Mind Forever Burning

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Some of what is going on with the higher priced items is obviously flipping.

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So the fact that all the prices rises have been concurrent with mechanics changes is pure coincidence, then?

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Mechanically, -resist is completely different from -defense. Defense penetrators subtract directly from your defense, after you resist them (if you can). DR "penetrators" are, effectively, scale factors on your damage because all DR resists all DR debuffs. The end result would not be the same.

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Technically, that's only true for autohit -def powers, which are significantly less common than the non-autohit variety. For regular -def powers to affect the target they have to hit first - which means existing defense will "resist" it in the sense of making the attack less likely to land in the first place.

Does it? I have to admit I never actually read the dialog. The only reason I run the arc is to clear out that contact from my active contacts list (I've become sort of OCD that way).

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Not exactly a 1 inf snag, but I got a crafted lvl 40 Decimation Acc/Dam/Rech last night for 6.5M - they normally go for 30-40M. That was my best market deal in quite a while. I took a screenshot but forgot to upload it anywhere.

Increasing the difficulty of the enemies you face increases their per-defeat ticket reward. Increasing the number of enemies you face increases the number of chances of getting ticket drops.

So yes, increasing your difficulty setting will generally increase your ticket drops - assuming you weren't already at the ticket cap for the mission.

I think it's even more general than that, and can be summed up as an inexplicable failure to use common sense. That can happen in any storytelling medium, to any relevant actor (protagonist, antagonist, minor characters, etc) - but when it happens in this medium, to the character the player is investing their energy in, it's particularly jarring and can be almost personally insulting.

I disagree. I haven't noticed any tendency in Venture to dislike the character being wrong. It's when the character isn't allowed to use common sense that the Idiot Ball is thrown.

From "Dr. Aeon's Nemesis" review, I see this:

"Then when you get back Aeon says he realized that there was never any danger in the first place because he hadn't used the components he thought he used."

So the character was wrong because the contact misled him (albeit not deliberately). But there's no idiot ball here for the character - Dr. Aeon arguably caught it for not knowing what the heck he was doing with his own experiment, but it's a comedic element so here it doesn't have the negative connotations.

The arc got 5 stars.

Some minor updates to the arcs:

- Gave all contacts "about this contact" info
- Standardized on 00bfff for colorized mission titles and subtitles
- Fixed level ranges to be consistent across missions for all 3 arcs, with one exception

Worth noting is that in order to get the level ranges consistent in "The Plumber", I upgraded two of the bosses from Paragon Protectors to Paragon Protector Elites. I doubt this will significantly alter the overall difficulty of the arc, which is still designed for characters in their mid-30s; ironically enough however the arc now appears to be designed for high-level characters.

Also, there is one mission in "Power Progression" where the level range has to be fixed at exactly 41 for reasons that should become clear within the mission itself. Hopefully that is not a serious issue since the mission has only one combat. Those worried about XP gain should easily be able to make this up in the other missions.

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Qr - so someone posts a 'hey everyone, here's an arc i enjoyed!' thread, and the forum heavies turn it into a witch-hunt.

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i c wut u did thar

lol

Your post count makes you right!

Sorry, I had to. (And for posterity, it's currently 1337, that most coveted of post counts - at least until 31337.)

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The evolution on the debate around Blight kind of pains me. I haven't yet played it (it's next on my queue) but it sure looks like what happened is that lots of not-so-critical players played and enjoyed it, and when the buzz mounted, suddenly a whole other level of scrutiny was applied to the arc.

I found in my own stillborn review thread that I was shifting between review modes. In one mode, I would highly rate the author on the basis of creativity and effort, because compared to the vast majority of badly-sketched and incomplete arcs, it was pretty good. But then an author would tickle me enough to start comparing the work to published fiction or some of the better canon, and suddenly little flaws that I'd otherwise overlook became jarring.

Witch, I hope you take all the review feedback with a grain of salt - because, after all, every reviewer brings personal bias, it's unavoidable - but also with an open mind and a dose of humility. Some of this feedback brings up valid points that can be used to make the story stronger for the 10% of the playerbase who might care deeply about a particular angle, without damaging the enjoyment for the 90% who already liked the story.

I'd like to recommend the arc "The Plumber" in my sig. Though part of a larger story, the arc should stand alone, and it's also the shortest and in some ways most humorous of the 3 pre-finale arcs. It's heroic with 5 missions, but 2 of those missions take place on really small maps, and the other 3 aren't very large.

Oddly, it also has the least plays of all those arcs, so I'm trying to get it a little exposure.

Actually, I'm pretty sure you can't use random bosses from custom groups. No idea why; I think it was a dev oversight.

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I see in IP:
[Broadcast] Player1: How do I get to Kings Row? (for the Rikti Invasion that was announced)
[Broadcast] Player2: Take Ouro to Atlas Park, then Take the Yellow Line to Kings
[Broadcast] Player3: Does your SG base have teleporters? The portal is near the Green Line.
[Broadcast] Me: Check the map. There is a tunnel on the East wall that leads directly to Kings. Its not far from the Tailor.
[Broadcast] Player2: I've never heard of a tunnel system. Just take Ouro. It's faster.

I LoL'd

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Hilarious!

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I did this with a VEAT and a bots/traps MM, playing the VEAT almost exclusively to 50. Then I discovered I enjoyed playing the bots/traps so much that I rolled another one and ran him from scratch up to (currently) 48, leaving the original one to gather dust

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I'd say WAI. They probably did this to all possibe 'buffing' allies in the MA to curb explotive farming techniques in the MA (and people say exploitive Farming doesn't affect of players in the game ).

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This speculation is refuted by observing that the change affects all allies, not just buffers. Also, the biggest balance issue related to buffers is having pacifist allies with toggle AoE buffs, which AFAIK is still a problem and totally unaffected by changing how AI click powers work.

On the plus side it does reduce XP leeching, but that's more than balanced by the loss of ally aid when it is actually needed (read: AV fights in solo-friendly arcs) and the RP violation (here's this big bad angry guy supposedly bent on revenge, and all he does is pick his teeth?).

It might not be bad to have an "almost pacifist" setting for allies to reproduce what we have now, but I'd much rather get back the behavior we had a few patches ago.

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The real answer, I think, is that it's impossible. At least, I believe it's impossible to write a truly excellent story where the protagonist is interchangeable with any other protagonist. Character is inextricable from plot. As one critic stated (sorry, I don't have the source available at the moment), "What is character but the determinor of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" This is actually a wonderful thing in fiction, but it's a problem in MA.

There are ways to avoid this issue, but I find neither of them fully satisfactory. First, one can do what Witch Engine does in "Blight."
...

The other strategy is to accept that MA arcs, as a literary form, are different from "stories," i.e., prose fiction or other narrative works, and to accept that they must sacrifice some literary perfection in order to remain accessible to the majority of players. That is, details that would enhance the plot of a story, or even the characterization of characters other than the protagonist, have to be left out or sketched more broadly than they would be in other literary forms.


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I think there is a third option, actually: use the NPCs as the primary sources of character development. The risk here is that too heavy-handed an application of this will produce Mary Sue stories, but there is a middle ground where the PC is central to the story, and the main protagonist, but his or her actions drive character development in everyone else.

The best MA arc I've played (aside from my own, which I dismiss as bias) is M for Malta, and one of the reasons I love it is that it shows a deep development in the character of the contact. In fact, at the end of the arc it even allows for a tiny bit of player choice through the trick of allowing the character to fail or not fail the final mission - a trick you probably can't use too many times before it gets worn out, but which is used to great effect there.

The Faultline and RWZ arcs use the same basic principle of showing complex interactions between NPCs, and allowing them to grow.

I think something changed relatively recently. I just reran "The Case of the Late Richard Faraday" and the allies that used to attack with abandon now mostly just sit there. I actually could measure how many times they attacked by measuring how much XP I lost and it looks like they threw an attack every 5-6 spawns.

Maddening.

If you can record the character names and times, it's possible the devs could datamine the rest.

I don't know whether pohsyb has "easy" access to the data but in theory it's stored on their servers somewhere if he has the time to look for it.

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AE already gives high rewards

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Only on farms. Story-focused MA content lags regular PvE on the reward rate scale because there's no patrol XP.

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...and once farms are again more populated outside of AE, the Devs can start contemplating tweaking things in favor of story-focused AE content and increase the rewards there... it CAN all come together nicely.

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We're going to have to agree to disagree I guess. Once I can run all missions on high difficulty, there's little incentive for me personally to farm at all anymore, in or out of the AE. But if I can't do that in the AE I just won't use it, I'll run canon arcs instead.

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Nothing that happens there affects the character's "real life" so your character shouldn't feel violated.

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Heh, except for all the new powers and slots and phat lewt you get!

The canon placement of the MA still rubs me wrong even after writing an epic 4-arc tale about it. Oh well.

I haven't played the arc, but it sure seems from context like you managed to push two or three of Venture's hate buttons at once.

The ongoing discussion is probably not too valuable. I would venture (ha ha) to say you're not going to make Venture happy with this arc without throwing away its core concepts, so at this point it seems like it's better to be satisfied with the demonstrably large number of people who got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

It's on my list to play, btw, right after I finish the newly updated version of "The Case of the Late Richard Faraday".

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As I understand it, the biggest problem with this kind of level jump is that just because a lowbie has been auto-SKed up to the appropriate level doesn't mean that they can actually handle enemies at that range.

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I'm just saying that if you pin the level ranges, you get this problem across the whole story arc instead of just some missions.

Venture's response is that's still better because at least there aren't any mid-arc unpleasant surprises, which I can understand, although it seems a bit nit picky to me. But I guess it's a polish question.

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I have to lay this problem squarely at the feet of the devs. The only option authors have is just to not use those tags at all in critter dialog, which seems unfairly limiting.

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You can restrict yourself only to using those tags at places where the critter will unquestionably be targeting the player.

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Well, I haven't myself had much luck controlling those circumstances, so I'm not going to knock another author for it. Maybe it's just me but it seems easy enough to consider it an out-of-context game glitch and not an authoring mistake.

It happens in canon arcs, too, by the way. I think the devs broke something in the general spawning/dialog code when i14 was released.