Red_Zero

Deleting the coh.checksum worked. Thanks

I was playing ok for a bit early this morning before the Server's maintenance cycle. A few hours after the maintenance cycle, I tried logging back in. The Updater downloaded something and then tried to apply it and could not. This is the error I get:

Updater-File Error

checksum failed on C:\Program Files\CityOfHeroes.exe
Click ok to do full checksum of all files.

You may be out of disk space or you may be trying to install to a location where you have insufficient permissions.

So I click Okay and it starts downloading and when it is finished the same error pops up. My choices are either to click Okay and have the problem loop again, or quit which closes the Updater.

Now, I know the game should have plenty of room to update as my drive is only a quarter full at best, and it should have all the permissions it needs, and it was working just fine a few hours ago. I am a bit frustrated by the new forums and the Community and Dev Digests aren't working yet, so I don't know if this is just me or if this is a known issue everyone is experiencing.

Anyone notice that the Architect Entertainment building in Sharkhead Isle is right in line with the Sky Raider air strip on the island villa?

I know the Rogue Isles are not a place to pay much attention to safety and regulations, but this would be one more enforced by laws of physics and airplane mechanics than legal regulations. That building is up for getting smacked by an aircraft hard if anyone tries to land or take off the wrong size or type of aircraft from that air strip.

[ QUOTE ]
As far as I know, the real world has yet to discover any methods of time-travel, so there's no way to know how actual time-travel works. If it even works at all....
.
And even if it does get discovered someday soon, there's no outside point-of-reference from which to examine the overall effects. It would solely come down to the traveler's experience, and how would he know if he was in an alternate timeline or not? Maybe he's been removed from timelines in general, and so gets to retain his memories of how things "should be". Or maybe he's actually in a branching timeline due to his own meddling.
.
There is no right answer, only conjecture.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes.

There is good conjecture and there is bad conjecture. It comes down to this: Are you using Time Travel because you want to invoke Cause & Effect, or are you using Time Travel because a different Time is a great place to visit?

As far as I know, there is no hint of any possible Physics mechanism that would make Time Travel possible. That Time is just an observed dimension of Physics and has no physical underlying cause or component. Personally I hope that Time Travel never, ever becomes possible. It would be interesting, educational, and enlightening at being able to observe past events in their original context. It would bring about many "Ah!", "AH-HA!", "Oh...", "OH!NO!", and "I told you so!" moments. The possibility of the future meddling with the past is something that I find rather horrifying. It is bad enough that politics often tries to alter history and science books and spin and flavor perceptions of current news.

[ QUOTE ]

Because every time a new group gets sent into the past, there will be a consequential reaction on the time span between the past and the future.

That's not a given, it's an imposed rule.

[/ QUOTE ]
It is a given, it is not an imposed rule. In "True Time Travel" there is only one single time line, if changes to the past are suppose to have any effect on the future, it will not be done arbitrarily at anyone's convenience. It will be done with the unforgiving, uncaring force that is Physics. The results will be felt on the future immediately as the past which is changed has already played out. Otherwise it is...

"I can't believe it's not Time Travel!" in which it really is NOT Time Travel, it is just an Alternate Reality which feels, tastes, and looks like the Past or Future and is not. In that case, you can do whatever you like, because no paradox can be generated, because your "Future" native Reality and the Alternate Reality "Past" are not linked by cause and effect, only by your method of travel. You leave your native Reality, travel to a "Past" Reality, make some changes, and then migrate to a 3rd "Future" Reality that is based on what the "Past" Reality would progress into.

Ouroboros is a lot like that, except you return to your native Reality where obviously no changes have taken place. All your doing is changing an Alternate Reality "Past" , then returning to you "Future" native Reality, and never getting to see the results.

[ QUOTE ]
Every failure will result in more and more change to the future as the past starts to wise up to the event.

Again.

Even worse, if you win, you probably lose. Now whatever historic event that prompted the time travel in the first place didn't happen as it originally did, and the repercussions of that alter history in untold ways, perhaps in ways that were critical to your own groups formation or reasoning for even wanting to expend so much resources and manpower into sending agents into the past in the first place. Again, paradox.

And again, and this one says "don't use time travel at all".

[/ QUOTE ]

No, and No.

The message was: Don't use brute force to invoke changes when Time Traveling, you never know what you will accidently break that was important to you.

[ QUOTE ]

I think you're entirely missing the point, which is that whoever possesses time travel can throw an infinitely regenerable army at whatever critical event they choose. If the first 100 agents you sent couldn't get the job done, send another 1000. Or 10,000. Or 1,000,000. The fact that it takes a century to train and dispatch 1000 agents doesn't matter because they all end up at the same destination. If the event is important enough to the possessors of time travel, they will eventually pile enough of their side onto it to win.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok.
That will not work.
Why?
Because every time a new group gets sent into the past, there will be a consequential reaction on the time span between the past and the future. The past gets to play itself out every time before the next group gets sent back from the future.

Every failure will result in more and more change to the future as the past starts to wise up to the event. This would probably result in the eventual elimination of what ever group started time traveling back to the past before they were even formed. Congratulations, you get a paradox.

Even worse, if you win, you probably lose. Now whatever historic event that prompted the time travel in the first place didn't happen as it originally did, and the repercussions of that alter history in untold ways, perhaps in ways that were critical to your own groups formation or reasoning for even wanting to expend so much resources and manpower into sending agents into the past in the first place. Again, paradox.

Trying to change the past with brute force is like trying to fix a wrist watch with a sledge hammer.

[ QUOTE ]
I cannot believe there has been an 18-page thread about "suspension of disbelief" on a message board for a game based on a fictional genre that involves grown men, women and occasionally children putting on colored underwear in order to fight/commit crime, giving themselves names like "Spiderman" and "Mr. Freeze" in the process. Not to mention developing the ability to stick to walls, fly faster than light, shoot laser beams out of their eyes and build doomsday devices, jet-powered cars and battle armor out of supplies purchased from the local Home Depot.
.
A high capacity for suspension of disbelief is kinda intrinsic to appreciating the format.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Laughing Out Loud] That is what I would have thought. It is apparently not true, and the requirement for a Suspension of Disbelief is not a game playing requirement nor covered in the EULA.

[ QUOTE ]
No, you're harvesting resources in your own present to send agents into the past. You can direct all of them to the same time, forever (for low values of 'forever').

[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, I see, your trying to Loop Resources. That might work for a little bit. It can not be kept up indefinitely. Parts break, corrosion happens, wear and tear, entropy takes hold, manpower must be constantly employed during all phases, maintenance will be required, people will want to get paid and have time off, expendables like power, fuel, and parts will be needed. Land will be needed to facilitate the equipment, which you can not send back and will have to acquire it from that time period for every repetition. And at the end, if everything is sent back to the past, there is nothing for the future to use except some very worn out nonfunctional junk pile.

That's a logistical nightmare. Something is sure to go wrong in a very spectacular way.

[ QUOTE ]
#1. No, I'm not. Jurassic park's understanding of DNA was idiotic even for the time it was made. Verne, Asimov and Wells were writing with good scientific understanding of their days, and extrapolated into interesting fields based on that. They didn't invent stuff and dress it up as 'sciencey.' No matter what time you're talking about, since we've found velociraptors, we have known that they are about the size of a basset hound.

[/ QUOTE ]

That was the movie, not the book. Hollywood make some changes from the book due to difficulty in generating the special effects, as CGI creatures were a very new thing in special effects that the movie premiered. This meant limiting the amount of creatures generated and animated in the movie ( the movie had only 3 raptors, the book had dozens and they were multiplying too, so the park really didn't know how many it had.) Also, generating realistic CGI feathers was beyond the technical capability of CGI animation at the time. To make up for the reduce number of Raptors, they made them bigger, and scaly rather than feathery due to CGI limitations.

The DNA process they used in the movie was glossed over, and actually had several key plot points that were critical in the book that were eliminated from the movie. In the book, they were sampling as much of the DNA as they could, using chaos theory and tons of computer algorithms to make as much sense out of it they could, they used existing animal DNA like frogs and birds to fill in the holes and help sync up the fragments, and after incubating it, IF it lived after many, many tries and reformulations, IF it looked like a dinosaur, Hammond called it a dinosaur, and they cloned it. All the "dinosaurs" in Jurassic Park where more like DNA Frankensteins then anything their original DNA resembled. This was all based on pre-1990 (and probably much earlier than that) genetics theory.

Verne, Asimov, and Wells, did make stuff up in order to bridge why "X" is possible. All robots in Asimov's books used a Platinum Iridium sponge for a brain which worked by channeling Positrons (i.e. the antimatter version of an Electron) thru it in circuitry. H.G. Wells made up the entire War of the Worlds where martians had a rule about 3's, and Jules Verne's Nautilius in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was completely made up before even the first hints of atomic power were know (radioactivity was not discovered until 1896, the book was published in 1870.) The submarine was electrically powered, and anything being electrical at that time was high tech.


[ QUOTE ]
#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.

[/ QUOTE ]

Cars are more expensive, and more complex, and the industry is suffering, and fuel efficiency has really not improved greatly. Things like Pens, Toilet Paper, and Firearms are really bad comparisons, as they are way too simple. Firearms really haven't improved in the last 100 years and there science was very well defined at that time, Toilet paper was used in ancient china, and the biggest development for pens was being able to engineer a ball point mechanism that would not leak and write on a paper surface at about the time of WWII.

[ QUOTE ]
Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.

[/ QUOTE ]

If your using an agent to gather resources in the past you will be displacing those existing resources from their initial use. All resources are finite, and if the agent is greatly disturbing the original resource distribution and competing against the native activities and inhabitants of the the Time Line, you will create enormous disruptions to the Time Line the agent would have come from. Even if Time was some-what elastic to allow for minor changes, at some point it would be stressed passed the point of improbability and create a paradox, at which point you've killed your original Time Travel program.

#1
I think your confusing science fiction with a science book. Science fiction is about taking premise, theory, and/or some kind of fictional mechanism and extrapolating them out and/or their use through use of a story. Jurassic Park is a really good book, better than the movie, and some of the work in fossilized DNA that has been in the news makes it almost creepy at how close it might actually be possible.

I take it you wouldn't like Issac Asimov's Robots or Foundation series, William Gibson's The Difference Engine, Burning Chrome, or the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern, or anything by the likes of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells (often both refered to as the Fathers of Science Fiction.)

#2
Computers are more of the exception than the rule. There is a staggering amount of collective work that goes into actually making the hardware, literally hundreds of millions of dollars of capitol equipment, millions of manhours, tens of thousands of people, all to make some tiny little piece of crystallized germanium arsenic doped and layered with a mind boggling array of trace elements and filled with chemical compounds, to sell at just a few hundred dollars. The only thing that really makes it possible is that it represents a VERY small material object sold to millions, perhaps billions of consumers at a significant cost. Even then, it is useless unless you get the hardware to use it in and the software to employ it.

I think something more on the comparison level of say, railroad infrastructure, orbital satellites, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, space stations, superconducting supercolliders, and atomic weapons and such would be fairer. Stuff no one is just gonna be able to put in there backyard, let alone use just by themselves.

[ QUOTE ]
3) Time travel is not an inherently bad trope to use if you can control it, which 99% of writers don't do. I am painting with a very broad brush here when I say 'time travel stories suck,' but it's only in the same way I say 'I don't want to have a nail hammered into my foot.' Chances are, one nail might actually feel AWESOME, but I don't have the will to find that one.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am curious by what exactly do you mean " if you can control it".

[ QUOTE ]

4) Everything that can be done can be done again, later, cheaper. This is a general rule for development. Compare the computer you're using to read this message to the first computers being developed.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is assuming that something can be scaled down, made simple enough that a single person can reasonably own, maintain and operated it, priced at a point where the a consumer could acquire it, and not have restrictions or inherent dangers that would cause the Governments and all the Ring Wraith Lords to descend upon the first guess of someone owning it. There are lots of things that could never be scaled down, made simple enough, cheap enough, or safe enough to be made available to the general or even private public to own or operate.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of science fiction do you like?

[ QUOTE ]
So it takes the resources of a program.

Then again, ten years later.

Twenty years after that, a different program.

The next five years are prosperous so three different programs get started.

Repeat ad infinitum, until humanity explodes. It's commonplace because every single one of those programs could send people to the same point in time

[/ QUOTE ]

I know your trying to say something. I have no idea from this what that is, if it was anything at all.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't like TimeCop because it doesn't follow the rules laid out in Timecop. The problem with the existence of time travel devices is that if one gets made, then one CAN be made. Therefore, it is an inevitability in a vierse population, that the device will be created again. Therefore, eventually, time travel becomes commonplace, simply because there's nothing stopping time travel from profligating in the future. In essence, the past would be full of tourists and resource-exploiters from the future. Time would become pretty meaningless.

Timecop doesn't really work because when time travel is introduced, all the people involved in its creation are kinda stupid and the rules that govern is use and abuse are so limited. People hop back to the ancient history to [censored] with time? Happens infinitely, spiralling out because time travel is possible.

Perhaps I think overmuch of people.

[/ QUOTE ]
What were the rules of time travel in Timecop? I (unfortunately) watched that movie and I distinctly don't remember any rules being introduced at all. The only thing I could come up with on a internet search was "you can't travel to the future because it hasn't happened yet" which as far as I can recall, they never did.

And why would time travel become common place? It it takes the resources of a national program or major corporation to actually build and run a time travel program (much like a space program), then even if it was possible it would still be highly restricted.

And the whole title premise of the movie "TimeCop" was that there is an active monitoring force that is patrolling Time looking for trouble makers, which even further ups the bar for making changes to the past.

I think your over-simplifying how "easy" it would be to Time travel (if it were possible) and how "easy" it would be to make changes and neglecting the the probability of repercussions and consequences for doing so way too offhandedly that would confound, compromise, or conflict with what changes a person would be able to make.

[ QUOTE ]
Still, steam would do Smashing and Fire damage, like Fireball. If you get hit with pressurized steam, it's concussive force and heat. Force in this game = smashing damage.

[/ QUOTE ]

I believe Nemesis's Staff is typed to do both 1/2 Smashing and 1/2 Energy.

Steam, in most cases, does not get hot enough to actually set fire to common materials. It COULD be made to get hot enough to set fire to something. That doesn't happen unintentionally. Most things burn at much higher temperatures than what it takes to make steam.

If it can not set fire to common materials, why would it be called fire damage? I believe Laser Beam Eyes use Energy as their damage type as well, to make the point that just because it is hot, does not mean it is Fire type damage.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I wonder why if it's superheated, pressurised steam, it deals energy damage.

[/ QUOTE ]

Heat is energy. Fire is combustion. Steam doesn't combust. I often take "Energy" in this game to mean any form of power that isn't a form of combustion, physical force, chemical reaction, or "negative"-type energy.

[/ QUOTE ]

Dude, it shoots a giant bubble. How do we get force fields out of steam?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because someone recycled graphics and animations.

[ QUOTE ]
I wonder why if it's superheated, pressurised steam, it deals energy damage.

[/ QUOTE ]

Heat is energy. Fire is combustion. Steam doesn't combust. I often take "Energy" in this game to mean any form of power that isn't a form of combustion, physical force, chemical reaction, or "negative"-type energy.

Oh, there is definitely a glam component to the Nemesis Staff. The fact that is actually does something functional other than look super cool is what makes it extra impressive.

Nemesis's Force Staff could easily be explained by just saying that it sprays super heated water out which violently explodes into steam when it comes into physical contact with a surface, such as the intended target. I think though, that it states somewhere that the actual functional mechanism of the staff is of some kind of very advanced unknown technology that has yet to be deciphered by anyone outside of Nemesis himself.

As far as Nemesis's automatons are concerned, being steam powered just means that the conversion of water from a liquid to a gaseous state is being used to induce mechanical force or motion. It does not mean that it uses a crank and piston mechanic like in a locomotive. Any system that is pneumatically driven is adaptable to being steam powered. A lot of the animatronics seen in amusement park rides are actually pneumatically driven robots.

An automaton could be therefore, pneumatically steam driven. Steam produced is internally recycled though a cooling process that helps preheat the water that is to be turned into steam. Further cooling is achieved by a capillary cooling jacket inside the skin, releasing just enough heat to mimic body temperature, finally, the last bit of heat energy could be released just from standard breathing along with some unrecycled water vapor. The hottest parts of the automaton would then be thermally insulated to not let its unnatural temperature be outwardly apparent to thermal cameras while improving its thermal efficiency. Assuming that the system is advanced and energy efficient enough, it wouldn't output more heat energy than a normal human would.

[ QUOTE ]
Not to take up too much space in your thread Venture but...

If you guys need to post a essay about your story's plot maybe you didnt explain enough in your arc. I found my biggest problem with my arc is I understand the plot without the story and I forget others may not follow the story as easily. Just my 2 cents

[/ QUOTE ]

Your right.

I just need to clear my head of this, drop it, and walk away. I had questions about it to begin with, and was hoping for something more constructive that I got. That's life.

[ QUOTE ]
The main problem I see with this arc (from reading it, not playing it, mind you) is that the person supposedly doing this experiment (i.e. the contact, Magenta Rogue) seems to be omniscient already. Otherwise how does he know exactly how to place the player in this grand tapestry before the events that cue it have happened yet? (I'm assuming your Fridge Brilliance is that Magenta Rogue is a time traveler himself, which would explain this part.) But if that's true there's no reason to do an experiment in the first place; Magenta already knows what's going on. If the experiment is supposed to be a ruse, it seems like an unnecessarily elaborate one.

[/ QUOTE ]
The whole arc really assumes that the Theory that is put forward during the arc is true. If that was not the case, then there would be no arc.

It is revealed during the arc that Magenta was tipped off to the Nemesis activity while hacking a Crey Corporation server. This is suppose to be a chance happening, not something he was originally looking for. It involved the manufacture of mass quanities of Jaeger Automaton parts, albeit disguised as "Not a Jaeger" products. It did, of course, lend an opportunity to test the theory discussed in the mission arc.

That means he starts out already knowing enough about Mission 3 to create a plan surround it from the start. From Mission 3, he can extrapolate Mission 5 just by tracking the shipment of the parts.

The whole intent of the experiment is just to see if Time is being retroactively changed when the Nemesis's plan is failed, or if indeed, there are plans, with in plans, with in plans, in which case, Time is not changed. It's not really suppose to be about defeating Nemesis, or what the Nemesis's plan is, or thwarting it. Its just to get Nemesis to react to a stimulus and see what happens.

To that end, Magenta must have devised or secured some way of preserving information from being changed even if Time and Reality is altered. This fact is never discussed, as it is not really important to the player. It represents the unaltered Time Record to which Magenta would later have to compare history too.

Since the 20/20 Hindsight of History is probably the best source of reconnaissance info for a potential Time Traveler, Magenta looks into potential collectors and curators of historical info and documents. This leads to Mission 4 and the Historical Archive where it's pretty plainly apparent that the building is staffed by Nemesis Automatons upon close inspection to the trained eye, and very likely the key source of vital information for a future Nemesis about the past from which to plan from.

Since the records cared for there represent most or all of the data that the Nemesis would be looking at, Magenta looks though those records and bases his decision, helping him limit what factors and information to actually consider so it is not an open ended problem. The place is a public archive house so this is not a problem, he can do it covertly or overtly without disturbing anything or drawing attention as long as he is discreet about it.

So now that a finite limit on available info has been placed, and Magenta knows that Nemesis wants to create X number of Jaegers based on the activity at Crey Corporation, he needs to deduce where good fall back positions are. Jaeger Automatons are nothing new, and being a Robotics mastermind, he would be at least knowledgeable in what the general the requirements for manufacturing them and what kind of resources they required.

This means that Magenta must try to predict Missions 1 and 2 based on the above. In order to further narrow down the options, Magenta has the data in the Historical Archive modified in Mission 4 to narrow down possible locations, as well as to obscure any record of mishaps that would historically tip the Nemesis off about his own plans.

Still, that could leave a lot of potential options open. Those options are further investigate before hand by Magenta before Magenta meets with the Player for the first time. Having narrowed down the list as much as possible, it is then time for action. Magenta then not only hires the Player, but several NPCs in similar capacities to the Player. He then "Just Happens" to send the Player to Missions 1 and 2 where the real action will occur as the NPCs go to other places that will be duds or non-starters. The Player and the NPCs are not told about each other for secrecy reasons and act independently.

The player is not "researching" anything, he's a rat in a maze. The only person researching anything is Magenta Rogue, and he's way too deep in this to call it any kind of "double blind".

You really need to qualify that. Do you understand how a double blind study is conducted?
*Magenta is the 3rd party removed from the "lab" as it were. He has pre-prepared the planned outline of the experiment but does not interact with the Test subject (The Rat) as to not interject his own biases, reactions, and/or presence into the mix.
*The Player is the Researcher, who performs the experiment by following the planned outline. The Player sets up the maze for the Rat (Nemesis) and interacts with the Rat. The Player performs the function of an isolation barrier between Third Party and the Rat.
*Nemesis is the Rat, the subject that is actually being tested. The Rat interacts with the Researcher but does not interact with the Third Party.

It is not compatible with the canon because Nemesis' history is not up for grabs. It's been spelled out in detail. Even if you take the book off the table you can't just discard everything ever said or written about Nemesis as being an elaborate lie and expect anyone to take you seriously.

While there being an extra-game canon source totally screws with the plot of the Mission Arc, the purpose of the arc was not to discard everything as an elaborate lie, but to show how misperception of a much larger, greater, more complex picture could be construed and simplified as Nemesis being a single person of a bygone era, based solely on the in-game presented facts.

Considering, though, that all of this happens in a Virtual Virtual Reality, and that the Mission Architect is basically Fan Fiction 1.0, your dragging canon into a designated non-canon environment and trying to call foul.

Yeah, we know. It does not, however, mean any other version of Nemesis has access to time travel. Since working time travel would be an instant I Win card for Nemesis (or just about anyone else) my argument would be that either Nemesis doesn't have it or it doesn't work.

Saying that Time Travel is an instant I Win Card is Throwing The Idiot Ball in a big way. That completely disregards how all but the most frivolous and laughable fringes of the Time Travel Genre. Time Travel is all about cause and effect, of actions or inactions, of consequence and repercussions, both foreseen and unforeseen, intended and unintended.

Characters that go into Time Travel willy-nilly and try and treat it as God Mode, always make that one tiny mistake, and prove their own undoing. When Death gets mad, it just kills you. When Time gets mad, it erases you from existence.... or even worse.

Time travel is hardly necessary to explain that.
It does not NEED to explain it. It is just that it COULD explain it.

The plot hinges on "laws" of time travel you have invented for your own purposes and apply selectively as necessary for the plot to work. For instance, if Nemesis' resources are destroyed in the past, why does he not simply bring new resources from the future? He (or she, in this case) could spend 10 years rebuilding in the future and bring it all back to ten seconds after the player's actions. For that matter, why build robots in the past at all when he could build them in the future? Answer: because then the plot doesn't work. It also requires near-omniscience on the part of the Contact, meaning we can add Xanatos Roulette to the arc's litany of sins, and several instances of Plot Induced Stupidity on the part of Lady Nemesis (really, attracting Clockwork was the best she could do for getting scrap metal, as opposed to, say, just buying it?).

What your asking for is to be the Omniscience Reader who knows all the reasons, all the facts, the entire situation. All these questions could have good, solid answers. The Story is limited to 18,000 CHARACTERS + additional tidbits. The Player only gets to read the story from the Character's Perspective. That means the Player get the One Sided Abridged Version. Exactly how many times do you think you could alter, re-alter, re-re-alter, ect., ect., a selected portion of Time before you did something that would cause it to implode upon yourself? Exactly how much of a disruptive historical act could you inflict without possibly compromising your own existance? How much power and resources is really needed to send men, materials, and supplies, back and forth? Are there practical limits? Is there physical restrictions? Laws of Physics that apply? Finite Resources that are available? This is not Plot Induced Stupidy.

And "litany of sins"? This isn't a Holy Inquisition.

Yes, it is a Xanatos Roulette. No one is going to want to read a Xanatos Roulette that doesn't even get off the ground. This is the Comic Book Genre. Masterminds and Mad Scientists are know for playing out successful Xanatos Roulettes after making obsessive studies and brooding for long periods of time about this kind of thing. They call it a relaxing hobby.

I think when an arc involves an author insert throwing Nemesis the Idiot Ball we can just stick the Mary Sue fork in it and call it done
You can have your fork back. There is no Mary Sue and you know it.

[ QUOTE ]
He says the test needs to be conducted in a " Double Blind " format which technically means he doesn't know what he's doing, either.

[/ QUOTE ]
Not true. Magenta Rogue is the Third Party overseeing the experiment, so he knows what he is doing. The Player is the Researcher conducting the experiment, so he doesn't know exactly what is necessarily going on. The Nemesis is the Human Subject being experimented upon, who isn't suppose to know that there is an experiment being conducted in the first place.

There are two reasons for this: The first is to avoid contamination in the experiment and ensure scientific rigor. The second reason is much more sinister and requires a bit of Fridge Brilliance to understand, because I didn't want to slap the Player in the face with it. Magenta Rogue is a villian after all and he did say that there was an ethical problem involved.

[ QUOTE ]
It discards as false a history of Nemesis that is given in the narrative in The Web of Arachnos (IE, not given by any character but by the "omniscient narrator")

[/ QUOTE ]
I am not familiar with that as it is an extra-game product. It is not required reading, and wouldn't be able to say how many players actually have read it, or if it is really even applicable to canon. Nothing in the title suggests "Nemesis Inside" and certainly no one has recommended it to me other than product advertizment.

[ QUOTE ]
That's not really compatible with the canon but the characters wouldn't know that, so onward we go....

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't know why that should not be considered compatible with the canon. Nemesis is an established deceiver and creator of elaborate deceptions. His involvement in Time Travel is fairly founded in the existance of Ouroboros with the fact that Mender Silos is an anagram for Lord Nemesis, and the fact that Mender Silos's appearance looks very suspiciously like that of the many Fake Nemeses, that Nemesis seems to disappear from existance for decades on end, only to reappear strong as before, and that his technology is highly complex and not entirely understood even if it is archaic in appearance. Explain, for example, how entirely mechanical Jaeger Automatons in the 1820's can actually sense the presence of a target at range when vacuum tubes were not even invented until the late 19th Century and electronic sensing devices not invented till the early 20th Century. It has always been hinted that Nemesis Technology has something "extra" in it that allowed it to perform past what should be the normal limits for the technology used. It could be as simple as micro-circuitry hidden in the elaborate etching designs and relief work on much of Nemesis's devices influencing the gears spinning inside the clockwork machines. Otherwise, I would almost accuse him of using Magic simply disguised as Technology if there was any hint of that.

It IS a challenge to the estabilished canon's portrayal of Nemesis. It is not intended to violate the canon, which incidently Nemesis does not seem to officially exist in. As far as the Player is concerned, canon may simply be what Nemesis wants you to believe.

I will accept the charge of "just a bunch of stuff that happened" with a slight modification to "just a bunch of stuff that didn't happened".

The plot of the arc is actually simple, but apparently hard to catch on to.
*Magenta Rogue is accusing Nemesis, any Nemesis, of being Time Travelers from the future, and that thier natural existance does not predate our own.
*To proof this, Magenta has hired the Player to perform a series of missions.
*Magenta intends to place the Player in the way of Nemesis at each turn and disrupt Nemesis's plan, forcing the Nemesis, to keep jumping backward in time.
*The Problem: The Player has no access to Time Travel and will be moving forward in time, while Nemesis has access to Time Travel (as the theory goes) and will be moving backwards in Time every time Nemesis's plan is disrupted to restart it.
*The Solution: Magenta must predict where the Time Traveler would jump back to at each event, and have the Player already there, at that location, at that time, ready to disrupt Nemesis all over again. This means sending the Player to the Last Mission first, and proceed in reverse order, hide or destroy any historical evidence that would tip Nemesis off to this (hindsight is 20/20 and when your a Time Traveler, you can have a lot of hindsight), and disrupting Nemesis's plan for the first time in the Final Mission.
*What Happens: For the first three mission, the Player is witnessing Time as it originally exists, pristine and unaltered. During these missions, the Player is "rigging" the trap by coming to those locations ready and pre-prepared to disrupt Nemesis's plan. Each mission represents a lower state of Nemesis's plan. The Forth mission, hides the trap, and the Fifth Mission springs the trap. -IF- Nemesis was indeed not a Time Traveler, all this will fail and be for naught, and the experiment will show negative on the results.


First Mission:
*The "Reed Milsons" warehouse is a bug caused by the Mission Architect. It was changed early on to the "Dean Smileys" warehouse, and indeed that's what it shows in my Published Arcs as being.
*Clockworks should need no explanation. If they are in a warehouse they are obviously looting it for metals and building materials.
*The Clockworks were the "Psychic" faction because I did want them to be Clockworks, and I did not want to cause level shifting in the story arc. Player Level Shifting is a major complaint in reviews, especially Gratuitous Player Level Shifting.
*The importance of it being Clockworks is reflected on in the Mission Souvenir.
*This is the Lowest State of Nemesis's plan. Nemesis has lost use of the Council Robot factory and all resources used there. Nemesis must now recruit people and build the Jaeger Automatons from scratch by collecting raw materials like Brass from Clockworks and processing and machining them into Jaegers. This would take the most effort and the longest amount of time and is most likely to produce the least amount of Jaeger Automatons and at low quality to boot. The Player enters this mission and destroys everything of potential value to Nemesis. This is the final effort, and if this plan fails, Nemesis is defeated and frustrated on how a non-Time Traveler is "following" her, and must retreat.

Second Mission:
*The label of Rogue Robots is an dumb oversight. I wanted to use the Rogue Robot faction. The Rogue Robot faction does not go to level 50. This would have created yet another Player Level Shift which was to be avoided. There are some robots in the Council and 5th Column factions that do go into the intended level range, a LT and a Boss, but no minions. I created a custom Council robot minon and created a custom group and overfocusedly called it Rogue Robots. In hindsight, it should have been called Council Robots.
*"Counsil" - ouch, I know better than that.
*The importance of the factory becomes clear in the Mission Souvenir.
*This is the Second Lowest State of Nemesis's Plan. Nemesis still has enough raw materials and personel even after splitting off enough to Crey Corp. to prevent voiding the Time Line to build lots of Jaeger Automatons, but needs a place equipt to build them with. Nemesis has gone back in time and has acquired possesion of the old Council Robot factory, dealt with the occupants, and has repurposed the factory for his own end, when the Player enters, destroys everything, and corrupts the manufacturing process.

Third Mission:
*As you noted, Grace Lightning is just a Boss. I saw no reason to foreshadow this on the Mission Introduction. I don't know if this was a contentious issue for you.
*This is the Second Highest State of Nemesis's plan. Nemesis still has operatives in the Crey Corporation, and having lost use of the warehouse where Nemesis was rallying forces, changes his orders for the Nemesis Automatons to create more parts and route supplies to another destination, as well as sending a Fake Nemesis to the Fifth Mission to replace herself. Magenta's already hacked the Crey computers weeks ago and when they see an alteration in shipping orders from a pre-determined norm, they change the Player's orders to Expose the Nemesis Automatons to Longbow, foiling the plan, and further disrupting Nemesis's plan by getting Longbow to hunt down where the Jaeger Parts were being shipped to.

Fourth Mission:
*The player blinds history to the first 3 missions as if they didn't happen, regardless of whether they did or did not or what even happened. This creates structured flaws in Nemesis's ablility to plan on past events as they truely happen..

Fifth Mission:
*This is the Highest State of Nemesis's Plan. Nemesis has been massing an army of Jaeger Automatons and no one seems to be the wiser for what is in store. This is when the Player busts in and defeats Nemesis. Nemesis, then jumps back in time to the Third Mission, unaware that the Player has already been to that location at that Time Period.

The Mission Souviner:
*If you want to read the mission from the Nemesis's perspective, read the middle five paragraphs in reverse order. It is as simple as that.

[ QUOTE ]
And the anagrams...people, it is not the 1950s any more, villains "hiding" their plans behind obvious anagrams is not clever, funny or anything but tragically stupid and trite. Yes, the devs do it. They shouldn't. Don't assume the devs do no wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]
Catch 22: Nemesis stylizes himself in an egotistical, anachronistic manner (1950's? try 1850's) and would and has used anagrams in canon. To portray Nemesis as not using anagrams would be a violation of canon. Thus, one charge can not be avoided without invoking the other.

Okay, seriously question here. Yes, the anagrams are stupid. No (sane) self respecting master villian should EVAR use them. The names used could be anything random. Have you ever thought that anagrams are not really meant for the characters in the story (that in fact, those are not the real names, which is why the characters never seem to catch on except in old Batman serials), but more for the reader as a meta-clue as to something about the story, or is that what your also objecting to? Not all readers catch on to anagrams very easily, or are even aware of them.

I have always thought that a well rounded enemy group should have a Minion/LT/Boss ratio of 3~4/2/1 for good variety. The first Mission Arc I made with a full custom group had a 4/2/1 ratio, but it took a lot of file space, and I only had room then for 1 Custom Contact, and 1 Custom Ally.

I think a real answer to running Stories in a Team Setting is to have a Story Line Channel added. The channel would dump the Contact's Mission Text for Introductions, Send Offs, Returns and Still Busy, as well as Mission Entry Pop-Ups, Exit Pop-Ups, and Clue Text. When added to a Chat Tab with NPC Dialog and such, it would allow Team Members other than the Team Leader to read the dialog as it is sourced. It would also have the advantage of creating a running narrative of the story that doesn't disappear as the story progresses and Players could freely read it at their leisure.