Silver Gale

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All told, looking the thread over, there are some folk here who seem upset that something they like doesn't bear up to critical analysis. That's okay. There are people who critically analysing something and finding what look like lots of legitimate problems.

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I'm just upset about the *quality* of the critical analysis. The arc does have legitimate problems, but none of the critics notice them because they're too busy harping on the things that offended them personally, which are entirely a matter of taste. The gist of Venture's arguments, for example, is "You touched my character! *Nobody* touches my character! Waaah!" and "Nemesis Plots are overdone and rarely done well, so nothing with a Nemesis Plot in it can possibly be good".

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Look, if you don't like thinking about or studying your entertainment, that's okay. There are whole cavalcades of things for you. There's every film Michael Bay's ever made, the works of Jerry Bruckheimer, and so on. But there's nothing wrong with demanding intelligence from your entertainment.

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So if you gave Hearts on Fire five stars and Venture gave it one (and found in it a host of problems that he finds in every other Architect arc), does that mean you demand less intelligence from your entertainment than he does?

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This arc, from what I've gathered,

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You could just play the damn arc so you know what you're talking about.

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Though I wish people would stop asking people who make it a duty to provide criticism to provide them with their criticism and then deny the criticism.

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The author never went out of their way to ask for criticism (except in the general way that putting an arc you made into public view invites criticism of it). Also, if the only criticism an author gets is "you should never write this sort of story", they are *well* within their rights to deny it.

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



No, only when the subject material warrants it.

And I would have let it go with one post if people hadn't yanked my chain.

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you never let it go, Venture. You always have to have the last word, followed with 'and now im done with this nonsense', as though the other person involved is so much worthless scum. Ive never seen you say 'well lets just agree to differ' or anything of that ilk.

Eco

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Well that's hardly fair to the man. He never responded to a single one of my posts in this thread. He's perfectly capable of ignoring a post addressed directly to him, he just chooses not to do so.

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

What happened to the community touted as 'friendly and supportive, not like WoWs' that i was told about when i started playing?

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I don't believe a friendly community has to include author-coddling. When you write something and put it out in a public forum for other people to look at, you need to be strong enough to weather the criticism that follows, no matter how stupid it might be.

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I bet witch is heartily sorry he ever wrote the thing now.

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Well I'm sorry I ever played it. So I guess everyone's sorry.

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Gale - I would argue that right from the get-go things in the arc aren't 'right' and it starts breaking down way before you see the Clockwork King.

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Which, again, goes against your assertion that the odd hazmat procedures and the sudden and rapid handbasket ride make perfect sense and are totally reasonable. Either things are wrong or they're not; you can't have it both ways.

Let's consider for a moment how your arc works out in the context of the rest of the game. The player character is a delusional psychotic who constructs an elaborate fantasy world for themselves in which they are a superhero. This world (represented by the entire rest of the game) makes perfect sense and is internally consistent, even if it has the occasional oddity due to the crazy person's ignorance of things like proper hazmat procedures.

Then, one day, out of the blue, the crazy person's world starts breaking down, buildings ruined, all their beloved friends dying of an unstoppable virus, and the very logic of the world breaking down (Clockwork King has no business being there).

The crazy person regains brief lucidity, takes a look at their miserable reality, and decides they'd rather believe their dream world. So they imagine the doctor as being the supervillain who is making them hallucinate all of this, beat the crap out of him and... arbitrarily decide to bring everyone back to life and reconstruct the perfectly sensible and consistent fantasy, and are never again jolted out of it, despite presumably being kept in isolation and force-fed much stronger drugs?

The Nemesis Plot option seems about as sensible.

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I wasn't trying to do that at all. I addressed only points that were either something I couldn't change because of the limitations of AE, something they missed in dialog, or my thought process behind why I did something that ultimately doesn't matter one way or another, and came down to personal preference.

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Doesn't matter. As an author, the moment you start responding to any sort of feedback with attempts to *explain yourself* is the moment the discussion ceases to have any merit. Because people start nitpicking your explanations and you nitpick the nitpicks and everything goes into an endless recursive nitpick loop.

For example, I could take issue with the fact that you insist everything in the first three missions makes *perfect* sense and is perfectly reasonable and realistic, and then when you get to the matter of the Clockwork King it becomes "well you're crazy and delusional so it doesn't have to make sense". Cake, eating it, still having it.

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To address a few concerns:

(tl;dr)

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Okay, seriously, you're not doing yourself any favors now. You wrote a pretty good arc and did a great job using the MA tools to implement it. A lot of people love it. Some people don't like it or are critical of it. Let the arc stand on its own. Don't try to "explain" things that people "aren't getting". Igonre the little voice that says "but only if they *understand*, I'm sure they'd all come around and we could all be great friends!".

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Wow, you...uh... got the theme and 'only logical' conclusion of elements pretty much entirely wrong.

If anything, the arc does everything in its power to suggest that it's not a Nemesis plot. In fact, Solemnise in all likelyhood is simply Solemnise. You seem to obsess about this hallucingenic agent, and that right there is where you're making a huge mistake. That's only one interpretation of what's going on, and it's a pretty weak one to boot.

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Just because it's an interpretation the author didn't intend doesn't make it invalid.

The Nemesis at the end of Mission #5 insists that the world has been wiped out by the plague and is his for the taking. Whether he's an actual Nemesis robot pretending to be Dr. Solemnise or a hallucination of your character, his words are definitely contradicted when you finish the arc and step outside the AE building. It's a jarring transition that cuts off whatever lingering feelings of uncertainty could have otherwise remained.

(Of course, I personally find that a *good* thing, because it means I can leave the entire mess behind me and assume my magical-construct-of-hatred-imbued-with-angelic-power is running through AE stories to try to widen her scope of emotional reactions.)

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Did I really say smartbooty? Damn filters.

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Clbootyic.

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he problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie.

From my perspective, people won't let my review lie. It was OK for people to post BEST ARC EVAH without showing their work but as soon as I said I didn't like it I was accused of being a troll.

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I said I didn't like it, too, and somehow nobody jumped on me for that.

Of course, I can recognise the difference between "I don't like it" and "this is a bad arc which does not deserve the praise it gets (and everyone who likes it is probably not as clever as me)".

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c) Appropriates the character's identity, which is an unforgivable trespass. The character's identity is utterly inviolate; it is what the player brings to the story in any RPG.

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Ever read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? It had a brilliant resolution that relied on breaking one of the deeply entrenched expectations that murder mystery fans bring to the table.

There are no "utterly inviolate" rules in writing, there are only good and bad ways of breaking them.

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d) The five most common words in high-school fiction are: "and then he woke up". These kinds of stories are not cute or clever: they are tired, cheap and extremely obvious. There is no trick at all to writing them, because the writer holds all the cards in the first place.

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Throwing up a whole bunch of crap that doesn't make sense and ending with a "and then he woke up" is different from deliberately constructing a narrative that slowly and methodically takes you Into The Mouth Of Madness.

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Oh, and I do enjoy having fun. So much so that I take fun very seriously.

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Just because you didn't have fun with it doesn't make it bad. The people who had fun with it are not wrong or stupid, and you're not wrong or stupid either for "not getting it". It's not your kind of thing. It's okay. Admit it, move on.

That was brilliantly written, masterfully executed and I deeply regret having played it.

Wow, an arc that made Venture literally speechless with rage? I gotta play this!

I've been spending time in Free Realms, which is a fun online world packed with cute little minigames. There are various "jobs" your character can do. Some of them involve monster fighting and are levelled through combat, but others (like Cook, Miner, and, um, Postman) are advanced through little mini-games.

The mini-games are your standard "here's a grid of tiles, match at least four tiles in a row, and they vanish and different tiles pop up to replace them". You've probably spent at least a couple hours somewhere playing a Flash game of this type.

Here's where the interesting part is: when listening to people talking about Free Realms, I was surprised to hear that some of them complained about the grind. "I had to run that posting minigame dozens of times to max out my Postman level!", they say. "This game is a grindfest".

What is most puzzling is that the only thing that you get from levelling up the Postman job is... unlocking more types of Postman minigames in different towns. Oh, and some nifty new outfits. That's it.

Personally, I find tile-matching puzzles irresistible. I count the time I spent in Free Realms sorting letters in the same category as the time I spent on Popcap's website playing Bejeweled. The fact that I levelled up in Postman is pretty much incidental.

But I guess to some people, whatever increases the time between now and them getting whatever shiny number they want next to their name is grind.

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Rikti Inquistion: Unexpected. Chief Weapon: Fear. Addendum: Surprise. Chief Weapons: Pruluar: Fear: Surprise. Addendum: Lineage of War: Devotion: Fanatical. Chief Weapons: List: Fear: Surprise: Devotion: Fanatical. Addendum: Uniforms: Snappy: Red. Declaration: Restarting.

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Fix'd

Well, that's useless.

If you've been playing for that long, you already know each and every map in the game *anyway*.

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I'm also on the boat of 'Not able to disable custom powers.'

If I have to see your god awful costume of a pink power ranger on the huge build type with a dragon head, you're gonna get to see my pretty pink energy blasts.

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But how am I going to explain it to my kids when they ask "why is that man using pink energy? Pink is for girls, he isn't a girl!" WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

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Heh, I'd stop wasting your breath Munki. Same tired debate is still the same and tired.

Before I leave the thread though, I'll only say two words...

Cryptic Bucks

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Now, now, they won't sell anything that isn't already available through gameplay.

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No problem and didn't realize ST had a rep. I remember him but not much about him.

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I was unaware I had a rep either, honestly. But apparently I do.

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I *told* you that one time you corrected some typos on my VV page would come back to haunt you some day!

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I don't think so. A lot of people were trying them both out because they were released at relatively the same time. I think EB had been out a few months before. I do think EVE had a lot of pull and I think had EVE not come around EB would have stuck around longer and perhaps EA would have stuck with it a tad longer to iron it out more.

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And we are about to get some competition in this niche market ourselves.. will the same thing happen?

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I don't think it's really comparable to the current situation with CoH and CO. A five-year-old game has a lot more staying power compared to a less than one year old game.

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You'll get generic'd if you use Paragon Studios' IP in your entire character. That includes powersets.

[/ QUOTE ]No you won't. You'll get banned if you impersonate a Dev, but not for RPing as a signature character.

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I'm guessing it's a joke - *all* powersets in the game are technically the IP of Paragon Studios.

This "it was all a social experiment for college" sh*t is getting seriously old.

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I am curious as to weather we will see a level increase with this expansion. Take us to level 60.

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Most likely not, although there have been suggestions of an additional system that can boost the power of level 50s while leaving them still at numeric level 50, and special content that's only available to those boosted 50s.

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AE bosses are not the measuring stick by which you measure challenge or difficulty in the game. AE farms purposely pick spawn that give a disproportionate reward for little risk. AE bosses are just bags of hitpoints; they're nothing special and require little thought and effort to mow them down.

That same group would die against groups of Vanguard Rangers, Malta, Knives of Artemis, etc. especially on maps where you don't have clear lines of sight with spawns set up like sitting ducks.

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Agreed.

It's not like the only two options for female clothing are burqua and bikini. I think there's plenty of high heels and lingerie already, and I'd like to see more armored outfits and boots with cleats. Or, y'know, more lingerie for male models. Either of those is good, really.

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It's the first actions of the new dev, Michael Bay.

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"AWESOME Hoverbot. AWESOME Drone."