Hercules

Wow, you must have a fortune invested in these pieces of art.

One of the things I dislike about the MA character editor is the size limitation placed on the characters. Nemesis, for example, I believe is somewhere between 10 and 12 feet in height. The characters I can create tend to blend in with the crowd, even with an aura. Except for clicking on the toon, and seeing "arch villain", I have no easy way of knowing this is the big boss. This is the case, more often than not, when playing against custom factions.

So, I'd like the MA to allow supersized characters. At a minimum, Nemesis height. If possible, I'd like to be able to create GM sized critters ( i.e. head scraping the ceiling type monsters ).

In addition, I'd like to have enhanced auras. Auras that arch out and dominate the room. Lightning, darkness, or Fire auras that extended far from the character's immediate body surface would look awesome and would immediately let the player know "this is something special" before even clicking on the mob.

The advanced auras and size I'd limit to just AV level mobs.

Sounds like a cool idea. Please add Tales of Croatoa ( in my sig ) to your list.

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Thanks guys I really appreciate the positive vibes. *BIG SMILE*

Spawning this stuff in Croatoa would work fine I guess, or even modify a zone that not many people like (i could be wrong here) but I dont think many people care for Dark Astoria or Boomtown. With the way that NPCs dissapear when you get close to them in Dark Astoria would be a cool way to make the ghosts in the Mystery Mansion. I would really like to see a new zone personally. But either way I would just like to see improvement from the current Halloween Event.

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If they were to implement this as a separate zone, I could see them slowly adding stuff each year, such as a haunted pirate ship ( Aaaarr, ghost pirates! ), Witch lair, etc.

Heck, I'd even like a TF similar to the "Headless Horseman" quest you get in WoW.

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Sorry about repeated deaths... when I made this, I assumed that Sliver Mantis would be easy with you having an ally, and Ms. Liberty would be effortless with two. Up until recently I had Ms. Liberty summon Longbow ambushes as well, although the main reason for that was to have them shout "Chick Fight!"

Neither of them is available as a boss, so the only way to make the mission easier would be to make them optional, or eliminate them altogether. If anyone has any suggestions for working that into the storyline, please post.

P.S. The original plan for the final mission was for the player to infiltrate the Vindicators' base and plant a hidden camera in the showers, but that's a bit too pervy even for me

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Make a custom mob that looks identical?

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2) Make it so arcs must be finished to be rated.


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I totally agree with this one. I really don't see why this wasn't implemented from the start. I can understand people might think something sucks so bad at the start, but maybe it gets better, or maybe it sucks all the way through, but you should have to have seen all of it to rate it.

If the devs want to make it so people who don't or can't finish want a say, they should add a completed vs. not completed field and a mandatory comment if you want your incomplete logged. Like bosses impossible for solo defender or arch villain in the first room made it impossible for even a purpled brute to get through. Or something like that so that it can be properly evaluated (even if the comment is anonymous).

Yes it would require a little more effort on the part of the devs, but if they really want to make this work they need to put it more effort.

Taking away the badges won't solve the problem because the problem is not the badges, it's the rating system, the reporting system and the inability for individuals to log a public comment or review in the game itself for an arc.

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The common argument I've seen against this is that some arcs are just not completeable. I've seen a few arcs where this is pretty much the truth.

Another proposal is to weight the responses.
You don't even enter the first mission? You get 1/10 of a vote (or less).
Having entered a mission, your vote is weighted by the total number of objectives you completed out of the entire arc.

You complete zero objectives, again you get 1/10 of a vote.

This doesnt help much with the 1 mission arcs, but probably the best that could be thought of.

I'd combine this with the idea of throwing out the top and bottom 10% of ratings ( have to at least get 10 votes before this makes sense).

Just to put this thread back on track. Was it ever on track?

CoH: Anti-Hero
CoH: Rise of the Anti-Hero
CoH: Praetoria
CoH: The Praetorian Gambit

Anyone else think the title of this issue is just lame?

Why not just "City of Heroes: Rogue" or perhaps "City of Heroes: Shades of Grey"?

I'm sure there are a lot of creative writers out there, what other titles do you think would be more appropriate?

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Mission 1:
This is by far not the first time that I've had a contact address me by name, but it is the first time one has recognized my super group as well. Nice touch there as he mentions working with them in the past and that I came highly recommended. Detectice Morgan informs me that Officer Bruce O'Leary has been taken hostage by the Freakshow and that there is generally a 24 hour window in this situations for a safe retrieval.


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I'd be very careful about using this feature outside of an arc for your own SG. If the player is not in a SG, the text defaults to something like "No Supergroup".

An arc I was playing had text similar to this:
"Boy, I'd really like to join No Supergroup. I heard No Supergroup was really cool!"

That left me scratching my head a couple minutes until I figured out what was going on. You can't assume the player is actually in a SG.

I dont think that would help. It takes a couple minutes to create a one mission kill-all mission. The people who are really out for blood would have no problem getting around this very minor hurdle.

Well, this arc got to about number 6 on the list before the bandits shot it down.
The first 19 plays = 17 5 stars and 2 4 stars...
The next 13 netted a grand total of 100 tickets.

Would appreciate some honest feedback on this arc. It's going to take a while to overcome the 9 zero star torpedos though...

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What would be really nice is if the devs would copy all existing published arcs over to test, then run a validation utility against them all. If any come back invalid - fix the problem with the code before releasing the patch.

But nah, way too much trouble for them to bother I guess - put the onus on the players...

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Which is one place it should be.

With World of Warcraft there is a TON of user made content in the mods that people write for the game. I actually can't play it vanilla any more. I need my interface mods, my bag mods and to a degree my quest helpers.

But when a new patch comes out they let everyone, including mod developers, get on the test server, and it's up to the mod developers to test their own stuff out and see if it works. It is not the responsiblity of WoW to do that, and I kinda don't see it as the responsibility of us here. We have 3 maybe 4 arcs to maintain. If they could at least flag our broken arcs so we can know they're broken with the patch then we can go in and fix them.

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I can't say I agree with you. I'm very familiar with having to constantly update mods in WoW, and it gets to be a royal pain. The problem with WoW is that they dont seem to differentiate between an "internal" interface and the "external" interface they present to the customer base. The external interface should be fairly static, but it isn't.

Just because "WoW does it" doesnt make it a valid business model.

What would be really nice is if the devs would copy all existing published arcs over to test, then run a validation utility against them all. If any come back invalid - fix the problem with the code before releasing the patch.

But nah, way too much trouble for them to bother I guess - put the onus on the players...

Wrong forum for this, try Mission Architect: Stories and Lore...

Sounds cool. An alternative, if the Devs think it's too much work, is to spawn this stuff, temporarily in an existing zone, like Croatoa.

Arc #131430: The Starfare Chronicles

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The contact is a moderately shapely green-skinned alien named Tari, who launches right into how she is a representative of the "Starfare", who are battling the Zrak'Tah, aka the Dominion, who are really really evil and planning to invade Earth. The 'Dominion' gives me Star Trek vibes, Zrak'Tah possibly a reference to the Jem'Hadar. Tari can't talk to the governments, so she is asking the help of heroes.


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Hrmmm, should be showing "The Domination", will check...

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Unfortunately, this is a minor case of Did Not Do The Research. (I'm stealing from Venture again, but then he got it from TVTropes). Tari says the Starfare and Dominion have both tried unsuccessfully to ally with the Rikti before. However, the Rikti are not from outer space; they're from another dimension, the gateway to which was open only briefly before being magically barred by Hero 1 and the Omega Team.


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My bad, I thought other dimensions had outer space too. And for another dimension that is supposedly closed, the Rikti hit Paragon with surprising regularity - with their space ships.
I can buy shutting off a dimension to Earth ... but not to the rest of the Universe...

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Up until now, when someone had a mission that required the player to defeat all enemies, I borrowed from South Park and said "Kill-alls are bad, mmmmkay?"


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99.9% of the time, I'd agree with you. But this mission essentially is "repel the invaders from the ship". Leaving any aboard would not make sense from a story perspective. The map is medium sized and really doesn't take that long to clear.

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Anyway, I Kill All, click the glowie for some interesting messages, and discover that Tari has been killed. No action here, although I briefly consider taking liberties with the body.


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Ok, thats just gross...

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4) In very well written narrative, Tari tells us that she has uploaded her consciousness into the ship's computer, and now _is_ the ship. This puts a damper on my plans for makin' bacon, unless I can upload my own mind into another ship, and, er, dock with her. (with Blue Danube Waltz playing in the background.) Her crew has been captured, and supplies taken, so I go to warehouse to get them back. This is a timed mission, although the time given is way more than enough.


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Yep, I wanted the slow readers to have plenty of time to read the narrative, and took into account soloing controllers or tankers.

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Despite the lack of alien poontang,


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Oh well, have to wait for the sequel

Thanks for the review.

i just played this arc with my 42 DB/Fire Scrapper. I had a few nitpicks here and there, but nothing major.

Chapter 1: Typically, if the last thing the contact says is a question, the mission accept link is a response to that question.

So, if the contact says "You game?", I would expect the accept link to be something like "I'm game! Lets do it!"

- Text Change: "You're a little nervous; ...." I'd make this a sentence.

- Clue: "It's not clear what happens to them after that." - I'd change "happens" to "happened".

Mission 2: Seemed like a repeat of mission 1. Free the hostages, meet up with the other teens, beat the bad guy.
Nice humor, with the rpg flavored text coming from the clockwork.

- I was playing a female toon, Spartaca. Spartaca Jr. just doesn't sound right. You can't assume a male toon is playing the arc.

The mission where I was doing "monitor duty" was just odd. I was going back and forth picking up team members who spawned at random places on the map.

The arc seemed a bit disjointed - there didn't seem to be a clear flow to the story.

Other than what I noted above, the text was clean and well written. Well done custom mobs. I was so busy fighting the EB at the end that I missed out on the robotic teen mobs.

Entertaining arc - I gave it four stars.

This.

Nuff said.

#83920: Two Chicks at Once

Ok, my two bits. I ran it with 42 DB/Fire Scrapper.

Mission 1:
- The intro text is a bit confusing as to who is saying what.
"...?" and "What? They are." I had no clue who was saying this, and what the statements meant.

- Longbow has financiers - I thought Longbow was a police organization, which , theoretically should be funded by taxpayer dollars. Maybe just change it to them raising funds for an orphanage or something?

- Enjoyed the custom Longbow mobs, nice change of pace. However, I didn't think they looked 'that' much more stylish than the normal costumes.

- Mission objective list - Need custom objective text "Search the Crate" instead of just "Crate"

Mission 2:
- "We should intercept and destroy..." is very dark blue and almost unreadable. If using colors, I'd suggest using Pastels - tone it down a bit. Same with the green and the red text.

- Objective list - I'd suggest "Crack the Wall Safe", "Steal the Medical Supplies", and "Hack the Computer"

- Crey usually has test subjects. If you have room, it would be nice to have to rescue (or take captive) some of their "enhanced" test subjects.

- "Tome of Bounteous Effervescence" - this sounds very "Circle of Thornish". Crey doesn't do Tomes. Maybe a Crey "Buns of Steel" exercise video with subliminal messages to buy their exercise products?

- Chest Slider with a "sliding bar" - makes sense from the costume creater perspective, but not from within the game. Also sounds very painful. Bionic Breast implants sounds more Creyish.

- "Jar of lotion" - mixed case. Also inconsistent with the object name "Pygmalion's Unguent". This also sounds somewhat like a "CoT" thing.

Mission 3:

- Text: " ... short on inf..." should be "short on influence".

- Ghost Widow doesnt have the closing quote.

- I didnt much care for the transition from talking to Recluse to talking to Scirocco. ( same thing on the next mission) Recluse's portrait still shows. Maybe some narrative text saying you went to see Scirocco and he said the following....

- Scirocco pauses unconfortably ( spelling )

- Who is Irena? Ice Mistral?

- Return message is entirely narrative. I think it would be better if Recluse said "I have picked out a bikini for Ice Mistral". Followed by narrative saying the bikini looks like 2 stamps and molecular wire.
Recluse grins fiendishly - "What do you think?"

Mission 4:
- The mission objectives implied that I would meet an ally first, then defeat Silver Mantis. Silver Mantis spawned on the 1st level ... the ally didnt. I tried twice to solo her, got her down to 25%, but face planted both times.

At this point, I gave up and quit the arc. No point beating my head against the wall.

Very humorous arc. Could use a bit of tweaking, but overall pretty good.

Edit: You don't have to do either of my arcs, just thought I'd check one of yours out. If you decide to play either, you might want to play the brute, they both feature an AV.

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Post your grief story here, and lets help the other grief victims out there to give their stories a fair shake.


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Yep, add me to the list. 5 stars yesterday and on the front page, now buried somewhere deep in the 4 star list. ( my Croatoa arc )

I believe the only way this could be done is a total wipe of your costume options - you can't take a huge model costume, for example, and have it apply to either the male or female models.

You'd have to start from scratch, as far as designing the costume.

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If I had to criticize anything, it would be the way thoughts and actions are forced onto the player, mostly during interactions with Rose. The arc first requires me to be awkwardly sensitive to the ghostly child’s worries and needs. Then, as events unfold, I seem to take an incredibly strong personal interest in the missions. At one point, it’s implied that I’m nearly torturing a Cabal witch to get information to help Rose’s family. Granted, it’s fleeting and implicit, and may be due to my own interpretation of the text. But it might not suit everyone’s characters.

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I have to confess, this is the first arc I wrote in which I became so emotionally involved with the contact. I guess I got caught up in it a bit too much. I might have to rethink the questioning aspect of that particular chapter - at that point, my response was ... anger. Guess I have to realize others might not have that intense a reaction.

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M3: Some of the wording of Jack’s Clue felt a bit awkward, particularly when he mentions the Amulet and Rhiannon.

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Some of that might have to do with the text limitations forced on me. I tried to fit it into the free captive clue, 100 characters just wasnt sufficient. 300 characters barely was enough, Jack had quite a bit to say.

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Mission 5: Perhaps you could highlight the AV warning in the Intro Dialog? As it is, it blends into the rest of the text, and might be an unpleasant surprise to someone who missed the arc’s description. Simply making the warning bold or italicized should be enough.

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Will do.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

Just played 4384 with my level 42 DB/Fire Scrapper on heroic.

Mission 1: "... break into one of Crey's law firms ...."
That sounds a bit villainous to me. "Investigate one of Crey's law firms" sounds a bit better.

"Search for Evidence Against Crey" - you usually search for evidence when you already know what the charge is. At this point, we're still trying to find out what they're up to.

Mission 2: ".... stumble on something big ....". I'd change "on" to "onto"

A number of your chapters end with Mynx asking you something like "Ready to intercept the mystery contraband?"
Instead of a response like "Yes, I'm ready. Lets do it!" you have "Head down to the docks". I've seen the question/response format used very effectively in a number of arcs, and I think it would make sense in your arc when the mission briefing ends with a question.

".... into the city of Heroes? Kinda risky ...."
You rarely hear the term "City of Heroes" in-game. I'd use "Paragon City".

Not sure, but I think an ambush hit me after clicking a glowy. No warning text, which is no big deal with a scrapper, but will cause squishies some issues.

Chapter 3: "I've debriefed Will Lindsey --- you remember the kid you rescued from Crey?"
That statement seemed a bit odd. I just rescued the kid in the prior mission, unless Mynx thinks I have very short term memory.

"a hidden bunker" is in dark green. Very hard to read.

2 of the 5 test subjects became allies, the other 3 were captives and left. I have mixed feelings on this. 5 allies would be overkill, but having some turn and run while others help is a bit disconcerting to the player. I like consistency.
Considering they were only Lts. and the first guy very quickly died on me, I'd just make them all captives.

Chapter 4: Josephine is now in temporary housing. I'm sent to an office building. Ok, I'll stretch my imagination and pretend it's a hotel.

I was playing a standard Crey arc, and now Carnies. I was thinking, oh joy, another arc with a complete U turn. Maybe a bit of a forewarning in the previous arc? This is explained later when Josephine is revealed to be a powerful psychic and the Carnies are just lusting after her psychic energy.

Chapter 5: Ok, the previous chapter leaves both me and the Carnies still searching for Josephine. Now, in chapter 5, Josephine has joined the Carnies and I have to go defeat her. This is the weakest part of the story. I'd end Chapter 4 with the Carnies saying "Ah ha! Too late! We already have her and she will soon belong to Vanessa!"

Either that, or have the Carnies still trying to control her in the final chapter. Perhaps some comments like "Oh no, her psychic powers have grown beyond even Vanessa's abilities to control. We must stop her!"

I liked having the optional allies, although 3 of them might be a bit overkill. I definitely needed help against Josephine - she is a very nasty EB. The custom group had the name "Vindicators". I'm not familiar with that group, doesn't seem like a canon name. Perhaps "Freedom Phalanx" might be more appropriate?

Interesting arc with a decent storyline. Needs a few tweaks, but has potential to be an excellent arc.

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Mmmmm... Candra does some very very nice work.

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Yep, awesome artwork.
Anyone know any other artist who does commissions in that style? I've been thinking about starting a collection ... and Candra has a "not taking orders" message.

There are a couple of my CoH toons that I'd love to have artistically rendered....

I just played this arc with my 42 DB/Fire scrapper.

Feedback:

Mission 1: You need custom objective text for the hostages, such as "Free the ... chocolatier". Did a pretty good job of that elsewhere in the arc. A little frustrating not knowing what the hostages were saying...

Text correction: "Stop you, the strawberry ... belongs to us."
You need a comma after the Stop, or get rid of the word "you".

Very funny clues from the glowies. Nice custom mobs.

2) Mission 2. We switch from Goldbrickers to Crey. I had mixed feelings about this. 1 - a break in continuity. 2 - I really enjoyed the custom mobs, but on the other hand, the "Crey Plot" to use a product to control people is just classic.
Mixed capitalization on "Praline extruder". I'd make extruder begin with a capital letter.

Mission 3:
Doctor Hershey: Possible copyright violation. I'd be very careful there. Also, some people might construe this as being racial in tone. I'm not politically correct, by any stretch of the imagination, but thats the first thing that hit me when he had his "dark chocolate" line. The defeat clue let me know otherwise, however. He's made of chocolate. Maybe a slight costume modification to make it more obvious?

"Heartbroken chocolate lover/connoiseur/etc." - mixed capitalization names

I gave it 5 stars. Very enjoyable comedy arc.