PoliceWoman

Thanks for the kind words WN.

Here's some other feedback I've received on this arc.

Inhuman Resources - Inevitable Evolution at Work review
Arc ID: 298132
Keywords: Easy, Canon Related, Drama
Morality: Neutral
Level range: unclear? goes 1-54, 1-40, 40-54.

The premise is that you're a villain applying to join a villain group that is opposed to Arachnos. I played a 29 db/ninj stalker. The contact is a custom figure in a semi-formal looking suit.

Mission 1
Briefing: Nicely formatted. The contact does a good job of introducing himself; it turns out he's the lawyer for the VG. Since he's a lawyer, I'm a little surprised he doesn't have me sign some kind of contract or waiver before he hands me the probationary VG items.

Second part of briefing: "resistence" should be "resistance".

I like that he says I can talk to him more about Inevitable Evolution, and then he actually does give me extra information if I do; I had just been thinking "Who is Inevitable Evolution and why do they oppose Arachnos?"

Mission objectives: "4 Fuel Exchanges" should perhaps be "4 Fuel Exchanges to sabotage". I'm not quite sure why the progress bar refers to Johnny Cash.

I found "Alert Squad Commander" and defeated him. His dialog was okay but didn't seem to have any special meaning. Defeating the Squad Commander didn't satisfy the "Cripple the Squad's Leadership" objective, which seemed strange to me. I ended up searching the map and found one Arachnos drone hidden behind a flyer that completed the mission when I killed it. This drone also gave me the "Souvenir from The Commander" clue; guessing that maybe it was part of the commander's group. You might consider making only the boss required to satisfy that objective.

In "Souvenir from The Commander", "iterinary" should be "itinerary".

Debriefing: The contact talks about "Operating as part of a larger team" but I didn't actually see anyone from IE during the mission. (Perhaps this makes more sense if this arc is run with a member of this SG, but you can't really assume that's always the case.) His comment on the lack of paperwork when dealing with Arachnos is kind of weird? Wouldn't Arachnos want him and the other IE members dead, regardless of paperwork?

Mission 2
Briefing: I think some time must've elapsed between mission 1 and mission 2 as now the contact says "I know you were working with the security detail on the Scrapyarder negotiations"; this was a little jarring, I assume this was meant to have happened off-camera at some point. So now we're helping to work out some kind of agreement between the Scrapyarders and the Cage Consortium, and something has gone wrong, so I need to go help.

Second part of briefing: "Its our first directive" should be "It's our first directive".

I like the "Locate the Negotiators. Roughing Up Cage is a Bonus" title. The objective of "3 Punish Cage's Strike Breakers" should maybe be "3 Strikebreakers to punish".

I found and rescued an IE hero named Strange Attractor; I liked his pedantic dialog:

[NPC] Arachnobot: Alright old man, tell us how you got here.
[NPC] Strange Attractor: Opinions vary on the exact process, but essentially a supermassive event at the beginning of time--


Kashira rescuing Strange Attractor

After rescuing him I got a new objective to find his wife, who is apparently held captive here. We end up teaming up against the mix of Arachnos and Cage Consortium inhabiting this warehouse.

I found a couple "Cage Negotiators?" body bags that I clicked, but it didn't update the "5 Negotiators to find" objective, which seemed confusing to me. Maybe I'm only supposed to find the live ones? Not sure.

Later I found some steel drums labeled "Negotiators" apparently containing messily dead scrapyarders which DID update the "5 Negotiators to find". Clicking the drum gives me some description in the Global chat box, but maybe should give me a descriptive clue as well, since it's easy to miss messages in the spammy chat box, and other team members won't be able to see the message that you got. I also think maybe the objective should either be to find all the negotiators (whether body bag or steel drum), or else it could be revised to be "5 Scrapyarders to find" so it would be understandable that the body bags don't update the objective.

Found a wooden barrel containing some gruesome remains, that satisfied the "Find Strange Attractor's wife" objective. You definitely should get a clue for clicking this.

Something I did apparently spawned a Security Chief objective that I had to backtrack over most of the map to find. Defeating him ended the mission, though. It also gave me an "Arachnos Hit List" clue which suggested Arachnos was wiping out both Scrapyarders and Cage Consortium, for some reason. This seems kind of odd because the mission had both Cage Consortium and Arachnos in it, and they didn't seem hostile towards each other.

Debriefing: Although nicely formatted, I felt the debriefing underplays the impact of the murdered negotiators, and especially Strange Attractor's wife. I sort of expected the contact and/or Strange Attractor himself to be shocked by this development. It's mentioned that Strange Attractor wants to join IE now; while this makes sense, I would've expected more reaction from him resulting from his wife's murder.

Mission 3
Briefing: a lot of nice detail here. I think it assumes I've joined IE now; perhaps this should've been made clearer earlier on. A newbie member apparently is out for revenge against the people who killed the Scrapyarders. I'm told that I should "look into this further"; seems reasonable. "foriegn" should be "foreign" here.

I'm apparently to bring him back while minimizing collateral damage.

Once I arrive it turns out there's more IE members to rescue than just Pulsar Force; perhaps this should've been mentioned in the briefing? Found and rescued Filha de Inhansa, a stormy ally.


Kashira rescuing Filha de Inhansa, who nearly kicked the bucket

At this point I got joined by a friend playing a dark/wp brute, so I had to pick up the pace a bit, and the rest of my notes are a little more sketchy.

We seemed to get hit by both Longbow AND Arachnos ambushes, which was a little strange but I guess IE is hated by both.

We found and rescued Pulsar Force; now my objective is 3 fragments to obtain. I thought I started with the objectives to rescue Pulsar Force and 2 other IE members? I've rescued Pulsar Force and Filha de Inhansa, what happened to the other member to rescue?

We found several computers that gave clues but didn't count towards the "3 fragments of code" to find, which was a little confusing. I think they were triggered by rescuing Pulsar Force, who I encountered in the middle of the mission, and some ended up spawning near the front of the mission in the area I had already cleared. This meant we had to backtrack a lot; once we got the last segment near the front of the mission, we had to backtrack again to click the secured mainframe, which spawned in the back of the mission. This seemed like a lot of backtracking; the Cage Consortium patrols (I think maybe were triggered?) helped keep it somewhat interesting, but rearranging the objectives to cut down on the backtracking would be nice.

Mission 4
From the clues found previously, we determine a ship of press-ganged workers is bringing slave labor to the Rogue Isles to add to the Cage Consortium's work force. We're sent to liberate this ship.

Cryopulse is mentioned in the briefing as someone who went ahead of us and we lost contact to her; I kind of think finding her should be one of our initial objectives? Since we know she's here. Instead the initial objectives seem to be to link up with Strange Attractor and Pulsar Force. Why don't we have an objective to rescue the slaves? That is the ultimate goal of this mission, after all.

We found Strange Attractor and he had some decent lines:

[NPC] Strange Attractor: My repriocity has no perceivable frontiers, reprobate! Annihilation rewards your cruelty to my wife!

I like his manner of speech, but "repriocity" isn't a word. Maybe this is a mispelled "reciprocity", but that doesn't quite make sense in this context. I suggest one of: acrimony, animosity, antagonism.

[NPC] Strange Attractor: Astonishingly paragon punctuality! Such serendipity is your hallmark, Kitten Puncher

Paragon is a noun, but you're using it as an adjective here. (I picture Strange Attractor using long words, but using them correctly.) Perhaps something like "Your fortuitous ingress is astonishingly opportune." Also needs a period at the end of the line.

Rescuing Strange Attractor triggers a new objective of saving Inhansa. I'm not quite clear on why finding her is triggered by finding him; is there a reason I wouldn't know that I need to save Inhansa at the very beginning of the mission? I think she was part of our strike team, no?

Likewise rescuing Pulsar Force triggers Cryopulse as an objective. Why isn't finding Cryopulse an initial objective?

Inhansa actually got beat up by a Cage patrol in mission 3 and my brute teammate commented that she was "back from the dead". I told him she probably used an Awaken.

One of Cryopulse's guards says:

[NPC] Tarantula: Anyone got a screwdriver? These armored leggings are locked down, & I want a taste of his "hero".

I think "his" should be "this" here.

Rescuing Cryopulse triggered the final objective, which was to defeat Captain Mako and "rescue the slaves". Mako spawned as an EB for us and I thought he had great dialog, and was a pretty fun fight. Ironically he placated me during the fight, which I was somewhat indignant about (though, to be fair, I was playing a stalker too).


Kashira fighting Mako as allies watch with awe (or maybe slow-to-aggro AI...let's say it's awe)

No actual slaves were present during this mission that I could see. Consider adding some "slave worker" hostages that the player rescues during the mission; this would help add to the impression that you're really rescuing a ship full of captives. As presented, the only people I rescue are the 4 IE allies.

Debriefing was nicely written and left me with a good feeling of accomplishment.

Overall
I thought this arc was a good "recruitment" orientation for the IE villain group, which I understand was the arc's main design goal. The briefings were well-written and I liked the various IE allies and particularly how Strange Attractor and Pulsar Force were both connected to the story.

I did think it was odd that IE is a villain group, but everything they are presented as doing (sabotaging Arachnos, helping the labor union against the Cage Consortium, and stopping the slave shipment) seems pretty heroic. Why does Longbow consider them a terrorist group that they attack on sight? Perhaps IE should be shown doing some shady activities in order to more clearly place them in the "grey" area. As presented, I have to wonder why they aren't considered a hero group.

I felt that mission 1 seemed rather disconnected from the rest of the arc; it doesn't tie in with the labor issues that missions 2 through 4 deal with, and doesn't have any clues or NPCs that are relevant to the rest of the arc. It also seems like there's something of a "time jump" between missions 1 and 2, which makes it feel even further disconnected. I understand mission 1 is meant to be somewhat introductory, but I think the arc would be stronger if this mission tied in a little better. Alternatively, you could cut this mission; but, I do think it helps to have a mission where the player is "recruited" to IE, so I'd lean towards keeping it in some form. Perhaps you could meet one of the minor IE characters that you run into later (maybe Cryopulse? she has the least screen time currently) and/or you could find some clue that leads into the Cage vs Scrapyarder labor standoff.

The gameplay in general was mostly good; possibly a bit excessive on the use of triggered objectives, but not too bad. I did think the use of glowies in missions 2 and 3 was a little awkward (multiple kinds of barrels/computers, not all of which count towards the objectives).

I liked the arc overall, especially the later missions. I wanted to rate this arc around a 4.5; the nice final mission caused me to err on the generous side. I ended up giving it 5 stars.

---

My queue is currently:

@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308
@GlaziusF - Backwards Day 329000
Aisynia - The Most Important Thing (266877)

Since we are spamming this thread with interesting and thoughtful discussion (which I like, don't get me wrong), I decided to consolidate everyone's posted favorites and add it to the Original Post, for ease of use by anyone else who happens across this thread.

Introspection

Some musings....

Even on the "MA Stories" forum, where the most rabid fans of story-oriented AE hang out, very few people play any story arc (not written by themselves) more than once. Several people who I know have played 100+ arcs (including myself), could only come up with 0 to 2 arcs they've played 3 times and would recommend as favorites.

For my own part (note: purely anecdotal evidence warning), I know I've played through Azuria's missions, Kalinda's story arc, the Bonefire arc, the Striga story arcs, the Croatoa story arcs, the RWZ story arcs, Westin Phipp's story arc, Seer Marino's story arc, all at least 5 times each. Some of them maybe dozens of times. But for the most part, the PvE content isn't as cool as the best of the AE content. So why do I keep replaying it?

Granted, most of the dev-created content has been around a lot longer than AE, and so naturally would've gotten replayed more times. But is that the only reason?

Thinking about it, the most avid AE fans (or at least the sample that frequent this forum) have played hundreds of story arcs, but re-play almost no story arcs. Could this be a factor in why AE seems to be in decline? Maybe a lot of the people who really like AE have already played most of the content they're interested in, and aren't interested in re-playing it? (Note: Speculation.)

Riddle: what makes a story arc replayable, that would bring someone (other than the author) to come back and play it again and again?

I don't know yet.

But I'd be interested in finding out.

Favorites list

There's a growing consensus that a "favorites list" would be a helpful feature in AE.

This would be much better as a built-in feature of the AE interface, but until the devs get around to adding that, I figure I can maintain my own.

Feel free to add your own favorites here as well. But, I'd like to request that we all follow the same ground rules:


1. You can't list your own arc as a favorite. (Otherwise everyone will.)

2. You must've played through the arc at least 3 times, and at least one of these times should've been purely for fun; i.e., not for review, not because you owe them a play through, and not just because you're trying to satisfy this rule -- honor system on this. (Can't really say an arc is a "favorite" if you only run it once, ever, after all.)

3. The arc can't be a farm. (The most obvious way to get someone to play it 3 times.)


These don't seem like very strict rules, but actually I've played/replayed surprisingly few arcs 3 times.



With those rules in mind, so far on my "favorites" list is:


Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette TF
Arc Id: 58363
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 1-14

It's admittedly not the deepest, most dramatic story arc I've played, but it IS fun. Fusionette and the other Nuclear 90 are charmingly characterized and the debriefings made me crave for hamburgers. It's designed to be suitable for lowbies, and with my rampant altitis, I find that I keep playing it over and over with newbie characters.


Escalation
Arc ID: 6143
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 21-50

The antagonist has an unusual but neat superpower that is cleverly handled, and the grudge match with the player is very comic booky and fun. I didn't originally rate this arc that high, but over time it's clear that the author has taken every review and bit of feedback as an opportunity to improve the story, and it really shows. The arc is full of little details that make it more cool.

------------

Consolidated list of other posters' favorites

Bubbawheat's favorites
A Tangle in Time (arc id 2622, level 5-50)

Lazarus's favorites
The Extadine Lab (arc id 2595, level 40-50)

londerwost's favorites
Blight (arc id 140423, level 40-50)
Rick Hall R[EVOL]UTION (Wake up, America!) (arc id 166081, level 41-50)

Eva Destruction's favorites
Ctrl + Alt + Reset (arc id 137561, level 15-30)
The Extadine Lab (arc id 2595, level 40-50)

anarchodragon's favorites
Bricked Electronics (arc id 2180, level 8-20)
Captain Dynamic, the Great, Faces The Great Face (arc id 190069, level 30-50)
Rick Hall R[EVOL]UTION (Wake up, America!) (arc id 166081, level 41-50)

Venture's favorites
Escalation (arc id 6143, level 21-50)

MrCaptainMan's favorites
The Consequences of War, pts 1 and 2 (arc ids 227331 & 241496, level 40-50)
The Tubbius Trilogy (arc id ?, level ?)
Celebrity Kidnapping (arc id 1388, level 30-40)

After some pondering on this subject, here's my thoughts:

I16 nerfs: were they needed?

Although most of us on this forum are more story-oriented, to the wider public, AE had become synonymous with powerleveling and farming.

This being the case, I believe a nerf to farming/PLing in AE was needed. I would hazard to say, most people probably even expected some sort of nerf. I think that most of us would agree that we would prefer AE to be more story-oriented, so really, we should view these nerfs as beneficial (at a macro level) to the environment. I don't think we'll ever get rid of all farming and PLing; there will ALWAYS be farming, it's human nature in these games. But I do think we need to curtail it enough that AE is not viewed exclusively as a farming tool.

I realize this won't be a popular viewpoint, but I think it's true.


I16 nerfs: did they go too far?

Now, assuming we needed a nerf, the question is raised: did the I16 nerfs go overboard? Personally, I think they did, but I can understand how this happened. Let me explain why I think this.

Lest we forget, there have been a series of smaller nerfs to AE exp, in an effort by the devs to reduce farming. Off the top of my head I can think of:

- Prisoners nerfed
- Rikti Comm Officers nerfed
- Mitos nerfed
- Freakshow nerfed
- Added a range power to every melee set
- Constant tweaking of the minimum powerset you can give a mob

But, none of these smaller tweaks were enough, as we saw.

As a result, I can totally understand why the I16 nerfs are trying to fix the problem with a hammer instead of with a precision instrument. They did try to fix it with smaller, more targeted measures first; but it was never enough.

So, painful as this nerf is, I can see why they did it. And it's certainly affected me, too -- I have an arc with a Zig breakout in which my Prisoners faction got nerfed and I had to write a custom faction to replace them; then in I16 I had to add lieutenants and bosses to my custom faction. That was pretty painful.

That said, I do hope the devs continue to monitor AE and eventually realize some of the I16 nerfs are excessive, and roll them back in future adjustments. I particularly dislike the "standard powersets = 75% exp" change, and agree with the general sentiment that a "standard powers" custom mob is usually harder than a generic PvE mob, especially at low levels. (It would actually be nice to have the "standard powers" set adjust based on mob level, but that may be too much to ask.)


Why aren't people playing AE now?

Well, a lot of reasons, really. Here are my speculations:

1. I16 powerset proliferation and color customization => altitis => less AE

A little counterintuitive, but think about it. I personally have started several alts since I16, some using new powersets, most using custom special effects for powers. I think most active players probably did the same.

If you don't join PLing teams (and I try not to), AE is pretty forbidding for a new alt; most new alts will be doing Azuria's or Kalinda's missions, or sewers, or something.

There are a few lowbie AE arcs (and I do like these) but they are not easy to find; most "1-54" arcs would be suicide for a real level 1. Usually a story arc has to be specially constructed (with easy mobs) to be survivable for a level 1 or 2 character. Maybe there should be a better search option for lowbie-oriented arcs? A new keyword or a way to find arcs that are no higher than 1-10 or something?


2. I16 supersidekicking => easier to get teams => less AE

It is really easy to get on a team now due to the SSKing feature; no more calculus to figure out if you have enough mentors to carry another level 22 or another level 14. And, unfortunately, teams rarely do AE any more. I was on a lot of teams that did AE early in I15 but lately, teams I'm on almost always do regular content (radio or door missions) or TFs.

Even when I'm the team leader, I'm reluctant to drag people into the AE building; usually a team is fast paced and you don't have time to read all the cool clues or catch all the dialog, because you have people on your team who want to fight something RIGHT NOW. As a result, AE has more and more become a "solo" activity for me.

I like soloing and I like AE, so I'm happy to solo my way through AE content. But let's face it, given the choice between soloing and joining a team -- usually being on a team is more fun. That's why most of us are playing a MMORPG and not a single-player computer game, after all.


3. AE is soooo I14 => I16 just came out => less AE

AE is several issues old now. People are drawn to shiny new things. Back in I14 and even in I15, AE was the shiny new thing. Now it's not. It's natural for people to be doing it a little less and looking at the new shiny new thing instead.


4. Less exp => less AE

I agree this is a factor too, and is extensively discussed above already. But I don't think it's the only factor, and I'd argue it may not even be the biggest one.



Personally, if I had to pick a "worst" problem AE has right now, it would be the fact that running through story arcs is becoming much more of a solo activity. I've noticed this trend in my own gameplay and it's rather worrisome; I don't know how to reverse it. But I'm not sure if everyone is observing the same thing in their gameplay, so your mileage may vary.

Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black review
Arc ID: 161629
Keywords: Solo Friendly, Canon Related
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 41-54
Warnings: enemies with custom powers

The premise appears to be to help some heroes against some kind of shadowy conspiracy involving the Malta. I played a heavily IO'd 50 AR/dev blaster on +0 x0 difficulty.

The contact is a Freakshow juicer.

Mission 1
Briefing: Nicely formatted and quite a funny intro that does a good job of explaining why your contact is a Freak and helps define his character. Apparently he's a reformed salesfreak whose shop is being attacked and he needs a hero's help. I especially like the line "The owner's probably got ninja insurance or something" to explain why you only need to save the hostages.

Inside the mission: the contact told me in the briefing that there are 3 salesfreaks to rescue, but the mission objectives only list "2 employees to find". This seems inconsistent initially. I did find an "employee schedule" with a clue saying that one of the salesfreaks left work early; perhaps that should count as an "employee to find" just to make the total add up to 3.

Clicking the desk satisfied the "find clues" objective, and my spam box says "You found some clues on the desk; you can check them out later, ninja chicks are trying to kill you!" but strangely, this did not give me a clue in my clue journal. I'm guessing I will get a clue on mission complete, but based on the way this is presented, I think I should get some sort of clue (though maybe an incomplete one) at this time.

Found a couple body bags that satisfied "2 employees to find" and completed the mission. Aww! Poor salesfreaks.

Finishing the mission did indeed give me the "Pwnzinator's Desk" clue. This clue is well-written with lots of little details.


This clue is just awesome.


During the mission, some of the KoA said:

[NPC] Mercenary: They said three. We're missing one.
[NPC] Mercenary: Not our problem. Our job is to eliminate everyone here and erase the evidence, so start erasing.

I think their count is slightly off. By my count, there are actually four salesfreaks: Robert, Mike, Trevor, and Pete. The KoA have ganked Mike and Trevor, so if they're here to eliminate "everyone", they should still be missing 2, Robert and Pete.

Debriefing: nicely written.

Mission 2
Briefing: "zig" should be "Zig". Otherwise a good briefing asking me to make sure Pete is okay at the nightclub he went to.

I like the mission entry popup and it's over-the-top description of the music they play here.

The irony of the contact telling me Pete is "a guy with a pink mohawk and a metal arm, he kinda stands out" becomes apparent as I find the nightclub is full of hostile Freaks.

Found and clicked a body bag labeled "Club Patron"; it didn't seem to do anything (no objectives satisfied, no clues). There's a message in my spam box about the patron's injuries; consider adding a short clue to that effect also, since it's easy to miss messages that appear in the Global window.


Sorry, guys. The party's over when police arrive.


There is a lot of good dialog in this mission, from the Freaks, the KoA assassins and the newbie heroine that you rescue. I like how both the Freaks and the KoA are after Pete here, and the general "We're here to kill someone and to party!" attitude the Freaks have, while the KoA display utter disdain toward the Freaks.

Mission 3
Briefing: another nicely written briefing. "I" decide to check out this address I found in that clue earlier, to find Pete (and apparently Kat, the newbie heroine).

I somehow find it hilarious that Kat's hero name is "Darkfire Avenger"...that's so stereotypical! Yet it kinda works considering how darkity-dark she's portrayed. I like the line from the Malta holding her hostage:

[NPC] Operation Engineer: Shouldn't you be out killing Skulls? Or can't you resist a man in uniform?

Rescued Kat and Pete and Pete tells me that some big shot ambassador is mixed up in the conspiracy that he read about on the Internet. Soon after, I find a body bag with "the body of an African man in the remains of an expensive suit" (according to the spam message window). Uh oh, is Pete helping a Nigerian prince move his millions of dollars out of the country? You might consider adding a clue to the clue journal for the body bag, also.


How do I keep ending up on these pickup teams?


"laptop" glowy should be "Laptop" and maybe give a clue. The spam box says something about Longbow personnel files; should maybe put this in the clue journal also.

Found "Ambassador Keyes" who turned out to be an evil duplicate posing as the ambassador, who called a sapper ambush onto me (ick). Managed to beat the Ambassador and the ambush.

My objectives now are "Find the real Ambassador Keyes", which makes sense, and "Defeat liquidation team Alpha"; but the dialog actually announces:

[NPC] Ambassador Keyes: Legion Black 3-6-3 requesting assistance. We have an MHI in progress, repeat, MHI in progress.
[NPC] Sapper: We read you, 3-6-3, initiating MHI protocols.
[NPC] Sapper: Liquidation team Gamma reporting. All quiet over here.
[NPC] Tactical Operative: Liquidiation team Beta reporting. Looks clear.
[NPC] Ambassador Keyes: Operation compromised. Requesting liquidation team.

....so why doesn't team Alpha report in, and why do I particularly have to defeat Alpha but not team Beta or team Gamma?

I did find and rescue the real Keyes (I hope! I didn't fingerprint him or anything) and defeated a boss named Legion Black 3-5-3 who seemed to count as Liquidation Team Alpha; though he doesn't have "Team Alpha" in his name or anything, so I'm not sure how I know he's Team Alpha. As his attack message, he says:

[NPC] Legion Black 3-5-3: This definitely qualifies as a security breach. Take 'em down.

....there seem to be some extra spaces immediately before "This definitely".

Got "The Malta Warehouse" clue at the end of the mission, with a lot of interesting detail about a plot against West Libertalia.

I like the bits of dialog the "real" (I hope) Keyes is given. He isn't on stage that long, but the writing definitely portrays him as being very idealistic and principled (for a politician).

Mission 4
Briefing: nice briefing explaining what happens to the ambassador. The mysterious text messages from Pete's phone are revealed to be from someone else, but we think this mysterious someone has been helping us, so we decide I should go save whomever it is.

Inside the mission there's a mix of Malta and "Crey Security" who at first glance look like real Crey, but I think were actually custom assault rifle/martial arts models that look a lot like Crey security agents, with a few power tanks mixed in. (I realized this after I noticed they were level 51 and I remember from using Crey in a couple story arcs that nearly all Crey models only go up to 45.)

"Security Chief" is in the regular Crey faction, while all the other Crey are in the Crey Security faction. I think maybe the Security Chief should be in "Crey Security" as well.

Found "Computer" and clicked it, which told me about a mysterious transaction that was scheduled, and satisfied the "seek clues" objective and triggered a "Find the buyer" objective.

Found Target242 and rescued him. Wow, it turned out to be a real person! I was half expecting it to be an alias of "The Doctor".

It seems Target242 is a disgruntled former Crey employee who invented an illusion device.

I found and destroyed a Shipping Crate, which gave me the Portable Holographic Imager clue. It describes me as turning on the little device. I actually would've thought destroying the shipping crate would destroy the device, though; if you're meant to capture it, maybe it should be a clickable glowy instead. But, later on, the mission exit popup says "The holographic emitters...you destroyed most of them." So did I capture a device or did I destroy it? Seems inconsistent.

I found and fought Legion Chrome 0-3 and killed him, but a nasty Malta ambush jumped me right after, with a sapper that drained all my END; fortunately defeating the boss completed the mission and I quickly punched out.

Legion Chrome 0-3 says:

[NPC] Legion Chrome 0-3: You promised ten units by the end of the day. We have two. First your brain-dead cyborgs tip off a hero, now you can't deliver on a simple shipment...you're not exactly inspiring confidence here.

I think you have an extra space between "your" and "brain-dead". Also, do they really have two? The mission exit popup says "one is unaccounted for". Did the fake ambassador have the other one? In that case, why didn't we find it when we beat the fake ambassador? Perhaps defeating the fake ambassador should give a clue describing a busted device or something.

Mission 5
Briefing: fun briefing. I like the interplay between the Zapmasta and Target242 and how Target242 compliments the player on her fight with the Malta.

Target242 says we only have an hour to stop Operation Requiem, but the mission actually has no timer on it (nitpicky, maybe).

It looks like we think Operation Requiem is an assassination attempt. Inside the mission, I have the objective of "Rescue Ambassador Alwani" ... but the briefing says that Ambassador Keyes is here too, why don't I need to rescue Keyes too? Do I know he's not a target somehow?

Oh, I like the "SWAT Officers" from the "Steel Canyon Police" that are present. They have some great dialog too. I can't help but notice they're level 30 but the Malta here are level 50; this makes sense though, they need a hero to help out. I see some friendly Longbow also,

I found these lines pretty funny too:

[NPC] Sapper: If those meta-noobs show up again, I got dibs. They're starting to tick me off.
[NPC] Tactical Operative: Did you just say "noobs?"

I ran into "Target", who seems to be Target242 repainted as a newbie hero and he started following me around as an ally; later I also found Darkfire Avenger and Pwnzinator again, too. I didn't really want to have to clear the whole map (being the outdoor Steel Canyon map, it's quite large) so I ended up leaving the allies behind.

I beat up Legion 3-6-1 and rescued Officer Chavez; neither of these seemed required objectives, but I liked that they were there; it made the big map feel like more stuff is happening on it. Some of the other Longbow had dialog referring to Chavez and how he wasn't responding, which was a nice touch.

Ooh, I found an "Officer Chavez?" also, who turned out to be an impostor. Managed to defeat him, and it satisfied the "defeat the assassin" objective. His dialog does hint that Keyes hasn't arrived yet, helping to explain why he's not an objective. I like how the "Longbow personnel files" foreshadowed this development, too.

After searching Steel Canyon for awhile, I finally found Ambassador Alwani held captive behind one of the buildings and rescued him, which finished the mission.

Debriefing: a nice wrap-up where Keyes thanks me for all the work I've done.

Fun souvenir as well. The last paragraph is particularly fun.

Overall
This was an entertaining conspiracy theory story. The writing in the briefings and the clues was very good. The characterization was excellent, with each of the NPCs having their own voice and personality. It wasn't really a comedy arc, but there were bits of humor that worked well. I liked the map selections in general; it was nice that most of them were on smaller maps that were just big enough to tell the story; except perhaps the final map, which did require some searching to find the objectives. But it wasn't too bad and there was a lot of stuff in that mission to keep it interesting.

I liked all the non-required side objectives, but I did think some of the glowies should award a clue rather than just a message in the chat box. Sorry to keep harping on this, but messages in the Global window are easy to miss, and if you're on a team, other teammates won't see that message at all. So if it's either important to the story, or interesting enough that you'd like the players to see it, it should probably be a clue.

Despite that, I thought this arc was very well done. I gave it 5 stars.



---

My queue is currently:

twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308
@GlaziusF - Backwards Day 329000

Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue re-review
Arc ID: 163967
Keywords: Custom Characters, Comedy
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 20-25
Warnings: custom power selections

This is a story arc about the rivalry between two restaurants. I played a 22 elec/SR scrapper on +0 x1 difficulty. Since this is a re-review, I'm mainly checking to see if the issues I raised earlier were addressed.

Mission 1
Briefing: "sabotoge" should be "sabotage".

I like the added food references in the mission. I think Tyrone's line:

[NPC] Tyrone Rider: Tira must have sent you to rescue me.

...is a little awkward; most people wouldn't naturally say something like that.

You might consider giving the KCCC employees a little more dialog in mission 1 to help set the atmosphere; maybe add an (optional) static boss or patrol that has a few lines talking about that they're up to.

I like the "Fresh Coupons" clue you added, that mentions King Colonel's Chicken & Cake.

Roaster's description seems awfully short and doesn't really describe her (unlike the other mobs whose powers are explained as being relevant to their fast food jobs). Maybe add a little text.

Mission 2
I like that there are some warehouse employees to rescue now.


Thunder Girl: You're free now, Mr. Warehouse Worker! You can go back to work!
Worker: Umm. Sure. Right after my coffee break.


One of these encounters generated the dialog:

[NPC] Sweetener: If you could just show us where the supplies are, we'll be on our way.
[NPC] Forklift Driver: Wow, this has been a crazy day.

These lines are okay, and the KCCC is here to steal supplies, but the lines are also kind of generic. I think it'd be more fun if you could give them lines that are either food-related (to strengthen the "restaurant" theme), or funny (since this is labeled a Comedy), or both. (Likewise for the other hostage.)

As an example, some other mobs in the same mission said:

[NPC] Dicer: I prefer the Explosive Chicken combo meal.
[NPC] Pulverizer: I think the fries are best with the glowing BBQ sauce.

...which is much better because it's both food-related (strengthening the "restaurant rivalry" theme) and somewhat silly.

Random idea: maybe all the KCCC employees should have the logo of their restaurant (maybe a golden K, or one of the bird symbols) as their "chest symbol", to make them seem more like uniformed fast food employees? (Not required, just a suggestion.)


Mission 3
Inside the mission, I find Tira Rider and rescue her. One of Tira's guards says:

[NPC] Chiller: Just because King Colonel is a little jealous of Rider's Ribs doesn't mean he's delirious.

I'm really not quite sure what this line is supposed to mean; maybe it could be made a little more funny. Or perhaps he could say something relating to Tira.


Thunder Girl: Tira! I'm here to rescue you!
Tira: Aren't you a little short to be a stormtrooper?


Rescuing Tira gives me the "Poorly thought out master plan" clue. Love the name of this clue; the plan itself isn't all that exciting though (King Colonel is stealing some recipes) and could stand to be made more funny and/or more outrageous. And would using some of Mr Rider's recipes really require kidnapping him?

I found and fought King Colonel, with Tira's help. I liked some of his lines:

[NPC] King Colonel: My culinary superiority shall infect your soul!
[NPC] King Colonel: Your Kentucky fried justice is no match for me!

...but some of his other lines seemed a little too generic:

[NPC] King Colonel: You worthless Scrapper. Die!
[NPC] King Colonel: You'll never beat me, Thunder Girl.
[NPC] King Colonel: Don't think you've won, Thunder Girl. You'll never escape!

...by which I mean, any boss could probably say those lines; while the first two are more uniquely "King Colonel" lines.


King Colonel: All I wanted was for people to like my fried chicken!
Thunder Girl: Your chicken is radioactive, you crazy freak!
King Colonel: Yes, of course! That's what gives the chicken that zesty flavor!


Poor Tira fell to the ambushes of fast food employees, but I fought past them to rescue Tyrone Rider, then led him out, fighting Disasta Recipe on the way out. One of her lines:

[NPC] Disasta Recipe: Uncle Tyrone's ribs may be good but they are no match for King Colonel's Chicken & Cake

needs punctuation (a . or a ! ) at the end of it.

The debriefing isn't bad but I think it could use a little more writing.... perhaps describing KC and Disasta cooking in the Zig, or the reopening of Rider's Ribs, or other wrap-up of what happens beyond "it's finally over", to give the arc a little more sense of closure.

I still like the Golden Spork souvenir.

Overall
I could see where you made improvements and I like the additions that were made. I definitely think it is better for them.

The main thing I'd suggest working on at this point is improving the writing and making the dialog more funny (since the arc is labeled "comedy"). There's certainly some good lines already, but there's also a lot of lines that were a little generic that could be reworked to be both funnier and better connected to the food theme. I'd suggest trying to make just about everything tied into the restaurant rivalry; especially the dialog and the clues, but maybe also add some more text to the briefings and debriefings.

I do think the arc is definitely improved though, and so I rated it 4 stars.

---

My queue is currently:

EvaDestruction - Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black #161629
twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308
@GlaziusF - Backwards Day 329000

9/23/2009

On Monday night, I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) on a Lady Grey TF with a team mix of:

2 brutes
1 stalker
1 blaster
1 defender (cold/sonic)
2 controllers (mind/rad, grav/rad)
1 corruptor (?/dark)

My colorizing of Spacegirl's powers earned me comments of "Rad should not be pink!" and "That's just wrong!" from a couple of teammates. Nevertheless I think I'm going to persist with wielding pink radiation at least for a little longer. This TF was a bit zergtastic with a lot of deaths, but we still managed to finish in 1hr 5mins.

After that I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on an AE arc called Splintered Shields, an investigation into internal corruption in Longbow. This was well-written with interesting characters; I gave it 5 stars.

I also started a newbie rad/psy defender, who I gave light blue radiation instead. Joined up with an 8-player sewers team in Atlas Park. Some much higher level players joined the sewers team, but since the team leader was level 4, they got exemped down by the SSK feature -- but were still getting exp in the sewers! This was actually kind of neat. This team got my newbie defender to level 8.


Tuesday night, I started off playing Thunder Girl (16 elec/SR scrapper) on a Positron TF with a team mix of:

1 tanker (ice/nrg)
4 scrappers (elec/elec, elec/SR, elec/shield, elec/regen)
1 blaster (nrg/nrg)
1 defender (traps/AR)
1 controller (grav/rad)

Electric melee scrappers seem to be really popular right now, due to being new and shiny in I16. Only the controller had healing ability; I do think the traps defender was helping (with acid mortar and FF Gen), but it was a subtle sort of contribution. The controller soon got very annoyed by how utterly crazy the scrappers on the team were (often aggroing extra mobs and such); I had started off being pretty aggressive (I do believe scrappers should be hyperaggressive in order to be effective) but dialed it back a bit after awhile, following rather than charging. The other scrappers mostly stayed aggressive. We had our share of deaths (I managed to suffer only one, due to getting mez'd by a Ruin Mage; I've been procrastinating horribly on picking up Practiced Brawler, my mez defense) but managed to make it through the TF in 2hrs 43mins for the new reward of 66 merits. This also got Thunder Girl to level 20 (I picked up Chain Induction at 18 and Stamina at 20) and I have to say that getting exp while exemped on a TF is really nice.

I went on to duo with the elec/regen scrapper for some of Stephanie Peebles' missions in Striga Isle. We fought a lot of Council robots, which normally are hard for my scrappers due to lethal resist, but seemed pretty easy for us; thinking they might be vulnerable to energy damage? This ended up getting Thunder Girl to level 22, where I took Quickness.

Splintered Shields review
Arc ID: 253991
Keywords: Challenging, Canon Related, Drama
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 45-54
Warnings: AVs, EBs, higher level villains appearing at lower levels (how do you get this at 45-54? I guess some 50+ only AVs?), enemies with custom power selections.

Description is something about an Arachnos agent raiding Paragon City; I don't get much idea what the premise of the arc from this, though. You might consider adding more description to give more of a "hook" for players to want to try it.

The contact is Captain Dietrich of Longbow. I played a heavily IO'd 50 AR/dev blaster on the difficulty formerly known as Heroic (now "+0/x1").

Mission 1
Briefing: Nicely formatted. The contact gives a brief introduction and says she needs my help to stop an Arachnos attack led by an Operative Kobushi. Seems like a pretty mundane objective, but let's go with it.

Inside the mission: some nice looking Longbow vs Arachnos battles. But wait...the Longbow are hostile? Huh? Is this intentional?

I overheard a Longbow patrol uttering some dialog about how they're worried about a hero showing up:

[NPC] Longbow Eagle: We are so screwed! Not only are the bugs here, but I heard a hero's inbound!
[NPC] Longbow Minigun: Uh...the datalink's out, just say we couldn't ID him, thought he was with the bugs.

I think this is the explanation for why they're shooting at me. I originally thought "him" was maybe Operative Kobushi, but later I figured out that it was meant to be me ("him" and "he" threw me as my character is female). I'd complain about the pronoun trouble, but arguably they might not know exactly who is being sent here. Consider making the dialog even more clearly damning, though, like inserting "we'll wax him" or something similar in there.

I examined a couple of the glowy boxes, which were labeled as optional objectives. They don't seem to do much, but they have some text in the chat box about smashed drug ampules. Maybe they should additionally give a clue? It's easy to miss messages in the game text spam box.

I found and fought Operative Kobushi, who had some interesting dialog hinting that the Longbow here were dirty somehow and he was....doing something heroic to them? Hmmm, wonder why an Arachnos operative would be doing good deeds? He assumes I'm with the dirty Longbow, of course.

Found and clicked a computer console that gave me the "Computer Files" clue (hinting at some sort of drug-related Longbow misdeeds) and completed the mission.

Debriefing: Nicely written. Dietrich acts like she doesn't know anything about the misdeeds of the Longbow at this base, and insists she will investigate it.

Currently the debriefing includes "Dietrich is visibly upset when you return" as descriptive text; you might consider making this a different color or enclosing it in parentheses or something to make it more clearly not part of her dialog, considering some of her actual dialog is also in italics.

Mission 2
Briefing: Nicely written. I like that she holds a press conference to apologize for the "friendly fire" incident. The contact wants me to interview the commanding officer of the Longbow involved in the incident. He's apparently performing a drug bust - which seems fitting based on the evidence in mission 1. Though it does make me wonder, is drug enforcement actually within Longbow's jurisdiction? (I wouldn't think so, but they're something of Ms Liberty's private army, so probably could do anything she wants them to.)

I like the dossier that she gives me on Livingston. "US infantry" is a weird term though, maybe should be "US Army" or "as an infantry officer in the US Army".

Inside the mission: some Longbow vs Family battles. Looks like the Longbow are actually friendly this time. I think I instantaneously got "An apology" clue upon entering the mission; I think this was meant to be awarded when I found Livingston, but maybe was immediately awarded because he was an ally who didn't have any guards. (Or perhaps the battles wiped out whomever was guarding him.)

Found and fought Victor Praetorius, a robotics MM. He triggered Kobushi, who I had to backtrack some distance to find. Kobushi had some more heroic (?) dialog about how he was disgusted with my actions and I obviously didn't care about how many lives the drugs ruin. I'd explain that it's all a misunderstanding, but I kind of have to shoot him full of bullets and stuff, in self-defense.

He gives me the "J'accuse!" clue, where he accuses me of colluding with Livingston for some unspecified nefarious activity.

Defeating him also ends the mission, giving me the "Livingston's Story" clue, where he admits some (?) of his men are dirty, re-selling confiscated drugs and such. But he wants me to give him "a little more time" so he can do his own investigation. Yeah, right.

Debriefing: nicely written. The contact doesn't believe Livingston's story either, and gives some more background info about Kobushi (who apparently is a "defender of the people" type who just happens to work for Arachnos) and Praetorius, which helps build up both of them as characters.

Mission 3
Briefing: Nice briefing with a lot of details, explaining what Dietrich thinks Livingston is up to. Now we have to check some of the evidence gathered during the last mission, which has been "transferred to a PPD evidence warehouse".

The briefing provides some technobabble about a gizmo to "check" the evidence without actually contaminating it.

Inside the mission: I rather like that you actually get to meet some (friendly) PPD officers in this mission, as you check out the evidence.


Police officers discussing the evidence


The first crate I check gives me the "Stolen Drugs" clue, confirming that Livingston is involved in stealing the confiscated drugs. There's 6 crates though, and the additional crates don't seem to reveal anything new - until the last crate, which spawns a KoA boss with some minions! I thought this was an ambush at first, but I think it just happened to spawn right on top of my head. Or maybe it was a boss AND an ambush or patrol; they had several lines of dialog.

I love that the PPD get involved in the fight and have lines that are triggered when they start fighting! Minor nitpick:

[NPC] Psi-Captain Kincaid: I'm glad I sent the civilans home!

"civilans" should be "civilians" here.

Debriefing: good writing here. A few awkward phrases: "Aside from your findings" sounds weird to me, maybe should be "In addition to your findings".

"only swiped the X, K or such, the stuff that only kills the users" sounds awkward to me; maybe "only swiped the X, the Special K, and other drugs that only kill the users". The "or such" is the bit that seems awkward to me.

Mission 4
Briefing: We have an arrest warrant for Livingston now, but he's fled the country for the Rogue Isles. We're going after him though; Longbow doesn't care about little things like national boundaries. Ironically, we're going to try and save Operative Kobushi from a revenge attack from Livingston. I'm to check out base 1 while Dietrich checks out base 2.

Objectives: My only objective is "Hack into the base's network", but this was actually something Dietrich asked me to do only if I couldn't find Livingston; this immediately gives away the fact that I'm not going to find Livingston here (unless he somehow gets triggered later). You might consider having this objective named something like "Find Livingston" or something similar to preserve the illusion that he might actually be here, but since he's not actually here, clicking the computer would ACTUALLY satisfy that objective. This is a little deceptive, though; so, I could see arguments against doing it, too.

Some good dialog from the various minions that inhabit this map; some are wondering where Livingston is, some talk about what Kobushi's up to. I like how this helps establish the story, even though it's looking like I won't see either of the bosses in this mission.

Deep inside the mission I find the "Main Console" glowy and click it. It completes the mission, but oddly doesn't give me any sort of clue. I do think it should immediately give a clue, even if it gets repeated during the debriefing.

Mission seemed a little too simple considering I could just stealth in and click one glowy and be done. The dialog generated by all the mobs that I stealthed past did help with making the mission feel like it had more content, though.

Debriefing: kind of terse compared to the rest of the writing thus far. We still don't know what was actually on the computer I clicked, but she's going to try and decrypt it. I think I would've preferred to just plain get the info in the clue and/or debriefing rather than postpone it until mission 5's briefing.

Mission 5
Briefing: Turns out Livingston wasn't in the Rogue Isles at all, but has somehow turned himself into a Longbow Ballista and is applying to join the Malta. Is there really a "process" for turning into a Longbow Ballista? I've never heard of such a thing, I thought they were just supers of various sorts that volunteered to join.

Dietrich says she gets orders "from the Joint Chiefs", but I don't think this is strictly correct - to my knowledge, Longbow is an organized militia, and not a branch of the US military at all. The real leader of Longbow (Ms Liberty) probably is too heroic to issue a "dead or alive" order like Dietrich says she's received.

Mission entry popup: "So are two rogue cops" - is this meant to be Kobushi and Livingston? Neither one are, strictly speaking, cops.

Objectives: "Defeat Operative Kobushi" is among my objectives, but based on the background story so far, I'm not terribly clear on why this is necessary. It seems like Kobushi wants to take down Livingston just as much as we do, and has been portrayed as having good intentions (for an Arachnos operative).

The mission is full of "Malta RDF", who seem to be custom characters representing advanced Malta mecha and upgraded sappers (!). They seem to be ALL custom characters; consider mixing in some standard Malta minions to make them feel a little more authentically Malta?

I found and rescued Captain Dietrich. I like her dialog where she brags about the player, and how intimidated her guards are when I show up. It's good to be a hero.


Police Woman rescues Captain Dietrich and Operative Kobushi from Malta v2.0


I found a body bag labeled "Operative Kobushi"; apparently he got ganked by Arachnos assassins (who had a brief line of dialog when I entered) before I got here. I kinda felt sorry for him, but upon clicking the body bag, it turns out he's not quite dead yet and we can medevac him.

I like Operative Taggart's (brief) cameo appearance. It warms the heart to have him say:

[NPC] Operative Taggart: Lord Recluse has long desired your death, Police Woman!

It's good to know you annoy the right people.

I also ran into "Omega 12 4-9-0", a Malta boss; I think his name is ever so slightly wrong for a named Malta. Normally they are named something like "<Random Word> <Random Color> #-#-#". So "Omega Red 4-9-0" would work. (Minor nitpick)


Uh oh. He looks mad.


Found and fought the new and improved Livingston; I totally thought he was going to be a Longbow EB, but he turned out to be a custom nrg assault/nrg armor EB, who I managed to defeat (though I ate a lot of inspirations to keep from getting energy melee'd out). Got the "Too Much, Too Fast" clue from defeating him.

Debriefing: the contact is rather unsympathetic about Livingston's demise, but this fits her character from what I've seen so far. She's rather nicer about Kobushi's "death", but this kind of works for me.

Souvenir: pretty nicely written, though I still think calling an Arachnos Operative a "cop" is stretching it. Rogue Island Police are cops; Arbiters might be considered cops. I don't think Operatives can be counted as such.

Overall
This was a nicely written story of an investigation into corrupt Longbow. The briefings and debriefings had a lot of good writing in them, and I thought the dialog overall was good and helpful for supporting the story. I liked the characterization of both the "main" cast (Livingston, Kobushi and Dietrich) and the minor bit players, who I thought were nice additions to the story.

The gameplay overall was decent; I particularly liked mission 3, the police evidence mission (though I might be biased on that ) and mission 5, where a lot of minor characters got to put in a brief appearance. On the other hand, mission 2 required some backtracking that didn't seem strictly necessary for the story, and mission 4 seemed a little too easy (just needed 1 glowy click).

I do think the story arc description needs to be a bit more descriptive to make players interested in trying this story. I also kind of question some of the Longbow background info that is used; I don't think they count as cops, serve the Joint Chiefs, and I'm not sure they really have a super-soldier serum for generating Longbow Ballistae.

It's a good story overall, though, and my gripes weren't all that substantial. I gave this story arc 5 stars.

---

My queue is currently:

Zamuel - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967 (re-review)
EvaDestruction - Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black #161629
twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308
@GlaziusF - Backwards Day 329000

9/21/2009

Last Monday I played Arrow Girl (32 archery/dev blaster) on an 8-player team doing Croatoa missions with some friends and some pickup people. A teammate praised her Rain of Arrows power ("a nuke with no end crash") which was nice. On the mission where you rescue Walter Daschle and lead him out, we tried using team TP to get him to the mission door; this works on a lot of missions, but didn't for Walter Daschle, and we had to run him out the normal way. This team got Arrow Girl to level 33. To celebrate I spent all 180 of her reward merits on random TF recipe rolls, receiving:

1 Aegis (END/RCHG) Wentw=100K
1 Aegis (END/RCHG/RES) Wentw=500K
1 Dark Watcher's (RCHG/END) Wentw=25K
1 Devastation (DMG/RCHG) Wentw=3M
1 Expedient Reinforcement (+Res Aura) Wentw=2M
1 Gift of the Ancients (RES) Wentw=3.3M
1 Miracle (+recovery) Wentw=60M
1 Numina's (+recovery/+regen) Wentw=42M
1 Scirocco's (chance of lethal) Wentw=1.2M

Total value: 112.125M infl, or 622K infl/merit. This was a VERY good recipe draw, more than double the normal yield for random rolls; mostly due to hitting the jackpot and getting both a Miracle AND a Numina's.


On Tuesday night, I16 was released and the first thing I did upon logging in was mess with power colorization, changing all of Star Amethyst's (dark/ice) powers to be various shades of purple. I tried making her ice and dark powers match up, but ice blast can only be pastel colors, so ended up a shade of lavender. And while I could make dark miasma a lavender color, it looked dreadful, so I settled on a deep purple instead.

I also changed all of Indigo Ifrit's (fire/rad) powers; initially I chose a very dark blue/purple which looked very villainous, but teammates seemed to think this was too ugly, so I tried switching to a brighter shade of blue.

I decided Thunder Girl (50 will/nrg tanker) absolutely needed to be an elec melee character, so I rerolled her as an elec/SR scrapper. Thought about will/elec tanker, but I'm finding that I enjoy scrappers more than tankers; and I'm liking the idea of SR for high DEF and high DEF debuff resist. With the new Thunder Girl, I almost immediately hooked up with an 8 player LB team that ran door missions and the Atlas safeguard, quickly getting Thunder Girl to level 9.

Logging in Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), my main character and main badger, I found the I16 badge changes caused me to immediately be awarded:

Back From the Future (100 pillboxes; formerly 1000 pillboxes)
Fabricator (2000 inventions; formerly 10,000 inventions)
Demolitionist (10 bombs in RWZ; formerly 25 bombs)
Imprisoned (60mins mez; formerly 10hrs mez)
Confined (3hrs mez; formerly 20hrs mez)
Caged (6hrs mez; formerly 40hrs mez)
Popular (250M infl earned; formerly 1B infl earned)

While soloing on Star Amethyst (36 dark/ice defender), a team invited me to do a MoITF; but they didn't want the character I was on, instead asking me to bring a 50 debuffer. So I switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor). But it turned out the team had two different players each running 2 characters, with the extra characters basically on autofollow. This sounded like a recipe for failure and frustration, and it irked me that I was asked to switch to a more useful character when two others were bringing dead weight, so before we started I excused myself to go back to soloing.

I got Star Amethyst to level 37 soloing missions in RWZ, then got another MoITF invite. This was a much more optimized group, on which I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and we basically did a "speed" ITF only with no dying, finishing in 33mins 1sec for the Master of the Imperious TF badge.


Wednesday night, I solo'd Police Woman through a story arc called Dr. Sigler and the Chronojumper, where you help out a scientist testing a time travel machine. You start off trying to fix a relatively minor problem that occurred in the past, but unforeseen implications of your "fix" cascade into the present time, and so you're sent back in time to fix the side effects of your first time trip. There's a butterfly effect that spirals out of control, as each of your fixes causes the timeline to be more and more messed up. It's a really nicely done time travel story with a lot of detail; I rated it 5 stars.


Jello Shooters Radio (KJSR), an Internet radio station, does a weekly show where they review various AE story arcs "on the air". On Thursday night, they did a review of my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc. The two reviewers were really positive about the story arc, laughing at all the jokes; one of them said it was "Definitely 5 stars!" and the other said "5 stars, I wish I could give it more!" It was pretty cool!

Also on Thursday night, I played Mayday (50 fortunata) on another speed MoITF; we finished the ITF in 36min 24sec, but failed the "Mo" part due to one squishy dying on mission 2 to an exploding nictus crystal.

Played Alice Slaughter (36 db/will brute on Triumph) for awhile, with an 8 player Demolition Girls SG team. We were doing someone's Mako patron arc and were a little light on support characters, so had a wipeout against some sort of magic "fonts" of power that smeared us with psychic blasts, and another against Mako himself, though we eventually took him down.


On Friday night, I played Star Amethyst (37 dark/ice defender) on a 5-player team mostly fighting Nemesis. Then I switched to Indigo Ifrit (50 fire/rad corruptor) for a Master of the Recluse SF attempt, with a team mix of:

2 brutes (elec/stone, SS/inv)
2 fortunata
3 corruptors (AR/kin, fire/cold, fire/rad)
1 MM (ninj/dark)

This actually went really well; we had tons of buff/debuff and the VEATs helped keep the squishies at high defense. We had a tense moment when one of the corruptors went linkdead during the final fight against the Freedom Phalanx, and had to stall out our damage while fighting Statesman for about 5 mins waiting for her to get back in the game; but we managed to stay alive long enough for her to return, and so we won the MoRSF with a time of 1hr 1mins. I got a Nucleolus SHO as reward.

I spent some time soloing Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper), working on getting the useful accolade powers. Atlas Medallion was no problem; I had all the kill badges already, just needed to run around clicking plaques. For Portal Jockey, I decided to solo my way through the rest of Maria Jenkins' Praetorian arc. This took awhile, but I solo'd (as elite bosses) Nightstar, Siege, Bobcat, Neuron, Battle Maiden, Black Swan, Mother Mayhem, Malaise, Diabolique, Infernal, Dominatrix, and Marauder. My badge progress bar shows I only need one AV to finish Dimensional Warder; this has to be either Anti-Matter or Chimera. I'm thinking I probably killed Chimera earlier in Maria's story arc, so it's gotta be Anti-Matter that I'm missing.

After that I played Samurai-ko (40 katana/will scrapper) on a Synapse TF, with a team of:

2 scrappers (kat/wp, spine/elec)
3 controllers (2 mind/cold, 1 fire/cold)
1 tanker (shield/mace)
1 warshade
1 defender (emp/archery)

We had a false start; though we had a mix of lowbies and high level characters, a 16 controller was leader initially. This caused us ALL to be exemp'd down to 16, but the TF spawned level 22 clockworks for us. Although we could hack our way through these, it took way too long. So we aborted the first mission and restarted the TF; I got nominated as new leader, and this caused us all to be exemped to 20 (or SK'd to 19). This went much better. I seemed to be playing more aggressively than the tanker or other scrapper, so ended up leading the way into most fights. We had no serious problems until we fought Babbage, who we needed to get some outside help to take down; once a rad defender arrived, though, Babbage went down quickly. Finished the TF in 2hrs 19mins; Samurai-ko leveled to 41 (it's REALLY nice to gain exp even while exemp'd) and took Tough.


On Sunday I tinkered with acquiring some IOs for Star Amethyst (37 dark/ice defender), slotting 3 Touch of the Nictus into her Twilight Grasp power, for +1.88% max HP and +9% acc; and 4 Positron's Blast into her Ice Storm power, for another +9% acc. Then I joined a speed Imperious TF; this wasn't quite as speedy as the regular speed ITFs because it was a 7 player team where 6 of the players were actually squishies, so we ended up dying a lot. Nevertheless we managed to finish it in 40min 17sec.

That same team went on to do a Lady Grey TF; I switched to Mega (50 SS/will brute) for that, and we finished in 40min 9sec. I went on to Cap au Diable to fight the Rikti invasion that resulted, and got enough Rikti bombs to get Mega the Elusive Mind accolade.

I finished the night playing Thunder Girl (11 elec/SR scrapper) on a 4 player Liberty Force SG team doing missions in Faultline and Skyway, which got her to level 16. I took Combat Jumping, Health and Dodge as powers; since I had the safeguard fly pack, I've been putting off getting a "real" travel power until later.

Weird, thought I posted this before!

9/14/2009

Last Friday I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) on a pickup Imperious TF on difficulty 5. Our team mix was:

2 blasters (AR/dev, nrg/elec)
1 brute (wp)
1 corruptor (AR/rad)
1 peacebringer
1 warshade
1 tanker (dark/dark)
1 fortunata

This seemed very light on support classes to me, and I said so, but the team leader seemed fine with it and we got started. We were on high difficulty and people were dying like lemmings; I used Vengeance 4 times and Resuscitate 2 times by the end of the first mission. At that point I suggested we lower difficulty, but some of the lower level people on the team were hot to get exp so felt we were doing fine. The team leader compromised by lowering difficulty, but only to level 4. I shrugged and decided to enjoy the feeling of perma-Vengeance. We managed to muddle through this in 1hr 26mins nevertheless.

After that I solo'd Police Woman through The Fracturing of Time, a rather surreal and creepy science fiction AE arc where the genocide of an alien race ends up nearly causing the destruction of the space-time continuum, and I'm only able to stop this by destroying my own psyche in order to become One With Nothingness. It wsa rather nihilistic and depressing (so isn't going to be fun for everyone) but it was also pretty awesome. I gave it 5 stars.


On Saturday I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper on Triumph) on an 8-player Moonfire TF organized by Demolition Girls SG; we finished in 1hr 27mins.

I also played Idealist (46 fire/thermal controller) on a Statesman TF organized by a friend as a last hurrah before he started a break from CoH. Our team makeup was:

5 controllers (ill/emp, ice/storm, ill/rad, fire/therm, fire/emp)
1 scrapper (katana/regen)
1 blaster (nrg/nrg)
1 tanker (will/SS)

I felt a little guilty for bringing a 46, but not guilty enough to not do it. (I did ask for an SK though.) I kinda rationalized that the thermal shields would be enough help to more than make up for it. We had some difficulties early on when the tanker and the rad controller would tend to go different ways, which caused an awkward split while fighting Arbiter Sands in mission 1. After that the team leader instructed us to follow the tanker, but the tanker was a little shy about engaging mobs, while the rad was hyper-aggressive, so we de facto ended up following the rad around. Once that was straightened out, things went a bit smoother.

In the final mission we assigned the two empaths to heal the tanker, who would tank Lord Recluse, while the rest of us took down the tower. On our first try, we had something of a bad start as the tanker got flattened by LR almost immediately, but somehow LR didn't come kill us all, and the empaths had enough time to rez the tank back into the fight. (I didn't see what happened exactly, but I'm betting Phantom Army was involved in temporarily keeping LR busy.) We ended up actually defeating LR on our first try (though with several deaths and battle rezzes), finishing the STF in 2hrs 45mins. I got a tasty Cytoskeleton SHO for my trouble, as well as hitting level 48 on Lord Recluse's death.


On Sunday I solo'd Kashira (29 db/ninj stalker) through the Wretch 'Trike Force, an AE story arc where the Wretch tries to get you to help foil a plot against Ghost Widow. This had some fun moments but Wretch being incoherent and dumb, while perfectly in character, caused some problems for the story because he really can't tell you anything meaningful (due to being incoherent and dumb) and he ends up asking you to do some things that create more problems than they solve. I ended up giving this arc 3 stars.

I went on to do a Citadel TF as Adventuress (29 MA/regen scrapper), with a team of

3 controllers (earth/rad, plant/kin, fire/kin)
2 tankers (inv/SS, DA/axe)
1 scrapper (MA/regen) (me)
1 defender (rad/rad)

Two of the controllers were lowbies who died like mayflies but wouldn't take an SK, and we had some trouble "stealthing" missions because, well, no one ACTUALLY had stealth (we had to just run past stuff and hope not to die). Nevertheless this TF is pretty straightforward and despite these problems we finished in 1hr 41mins.

After that I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF. On a 6-player team, we finished in 28mins 22sec.

I started a newbie dark/storm corruptor for fun, and also because I saw some friends had started lowbie villains. I ended up with "Snow Devil" as a name, so I made her an evil blue-skinned demon-looking person with demonic wings. Got her to level 4 before switching to something else.

As Arrow Girl (30 archery/dev blaster) I helped take down Kraken in Perez Park, for 2 reward merits; then joined a Katie TF with:

2 tankers
1 scrapper
2 blasters
2 defenders (rad, empathy)
1 controller (rad)

...which finished in 38min 54sec and got Arrow Girl to level 32, where I took Rain of Arrows, which I think is the power that is the main reason to take archery.

I ended up reworking the "Manticore Task Force" faction a bit, in response to some of the exp changes made by I16. Formerly there were 3 mob types, all of whom were lieutenants.

All three of these (Scrapper, Controller and Blaster) got demoted to "minion" level.

I added a "Defender" lieutenant and "Tanker" boss to the Manticore TF faction, so that there would be something at each enemy rank.

The guards surrounding Hopkins were upgraded to a "hard" encounter, in order to compensate for most of the mobs being downgraded to minions. Ran a test while solo and a soloer on low difficulty will typically see 3 minions guarding him.

The enemies still don't give full exp (since I'm rather leery of raising them all to be "Hard" difficulty on both powersets) but they don't get the big penalty for not having mobs of certain rankings, at least.

Thanks much for reviewing Teen Phalanx Forever! It was fun listening to the AEntertainment Tonight show. I missed the first few minutes, but I liked listening to the reviewers' opinions of Consequences of War (which I had played through too). I enjoyed the symphonic metal music (was that Within Temptation maybe?).

I'm glad you enjoyed the Teen Phalanx story arc. Loved hearing that y'all thought the Vahzilok brides maybe were a real Vahzilok minion, and the comments about how biased the "heroic clockwork and villainous humans" press release was, and "Do I really have to watch this monitor for 2 hours?"

Thanks again for the reviews. It sounds like you are short on story arc submissions, so I may (greedily) submit a few more.

Dr. Sigler and the ChronoJumper review
Arc ID: 131158
Keywords: Solo Friendly, Sci-Fi, Drama
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 45-54, 40-54, 38-40

The arc description says this story is "about the consequences of messing with forces you don't understand", which says very little about what this arc is about. Maybe could use some more descriptive text to try and entice players into trying it. I do like the arc title though, sounds very pulp adventure.

The contact is a white lab coated scientist. I played a 50 AR/dev blaster on difficulty 1.

Mission 1
Briefing: Nicely formatted, contact does a good job of introducing himself and explains he wants me to test a device he's invented that apparently will "put an end to all the sufferings of humanity".

Second part of briefing: his invention turns out to be a time machine. His plan is to have me time travel back into the past and "correct" things. First up is stopping a robbery. What Could Go Wrong?

Mission entry popup: Love the description here, both wondering about whether it's a good idea to help Sigler, and about the 80s era stuff in this mission.

Mission title: "Arrest all the thieves" is a bit redundant with the objective "Arrest all the robbers" ... you might consider changing the mission title to something like "Stop the Robbery".

"RavenThorn" is in my objective list, but should have a verb, like "Defeat RavenThorn". Though, I don't know who RavenThorn is (he wasn't mentioned by the contact), so maybe it should just be part of the "Arrest all the robbers!" objective. Or perhaps "Defeat lead robber".

Found and fought RavenThorn, who said:

[NPC] RavenThorn: Fool! You cannot beat one who can forsee your every move!

...hinting that he's a precognitive, which is cool. I like that the fact that I'm a time traveler messes his precognition up, though. "forsee" should be "foresee".

In RavenThorn's description, "unkown" should be "unknown". He's in a group called "The Corruptors"; but all the other robbers are "Family". Should they maybe be in the same group? Or at least there should be some explanation for why they're working together.

At mission completion, I get the "RavenThorn talks" clue; but I actually completed the mission by defeating the last Family guy. Maybe you should award the "RavenThorn talks" clue when you defeat Raventhorn instead? Nice ominous warning he gives. I think there may be an extra line break at the very end of the clue. (Minor nitpick.)

In my chat window I got the message

Before RavenThorn loses conciousness, he gives you a somewhat cryptic message...

"conciousness" should be "consciousness".

Debriefing: great debriefing. The contact reveals he actually had you save the life of his wife; I can understand wanting to do that. "There's just one little complication" certainly sounds ominous, though.

Mission 2
Briefing: nicely written briefing. Turns out stopping the robbery ends up having a butterfly effect causing a supervillain to go on a murderous rampage in Kings Row. Fortunately, being time travelers, we can fix this! (I can see where this is going... )

"traficking" should be "trafficking" in the briefing.

Found and rescued Billy Thurman, a decent looking custom model with a good description. He was in the "Ally" group, which was a little puzzling as he immediately left after being rescued. I wonder if he should be in a "Civilian" group instead.


Police Woman versus Fire Phoenix


Found "Fire Phoenix", another member of "The Corruptors", hmm. The mission title, mission objectives, and his own description, all call him "FirePhoenix" but the name he's given is "Fire Phoenix" (note space); should be made consistent. The clue I get on defeating him is interesting ... why am I portrayed as coughing now? This can't be good...

Debriefing: Nice debriefing. I like the reference to Brass Monday and Nemesis's historical attacks.

Mission 3
Briefing: Another nice briefing, with more butterfly effect stuff as our rescuing the kid and stopping the villain accidentally results in nerve gas wiping out much of Kings Row. So now we have to go back further in time to prevent Nemesis from stashing this nerve gas here in the first place.

Second part of briefing: "those PPD members all those peoples will not have died" doesn't quite scan, should maybe be "the police officers and all those other people will not have died".

Mission objectives: "Defeat Colonel Pritailleur" is in my objectives, but Pritailleur wasn't mentioned in the briefing, so I'm not sure I would know who he is; maybe should be "Defeat Nemesis leader", or else mentioned by name.

I beat up Pritailleur (who turned out to be a sniper who could see through my stealth) and clicked the various cannisters. When down to only one cannister left, the objective becomes "neutralize the final cannister"; "neutralize" should probably be capitalized. (Minor nitpick)

Mission exit popup is very ominous after coming back from this mission, it seems Arachnos has somehow conquered the world!

Debriefing has some nice writing in it.

Mission 4
Briefing: It appears that stopping Colonel Pritailleur has somehow prevented Statesman from being born, and as a result, Lord Recluse has conquered the world. Hmm, mission 3 must've been further back in time than I realized, since Marcus Cole served in WW1; now that I think about it, I think it WAS mentioned that the mission was in 1889.

I like the mission accept message of "This is getting out of control. You'd best be right this time."

Now the contact wants me to destroy the scroll that gives the directions to the Well of the Furies, so that Lord Recluse can never drink from it. Unlike the earlier missions, this strikes me as a pretty obviously bad plan since Arachnos would still exist even without Lord Recluse (he actually took it over from The Weaver) and it would also prevent Marcus Cole from ever drinking from the Well and becoming Statesman.

Mission title: "Destroy the scoll with the directions to the Well of the Furies and stop The Triad!" is a neat mission title, but kinda long. "scoll" should be "scroll". I wonder if you could summarize the mission in a shorter description? Like "Prevent Lord Recluse's origin" or "Conceal the Well of Furies".

Inside the mission: Ran into what appear to be some custom zombie mobs; is it necessary to have new types of zombies? There are a lot of existing zombie mobs already.

Dark Zombie Servant's description, "infused with the the magic" should be "infused with the magic".

Found "Zurial the Destoryer", who said:

[NPC] Zurial the Destoryer: What sorcerery is this, that you can resist me?

"Destoryer" should be "Destroyer". "sorcerery" should be "sorcery".

While fighting him, I got ambushed by a group of mobs in a group called "Zuriel ambush" (should maybe be Zurial?); I don't imagine there should be a faction of enemies purely devoted to Zuriel's ambushes, so these should probably just be in regular Circle of Thorns or some similar group.

Likewise there are several other enemy groups that seem to be named after their purpose, like "Dead patrol", "Mistress patrol", "Onorius guards", "Glaxar guards". Probably these should all be in the same villain group.


Police Woman vs Glaxar the Magnificent...ooops! Should've brought break frees.


I found and fought Glaxar the Magnificent, who managed to beat me up via holds and an ambush (which belonged to the "Glaxar Ambush" faction). Upon killing me he says:

[NPC] Glaxar the Magnificent: You should feel honored to feel such exquisitness of pain at my hand, trespasser.

"exquisitness of pain" should be "exquisiteness of pain", or maybe "exquisite pain".

Tried to hospital and ended up in a CoT jail, which I broke out of.

Lots of nice dialog in this mission from the various mobs. I overheard a minion saying:

[NPC] Zombie of Onorius: Lord Onorious plans to visit The Well again soon - we must prepare for the journey.

"Onorious" should be "Onorius" based on the way it's spelled elsewhere in this arc.

I found the right glowy that gave me "The scroll of The Triad!" clue. "unidentifyible" should be "unidentifiable".

Found and rescued some hapless Cimerorans from the CoT, and they became allies and helped me, which I thought was a nice touch for the time travel thing. I eventually beat up all three of the named mages to complete the mission.


Rematch against Glaxar! Only now with some manly Romans to help out!


Mission exit popup is funny. Now Paragon City has been utterly destroyed. Pesky time travel.

Debriefing, also funny. Now the contact is totally sorry he had me destroy the scroll.

Mission 5
Briefing: Nicely written. Now that I've undone Recluse's and Statesman's origins, the Rikti basically are destroying the world and genociding humanity because no one can stop them. The contact is basically crying DOOM and doesn't know what to do.

I like that the mission accept message has "me" taking control and "deciding" how to fix things.

Second part of briefing: "ChronoStiblizer" should be "ChronoStabilizer". "inital" should be "initial".

I like the mission title and the list of objectives (a LONG list of objectives; I like this, but some people might feel it's too much). Good mission entry popup also. I've basically gone back in time to ... prevent the contact from inventing a time machine. This is paradoxical, yet sort of makes sense as the best way to fix everything.

It's a little awkward that this mission exemps me down to level 40 when all the other missions went up to level 50, but I assume this is because of level limits on the Security Guards.

Found a glowy that gave me an "Early Protoypes found" clue. Should be "Prototypes".

I like that you encounter "Young Dr. Sigler" in the mission and get to confront him, sort of. He's in an "Ally" group, probably should be "Civilian" or "Scientists". In his dialog he says:

[NPC] Young Dr. Sigler: Let's see....maybe if I reverse the polarity fo the flux capacitor.....

"fo" should be "of" in that line.

Found a destroyable object called "Dr. Siglers Chronojump early stage prototype"; "Siglers" should be "Sigler's". Though I actually think this object's name is too long; maybe call it something shorter like "Prototype Chronojumper"? Destroying it gave me a clue called "The ChronoJumper protoype". "protoype" should be "prototype", both in the clue title and clue text.

Finally found and destroyed all the notes and computer files and completed the mission.

Debriefing: good wrap-up of what ended up happening in the "final" timeline after the arc. It's a little sad that we've basically ruined Sigler's career and never did save his wife, but at least we prevented the genocide of the human race.

Souvenir: nice synopsis of the arc. "your fight and broken" should be "your fight had broken". "neighborood" should be "neighborhood". "troops primary mission" should be "troops' primary mission". "Statement" should be "Statesman".

Overall
Normally I don't really like plots where the story scripts you to make a mistake at the beginning, then you spend the rest of the arc trying to fix it. But the way this was presented was really quite good. I liked the descriptions of the results of each of the timeline adjustments, and especially the throwaway references to the fate of various in-game characters. I thought Sigler was a well-written character with a noble purpose in mind for his invention, and it's clear that each time (except the last) that he's sure that he can fix things, if he could only apply his invention the right way.

On the downside, there were quite a lot of typos scattered throughout the text, and while the first three missions had pretty reasonable initial goals, I thought the plan for the fourth mission was a little too obviously self-destructive (I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that undoing Recluse's origin also undoes Statesman's?). I'd suggest tweaking the writing a bit to make it seem a more plausible action.

I felt bad that the net result of the arc is that we've ruined Dr Sigler and no one has benefited, so really I would've been better off not getting involved at all. I kinda would've liked a happier ending (would've been nice if at least his wife survived even if his career is ruined), but that probably would blunt the moral of the story, so maybe this is the best way to end the story.

Despite those misgivings, I thought this was a really good story about how good intentions aren't always enough. I gave this arc 5 stars.


---

My queue is currently:

@Venture - Splintered Shields 253991
Zamuel - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967 (re-review)
EvaDestruction - Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black #161629
twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308

In mission 2 of arc id 67335 (an arc published prior to I16), the Clockwork King's Lair map is used with 4 Ally, 2 Hostage Rescue, 1 Boss, and 1 Collection (wall) objective on it. These objectives were within the bounds specified by the map pre-I16.

Following I16, the Clockwork King's Lair does not appear to allow any Rescue/Ally, Boss, or Wall Collection objectives any more. In fact, it doesn't seem to allow any objective spawn points at all, any more.

I'm pretty sure this is some sort of error.

I could not find "Hooray for Hamster Hell" (arc 246464) or any other arc by @EraserDog when I looked. So I ended up moving on to the next on my list.



Wretch's 'Trike Force review
Arc ID: 249890
Keywords: Canon Related, Comedy, Drama
Morality: Villainous
Level range: mostly 20-30 with some 35
Warnings: EBs, enemies with custom power selections

The premise is to help Wretch foil some sort of plot against Ghost Widow. I played a 29 db/ninj stalker on difficulty 1. The contact is Wretch.

Mission 1
Briefing: Nicely formatted, if a little short on detail, though truthfully it makes sense for it to not be that detailed considering the contact's diminished mental capacity. Basically I'm helping Wretch stop "bad mans" from hurting Ghost Widow.

Mission accept briefing: This displays as "So, someone's after Ghost Widow again, huh Wretch? What will you give me I&nbsp". Seems misformatted.

Second part of briefing: this part of the briefing has some more details, which is nice. It's a little awkward to read through Wretch's dialog, but despite that it's pretty funny. "help wretch find bad mans" should have "Wretch" capitalized though.

"Encrypted Wyvern PDA", I'd suggest replacing "Wretch gave you this PDA, it's encrypted, but..." with "Wretch gave you this PDA. It's encrypted, but..." (Admittedly nitpicky.)

Mission entry popup: This says I'm in a Longbow base. But as I get further into the mission, although there's Freedom Corps insignia hung all over the place, the base is actually full of Wyvern. Seems inconsistent.

"Encryption Codes" mission objective should have a verb, e.g., "Steal Encryption Codes".

Found "Out-of-place computer desk" which, after clicking, satisfied the "Encryption Codes" objective. You might consider also adding a clue to the clue journal at this point.

Found "Base Commander Aerrow", who is a decent-looking custom Wyvern boss. His description and dialog try to suggest that he's fairly inexperienced in combat; the lines aren't anything special but do help define his character some.


Kashira: So, you think you know Kung Fu!
Aerrow: Um, actually, no, I don't. Not even a little.
Kashira: Time for a lesson then!
Aerrow: Um...can we do a lesson that doesn't hurt quite so much?


All three of the bomb glowies are named "Bombs1", should maybe just be "Bomb".

Clicking the last bomb glowy completes the mission, giving me the "Decrypted Wyvern PDA" clue; I kind of think this clue should be awarded after clicking the computer, though, since setting the bombs shouldn't really help decrypt the PDA.

Debriefing: Wretch gives me a fairly incoherent debriefing, but it kinda makes sense for him.

Mission 2
Briefing: Following up the clue from the last mission, I'm sent to "smash all bad mans on boat".

Mission objectives: "Find chief conspiracist!" should probably not have an excalamation point (there's a second objective listed too, and the exclamation point looks weird with a comma right after it) and perhaps "conspiracist" should be "conspirator". Or if you're purposely mangling language to be more Wretch-like at this point, conspiracist probably should be something with fewer syllables.

This seems to be a defeat all on the cargo ship map; a defeat all on a moderately big map is unfortunately rather tedious.

I found and fought Arcanist Crowley, who was in a group called "Legacy Chain?" and escorted by an archer in Wyvern. The rest of the ship is filled with a group called "Conspirators", though, which seems to be a mix of Legacy Chain and Wyvern. I'm a little puzzled at why there are separate "Legacy Chain?" "Wyvern" and "Conspirators" factions in this mission; I kinda think you should either have them all be "Conspirators" (including Crowley and his escort), or else keep them separate as "Legacy Chain" and "Wyvern".

Crowley does monologue a bit about the evil plan to take down Ghost Widow before I defeat him. I also got the "Crowley's Final Taunt" clue; in this clue, "posessions" should be "possessions" in that clue. Also, "Perhaps he was arrogant enough to assume you wouldn't bother to search his body" sounds really weird; I have a hard time believing anyone would think "She'll probably kill me, but she would never actually search me!"

I finally cleared the whole ship of Conspirators. Despite having to fight the whole map, only Arcanist Crowley really had anything interesting to say or do. You might consider adding some more mission details? Perhaps some patrols or static spawned bosses with some extra dialog.

You might also consider dropping the "defeat all" requirement and having the "Island Coordinates" clue come from some other source -- perhaps defeating the ship captain or the navigator (i.e. a boss), or maybe stealing it from a computer (i.e., a glowy). Though, the story seems to want this to be a defeat all, so if you think it makes more sense that way, you could leave it like that; but bear in mind some people will be annoyed by defeat all missions on medium-large maps.

Debriefing: still seems awfully short. Makes some sense for Wretch to talk this way, but you're left with pretty large areas of blank space in the briefings and debriefings. Maybe you could add more "internal monologue" of what the player is "thinking"?

Mission 3
Briefing: something of an incoherent non-briefing where Wretch wants me to go hurt more "bad mans". This time, traveling to an island identified by a clue in the previous mission.

Inside the mission: the "island" turns out to be a tech lab, which seems a strange choice of map for an island.

The enemies in the mission are a mix of "Crowley's Base Defenders" and "Legacy Chain". It looks like "Crowley's Base Defenders" has some (Vanguard/Legacy Chain hybrid?) custom mobs, plus standard Legacy Chain mobs mixed in. As a result, the two groups are so similar that I'm not sure why there is a distinction; I'd suggest making all of them be in the same group. (It's actually possible to make a custom "Legacy Chain" group that appears to have the same tag as standard Legacy Chain, to make it seem more seamless.) The custom mobs do look quite natural with the standard mobs though; their costumes blend right in.

Possibly I got lucky, but the very first glowy I found (Computer) completed the mission; I didn't actually have to find 6 transmission records. This being the case, you may want to change the "6 Find Transmission Records" to just "Find Transmission Records" (with no 6).

In "A Plan of Action" clue, "legacy chain" should be "Legacy Chain" (note capitalization). "Lady Gray" should be "Lady Grey". The appearance of the Vanguard/Legacy Chain hybrids does kind of hint at the Lady Grey connection; I wonder if you could get one of them to utter some dialog that further foreshadows this? Perhaps a static "Boss" using one of them, that has some dialog.

You might consider changing the mission title ("Help Wretch Attack Island") which doesn't seem to match the actual mission; although it's explained as being an island, it doesn't look like an island, and since you can click a glowy to complete the mission, you don't really have to attack anyone.

Mission 4
Briefing: This is kind of a non-briefing as the plot has baffled poor Wretch and he has no idea what we should be doing (which kind of makes sense considering how brain damaged he is, but still makes this something of a non-briefing), but my character realizes we should be beating people up in RWZ to find out information.

Mission title: "Help Wretch Find Clue!" is kind of funny.

Inside the mission, I find tons of Vanguard/Rikti battles. Although the mission accept dialog suggested I would be "busting heads", I leave these battles alone because my objective is "Seek Clues". Also saw some more of the Vanguard/Legacy Chain hybrids, though this time they're (correctly) in the Vanguard group.

I roamed around the map for awhile looking and eventually found a Rikti named "C'lue", which did get a laugh out of me. C'lue says:

[NPC] C'Lue: Self: Greatful: Allies' Assistance.

"Greatful" should be "Grateful" here.


Kashira: You will tell me all your secrets, C'Lue!
C'Lue: Just try me!
Kashira: It was Miss Scarlet in the Dining Room with the Wrench!
C'Lue: Wrong again!!


I fought C'Lue and beat him up; actually, his Vanguard escorts were much nastier than he was, despite being only minions. (Vanguard is just mean like that.) Some of his dialog does not seem to be in the standard Rikti "Noun: Phrase" format:

[NPC] C'Lue: ... Wretch? You: Serve?
[NPC] C'Lue: Ghost Widow... Self... Afraid...

Defeating C'Lue gives me the "C'Lue: Statements: Cryptic" clue and changes my objective to "Defeat Vanguard Leader". You may want to add some text about the Vanguard Leader to the actual clue, to help explain why it is now necessary to find the Vanguard Leader. Also "anymore" should be "any more", and you might want to make it clearer that C'Lue is worried about Ghost Widow in particular; maybe "a real, life ghost" should be "an actual ghost, like Ghost Widow".

Minor nitpick: "Seek Clues" maybe should be "Seek Clue" since there was only one C'Lue to find; or maybe "Get a Clue".

After some more searching I found Sorcerer Ragan. His description says "If anyone knows the location of the Rikti Traditionalist's bases, it's him". "Traditionalist's bases" should perhaps be "Traditionalist bases". I guess I'm looking for the location of these bases? Needs to be made clearer in either the objectives or C'Lue's clue. Though, thinking about it, wouldn't an actual Rikti Traditionalist make even more sense to interrogate for a base location?

Ragan has some good dialog about how my beating up C'Lue has messed up relations with the Traditionalist faction and may provoke a feud between the Traditionalist Rikti and Arachnos. So actually, my actions are increasing the danger to Ghost Widow. Oops. Nevertheless beating him up gives me a lead to the Rikti base.

Mission 5
Briefing: seems awfully short. Wretch basically wants to smash the Rikti.

Second part of briefing: suddenly switches from Wretch speaking, to me thinking or talking to myself. You may want to change the way the text looks (italics, different color, something like that) to emphasize that it's not Wretch talking any more.

Mission objectives: "Rikti Leader" should perhaps be "Defeat Rikti Leader" (the way it's written currently is "Save Wretch, Rikti Leader" which makes it kind of sound like you save them both). "2 Other Leaders" should be "2 Other Leaders to Defeat".

The mission is full of "Ghost Widow Task Force", a custom faction containing a mix of Vanguard, Longbow and Rikti. I'm not sure this is the best name to use, though, as "Ghost Widow Task Force" implies it's a task force assigned by Ghost Widow, not a task force to take down Ghost Widow. Compare to: Statesman Task Force (to defeat Recluse), Lord Recluse Strike Force (to defeat Statesman), etc. Also I found it a little weird that the Rikti in the GWTF faction have descriptions like "The Rikti have come to stand for everything humans hate and fear" while the Vanguard have descriptions of "Everything they do is centered around containing the Rikti menace" when clearly they are working together.

Also it doesn't quite fit that Vanguard is here to help take down Ghost Widow, because Ragan's dialog in mission 4 actually said Vanguard needs to keep good relations with Arachnos, and they had been trying to prevent the Traditionalist Rikti from going after Ghost Widow.

Found "Officer Igon" who was in Longbow (should he also be in Ghost Widow Task Force?). His description says he "leads the longbow contingent here"; "longbow" should be "Longbow" (note capitalization). For what it's worth, all the RWZ content seems to suggest that Longbow and Vanguard actually don't get along very well at all, so it is a bit odd for them to be working together.

Igon says, while fighting:

[NPC] Officer Igon: Intruders!
[NPC] Officer Igon: This doesn't look good!
[NPC] Officer Igon: Xela's plan... drew this much attention?

"Intruders!" is kind of an odd thing for a Longbow officer to say while in a Rikti base; it's normally something you'd say when in your own base. I think this is the first reference I've seen to "Xela"; perhaps the person behind this whole plot.

Deeper in the mission I found Kebert Xela; s/he is in the "Rikti Traditionalist" faction instead of the GWTF (not sure if this is intentional or not) and has some interesting dialog about his/her fear of ghosts. I liked this line:

[NPC] Kebert Xela: Who: You: Call?

....I almost think he should have more Ghostbusters references, like "Ghosts: None: Afraid of", though this wouldn't quite work because he clearly IS afraid of them. I'm guessing Xela was the big bad guy of this arc; you might want to give him a clue that he drops when you defeat him, and/or rearrange objectives so he's one of the last things in the mission that you do.

Found and defeated Sorcerer Mareth, who is apparently the Vanguard leader here. She's in the Vanguard faction, but I wonder if she should be in the GWTF faction?

In the mission objectives, once you defeat one of the optional leaders, it changes from "2 Other Leaders" to just "Other Leaders" (shouldn't be plural).

Due to the vagaries of the map layout, I found Wretch last, long after defeating Xela and the 2 other leaders. It seems like it would be more dramatically appropriate if you found Wretch early on, and then he helped you fight the other leaders. You might consider rearranging the spawns to allow that (perhaps putting Wretch as a "front" spawn; I suspect the Longbow leader is currently "front" and could be moved back) or picking a more linear map to increase the chance that the player runs into the objectives in the order you planned.

Wretch was guarded by a small group of Longbow; I wonder if he should be guarded by a group from the GWTF instead?


Kashira: Why are they all looking at me? Taunt, dammit!
Wretch: Wretch brute. No take taunt. Taunt for sissies.
Kashira: Argh!


After rescuing Wretch, I now have an objective to "Save Ghost Widow!" I'm not really sure how Ghost Widow ended up here - did they kidnap her somehow, or did she follow us here, or something else? Also, considering I've already defeated the 3 enemy leaders, does she really need saving any more? Could use some explanation. I did get a "Help Wretch..." clue from rescuing him, but this clue really doesn't have enough information; "You've found Wretch. Now to save Ghost Widow!" doesn't tell me enough, IMHO. Perhaps elaborate on just how it is that Ghost Widow got lured here and why she needs to be saved?

Exploring some more, I found Seer Marino and rescued her from some Rikti. They had the following dialog:

[NPC] Improved Drone: Future: Unforseeable. Information: Give: Ghost Widow!
[NPC] Seer Marino: I forsee much agony in your future.
[NPC] Improved Drone: Development: Unexpected!
[NPC] Seer Marino: I forsaw your arrival, as well as the presence of my brother.
[NPC] Seer Marino: Ghost Widow is safe, the Rikti Traditionalists won't attempt something like this again.

"Unforseeable" should be "Unforeseeable" or perhaps just "Unknown". "forsee" should be "foresee". "forsaw" should be "foresaw", though I think "Your arrival was foreseen" would sound a little more mystical.

I like how the arc hooks in Seer Marino, who is connected to Wretch's story. Though, how did she get here? Did she get captured somehow? I guess the Rikti are interrogating her for Ghost Widow's location, but the location of Ghost Widow's tower seems like it is pretty well known (it's the place Seer Marino's story arc sends you). Perhaps the Rikti don't know, though. Anyway, how Seer Marino gets here and what's going on with her could use some more explanation.

Rescuing Marino ends the mission for me.

I like the mission exit popup: "You've saved Wretch (from himself), saved Wretch's sister (also from Wretch), and potentially saved Ghost Widow as well. Now, to collect your reward!" This seems so true, most of the events in this arc happened due to Wretch.

Debriefing: pretty short debriefing, with not a lot to it. Wretch gives me his "favorite thing", which proves to be the story arc souvenir: a "Half-Eaten Rat". Wow, that kind of came out of nowhere. There were no rats (half-eaten or otherwise) during the story arc, so this is a rather puzzling souvenir. In the text for this, "posession" should be "possession". I like how it describes the story arc as "you'll never forget the day you helped the big oaf into (and back out of) a jam of (mostly) his own making."

Overall
The arc gives a nice tour of the various anti-Arachnos and RWZ factions, and the Vanguard/Legacy Chain hybrids were an interesting concept with good costuming. There were some good bits of humor also. I did think the ramp-up in difficulty from the Wyvern enemies to the Vanguard enemies was a bit sharp (Vanguard are much tougher, and managed to drop my little stalker a couple times). As a result, someone who gets exp just fine in the early 20-30 missions can run into trouble during the later 35-35 missions with Vanguard.

I was of two minds on the writing in the briefings and debriefings. I felt they were all really short and uninformative, which hurts the story, but it's also perfectly in character and makes sense that Wretch would talk that way and not know much. I'd really like there to be a little more content in these areas. Perhaps you could preserve Wretch's dialog, but add some more "internal monologue" text (perhaps in italics or a different color) where "the player" fills in some of the gaps from her "own" knowledge (much like the "mission accept" messages currently are written).

I'm afraid I don't really like that almost all of the problems posed by this story arc are self-inflicted; basically the whole situation is caused by helping Wretch, and at the end of the arc all you've done is to get back to where you started. This kind of gives the feeling that the player would've done better to not agree to help Wretch in the first place. I think I'd prefer a plot where you accomplish things despite Wretch being dumb, and maybe end up with a better reward than a half-eaten rat. This might change your story too much, though, so up to you.

I liked the idea of some of the "combined" factions, where you had several special groups which drew from multiple standard groups. The actual usage of them was a bit inconsistent though; there were a couple missions where there were a lot of the combined faction, but then spawns here and there of the original groups they were drawn from. I think if you use them more consistently (make everyone be in the combined group, or everyone be in their individual groups, but not both) it would look a little more polished.

I did like the humorous bits you had in the arc; I think you could benefit by adding more. More Ghostbusters references and/or info about Xela's weird ghost obsession (perhaps some foreshadowing of this in an earlier mission, or optional glowies that are Rikti surveillance of Numina and Kelly Nemmers, maybe a custom Rikti "ghostbuster" mob, etc); maybe elaborate on the C'lue joke (have him die with the line "Colonel Mustard: Conservatory: Candlestick" and have the Vanguard leader be named Colonel Mustard), little bits like that.

I thought the defeat all in mission 2 was a bit onerous; I think this is actually a common sentiment towards Defeat All missions. I'd suggest reworking the objectives to make the mission a bit more interesting overall.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I gave this story arc 3 stars. Hope you think that's fair!

---

My queue is currently:

@Johnny Courageous - Dr Sigler and the Chronojumper 131158
@Venture - Splintered Shields 253991
Zamuel - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967 (re-review)
EvaDestruction - Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black #161629
twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308

From experience, I'd have to say, no, I wouldn't be willing to switch to YouTube to view a streaming video as part of the story arc.

I say "from experience" because, as it turns out, I've already run an arc that had a video linked to it (Ashley Porter and the Gorilla War, a fun WW2 era romp), and I didn't look at the video until some weeks later.

The video proved to be pretty awesome (I wish I had that author's skill at demorecording and video editing!), but I certainly didn't look at it while I was playing the arc; and even if I had, it would've been unfair to let my opinion of the video (which is really a different medium) color my opinion of the story arc.

However, if the MA interface changed so you could splice a "cut scene" seamlessly (or approximately so) into your story arc, I'd be totally OK with viewing those. That would essentially make the video clip part of the AE experience.

The Fracturing of Time review
Arc ID: 171031
Keywords: Solo Friendly, Non-Canon Story, Sci-Fi
Morality: Heroic
Level range: some 25-54, some 41-54
Warnings: custom power selections

The premise is to "save a doomed world" by repairing fractures in time. The description warns it is surreal and has philosophical elements. Sounds interesting! I played a 50 AR/dev blaster on difficulty 1.

The contact is a custom character that seems to be a featureless black figure surrounded by white fire.

Mission 1
Briefing: very nicely formatted briefing. The contact wants me to save the population of an alien world that is slated for destruction. The way the contact says "tomorrow it is..will be destroyed" is awkward, but seems intentionally so; wondering if that is foreshadowing of something.

Second part of briefing: some nice description that helps explain why the alien world uses an indoors map.

Objectives: "Defeat Worldslayer Krezyrax" is in my objectives list; this sounds cool, but Worldslayer Krezyrax wasn't mentioned prior to this; should maybe be "Defeat Raigaus leader" or else mention him by name in the briefing.

Found and rescued a Kyrdosi Scientist, which triggered an "Activate the Transcendence Device" objective. The Raigaus and the Kyrdosi are pretty good looking custom models with good descriptions.

Found and freed a Kyrdosi Champion, who seemed to be an ally who almost immediately was killed by Raigaus; the Kyrdosi Champion was only a minion, so seemed very squishy. (Maybe this is intentional, though, since they're described as dying to safeguard their species.)

Found "The Transcendence Device" glowy and clicked it, getting the "Transcendence" clue, which I think is beaming the Kyrdosi into energy forms. This is a neat clue; I wish it were possible to have more of a special effect after clicking the glowy, to represent what's happening. In the clue's text, "make the Kyrdosi became only thought and energy" should be "make the Kyrdosi become only thought and energy".


Police Woman fighting a Raigaus


I found and defeated Worldslayer Krezyrax. He has some nice evil archvillain dialog (though, he just spawned as a lieutenant for me - I think because I'm on low difficulty). His threat of:

[NPC] Worldslayer Krezyrax: Impossible! I will see your world BURN for this offense!

...seems like possible foreshadowing.

Debriefing: The contact relates that Kyrdos was destroyed, but the transcendence device somehow malfunctioned, so the Kyrdosi still need help. Seems neat.

Mission 2
Briefing: The contact says something has gone "Terribly, terribly wrong" but seems very vague about the details, saying "I cannot see what has happened to them", which makes me wonder, how does it know something happened to the Kyrdosi? I would guess that it can just sense or feel that something is wrong through some sort of telepathic or mystic ability; consider explaining how it knows. Anyway, it wants me to go to "the border between Time and the Void" to find out what happened to the alien race we were attempting to rescue.

Second part of briefing: refers to the contact as female ("You are considering asking her who she is") but the model used for the contact looks like a male figure to me; seems inconsistent. (It occurs to me at this point that it might be using pronoun substitution and this mysterious figure is actually a future version of my character, which would be neat.)

Inside the mission: I like the mission title of "Discover What Became of the Kyrdosi". It comes with objectives to confront 3 figures.

Echo of the Champion's description refers to "Blood Echoes". I saw some Blood Echo minions nearby, is the Echo of the Champion meant to be a special Blood Echo? It's not totally clear from his description. I ended up defeating the Champion to get "The Strength of the Kyrdosi" clue, which says that he blames me for his destruction.

A bit later I found some Soul Echoes. So Blood Echoes are a subtype of Void Echoes. Is Echo of the Champion actually a Blood Echo too, then? Or something else?

Wandering around I heard one of the mobs say:

[NPC] Blood Echo: Time is like a pretty picture.... I will cover it in blood now, that will be ...pretty.

...which I thought was a really cool line.

Found Echo of the Scientist, whose description refered to Soul Echoes; I'm guessing it's meant to be a special Soul Echo. Her lines were quite good. It seems the transcended Kyrdosi are badly messed up in some way... "fractured" as they put it.

Found some more roaming patrols with creepy (but good) dialog.

Finally found and defeated Echo of the Hero, who had some more good dialog. He gave me "The Leader of the Kyrdosi" clue; in the text of this clue, "threated to destroy your Universe" should be "threatened to destroy your Universe".

Mission 3
Briefing: The contact tells me the insane Kyrdosi are now trying to "burrow into Time" to destroy my universe. This sounds bad. But apparently I have a chance to stop them.

Second part of briefing: I'm now told the Kyrdosi are "lost" and cannot be saved, which seems sad, since the whole goal of this exercise was originally to save them from annihilation.

Inside the mission, I have 4 Fractures in Time to seal, and have to "find a way to stop the Echoes" which sounds like a neat goal.

I found a "Kyrdosi Echo of Action" ... I kind of wonder why this isn't simply "Echo of Action" since, really, all of the echoes are Kyrdosi. The Echo of Action was very nearly the first thing I found and fought in the mission; it seems to be the "boss" of the map, though (it satisfies the "Find a way" objective), so I wonder if it would be more logical for it to be in the "back" of the mission. He gives me the "Kyrdosi Vengeance" clue, which says I've slowed their progress but there's still more out there; this being the case, I'm not sure if this should really count as "Find a way to stop the Echoes". Except in the general sense of shooting stuff dead tends to stop them.

I found a Fracture (a destroyable object) and destroyed it, triggering an ambush. I like their line:

[NPC] Blood Echo: Police Woman is sealing the fractures! We will unmake her!

....using words like "unmake" instead of "kill" nicely contributes to the (rather weird) atmosphere of this story arc.


Police Woman seals a (small) fracture


I find it a little odd that you "seal" fractures by breaking them - normally breaking something will open it, not close it. (This is somewhat nitpicky.) You could perhaps make the fractures some sort of clicky object, but admittedly the dark crystal is a good looking graphic for the fractures; maybe the visual is more important than the logic.

Breaking all 4 Fractures caused the mission to end. Universe saved? I hope.

Mission exit popup: "You have sealed time but you fear your efforts will be for naught." Why do I feel this way? I'm guessing it's because of the Kyrdosi Vengeance clue, but I think it might be worth elaborating a bit to explain why.

Debriefing: the contact says the fractures I closed are just small ones, and to really stop the fracturing of time, I need to become ... One With the Void. This sounds ominous!

Mission 4
Briefing: Nice pseudo-mystical explanation of how easy it is to screw up becoming One With the Void. It seems I need to find my center and become "unstuck in time in space" to truly embrace Nothingness. I do think it is a little odd that the contact now says "I will not ask this of you" when, based on the story so far, the universe potentially will be destroyed otherwise.

Second part of briefing: really rather neat as the contact throws a temper tantrum because I'm about to (mystically?) destroy myself to become Unstuck in Time.

Inside the mission: This is getting seriously weird as I enter a ruined city map and am given objectives to "Destroy your Love, Unmake your Mind, Banish your Hope".

I'm not quite sure that the landscape of my psyche should really be a Ruined Atlas map; I'd almost lean toward some sort of cave instead. The map where you fight Johnny Sonata's soul, or Psymon Omega's personality problems, would be cool, but probably not available.

I find a bunch of fragments of my "fractured self" on the map. The storm elementals are a great visual for this.

Found and defeated Echo of Love, whose dialog was eerily nihilistic. Perfect for the story, though. Destroying Echo of Love gave me the "Echo of Love" clue, which tells me the effects of my destroying love; it's quite evocative. I might suggest you rename the clue to something suggestive of loss, like "Love Destroyed" or "Absence of Love"; since "Echo of Love" sounds too positive.

Likewise Echo of Mind had excellent dialog and gave a good clue. I'd also suggest renaming the "Echo of Mind" clue to something suggestive of loss. Perhaps "Mind Blank" or "Absence of Thought". Also, "lost all that you are and know" sounds awkward to me; perhaps "lost all that you are and all that you know".


To achieve Nothingness, one must destroy Hope


Likewise for Echo of Hope. Perhaps rename "Echo of Hope" clue to "There is No Hope" or "Abandon Hope" or "Absence of Hope". Also, this clue seems noticably shorter and less descriptive than the Love or Mind clues; needs another (depressing, nihilistic, yet descriptive) sentence for the sake of balance. As it stands the Love and the Mind clues are a lot more soul-destroying than the Hope clue. Perhaps something about acceptance, nothingness, and/or despair.

Debriefing: Aha, I was right, the contact IS me! Or ... a pale shadow of me. She/it had tried to talk me out of this because it would prevent her from coming into existence. That's simultaneously twisted and kinda cool.

Mission 5
Briefing: "I" (the contact) tell me that I can now go fully to the other side, into the Void, to stop the fracturing of time. The fractures are too big to be sealed, so I have to "absorb" them. Oh, and this will result in killing myself. Eep.

Mission title: I like the objective of "Save Time", though this could be misread as, well, conserving seconds or something. Perhaps something like "Save the Space-Time Continuum" or "Save the Universe"? Might be too ostentatious though. Up to you.

Map selection: Inside the map, I discover the Void is much like a Cimeroran catacomb. This isn't all that suggestive of the horrible black Void to me; an underground map is good for this, but I might suggest using one of the blue caves, for the darker lighting and more natural caverns. (Maybe nitpicky.)

The goals of absorbing the past, present and future are rather cool.

Found "Echo of What Was", whose info says it was once the Echo of Love. Freeing it, it starts following me. I thought maybe it was the Fracture of the Past and I should lead it out, but taking it to the door doesn't do anything.

A little deeper in the mission I find Fracture of the Past. I end up absorbing it by destroying it. This doesn't "feel" quite right because it's exactly the same way that I sealed the fractures in mission 3, but the story is presenting these fractures as being fundamentally different than the earlier ones.

Freed Echo of What Will Be, who had some dialog about the Fracture of the Future. Hmm, starting to think maybe freeing the echoes might be silently triggering the fractures to spawn (but both echo and fracture have the same objective text). Ran around stealthed a bit and confirmed that this seems to be true; neat technique.

Found and freed Echo of What Is. Thinking about what they're saying, like

[NPC] Echo of What Is: Absorb the Fracture of the Present and I will use its energy to preserve your Mind.

....I'm thinking that maybe these Echoes are saying that this mission is survivable after all, and that they'll somehow preserve my sense of identity despite what "I" (the contact) said earlier.

The mission complete clue, "The End of Police Woman", is pretty neat. I'm a little sorry that the Echoes of the Kyrdosi could not be redeemed, but "released at last from their agony" is an improvement on their status, at least.

Debriefing: Ooh, I really like this ending, where the contact (a fragment of "me") is about to go back to eternal torment, but I manage to just barely save her in time. Gives an elegant sense of closure.

Souvenir: well written. Minor quibble: "The Fall of the Kyrdosi" is in the place where normally the story arc title would be, i.e., "The Fracturing of Time", which you have in the place that the name of the souvenir normally would be. Perhaps the souvenir should be "A Fragment of Your Identity" or something symbolizing the Fractured One that you re-absorbed?

Overall
I found this story arc very moody and nihilistic. It evoked a strong sense of doom and despair and it was seriously creepy to be destroying parts of my own identity in order to empty my psyche enough to be translated into the horrible black Void. I liked the eventual reveal of the contact's identity and her final redemption.

I didn't like that the whole problem seems to be of my own making, to some extent, because my traveling to Kyrdos and activating the Transcendance device is very nearly the root cause of the universe being destroyed. For this reason I feel bad that we never actually get to save the Kyrdosi, but I don't think the story really allows it. The arc does try to assure me that it isn't really my fault, which is nice; you might consider adding some more foreshadowing to the Kyrdosi Scientist's dialog and/or clue, to the effect that the Transcendance device is still experimental and it's not certain what will happen.

I kind of wonder why the contact has me try to rescue the Kyrdosi in the first place? Based on who the contact turns out to be, it seems like she would have foreknowledge of what happens after the Transcendance device is activated and could avoid the whole situation by simply allowing the Kyrdosi to be genocided.

That complaint aside, I found this arc to be very strong in establishing a sense of atmosphere. I don't think everyone would actually enjoy this story (due to the sense of nihilism and despair), but the story really grabbed me, the dialog was excellent, the writing in the briefings/debriefings very good, and the gameplay all worked pretty well. I rated this arc 5 stars.


---

My queue is currently:

@EraserDog - Hooray for Hamster Hell 246464
PoptartsNinja - Wretch 'Trike Force 249890
@Johnny Courageous - Dr Sigler and the Chronojumper 131158
@Venture - Splintered Shields 253991
Zamuel - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967 (re-review)
EvaDestruction - Freaks, Geeks and Men in Black #161629
twelfth - Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
@Gypsy Rose - In Pursuit of Liberty 221702 (re-review)
@The Cheshire Cat - Astoria in D Minor #41565
@Baron von Doffen - A Surprise Fit for a Baron #318352
Gryfyn - Trick or Treat #320225
SkarmoryThePG - Sky Kings' Ransom #232308

9/9/2009

Last week I got the "Mercenary" and "Vanguard Recruit" day jobs on my main character, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), for hanging out in the Vanguard base.

I played Kashira (28 db/ninj stalker) for a bit, joining a friend on a 5 player pickup team which got her to level 29.

Mayday (50 fortunata) did a speed LGTF in 26min 26sec, which most of the team complained was too slow.

I solo'd Mega (50 SS/will brute) through a story arc called A Falling Angel where you explore an anti-heroine's back story, which links her to the Banished Pantheon and ultimately leads to a dark destiny. This was interesting overall and I gave it 4 stars. A passerby in the AE building complimented Mega's background story, which was nice.


Last Saturday I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on an Imperious TF on difficulty 3; it wasn't exactly a speed run (we cleared most of the stuff that was in our way) but we finished in a fairly speedy 49min 49sec.

After that I played Arrow Girl (29 archery/dev blaster) on a Citadel TF on difficulty 2; I didn't really need the TF badge but figured it would be a nice way to get some exp. Our team was

2 scrappers
1 defender (cold/sonic)
4 controllers (fire/rad, fire/storm, earth/kin, plant/emp)
1 blaster (arrow/dev) (me)

The kinetic disconnected early and didn't come back, while the empath was mostly afk for several missions, then suddenly quit the TF. Despite this we did fine, finishing in 1hr 45mins and getting Arrow Girl to level 30, where I took Explosive Arrow for the sake of more AoE. I finally got around to writing a bio story for Arrow Girl, making her an Olympic archer who hires a talent agent that persuades her to become a superhero for sake of publicity. A friend let Arrow Girl join the tail end of her Midnighter arc, which let me mooch the Lost Savior and Midnight Squad badges.

After that I solo'd Olivia Q (50 MA/SR scrapper) through Pagkagising ng Kaluluwa, a story arc about a Filipino martial arts academy. This was a well-written martial arts epic and I gave it 5 stars.

I had just finished up that story arc when I got a pickup invite to a Statesman TF. I should know better, but I'm a sucker for pickup teams, so I signed on. Our team mix was:

3 defenders (empathy, empathy, rad)
1 tanker (stone/ice)
1 scrapper (MA/SR) (me)
3 blasters

This isn't a bad looking team on paper, but we had a near wipe in mission 1 against Arbiter Sands which immediately made me feel rather dubious about our prospects. We had countless squishy deaths against the Thorn Tree in mission 3, and we had a team wipe (except for me) in mission 4 against Barracuda, of all things. In the final mission we managed to overcome the patron AVs, only to suffer a team wipe against the Arachnos Flyer due to loose aggro beating up all the squishies (the tanker explained "It's too high to taunt" .. doh!). We beat up the flyer and then suffered a wipe against Lord Recluse due to loose aggro causing LR to rush the DPS fighting the red tower; I think maybe we attacked the red tower before the tanker was ready. After that we killed the flyer again and then had six straight team wipes against Lord Recluse. With both empaths healing him the tanker usually survived for about a minute or two, and it seemed like we could not actually drop the red tower in that amount of time; the Arachnos Repairmen were much more annoying than I ever remember them being on previous STFs. It seemed like it was impossible to interrupt their heals.

At one point we had actually dropped the red tower and moved on to work on the yellow tower, but then the red tower respawned (not sure if it was a bug or a repairman somehow rez'd it). I got fairly annoyed by this and I ended up dropping 2 Shivans and a chemical nuke (from Warburg) to try to drop the red tower again, but to no avail. After 2 more wipeouts, the team leader called it quits and the team fell apart. On the bright side, I did get an Absolute Amazement (STUN/RCHG/ACC) purple recipe drop, so it wasn't a complete waste.

A friend asked me if I wanted to try it again, and initially I was like "no way" but later that night I saw another STF forming and ended up being enough of a sucker to hop on board the new STF. This time I played Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and our team mix was:

1 tanker (ston/ston)
1 defender (emp/elec)
3 controllers (earth/rad, mind/storm, earth/kin)
2 blasters (AR/dev, sonic/EM)
1 scrapper

The tanker on this team was much more aggressive, tougher and effective at keeping aggro than the stoner on the previous TF team; we easily got through the first four missions (we were lucky enough to find the key mob of mission 4 on the very first Security Chief). In the last mission, the tanker actually tanked all 4 patron AVs simultaneously while we took them down. We did have a team wipe against Lord Recluse (again the team attacked before the tanker was really ready) and a second time the red tower respawned after we dropped it the first time (oddly, this time it wasn't on the proper spawn point for the tower). The repairmen were still a problem until the stormy started using hurricane, which helped. We beat up the red tower again and were then able to take out all the towers and Recluse himself, completing the STF in 1hr 48mins. I got an Enzyme (debuff/END) SHO as reward.

On Sunday I solo'd Blackout Girl (10 elec/elec brute) for a bit, starting a King's Row mayhem during which CoH crashed, then I made it back in game with 2 minutes left on the clock. Managed to break enough city scenery to get more time to finish the mission anyway. I went on to do Shelley Percy's story arc about finding a Nictus and extracting it for study, which got Blackout Girl to level 11.

After that I played Star Amethyst (33 dark/ice defender) on a 7 player team running through Croatoa missions and some other door missions; this finished her story arc with Buck Salinger (unlocking the Katie TF). One curious thing about this team is that we had 3 shield defense characters (scrappers and tanks) and yet none of them took Grant Cover -- which makes sense from a selfish perspective, but if they had all taken Grant Cover, I'm sure they would've hit the defense soft cap (which they definitely weren't at otherwise). With our team so heavily defense based, our one team wipe was against Devouring Earth (due to their quartz). This team got Star Amethyst to level 35, where I took Hover (mostly for convenience while teleporting).


On Monday I played Star Amethyst some more, joining a 7 player LEGION/Sisterhood team; we suffered 2 team wipes against Circle of Thorns, but also got Star Amethyst to level 36. I also helped kill Eochai and Jack-in-Irons for some merits and badges.


Tuesday night I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through Consequences of War, Part 2, a story arc about the Rikti War, and one SG's battle against the Rikti. This was pretty good and I gave it 4 stars. I also joined a badging team from LB channel that ran an 8-player "test AE" mission for the Among Friends badge.

After that I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller), joining a friend's 6-player team doing door missions in RWZ. We beat a Captain WM Dietrich AV, Positron Automaton, Manticore Automaton, Silver Mantis AV. We actually beat that horrible "Get the News Out" mission (that almost always auto-fails when mobs see you and attack the destroyable objects) mostly due to the advice of an experienced illusion controller, and did a "Get the General's Intelligence" mission where a defender teammate had the idea to team TP us all (and the General Bu'dekka NPC) into the mini-fortress inside the mission, letting the Rikti ambushes destroy themselves on the Vanguard/Longbow defenses. While playing, one person complimented Spacegirl on having a cool name and another person said she had a cute costume, which was nice.

We finished the night doing the "Save the World" mission. During this mission I embarrassedly realized I had a blaster teammate on gignore (he was a pickup who was on the team for 2 hours before I realized that -- I thought he was just really quiet!). I couldn't remember exactly why I had him on gignore, but he helped remind me by not following the team, dying more often than Fusionette (seriously, Fusionette lived til the end of the mission, while the player blaster died repeatedly) and, after standing there not attacking while we whittled Nemesis AV down, he volunteered to "show us how it's done" by soloing the last 5% of its life. The tanker was pretty willing to let him try this and tried to disengage; I kept my rad debuffs on because I didn't really want a team wipe over some kind of ego contest. But a Phantasm ended up getting the kill.

On the bright side, though, we did Save the World, and that seemed like a good time to call it a night.

Woo, I can read this thread now without fear of spoilers.

I'm going to be different and say they should be separate factions, if only so you can have Hero Wannabe versus Villain Wannabe battles. (Of course, they would all be hostile to the player characters.)

It's been awhile since I ran through this, but if you haven't already, have a few fixed spawns of particular wannabes who utter thinly disguised versions of the original hero's battle cries.

"I'm at the soft cap for what I do, but what I do isn't very nice!"

"With great pizza comes grated cheese!"

etc