Mind Forever Burning

They do? Where?

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I'd just like souvenirs to work right (character-specific instead of installation-global, not disappear randomly, etc).

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As of i15 you can only one-star arcs, yes?

I think the ambush may be a red herring, and that the captive will spring back to his feet when the animation is done playing regardless. That's just how animations work; once they're done playing, there's no way to tell the game to leave the stance alone.

Actually... I think you're right, in this case the level slider doesn't do anything. All that matters is the level range you click on to get the recipe roll - if you grab the 26-30 random roll, for example, you'll get a shot at sets that cap at 30, regardless of what the slider is set to.

The merit vendor UI wouldn't even show you those bands as available to be chosen unless you manipulated the slider, but IIRC the ticket vendor shows you everything you can roll.

So, yeah, for random rolls I think the slider is useless.

Yes, the Xs and Os are reversed in the help pop-up. Also, there are maps where the Xs and Os are labeled incorrectly for a variety of reasons - front/middle/back are scrambled on the map, or the minimap is reversed left-to-right or rotated 90 degrees.

I bugged all this in beta and predictably none of it was fixed. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Well, I feel like an [censored]. My heart goes out to you. I hope the game and the AE give you some escape.

Working as intended, unfortunately. The level slider affects only what recipes are available to be chosen; once chosen the recipes awarded will be at your level, or their max level, whichever is less. Drives me berserk but there you have it.

I would actually support per-critter-type diminishing returns if it had the right parameters. IMHO players should be rewarded for the effort of changing tactics to fight multiple enemy types. Getting the parameters right would be hard, though, and the whole thing might be too computationally intensive to be feasible.

One note for anyone who wants to play the finale:

I've been alerted that there's a bug in the AE that will sometimes erase souvenirs. Since that's where the 2-part code for the finale is stored, there is a chance that someone intending to play the finale will have one of the souvenirs disappear on them before they get a chance.

For that reason I recommend writing down the code fragments out-of-game somewhere. If anyone encounters this bug and didn't write them down, PM me and I'll reply with the codes.

I'm glad you enjoyed them! Part of me was wondering whether anyone would find the concept interesting enough to push through to the finale.

By the way, I should mention that the difficulty setting almost doesn't matter in the finale - everything is level-locked. 2 and 4 are harder than 1, 3, and 5 because they spawn larger groups, but other than that they're equivalent.

In that case, in the game-global sense, you're not generating inf, you're generating items.

Actually, since PvP farming doesn't generate any inf per item, the introduction of high-valued PvP IOs to the game should be a deflationary force on the rest of the economy.

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Solutions like requiring minions, lts and bosses (like regular missions) ... would vastly bring AE into line with regular missions.

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Yes, but would that be a good thing? I'm serious: part of the reason the AE allows greater returns is that it allows players to fight greater threats than are available in PvE. I don't want to see that go away. I would much rather see the difficulty slider modified so that players could achieve similar effects in PvE.

It's actually not bad because salvage is cheap to buy with tickets - but it's quite tedious to list the results because you end up with stacks of 3 and 4 spread across the different types. Usually I do a little of this and then say "Screw it, I'm buying recipes with the rest."

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Well, if you honestly think "Ha ha, Virtue" and "Ha ha, stoners" are unacceptably adult themes, then petition the arc. If it really is out of line, the GMs will deal with it. If its not, then its not.

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There's a zone in there where the content is not unacceptable enough to warrant GM intervention, but juvenile enough to be unappealing to many mature players. I think the OP is honestly surprised that so many people voting for this arc aren't turned off by that aspect.

I haven't played the arc specifically for this reason - I know it won't appeal to me to have any kind of romantic attachment between my character and an NPC or contact. The very thought makes me shudder.

I'd suggest loading up i15 and examining the spawn points - they're now displayed in the mini-map in the AE editor. Once you find a map with the right configuration you can use it on Live.

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There are a few things that I wonder whether are 'sploits. Take the popular Lord Recluse AV farms. Is it exploitive because his powersets seem so limited - no doubt designed with his towers in mind? Or do we just not see other AV farms because... ?

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It's because Recluse gives bonus XP. Most AVs aren't worth the time to fight compared to boss farms, but Recluse seems to be competitive.

I believe these versions of Recluse are from the Villainside patron arc finales - though if someone really is farming level 54 Reclues from the STF, I'd like to know about it...

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At the time I'd planned to make it a two parter, three actually with the second part focusing on Armington while we wait for Faraday to come back to life again, but I only finished the second arc before my son was born. Now it's busy busy busy.

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Heh. OK, no worries. I look forward to the revamp.

By the way, some people have been claiming huge space savings in i15, but I don't really see it. I do see maybe 5% on my arcs, but nothing like the 30-40% some people are reporting. Anyway, hopefully even 5% is enough to add a good ending.

I'm more than willing to engage Faraday again in a 2nd arc, I just felt like this one wasn't quite tied together at the end. You can leave him as escaping as long as I find out enough about him along the way to explain the nano-virus connection.

I'm probably going to jinx it, but it seems to me like the 1-star bandits got bored and moved on.

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Well he missed the clue telling him he found the files in mission 5 (the clue is in the Archmage Of Death Clue), after telling me most of my clues were meaningless(which 17 of them were... I just summarized what happened in a line or two so that If a player took a break they could come back and look at the clues and remember what happened).

Not reading the clue would be Venture's fault.

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See, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. It's Mission 5, far enough into the arc for the player to understand your style. If you haven't by that point convinced the player it's worth their time to read all the clues, then they're going to skim them, or maybe skip them entirely. Going by the description, you haven't convinced Venture it's worth reading the clues - in fact, it seems to be the opposite - you've convinced Venture it's not worth reading the clues. So he skipped it.

I'm really not trying to beat you up here. Venture does say at the end of his review, "There's a good story here trying to get out" - I'm trying to help you get it out, by trying to change your perspective a little bit. The writer's effort doesn't matter to the player, only the player's experience matters. That's what they rate the arc on.

By the way, one of the hardest things for me when the MA came out was to admit to myself that not everyone's going to like my stories. I like convoluted, thought-provoking plots, and a lot of people just like to fight through. As a result I decided to try to advertise effectively so the kinds of people that like the kinds of stories I write would identify them correctly and that those who don't would be able to skip over it without getting involved. But I also made an effort to make the convoluted plots optional; if you just liked to grind through, you'd get an interesting arc mechanics-wise, and things would mostly hang together without being too confusing. (I probably did not succeed at that as well as I'd like.)

Writing to a specific audience versus expanding your audience is a tricky balancing act, but it has to start with the player's perspective first and foremost.

First of all - you definitely have a right to respond to criticism; I'm not trying to say you don't. I was just trying to say I don't think you made your points as clear as you might have thought.

On this:

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When I spent so much of my limited time working on this arc (I am gone 16 hours a day with work/travel). It is disturbing to see all the work that has gone into the story being ignored and every one of the various themes being missed.

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I think that happens to every writer in every medium. It's certainly happened to me. But ask yourself this: did Venture miss the work you put in because of something about Venture, or because of something about the way the story is written?

I get the feeling that you have a very large back-story behind this arc that is not tied to canon. In those kinds of situations, the first thing you have to do is make sure that the player is going to care about that back-story enough to invite examination. Given Venture's description of the contact and first mission, I think that didn't happen, and everything beyond that is necessarily going to suffer.

And now the review that I've been looking forward to all evening...

181165 "The Case of the Late Richard Faraday"
tl;dr: 4 stars
Pros: Gripping plot, interesting theme, great gameplay
Cons: Spelling and grammar issues, unsatisfying ending

Reviewed: 6/27/2009
Level range: 20-54
Character used: lvl 42 bots/traps MM

Detective Morgan has a problem: one of his men, an Officer O'Leary, has been taken hostage by the Freakshow after a failed attempt by the PPD to intervene in the "conditioning" of some new recruits. Time is short, so he's looking to bring in some heavy hitters, i.e. you.

You enter the map and discover that time was shorter than you thought: O'Leary has already been modified, and it wasn't Doc Buzzsaw but one Dr. Armington who did it. O'Leary (custom claw/regen boss) fights you, clearly against his will - the modifications Armington made seem to be something outside the standard Freakish treatment. After that battle you encounter Armington himself, who summons an ambush of a custom faction called the Cultists (who also accompanied O'Leary) to cover his escape. He mentions someone named Faraday in his unaware text.

Act Two has you checking in on O'Leary's fate, as the PPD techs try to reverse his non-consensual modifications and determine their significance. Morgan invites you to the lab with him, but you find it already overrun by Cultists who have taken the techs hostage. You rescue them and discover that O'Leary's mods are the work of nano-tech mites controlled remotely; they've blocked the signal locally, allowing O'Leary to fight by your side, but don't know the encryption codes or the source. Faraday is mentioned again, IIRC by some cultist patrols.

Morgan explains that Faraday was something of a cult figure in the late 90s, who hari-kari'd himself when the world didn't collapse as he predicted at the century rollover. If he's come back to life the how of it is a mystery... Anyway, it's time to go get answers from Armington himself, who's holed up in an abandoned tech lab with cultists and some nano-tech combat models. He's working for Faraday, but isn't too loyal, as he gives up pretty much everything he knows on defeat. Maybe he's having second thoughts about deploying weaponized nano-tech mites that will turn Paragon City into someone else's army...

Now that you know how serious the situation really is, Act IV sends you to stop Faraday's mad scheme by destroying all the requisite components in Faraday's lab in Baumton. Of course Faraday himself is also there, as a dark/dark AV, but with both Morgan and O'Leary at my side he didn't give my bots/traps much trouble.

Before I tell you how the story ends, I should say that up to this point I was absolutely, totally gripped. The idea of Freakshow self-mods becoming non-consensual is something that's come up in canon before, and there's a theme there about the seductiveness of (dangerous) technology combined with eugenics. The character of Faraday was intriguing me and I looked forward to discovering the link between his cult-leader status in the 90s and his nano-tech-wielding egomania in the present. My own theory was that Rikti technology was involved in his resurrection, probably Rikti nano-tech, which would explain both that link and his obsession with "sharing" the blessing of nano with the world. And I was having a great time working these things through in my mind while fighting through the story, which had exactly the right sized maps and exactly the right mix of custom spawns and story points in them.

So... how does the story end?

It ends.

You defeat Faraday, stop the nano-virus... and learn nothing of import. You also find out later that he escaped (which opens room for the sequel, mentioned in the souvenir).

Aargh!

Here's what it felt like: the home team is down by 3 runs in the bottom of the 9th. With the bases loaded and 2 outs, your favorite batter is up, and lines up a really nice line drive along the 1st base line. The outfielders can't quite get it - one run scores - two runs - three - and your batter is rounding 3rd, with the outfielders scrambling to put a tag-out at home into play...

And the batter stops running mid-stride, walks over to the dugout and starts signing autographs. He's tagged out. Now it's a tie and we're in extra innings.

Why, lord? Why, oh why, could you let this happen?

If the story had revealed the link between Faraday and nano-tech in the way I believed it was leading up to, this would be a 5-star arc despite the many spelling and grammar issues I ran into (noted below). As it is, it falls short.

Fortunately these things are not hard to fix. The gameplay, plotting, and pacing are all spot on. Add that missing ingredient to the end and fix the spelling and typo issues, and I'll happily give this one 5 stars, run it on all future characters, and recommend it to friends.

OK, on to the spelling issues (I note that Venture mentioned several of these, so I'm surprised they weren't already fixed).

Mission 1

accept, clue - Drek - spelling
debrief - freak - caps
debrief - thier - misuse (and spelling) - they're

Mission 2

intro - Thanks - should be lowercase
accept - their - misuse - they're
accept - last sentence run on
popup dialog - last sentence run on
give hostages a brief animation so I can see their dialog
clue - hadnearly - typo
exit popup - shareing - spelling
debrief - "Probably to prevent infecting each other"... "each other" has no antecedent

Mission 3

intro - abotu - typo
intro - dispursed - spelling (dispersed) (disbursed is for money)
clue - nit: transmitter frequency isn't what they didn't know, it was the encryption
clue - Farada - typo

Mission 4

accept - We''ve - typo
nit: "destroy the nano-virus" (single nav bar text) - should be just a component
Faraday's defeat: you city - typo (should be "your city")

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(BTW, there is a hidden clue with story information within the useless and joke glowies, it's lab equipment with the clue: "You find some research about Time Shifter. Apparently it's original intent was to give surgeon's more time in critical situations by allowing them to reset if something unexpected goes wrong. There was also a previous try, something called a Time Splitter. Though that turned out to speed up time.", did you happen to catch that one?)

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Forgot to respond to this - yes, I did catch that clue. I'm honestly surprised it's not required, as IIRC it's the first reference to there being a "shifter" and a "splitter"... but again, does this imply that either device has an AI? It doesn't seem to me to imply any such thing. You'd think that such a relevant clue would give more information on the true nature of the technology.

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Nerf AE xp to one half normal rate. (IIRC this was going to be the way it originally was anyway, and only "Dev Choice" arcs would get full xp)

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As best I can tell, this is the efficiency scale for leveling speed:**

Solo AE -- slowest
Solo PvE
Team PvE
Team AE -- fastest

The reason for this is that the AE opens up possibilities for a higher "enemy density" than you see in PvE, so for teams that can take them on, it's a lot faster. But for most soloists, the loss of patrol XP and mission bonus XP more than outweighs this, so PvE is actually faster.

Add to this the fact that on teams it's harder to follow a story, and it's no wonder the AE has such a built-in incentive to do team combat-grinds.

Your solution doesn't really fix the problem. IMHO they should restore patrol and mission bonus XP to the AE to make the solo experience competitive with PvE, and then do something else to rebalance the team experience.

** To be more exact, it's really a question of single-target vs. AoE, but the mapping is close enough that I think the generalization is valid.

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Although, if you have problems with the general concept of a "time vampire" as I was going for, then I doubt further explanation could sway you. But the basic idea is a learning ai that uses the energy of those around it to jump them both back in time in order to speed its own learning/evolving process.

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I don't have problems with that general concept as long as it's somehow built up to, or flows naturally from the unfolding events. But I felt like I didn't really have enough information to put the pieces together that way.

Let me put it this way: good endings need to seem both surprising and inevitable to the reader of the story. It's a tricky feat to pull off, but when done well it's very satisfying. Lots of stories, particularly CoX canon, err too far on the side of caution and spoon-feed everything to you, so there's never really any time to build up to a surprise. You've gone in the opposite direction: there was no way to know by Mission 4 whether there was a single person or group behind the events in question, or (as it turned out) that it was an artifact of the technology itself. Surprising, but in no way inevitable. The details of Mission 4 could have been swapped out with a variety of other endings while leaving the rest of the story completely alone, and that makes the ending seem like kind of a randomly-chosen set of plot elements.

As one example of this, I'm not sure the story ever mentions these devices having an AI that could evolve. I certainly don't remember it, and it's pretty non-obvious that a baseball-sized "rewind" button device would have one.

EDIT: The whole Steve thing did achieve this by the way - the extra Wyvern boss was introduced early, and clearly had a role, so it was very satisfying to catch on to his significance as the plot unfolded. Kudos for that.