Sister_Twelve

Yah, I think this is important to remember. Not every Hellion you run across is going to be the same, although I think because of the nature of seeing them as labels all the time, ie slammer, buckshot, gunner, etc, like we do, we tend to sort of lump them all together into one big amalgamation called Hellion. The same phenomenon takes place for every faction in the game just because so few of our foes even have names that we know.

That makes it pretty easy to depersonalize them.

But everyone in a gang is a different person. Even in the same city, one group of Hellions is going to have a different sort of 'character' than another group of Hellions. And that character will probably reflect the personality of whoever the leader is.

So I think it's entirely reasonable that you might have a group of doofus Hellions in one arc, then a group of semi-professional car thief Hellions in another arc, and then the group that populates my arc, who are ruthless and nasty and probably some of the better 'heavies' that I've ever written.

I'm not sure how much comic book reading you guys do on the whole, but I think I'm probably more influenced by the style of Busiek in Astro City and Miller during his run on Daredevil than most of the contemporary comic book writers like Bendis. That's typically why I tend to try to personalize everyone in the story by giving them a name.

I think the story resonates a little bit more because you know that it's Eric Ridge who killed Donna Wright than some nameless Damned who killed an old-time heroine called The Weaver.

Hrm, let me try to explain what I mean by that because I think you might be misinterpreting what I meant. I really wish that, in practice, the ratings were turning out to mean what they were originally intended to mean. Because I view something as a 4 out of 5, that doesn't mean that I think that it is bad. In fact, it means the exact opposite. On the flip side, I fully understand why you want to keep yourself out of the 4 star limbo that so many arcs fall into.

However, what I meant...

Let's look at the recently recycled trend in Hollywood to remake every horror movie put out in the last 30 years. Some of these remakes were good. Some were not so good. In fact, when the director was remaking a film that was frankly quite bad, like the original Last House on the Left or the original The Hills Have Eyes, (Sorry, Mr. Craven, but in your earliest forays into film, you just weren't a good director yet), the resulting remake was often better in almost every way than the original film.

Yet they were derivatives.

And if you ask almost any horror movie afficionado, her or she would tell you that he or she prefers the original film for no other reason than the sentimentality that comes along with something being the original. Yes, I have actually had conversations where people tell me that they prefer the original Last House on the Left, even with the 2 stupid cops and all the screen time they sucked from the film, the poor acting, the even poorer technical aspects, the obvious and glaring audio errors, and the relatively thin script.

The Last House on the Left (1972) was just a bad film.

The original Hills Have Eyes was better, but still, the version that came out in 2006 (?) was still better in almost every facet of filmmaking. Not the sequel... the remake with the cop from Monk and so forth.

So what am I saying?

Only that in most regards, even if what you do is very good (4 - in our parlance), it won't be classic (5 - in our parlance), simply for no other reason that even if you clearly outperform the original arcs, your arcs will be derivative of material that has already been produced.

Again, it doesn't mean I won't like it... only that I probably won't view it a classic material.

Now, of course, for every line in the sand I draw, there are exceptions. The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978 is probably viewed as more of a classing than the original. The Thing that came out in 1982 is probably viewed as more of a classic than the original as well.

So it's not to say that I won't be so totally blown away by one of these arcs that I instantly rate it as a classic. (All critics are self-contradictory in that manner.)

However what I will say is that all things being equal, I will generally regard strong material that is original as stronger than strong material that is derivative.

The ones you pm'd me earlier are in the area of what I consider to be 'quick fixes.' If it's in an in-mission clue, I can usually strip the formatting and fix the typo in about 30 seconds. The tough stuff comes when I've completely color coded a briefing box and have like 2000 characters crammed into the space where 1000 is supposed to go.

The favorite thing I do to myself is when I forget to leave the MA interface after stripping one of those big ones down and have the paragraph breaks without tabs yet. When you highlight a large section of text that isn't broken by tabs and is only broken by enters, when you color code the text, it proceeds to put about 40 extra {color}{/color} tabs in as it attempts to color and uncolor something that only its mechanical mind can perceive.

It is great fun to see a text box designed to accept 1000 characters suddenly jump up to over 4000, which I've seen once.

Hrm. Guess it was a bad idea then.

Disregard.

Completely understood and of course, this should be a process that unfolds over time with the MA author team doing most of the heavy lifting using the MA tools to do the proposing, brainstorming, arc writing, then balance testing and so forth prior to providing the developers with as close to a polished, finished product as possible with the limits of the AE interface.

At that point, what the devs would have to do, (given that the framework of the zone is already there), is the equivalent of data entry... ie embedding the contacts, setting the doors in he zone for the instance maps, probably reducing the spawn sizes of the zone to less 'hazard zone-like' levels.

If the MA author team does its job successfully, hopefully the time limit problem that you describe could be reduced and done with a minimum of developer staff backup.

Played through this one. As requested, if not a 5, I did not rate, though if I'd rated normally, I would have given it a 4. It was an engaging arc that flowed naturally, but since it was derivative of content, (even not so good content), already written, I couldn't in good conscience say that it was the 'best of the best' per se.

As far as your experiment is concerned, I honestly didn't see much different from it than the majority of what the other known authors are producing right now stylistically. It appears as though a lot of the text that would normally appear in the clues is being placed in dialogue balloons, which tends to create really big dialogue balloons that may spawn so far away from the player that the player either needs to read them in his chat area or miss them entirely.

Everyone, for the most part, at least the authors who have really delved into this activity has taken to color coding text and everyone has his or her own system for color selection. Yours wasn't distracting, but until you pointed out in the above post that you were attempting to highlight specific plot points, I didn't really pick up on that this was what you were doing.

Overall, it was a good arc that played fairly well and I enjoyed it.

The Punisher - Yes.

The Shadow - No.

One was a villain. He was introduced as a villain and Marvel later gradually morphed him into an anti-hero and then a hero. The other was a radio play character and the brutality of his actions were largely left to the imagination of his audience at the time, but he was never characterized as a villain or anything other than a relatively grim hero.

I'm not saying the Ultra Mode is a waste or anything, only that if you are buying a high end video card solely for the purpose of running it, you will be thinking later about the other things you could have used that $400 to buy.

Hey, I'm as geeky crazy about this game as the next person and if what they have described ultra mode to be was something that significantly changed my CoH gameplay experience, I'd probably make the investment in a heartbeat. But what they've described is that the gameplay experience essentially won't change at all. There will be some additional effects and the overall appearance will sharpen to some extent.

If that is worth $4-500 to people and they have the extra cash to do it, then by all means, go for it. But if it's a choice between those incremental types of changes and spending that money on something else, then I think most people would probably end up wanting to go with whatever that other thing is, all things being equal.

Basically, this game and WoW are the only games I really play on my computer. And I don't even actually play WoW anymore, so this game is the only game I play on the computer at the current time. If it was a choice between devoting $400 to get a video card only to run ultra mode and getting a Xbox 360 and ME2 so that I could play ME2, I'd probably go for the X-Box, even though I really don't like the instability of the console and would probably get very few other games for it.

However if you already have a high end system with a great video card, then ultra mode is certainly a nice add-on to the already existing game.

Probably has to do with the number of arc slots people have available and also the amount of potential free time needed to write arcs now that the holidays are over with and people are back into the usual grind of work and school and so forth. I imagine with the lower number of plays people are getting on average these days, there is less of a desire to unpublish a potentially high rated arc in favor of a contest entry. You would essentially lose all ratings to that point if you intend afterward to take down the contest entry and republish the older arc.

We don't know. The bio simply says nothing. Then some random player character near them mentions how mysterious their past is, at which point they either shoot 15 people, pull out a sword and stab 15 people, or produce blades from beneath their skin at some point on their body and slash 15 people to death with them.

Many discussion threads ensue, all which mention the character's mysterious past, thereby solidifying the sheer mysteriousness of it all.

I call foul. Everyone knows that people named BLOODEATER have no bios.

They are all men with mysterious pasts, presumably so the creator doesn't actually have to write anything about them.

::shrugs::

You can make a pretty strong case that Elektra is a stalker and they sold her as a hero, or at lease an anti-hero, for awhile.

Like I said before, it's the personality and the history of the character that determines whether or not he or she is evil. In this case, I think it would largely depend on the choice of target.

I know most will say that Wolverine is more of a scrapper than a stalker, but Wolverine stabs, slashes, cuts, and otherwise sticks people with pointy pieces of metal pretty much all the time.

I think basically it's just a matter of different players favoring different things here. I took time off from CoH, played WoW for several months, took two different characters to 80 during that time, participated in end game raids up to and including Ulduar and the Trial of the Crusader, which was the last one released before I quit and came back here. WoW has everything that you describe... voice acting, cutscenes, end game raiding, etc.

I never felt a sense of immersion in WoW.

I feel immersion when a game inspires me to add to the storyline with fiction of my own. Ironically, every game I have ever played for the last 20 years has engendered that sort of immersion in me. At least on the internet. However, console games generally don't. Knights of the Old Republic was a great game, but it was not an immersive game. There was nothing particularly different about your jedi from any other jedi who might be walking through this story. Mass Effect was the same. Great game. Had loads of fun. But it never became more than 'a game,' which is what to me defines immersion.

Once a game becomes a storytelling experience and inspires me to write my own stories to add to the universe, then I am immersed. You cannot do that with the linear, console rpgs because essentially there is only one story to add to and the developers have already written it from beginning to end.

That is probably why I never felt any immersion in WoW. Blizzard controls the story to such an extent that there is really no room for your character to become part of the narrative, any more than 'generic character x' is part of the storyline. Blizzard's story is about Arthas. At least during the period of time I played. Every cutscene I saw, every bit of voice acting I experienced, every raid I participated in... all of them were part of Arthas' story, a story in which I was a minor, minor character, because it was always implied that I would have to gather at least 40 of my friends to even have a chance against Arthas and even then 40:1, we would probably still lose.

That is not immersion to me.

Sometimes I wish the original devs never bothered to explain why a character never dies in an MMO. The one they came up with is so immersion breaking, it's basically become a self-mocking joke of the game now 7 years later. Most other games never try to explain it. They just come up with a mechanism for it that's never really explained.

The fact that you will automatically be teleported to the hospital means that you can never create a narrative with a true level of threat in this game... unless you just ignore the mechanism and its underpinnings.