend for Koji to help the player fight him.

The minion monster spawns in the third and fourth mission really seemed weird. I got after a second that mission three was supposed to be Grayhawk and monster spawns don't really have to make sense in Grayhawk, but at first it was a bit jarring seeing snowmen on that map! I think it works Ok for Grayhawk, but I'm not feeling using that same mismatched group for the "anime" level. I guess they were supposed to be like the weirdo bad guys that Sailor Moon fights and you were using stock mobs to save space, but the only way to get the anime vibe from that mission is the contact you have to rescue. This falls a little flat because it's not THAT unusual to see anime-neko-kawaii heroines in Paragon City to begin with. Neko-chan wasn't over the top enough to feel different or interesting from that perspective.

As an outsider, I would say the tabletop homages are the reason to do the arc, so you may as well do tabletop universe homages the whole way through instead of doing "magical girl anime" as a mission. Maybe some L5R? (I have a Blaster based on my old Mantis on Freedom... heh) I don't know how much room you have for custom mobs left in the arc, but it feels like you're trying to let the allies carry across the feel of the universe, and that works Ok for the Shadowrun area and less so for the anime one.

For that same reason, the lizard world at the beginning falls pretty flat... well, Ok, it falls flat for me in particular for two reasons: 1. There's that entire arc about the Lizard People that has a Dev's Choice/Hall of Fame and a lot of people might've played, so fighting bipedal lizards doesn't seem different now... 2. Sometimes people forget that anything you can make in the AE, you could also make as a character, and my scrapper happens to actually be a bipedal lizard. You can imagine that made the lizard people arc weird for me too, but I know I happen to be a special case at least in that regard. I think you should do something more interesting with the first mission, or... I think you could actually lose it altogether without hurting much, and save some room in your memory for stronger customs in the other universes.

Sometimes your Navbar text needs a little work, I noticed. In mission 5 it just says "Milon," and in mission 3: "Blue Robot Leader," not, "Defeat Blue Robot Leader" or something like that.

Also, this may be a personal thing, but I think "Blue Robots" is a dull name for a faction. This probably worked okay in tabletop because the players would just talk about the "mysterious blue robots," but it has no impact to see that when it's written in text format. I would give that race some kind of name, and maybe flesh them out a little more, adding a second minion type or something.

I hope this helped! Thanks for the arc.

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web page

This is his post/blog about his last day with CoH. He goes back and does the exact samething, then wonders why he gets the responce.

EDIT: Wow. I was reading the replies from his site and a woman was discussing the matter with him and making valid points. He was responding and answering her questions respectfully, but once he found out that she was "just a player" and not someone at a 'his' level he just blew her off.

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Ty That's me and while I am not familiar with sociology I actually have several papers in well known peer reviewed Scientific Journals like the Journal of Neuroscience, and the Journal of Experimental Neurology, so I know how to conduct a controlled experiment. His lack of ethics still astounds me, I can't imagine any sociology journal publishing any work of his and he dismissed me when I brought up ethics and IRB review boards lol.

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I wish I had found this thread sooner; I just got internet back in my house after a week outage and look what I miss, lol. Good on you for refuting his arguments. I'm a teacher and game-studies academic as well and this whole story bothers me a lot. His work doesn't even cite the right papers in his field and his "conclusions" (as someone else said above: people don't like it when you do things they don't like) are ridiculous. I think it casts the whole community in a bad light and needs to be heavily refuted. Unfortunately people are just too willing to buy the "video games make you maladjusted" conclusion no matter how you package it up.

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I zone in at level 30, they're all level 40.

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Ah! I think someone else had reported this problem, but I didn't understand it was a bug with the Carnies in specific. Since that's the only mission with only Carnies, it was spawning wrong.

I fixed the problem by tossing in an optional boss that level locks the mission to 45+, which is as intended. Maybe that should solve the Carnies bug.

Thanks for giving me this feedback, this really helps me to figure out what was wrong with that mission!

You might enjoy my mission at some point:
Ye Old Faire
Arc #72945
It's about an anachronistic group that stumbles in to Paragon City accidentally from another dimension. However, it ranges at about level 45-50 for most missions due to my use of a (canon) AV, so you probably want to save it for later. I find it perfectly soloable with a Scrapper, though people have reported it's hard with other ATs due to the last mission.

Someone commented to this effect about my arc, where they said I needed to check the AI on the final EB. This seemed like a nonsense comment at the time, because I have no power over the AI (unless I had purposely told him to run, but didn't). But now I guess it's because I had only tested him either with a melee soloer, or with a team, neither of which triggered him running like mad the way a ranged soloer seemed to do. Helpful thread, reminds me to test arcs with ranged soloers from now on.

D'oh, actually, I now notice that Venture did answer that question, somewhere on page 37,ish, so I'll quote it for people who missed it the first time like I did:

Venture Said:
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A story is "just a bunch of stuff that happened" if it doesn't have any kind of moral, theme or character development to it at all. Humor is an acceptable substitute, as long as it is actually funny. Of course that's subjective.

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This makes sense, though it sounds like it might be tough to avoid for SOME stories I'll keep it in mind... Sorry to retread old ground!

I'm really enjoying reading these reviews. Definitely giving me more ideas for arcs to play when I get the chance this weekend!

I have a question about the reviews, from Venture, or other... this may be answered somewhere in the thread, that I missed, but, how does one avoid the sin of "just a bunch of stuff that happened?" Does that basically mean that the events don't seem connected to each other? Does that mean what initiated them was uninteresting? I'd like to avoid this because it SEEMS bad but I don't know how it's defined.

While people are posting arcs, I'd love to ask for reviews (from any) on mine, #72945 "Ye Old Faire." Honestly I think its biggest weakness is a sorta weak name and info blurb because it has been fairly fun for people so far.

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Ok, I can no longer get the timer to start for the ski run on my current character.

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I had this problem happen to me as well. It cleared up when I did the run again, even though I didn't have a timer or waypoints. Basically just do the run without a timer to get a 'race complete' and it will reset.

I have a question about the holiday 'gift' powers, specifically Holiday Spirit, and I'm not sure where to ask it. The prize grants debt protection for 48 hours of gameplay when used. Being a player with a lot of alts, I still have multiple alts (okay, the majority of my alts), still running Holiday Spirit from LAST year. IE, they haven't been played 48 hours yet all year. Does the new Holiday Cheer 'stack,' or do I just hold on to it until last year's runs out?

My main character finally got to 50 a few weeks ago (after all these years - altitis got to me) and since I signed her up with a few of the tracking sites and such, I thought I might as well do some art of her.

Sketch and coloring are still sort of raw so comments are welcome!

Jayde Chameleon - Virtue

Yes, she's a lizard girl; I wanted to be something offbeat. Plus with the new TMNT movie out right now, superpowered reptiles are back in style!

Thanks for the compliments!

I'm not doing any requests/commissions right now until I do all the people in my SG who have asked for portraits, and there are a few left who want them. Maybe after that, though. I'm glad you like the art enough to ask!

Programs are a combination of Flash and Adobe Photoshop - using Flash to clean up line art and Photoshop to do better color.

Hi, forum newbie, but coming in on a whim to get feedback about fanart. First time posting, please be nice!

Electric Youth - My Blaster
Captain Ghoul - Scrapper (from my SG on Virtue)

There's a picture of my scrapper and some other varied fanart in the gallery but it's not all good.

I want to work on more dynamic poses since these are kind of "portrait" rather than good superhero action shots. Also I want a tablet to improve my line quality, but, one thing at a time.

And yeah I have no sig or avatar yet - just getting the hang of this.

Thanks if you read the thread or have any feedback!