Olantern

PW, I notice I'm getting up there in the queue. I was hoping to have you take a look at a new arc for me, but I've been out of circulation lately and haven't had a chance to write it up. Therefore, unless I post otherwise between now and the time you do your review, why don't you take a look at #193451, "The Key and the Chain." I *have* soloed it with various characters of level 25 and up, but I don't recommend soloing it with a low-damage character below level 35. You'll see a better mix of enemies if you're around 30; above that, you'll see only customs in the final mission. Finally, please note that I've repeatedly made a couple of changes to the arc that just won't stick: I've added a description to the contact and made the optional rescue objective in the final mission required. Thus, I'd appreciate it if you could hunt up that last objective, even if I still haven't gotten that change to stick yet.

Also, if you could post a link to your review of my arc #30242, "The Love Talker," I'd appreciate it. The arc was getting near-constant play a couple of weeks ago but now seems near-forgotten.

For another example of "does living on evil make something evil itself?," locate a description of a monster called a "vaath" in the '90's AD&D Planescape product "Planes of Conflict." To spoil the ending, the backstory on that particular creature suggested that while it lived on being evil, it'd still do nasty things even if it didn't. The survival was just a side benefit.

This seems to be how the Red Caps are portrayed in CoH. Honestly, I never got the sense of "the Red Caps MUST do this or die" that you drew from Kelly Nemmers's arc. I got the impression that they were just out being vicious one day and noticed that they could live off it. Contrast the portrayal of, say, the Circle of Thorns, who are often cast as pawns of their own scheme to wipe out the Mu.

Frankly, the Red Caps are creatures with a strong basis in folklore, and folklore generally isn't about this kind of philosophy. In fact, I think it would cheapen the portrayal of the Red Caps to suggest that they'd be less evil if they could, but they're forced into it by their "diet."

That isn't to say that you can't have pathos with a folkloric creature. For an attempt at this, take a look at AE arc #30242, "The Love Talker," which deals with the Red Caps and their victims, as well as other supernatural threats. (Yeah, I'm sorry . . . the whole post was, in fact, a shameless arc plug. :P )

I've never contributed to one of your threads, A-C, and goodness knows I have often disagreed with you, but your post made realize how much the community will lose without you around.

On a personal note, as the author of a pretty melodramatic comic about love in the face of hopelessness, I'll always remember and admire your heartfelt comments about romance in one of the boards' many romance/dating-related threads. The world needs more people with that kind of faith in others.

Finally, I'm surprised to learn you're only 18. Considering how erudite your writing style is (heaven knows, you write better than most of my graduate-level students), I'm sure you will succeed in your academic endeavors.

Best of luck!

I'm working on an Illusion/Kinetics controller, and one of the most enjoyable parts of this build is the variety of IO sets it can slot.

I'm getting close to picking up Transference, and I noticed I have an old Energy Manipulator: Chance to stun proc left over from my electric/energy blapper. I hadn't worked it into her build because I suspected it wouldn't do much good in a single-target attack, and her AoE's already had them.

Anyway, for the purposes of this proc, is the target of Transference the enemy whose endurance gets drained or the allies who get theirs refilled? If it's the latter, the proc will do nothing, and I'll save it for the blapper. If it's the former, I'll consider sticking it on this controller.

In an unrelated matter, I know that Achilles Heel: Chance for -res doesn't stack from the same power used by the same character. Will it stack from different powers used by the same character?

Thanks for reading.

I'm not sure I understand the argument you're making. I think you may be misunderstanding the way spawn points work.

Every zone (and every mission map, for that matter) has a number of spawn points. Nothing exists at a spawn point until at least one character approaches it. Once that character comes within some distance (not sure what), the spawn point is populated based on the level of the character and the attributes of the spawn point itself. For example, a level 50 passing through an entirely new instance of Atlas Plaza will spawn level 2 Hellions in the parking lot, because the spawn points there spawn up to level 2, and the game will detect the character's level and try to get as close to it as possible if it is above the point's own maximum. If the character were passing through, say, the Storm Palace, points might spawn enemies of level 49 to 52 for the same character.

I believe, although I'm not certain, that team size also affects spawn points, at least in non-hazard zones. For example, although Bone Daddies are almost never seen outside on Mercy Island, I've heard that badge-hunting teams sweeping the area will get them to spawn due to their team size. I don't think hazard zones follow these rules; they're automatically set with different spawning rules that produce larger or otherwise more threatening groups.

Now, all this said, what does this have to do with AE? If your point is that fewer teamed characters are passing through zones, meaning fewer team-sized groups with bosses are spawning, you may be right. However, this is nothing new; I've had this problem when hunting various things for badges for years on a variety of servers. However, that isn't really an AE issue; that's an outdoor population issue. The simple fact that lots of players are in AE buildings doesn't mean things aren't appear. Approach a spawn point, and SOMETHING should spawn there, even if you are solo.

After trying to lead a team through it, the final mission of the ITF. I know that Task Force is considered a twenty-minute-long joke on the forums, but after trying to defeat Romulus with every strategy I've ever seen work and failing miserably at all of them, that one takes the cake. It doesn't help that this was with one of the few characters I have that actually would use the Roman armor for something. I really, really don't want to wait until 50 to do this successfully, but it looks like that's what's happening. Again.

Runners up include trying to solo anything featuring Infernal (either version) and the "rescue 21 magicians in Oranbega," because it literally makes me physically ill after about the sixth time through the map looking for hidden magicians numbers 16 through 21.

The best I've ever seen was one of mine, when I typed, "afk bleeding all over mouse." The cuticles on my fingers tend to crack in cold, dry weather, and this was a real gusher. I'd been wondering why the cursor wasn't moving right. The blood on the mousepad had been throwing the optical scanner off.

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... If we've been having issues with getting NC mail, what then? I have to wonder, because the only NC emails I've been getting are my bug reports and petitions in the live game. Nothing whatsoever other than those.

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Same here. I've checked my address with NCSoft and my e-mail filtering, too, and it doesn't seem to do anything. For all I know, I've been in every closed beta they've had since . . . whenever it was I stopped getting those things.

Therefore, if the devs want me in this closed beta, they'll need to send me a fruit basket to let me know. (No cheese or tomatoes, please.)

Seriously, I'd rather wait and see it live. I've done one closed beta (last wave of CoV), and it was frustrating and involved. And unproductive, since I never found anything that I felt needed correction or tweaking because I barely had time to get a feel for the game before it went open.

For what it's worth, my level 50 scrapper was able to take out a Blue Mito in an old arc by using several purple inspirations, staying at long range, and plinking it to death with the veteran Nemesis Staff.

It CAN be done, but the fact that there's such a trick to fighting these things would prevent me from putting them in a mission unless I specifically designed and described it for players as a game design exercise rather than a story thing. I'd also make sure to give information in the mission description AND the arc description about how to fight the mito.

Bottom line? Almost certainly more trouble than it's worth.

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They both felt more like stories than almost any other mission I've tried, and I was happy to get caught up in them and just go along for the ride to see where the story would go.


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I think this may be tied to the "character is inviolate" issue.

I remember back when Joe Morissey ("Hero 1") did his Dev Q&A. One of the questions I asked, which ended up being one he answered, was "How do you write stories knowing nothing about the protagonist?"

His answer, such as it was, essentially amounted to, "Good question. Um, It's hard."

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 author can create a prototagonist and project that character onto the player character. Effectively, this converts the MA arc into a traditional story. This is, in my opinion, exactly why something like "Blight" "feels more like a story" than most arcs.

However, this technique will frustrate players who want to preserve their own characters' . . . characters. I know it frustrates me, and it clearly enrages Venture. (That's not to say that all arc writers, including Venture and me, don't do it at least a little bit by making assumptions about the player character, as I intimated in my last post.)

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.

This approach, too, has its problems. At its most extreme, it produces arcs that are little more than a series of combat animations. Because, as I argued above, plot is tied to character, skimping on character ultimately means skimping on plot.

Neither strategy is adequate on its own, but I believe both have to be accepted, at least until we have a better sense, as individuals and a community, of what we feel "works" in MA arcs, or, indeed, in MMO stories in general, for story purposes. This isn't going to be a quick process. MMO's have been around for only a few years, in the scale of literary history. Right now, we're working from a small set of gut reactions. We need a bigger set of emotional data, one that could take years and several games beyond CoX to accumulate.

I guess what I'm really arguing is that MMO stories and other forms of fiction are different and need to be analyzed in different ways. An MA arc is not a book or a TV show, and, in my opinion, it can't be critically reviewed as if it were. Something new, a form of criticism we're still developing as MMO consumers, is needed. I often criticize the devs for spending too much time as game mechanics engineers and not enough as storytellers, but there's something to be said for the unique nature of a story in the form of an MMO, too.

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Yeah that's true enough. If he's that opposed to the actual core story and concepts of the arc, there's pretty much nothing I can do to please him short of completely changing the arc into something tailored for his likes, in essence, just making it his story, and not the one I wanted to tell.

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This sums up my feelings about the arc pretty well. I pretty much hated everything after mission 2, and I had several of the same criticisms Venture did.

Without (again) giving anything away, all I can say is that the arc suffered from the failure inherent in all modern horror: mistaking gloom and mind-tricks for horror itself. I didn't feel frightened or even intrigued at the end of this thing, just manipulated into a situation of saying, "My character is a joke, life is meaningless, and every thing sucks."

All that said, I still rated the arc highly. When I'm doing criticism on an arc, I try to keep in mind that I may not be the arc's intended audience. I'm reminded of something my Creative Writing thesis advisor told me some years ago, about when criticism strikes a chord with a writer. He said something along the lines of, "When you find someone who loves what you've written but finds fault with what you've done it, that person is the person you should be writing for."

Someone who can't tell the difference between the two will provide you with tinted feedback that you'll have to filter to make useful. The problem with this, of course, is that writers are horrible about filtering feedback on their own work, and why that person you should be writing for is so valuable to find.

Edited to remove asterisk that connected to the footnote I decided to take out.

One other thing that sounds like it might be confusing you is the contact menu itself. If you see the picture of the radio at the top, click on it, and it'll give you missions to choose from. That is, the radio itself is a contact.

This is different from being able to call your human contacts, which you'll be able to do after doing a certain number of missions for the particular contact in question. Once that happens, a blue "call" button appears near the contact's picture.

"Celebrity Kidnapping" also features an interesting use of an ally-aligned, triggered escort NPC as an optional goal. Or, at least, it did the last time I played it, sometime last month.

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I personally HATE Port Oaks with the entirety of my being. I loathe and despise it. Hatred can be DEFINED and ascend to a high plane of meaning through my feelings towards Port Oaks. Port Oaks needs to be chopped into hundreds of chunky, pulpy red smears, set on fire and then scattered to the winds with a fragmentation grenade. Port Oaks needs to go and kindly DIE IN A FIRE. Port Oaks needs to crash and burn. Hate. Hate. Hate. Allow me to tell you how much I have come to Hate Port Oaks since I came into being. I have 3,567 miles worth of paper cut into the word "Hate." If the word "Hate" was further engraved into every nanoamstrong of those 3,567 miles, it would still not equal one trillionth of the Hate I feel for Port Oaks. Hate. Hate. Hate. There should be entire religions devoted to despising the vacuous waste of space that is Port Oaks. It is something where there should be nothing. It needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth, off the face of the universe. Port Oaks needs to be leveled so that not one dust molecule stands atop another. We need to blow a hole in the very fabric of reality where Port Oaks is located and erase existence itself in that one area.


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I can tolerate Port Oakes, yet this post captures my mood at the moment so perfectly that I can't bring myself not to say "/signed."

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My 40 Fire/Shield Scrapper pretty much just tore the AV to shreds. The only thing that made the fight even remotely difficult was the massive spawn around him, which did take me down the first time because I evidently hit keys too fast for OWTS to actually trigger. The second try went much more smoothly. I had more trouble with Talos because of the high Fire resists. On a thematic note, I have no idea why anyone would think Odysseus (leader of the Warriors) should be an Archery/Trick Arrow build that uses the laser sight bow....

I didn't use the ally in act II, either.


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Thank you for the feedback.

Odysseus has a bow because stringing a bow (admittedly probably a hunting bow, not a war bow) plays a significant role in the finale of the Odyssey. Also, I just wanted to try something different.

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Also, take a look at "Urban Renewal," which I designed specifically as a "complex mechanics" arc.

Haven't tried it yet but I'm not optimistic.


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That's just uncalled for, Venture. Criticizing an arc is fine (though I question the point of doing so in someone else's thread), but criticizing someone's intelligence or ability is, in this context, in poor taste.

Check out "The Heart of Talos," #175660. It has a specialized ally designed to enable soloists to defeat Elite Bosses in Mission 2. It also features a final AV fight set up to prevent scrappers from simply tearing the AV to shreds.

Also, take a look at "Urban Renewal," which I designed specifically as a "complex mechanics" arc. (I don't have the arc ID # handy, and it may need fixing; I'll check it tonight when I get home.) It features, among other things, non-custom enemies that buff the custom enemies, use of patrols as replacements for ambushes, non-ambush surprise attacks, chained objectives (on a big map, sadly; they didn't fit on a smaller one), enemies designed to support one another, the use of Sonic Resonance in place of an armor set on one kind of enemy, lots of allies with a variety of interesting powers, goofy outfits, and Freakshow with English monocles. And all of this without archvillains.

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Nemesis: Single male Emperor of the Earth seeks loving female for help with world domination plots and romantic invasions. Please be well-organized and capable of multi-tasking in a high stress environment. Ambition is a must! Do not bother sending a resume or calling, I have been watching you for several months now. This ad was simply a means of letting you know I shall be contacting you soon.


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You laugh, but I've long considered doing a Kid Eros story based on exactly this premise.

QR

I'd just like to say that I heartily approve of the new "invalid arc" icon that an arc is supposed to get if it's invalidated by a patch.

I disapprove of the fact that not all invalidated arcs seem to get this icon. I have an arc with a generator in it, and I assume it's invalid now, but I had no idea about it until I read this thread. Mystifyingly, I had a completely different arc invalidated because the last patch somehow caused something somewhere to forget what I'd designated a glowie as, and that one got the icon.

I'm generally happy with the colors of my existing characters' powers. One exception that springs to mind is my long-neglected spines/regeneration scrapper. It sounds as if I can finally make the spines look properly thorn-like, and if they can be tinted on a per-outfit basis, I can have a different version for each of his four seasonal costumes. (The gaudy glow of regeneration stays for him; part of his concept is using Invisibility to turn into a cloud of lights.) I'll also change my electric/energy blaster's Energy Manipulation to pale blue to match her electricity.

I will, however, make some new characters based on specially colored powers. I'm considering a radiation/energy or /electric blaster in yellow, since yellow is my favorite color. I'm also thinking about an ice/something tank with faintly greenish ice armor based on Antarctic icebergs, which are often tinted green due to microorganisms in the ice.

If you want to see a good range of challenge-focused enemies, check out Arcanaville's Scrapper Challenge mission arc.

Personally, I can tell you from experience that Sonic Resonance on Extreme on higher-ranking enemies can be pretty nasty, especially if you're playing a resistance-based character. This is doubly true if the Sonic Resonance enemy is supporting some minions with a damage or defense-debuff focus.

QR

I'm wondering if it'll cause file size problems in existing MA arcs. Of course, there's no way to know whether enemies will get customizable power colors or not at the moment.

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Yeah I've always wished there were some good Warrior arcs in the game. They have a kinda cool background, but no exciting stories. They are just sort of a forgotten group, more or less.



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In a bit of shameless self-promotion, might I suggest my arc #175660, "The Heart of Talos?" It's meant to wrap up a major Warrior plot point that just sort of gets dropped without explanation in the 20's.

Also, if you like ambushes, I second trying Mercedes Sheldon's third arc. The plot isn't too complex, but you'll get to see a lot of tough melee fights and some relatively complex mechanics.

Atlas Park reminded me of Washington, DC when I used to work there (DC, not Atlas). It has fancy-looking government buildings, historical plaques, prominent public transportation (it's even called the Yellow Line!), and people complaining at the top of their lungs about anything and everything, all the essential characteristics of Washington except the cruddy-looking '70's-era buildings where all the real work gets done.