Sister_Twelve

I've thought for a long time that a hero or villain should perhaps have a little bit more control over his or her life than we've ever been given in this game. Even as we're reaching the pinnacle of our careers, we are still basically playing the flunky and not thinking for ourselves. I'm not sure if this is the best mechanism for generating that sense of control, but it's better than the nothing we have so far.

[QUOTE=Golden Girl;2637288]

I think the most salient issue is that they're basically trying to recreate something that they created several years ago as a very simplistic and evil group into a group that has more depth. Depending on how they choose to write the story, they can either ignore what they've written before and try to create this sort of 'moral gray area,' which seems to be the way they are going with it. Or they can try to reconcile what they are writing now with what they've written in the past.

The first versions of the Praetorians were basically mirror universe versions of the Freedom Phalanx. You can try to semantically argue that isn't the case all you want, but if you go through Maria Jenkins' arcs even today, there is nothing there that is remotely redeemable about any of them. Tyrant, at the end of the arc, is hanging around in a cave on our world, gloating because he has Statesman hanging there helpless. He's not doing anything for the good of anyone. He's doing something petty and spiteful because at heart he's an evil guy who cares as much about Praetoria as Recluse cares about the people of the Etoile Isles.

Now they can retcon as much as they want, but as long as the storyline is still sitting there for anyone to play, they really can't snow us into believing these people were anything other than evil versions of the Phalanx.

Hopefully, they'll do something at some point to rectify this and justify your faith that these people are more than what we've seen of them thus far, but thus far we really haven't. We have a synopsis of Tyrant's life history that really doesn't jibe with how he was portrayed in previous canon material, but that's all we've seen.

Until we see more, I am still operating under the assumption that Praetoria is nothing more than Goatee Earth.

For some reason, I can really hear Fairuza Balk, (in full meltdown mode during The Craft), doing justice to Silver Mantis.

Wouldn't the more appropriate gender specific term for a male witch be "War Warlock?"

Which, yes, would sound quite stupid, but would be more apropros than War Wizard.

I'd settle for getting the same model for each pet every time. I've only played 1 MM and I stopped mainly because after I'd named his pets, I discovered that sometimes the thugs that would should up would be 1 guy, then the next time around, it would be another guy, then another guy altogether.

This may be sort of strange on my part, but I didn't really care what they looked like the first time around, but I did want them to be consistent.

None of the MM sets are any more inherently evil than any other AT is. The undead one comes closest, but Marvel comics had heroic characters with dark supernatural origins throughout the 70's with a brief resurgence as the Midnight Sons in the 90's.

Whether a character is evil or not depends on the character's personality and his or her history, not the origin of his powers or how he is designed.

I could easily see Hardcase in St. Martial serving as the template for a thugs MM reformed hero, if Hardcase had a group of fellow hardcases who chose to hunt Wailers with him.

Coyote actually has powers? I thought he was just some guy in a suit, so the other heroes felt bad for him and threw him a bone with the 'introduce the newbs to their powers' thing.

You mean there will be two people in the world with the same name?

Crap. That needs to be addressed immediately. Such a travesty would result in a rift in the space time continuum and the game would immediately end.

Thank you much to everyone who voted for me!

Play all of these contestants' arcs because all of them are great!

Like I said in my pm, good luck with the challenge. I doubt I'll be playing through this again. I have a lot of others' to play through and you seem to be pretty happy with yours the way it is.

Played through this. Did not rate it as of yet, because I see no reason to down rate a work in progress that the author asked for play throughs on.

I have no issues with the story that is being told to this point. (At this point, I have only made it to the beginning of the third mission with others in the MA group and to the end of the 2nd mission solo.)

The biggest issue that I have by far is that the custom group is severely unbalanced for the level range. At a higher level, this group would be fine, but at levels 5-10, in the group setting we were having deaths every time we encountered a patrol from this faction during the 2nd mission and wiped while inflicting minimal damage the first time we encountered a stationary group of them in mission 3.

The biggest problem with the faction for the level range is the sheer variety of powers they have. There is a reason that the devs designed bland and boring groups with a narrow range of abilities for low level content. Even the sturdiest of ATs probably do not have any mez protection yet. When you have multiple minions throwing out mez, some of them throwing out slows, most of them throwing out damage types that no one in the group has any defense or resistance against, and some healing the others in the mobs, almost no player group except those composed of players set up for strike forces are going to be able to accomplish much.

It is actually much easier to solo this arc, at least from what I saw during the two missions I ran. However, my the final boss of the 2nd mission appears to be an energy brute and she 1-punched my exemplared brute with a built up bone smasher. If she can 1 punch a brute, that means she can 1 punch any AT with the possible exception of a tank. That is simply not acceptable. I do not mind losing. I do mind it when I never have a chance to do anything.

As far as content is concerned, I would suggest you consider how you format your text blocks. At the present time, you are throwing out huge blocks of text without many paragraph breaks. There are a lot of players who will not play this for that reason alone.

I think this is probably a good story. However, the necessary work to make it readable and playable hasn't been done yet and must be done before you enter it. It could be very good, but it's just not finished yet.

I've never really understood why some people freeze their characters from advancing, but if you want to 'twink,' which is what it is called in WoW, I think, then I have no issue with you spending the merits you receive. You really aren't hurting my gameplay experience with your twinked character and if that's what you enjoy doing, more power to you.

Concerns raised by last night's playthroughs:

- Airhead notes that some of the color choices and textual formatting makes certain things hard to read. I agree. Unfortunately the number of color choices are fairly limited and about half of them, especially those that require you to place dark text on a dark background if you use them, are virtually unusable. Using red for anything denotes certain things to most players, most often 'DANGER.' So using red as a default is probably not a good idea. I will look at what's available.

He also mentioned that changing the newspaper articles to clues gave him the feel that the player was taking them. I am not sure. I don't necessarily perceive a 'clue' as something that is always in the character's physical possession, so much as something the character has learned. I do think the comment that he was not sure whether the articles actually belong as clues might be valid. However, like I said in a prior post, the majority of the less positive reviews were coming from players that were in teams, but not the leader. It might be coincidental, but I think the reactions were partially driven by the fact that the articles are necessary due to providing context the player would otherwise not have.

- Airhead also noted that there was a CoT patrol at the doorway of mission 3. I have not seen this, but I could easily see it happening. The only way to have 2 factions populating a specific mission is to have 1 faction as the default and have the other faction as several groups of patrols.

Since the Hellions are probably the easier of the two groups populating that mission, (as long as you are solo and there are no bosses, Damned are no joke at 5-10), it might be best to have the CoT as stationary and have the Hellions as the patrols.

- Another player mentioned that The Weaver was the original leader of Arachnos. I know. However the only references I can find to this character are a blurb in Paragon Wiki and in Recluse's description in the signature villains section. Both essentially say the same thing. A character called The Weaver was the original leader of Arachnos.

Obviously we are not dealing with the same character, but it's interesting to not that both my creation and The Weaver who was the leader of Arachnos seem to have emerged in the post-WWII world. These days, a lot of attention is paid to trying to make character names unique.

However comic books in general are replete with examples of characters with duplicate names. And I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that one person in the United States and another person in Italy both decided use the name 'The Weaver' independently during the same period of time.

As it stands, especially with Oroborous, there may come a time when the developers decide to expand and go back into the past and flesh out The Weaver who originally ran Arachnos. At that point, I may run into a situation where I have to decide whether to Donna's name or not. Right now, though, I don't think she's really swimming upstream against a bunch of history. She's basically only swimming upstream against a sentence. And I can deal with that.

- I am considering toning down the difficulty of the ambushes across the board. Right now, the ambushes are hitting pretty hard against all of the playtesters I've played with.

A few alterations based on playthroughs over the last few days:

- Altered the color scheme and the formatting of some of the text elements based on comments by StratoNexus. Hopefully, the new color scheme will be less harsh on the eyes.

- Scrapped all of the original Mission Begin clues and replaced them with the 'Still Busy' text from each of the mission. There was a lot of discussion about this during the long run through of the arc on Sunday. After seeing the reaction to the arc from various types of people, by far the most negative or indifferent reactions have been from people who were in teams, but not the team leader. This gives me the impression that the original 'Still Busy' text for each mission was more integral to providing context to the story than I initially believed it would be.

Strangely enough, I notice no drop off from losing all of the original Mission Begin clues, leading me to think that the text contained in those clues was probably irrelevant padding of the story.

- Fixed numerous typos, word repetitions, and other mechanical errors. Undoubtedly some still remain.

- Players have mentioned that they think the individual characters might be more memorable if I gave them supervillain names versus the real world names that they currently have. I think it's a stylistic type of difference, but if others mention the same thing, I will consider altering it.

- Tangler mentioned that one of the optional objectives in the 2nd mission might have been glitched because he could not find it. None of my playtests have encountered this problem. I also ran it 3 times tonight specifically looking for that and easily found both optional objectives on all 3 run throughs. If anyone else encounters this problem, let me know.

Thank you to everyone who has played it thus far. So far the run times have ranged from relatively short... 45 minutes... all the way up to 2 1/2 hours, which was greatly influenced by the fact we were running in a group that was providing lots of discussion and commentary along with looking heavily for typos. ((Extra thanks to the three in the MA group who did that runthrough with me.))