Madcat_88_NA

Arc name: The mystery of the MAGI vault
Arc ID: 7251
Faction: Heroic
Global creator: @madcat
Difficulty level: Average (1 custom boss, 2 custom EBs.)
Synopsis: Tired of taking the blame for artifacts going misssing from the MAGI vaults, Azuria has come up with a plan and has requested your help in implementing it.
Estimated time to play: 30 mins - 1 hour (5 maps, but they're all quite little)

Feedback thread

Notes: Mission 3 is fairly easy to fail, and and probably becomes easier to do so on a larger team. Have completed the arc with both a lowbie blaster (7) an a team of two 50s. Missions are mostly geared up for the mid-teen levels.

Covention specific exclusives are, IMO, a bad idea unless they end up being purchaseable a few months down the line.

Espcially when they're region locked convention exclusives, so say, Euro's playing on US accounts can't use them even if they go to the Euro convention.

Please, if you're going to keep having these stupid things, could you please add some damaged buildings and craters to all the zones that get hit.

Please?

It would make the continued invasions feel a lot less stupid.

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Third and optionally, explicitly indicate intention in the dialogue, maybe with a tag in brackets at the beginning, so people don't do the wrong thing for them due to misinterpretation.

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I loved this in Planescape: Torment. You'd get dialogue choices like, "Tell me what you know or I'll kill you" (Truth) and "Tell me what you know or I'll kill you" (Lie) as well as a few others - but basically, where there was room for doubt about the consequences, the game would spell them out for you at the dialogue options.

I really really hope that they apply the branching to the villain arcs where you get a different souvenier if you let the clock run out - to differentiate beween failing, and choosing to let the clock run down.

Also branches in any story arcs that currently make assumptions about what your character does (please, for the love of (diety of choice) let us beat Hardcase to a bloody pulp rather than be intimidated by him) or make them out to be an idiot.

Two reservations, I hope that the threat is not Nemesis, and are the costume unlocks going to be mission keyed, or if they require tokens (like Vanguard merits) are the tokens going to be tradeable or the unlocks account wide?

Never mind full power customisation, the one thing I'd like to see is blue rather than pink pom poms for /energy blasters so that it doesn't clash with energy/ .

Yawn.

Could we at least have some battle-damaged skyscrapers and construction sites added to the invasion zones to make all feel a bit less meta-gamey?

Meh.

Please do something about the admin channel spam. It was bearable when it was going to be for two weeks then random other times, but this is getting ridiculous.

Also, better recall that 'Vanguard claims success' article.

And how about adding some damaged buildings to the maps if this is going to continue?

Here's what I wanted it for:

Crey Industries motivational poster

Perfect, thank you.

Hi, does anyone have a high res screen shot of the Crey Clone tank room with no UI, and preferably no PCs in shot?

Bit light on hard info compared to the other background articles; in fact very little that couldn't have been inferred by their in-game information.

And I'd just like to say that whilst 'backgrounder' sadly appears to be a real word, it's an awful one that shouldn't be encouraged.

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If this event gets recycled again, might I suggest that different maps get used rather than the same bit of Nerva?

Would fit in with Zero's claim that Snaptooth is shutting down his portals all over the place.

And the female version of the hearts costume is seriously icky - almost as bad as the original 'Excess'.

I don't know if this is a bug or a request, but the Millitary Coat and Vest options have become too form fitting on female characters. They look as if they should be heavy jackets, and heavy jackets just don't conform to the contours of the body that closely.

The original version, even with the uniboob looked a lot better.

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But what's clear from this thread - and from many, many posts - is that bases are "too expensive". To me, that's interesting (as it is to the Serious Games crowd). Costume changes come with a minimal cost that no one really complains about, but we complain about the costs of bases. Evidently, the costs exceed the perceived value of creating one's own HQ (btw, I confess that many other games have the notion of personal property, but aside from Second Life, I don't think they offer as much customizability as our bases).

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Have you had a look around Ultima Online since they added customisable housing?

And even before then, the amount of personalization you could achieve with the pre-built house designs was near limitless due to the number of ingame items and the way they could be arranged.

(For those who've never seen UO, it uses an isometric viewpoint with 2d graphics. The classic UO house decoration is the fish tank made of dyed cloth, shells and fish. It sounds naff, but it actually looks very good.)

The reason that housing works in UO is that most players manage to get their own house which they can play with as they like. If a guild leader wants to set up their house as a guild house that doesn't impact on anyone else in the guild.

You can also hang out at your house and still be part of the game world.

In my guild in UO we used to have meetings at our guildhouse. At the end of a hunt we'd go there and split the loot. We'd have training events with other guilds there. We could easily take people who weren't part of the guild to the house.

In CoH, one of the RP groups I'm in, despite havign a nice enough base, continues to meet at Steel Canyon university. The base is sometimes used for private conversations between characters, but is usually just a transit point between zones.

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You know what I was really hoping to find out in this article?

An explanation of why/how Consiglieres are gravity controllers.

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"Pure" Superadine?

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And/or Black Market Tech.

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Mutation could be a possible explanation, but to have such a consistent mutation among that level of Family seems highly unlikely.

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I went for the mutation explanation when I created my Family connected character. (Adriana Draco of the Young Paragons on Freedom.)

Nice work, but there's something that really bugs me.

Calling these 'Backgrounders' rather than 'Backgrounds' sounds wrong.

It's like 'Burglarized' instead of 'Burgled'.

Sorry.

Male camo trousers come to just above the ankle, whilst the female version ends just below the knee.

The male version looks better IMO.

and re: Suit.

The sadly missed old style suit, as seen here:
http://www.fngsqutzble.com/coh/costu...erno_jones.jpg

To Djeannie, re: uniboobs.

Now I see what you mean.

The 'uniboob' on bulky jackets like the leather and mililtary ones is fine - bulky jackets do end up like that.

A couple of examples with biker jackets:
http://www.hitleather.com/members/13...ed/LCJ-2BB.jpg
http://www.leatherup.com/prod_img/Wo...ker-B-7900.jpg

Costume options that are currently unavailable used to be grandfathered in. Now they just get set to default values if you try to edit that costume, even if you weren't going to make changes to the old-style costume bit.

Young Face 12 is missing from the female faces

Old style hero faces are often missing, more noticeable with male characters. There are often close replacements, but they do look different.

e.g : Old face - No frown, smiling slightly

Best match new face - slight frown (check just above bridge of goggles), not smiling, nose seems less pointed, shading under cheekbones seems more pronounced.

Sliders (set to 'Youthful'), lighting and camera are the same between the two shots.

Combined with the lack of costume grandfathering, this makes making changes to many characters difficult if you don't want to change the way they look.

edit - re: 'dud' clue - beaten to it twice.

The baseof The Dragon's Teeth.

The explanation for the arcane teleport chamber is that the builders tunnelled through into a bit of Oranbega when the base was being expanded. (The ooc reason being that tech teleporters are bugged, ugly and I wanted a break from the tech theme.)