Sister_Twelve

I was writing while you posted.

A couple of nights ago, I ran "For All the Wrong Reasons" by Dark Respite.

This story was inspired by the upcoming Going Rogue expansion. Since the author is the creator of quite a few rather spectacular game inspired videos that serve as previews for the various past issues, it was not surprising to me that she would preview the expansion in a way, (or at least do some work to bring the Praetorians back into the collective minds of the players), with her entry into Dr. Aeon's competition.

The basic premise of the story is that the Praetorians are close to being able to stabilize portal technology in a way they have not been able to do in the past. This would threaten our world because the likeliest use of their portal technology would be as mechanisms for invasion, in the same way that the Rikti use them.

As I've said before, I tend to like invasion stories in general, because they allow typical roles to be challenged. In the midst of invasions, heroes can act less heroic. Villains are free to show their better sides because, as the saying goes, "it's their world too," and alliances are formed that would never be contemplated during other times. Invasions can serve as catalysts for new plotlines and to revive old characters that have become stale.

To be honest, though, I have never been particularly fond of the Praetorians. Their creation always sort of struck me as a development cop-out. It was sort of like, "well we spent all this time and effort creating these kick-butt characters, so the biggest, baddest adversaries we can think of for them are mirror universe versions of themselves."

However, be that as it may. With Going Rogue centering on them, it is obvious I will either have to tolerate more stories being written about them or spend the next year or so in the game walking around in a snit.

And considering that their ongoing stories have been wedded to something I have long wanted in this game, ie falling angel stories for heroes and redemption stories for villains, I will probably have to do a little more than tolerate them in the future.

The author indicates in a (very long) mission to start with that the Freedom Phalanx probably have a perspective on the Praetorians that the character will need to proceed with the plan to deprive the Praetorians of their newly developed portal technology. Once you have defeated a bunch of carnies and tracked them down, the heroes each grudgingly give you a bit of information.

In short, you learn that the Praetorian you need to target for the operation is Anti-Matter because he is the likely source of the technological advancement. Anti-Matter apparently has a relationship with Dominatrix, (which I honestly did not know and am not sure whether this is canonical, but I am willing to go along with it for the purpose of the story).

So the arc picks up the pace a bit after that and in short order, you kidnap a couple of Praetorians, break a rather famous Fortunata out of Longbow custody, use her to interrogate Anti-Matter and so forth, then return Dominatrix and Anti-Matter to Praetoria, kick Tyrant's tail (again) on the way out the door, and return home, having stopped the Praetorians' potential invasion plan.

I suppose the question the arc really asks is whether it is okay to do bad things to bad people if you are relatively sure they are about to do bad things to you.

On that level, I can certainly accept it as an entry for Dr. Aeon's contest, though I have to admit I never really felt all that bad about doing these particular bad things to these particular bad people, especially when I ended up returning them to their homes at the end. And kicking the tail of big bad of their world in the process.

My thoughts:

- The first mission is looong. I can deal with looong missions if the longness somehow is intrinsic to the story, but during what I consider the 'information-gathering' phase of an arc, going this long this early tends to result in loss of interest. I understand wanting the use the carnie map for the carnie mission, but the carnie map is annoyingly huge and trying to find multiple glowies and several Phalanx members on it is draggy.

- Once you get past the first mission, this goes away. The map sizes are reduced and for the most part, the pacing improves dramatically.

- Played it with my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. You face carnies and several of the Praetorian mob types from Maria Jenkins' arcs. You also face a few of the Praetorian EB/AV types. I had no problems with any of them, but my widow handles these types of things fairly easily. Squishier type archetypes might have some problems.

I enjoyed this story quite a bit. It was well written and the characterizations for the Praetorians were certainly a little bit deeper than what we've been given of them thus far. To be fair, the vast majority of the Praetorian material was written during a period of time when deep characterization was not in vogue in CoH, but we get more of them in three or four missions here than in anything that's been done before by the developers. The author humanizes them to a larger extent and that makes you care a little bit when you are doing bad things to them. On that level, I would give some kudos to the author because she actually goes far in making essentially unlikable characters just a little bit likable.

Overall, the one thing that I would take away from this arc is that the author seems to view doing 'evil' in a different way than many of the authors who wrote arcs for Dr. Aeon's contest. What you end up doing, (to me anyway), isn't really all that bad. In fact, when given the opportunity, at least within the scope of the arc, to potentially cripple the Praetorian threat facing our world for a long, long, long time, ie, taking out Tyrant, Anti-Matter, AND Dominatrix, the hero instead chooses pretty much to support the status quo and simply remove their ability to make war on us in the near future.

I am not sure if I would classify that as 'evil,' though I do have to say you end up doing some fairly bad things to some obviously fairly bad people.

My thoughts are posted in my 'One a Day' thread.

Well, as someone who has dictated entire conversations between the player's character and Nemesis in Union of the Mask, it would be pretty silly of me to say I object to this. Some players will hate it. Others will be interested in the story. Some will torch the arc's rating as soon as it starts to happen because they feel that you are hijacking their character and they won't care about how well the story is written from that point forward.

So I guess it's a gamble. The Union of the Mask has gotten decent ratings thus far, averaging a 4, so I guess it's not the kiss of death, but like I said, on occasion, dictating player dialogue will result in a very low rating.

Thanks for the review.

Just a couple of clarifications:

A couple of days ago, I played "A Taste for Evil" by Fredrik Svanberg.

Whenever I am talking to people on these boards, I am never sure whether there are references I throw out that perhaps the majority of people here are not old enough to really get or remember. I think "Soylent Green" is probably one that is pretty safe. At least as far as the reference itself is concerned. Just about everyone knows what Soylent Green is made of... ironically even if they've never seen the film itself.

At any rate, there were a lot of films like Soylent Green made in the 60's and 70's, which a lot of contemporary academicians and critics consider to be the bronze age of science fiction. It was sort of an era of what I call 'conceptual science fiction,' that is... the writer would be sort of locked onto a cool speculative concept like telepathy or teleportation or some other 'science ficition trope' that we, in 2009, are very familiar with seeing and centering a sort of meandering story around this trope, just to show off the speculative concept.

So basically a 'concept' became a 'narrative' in many cases with varying levels of effectiveness.

To me, this is why a lot of movies from this period of time, especially science fiction movies like Phase Four and Logan's Run seem so dated to us now. It isn't the visuals like so many critica would have you believe. It's the fact that this is basically an empty shell surrounding a single concept with nothing other than the coolness of the concept to sell the film.

The reason I mention all of this is because this arc has sort of a similarly meandering type of structure to it. It is also part of a series of arcs and it might very well be that the overarching narrative is only one that can be appreciated if the player has experienced all of the Nutripaste arcs. However, the basic concept of this one is that you are ordered by Arachnos to test the substance and then you are sent out on a series of rather loosely connected assignments and at the end, you are done.

In the midst of it, you stop what appears to be a major Luddite uprising, (major in comparison to what I've seen of Luddite stories in the past... which is to say, not much). I also consider this uprising major because I've never seen a greater concentration of Luddite crusaders at one time before though that might have happened merely because of my personal game settings more than anything else.

My thoughts:

- I suppose since you are considered part of the Arachnos organization during this point in your villain career, Marshall Brass giving you the military version of the flunky treatment is understandable, but from what I remember of his arcs coming up in CoV, all of his dialogue toward the character seems a bit out of character.

- No customs, but the opposing factions selected for this arc are some of the hardest hitting against low level characters ever created by the developers. In order, you face Snakes, which chew up low level characters, Vahzilok, which chew up low level characters, and Luddites, which normally do not chew up low level characters, but if you give them things like lots of ambushes, they have the propensity to do so.

I don't know if you intended this to be difficult, but it turned out to be one of the more difficult arcs to solo I've played in AE and for that reason, it tends to grind because of the fight-recover-fight-recover cycle you get into.

- The map at the end is huge. It took a long, long time to find everything there. It didn't help that one of the bosses spawned all the way at the top.

- Played on my widow at 1/+2/Boss/No AV. Like I said... tough. No deaths, but took a long time to get all the way through it.

I think the author intends for this to be sort of lighthearted villainy, but the grindiness bogs it down to the point where toward the end, you just want it to be done. I think this might actually work better in a larger group. At least, I've always found that the more eyes are present, the quicker those 'find the glowies on the outdoor map' missions go.

Overall, it's not bad, but I'd have to see what the other VEAT arcs are like to really evaluate the overarching narrative.

I think it's really a matter of taste and perspective than anything else. I've played many of the arcs that were submitted for the contest and all of them were flawed in one way or another, (as far as meeting the objective of the contest was concerned), including my own. Every audience member will either feel the ends of arc a wasn't enought to warrant the hero sacrificing his ethics for, or that the act committed of arc b wasn't evil enough to properly be considered 'evil,' or that a choice was offered or a choice wasn't offered.

On that level, every person has his or her own criteria. But the bottom line was the judge of the contest and felt that this particular arc met his own personal set of criteria the best.

I do find it unusual that he selected an arc that was mechanically broken at the time of the contest's judging for the winner. I personally started it four separate times the day after it won and was never able to successfully complete it because the necessary character never spawned for me. The author indicates that the problem is sporadic. Dr. Aeon apparently hit one of those lucky occasions where it worked properly.

Personally I never rated the arc and never finished it because after four times, I was very tired of it and felt the story would get an extremely, and probably unfairly, harsh rating from me after experiencing so many problems with it.

Removed at the request of the arc's author.

My thoughts will be posted in my One A Day thread. - S12

There's a lot of suffering that goes on in the world every day and I'm pretty lucky to live in a place where we really don't want for much of anything. I don't spend a lot of time doing charitable type things and I guess I really don't think about it that much for the most part.

But people estimate that anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 people died today.

We spend $15 a month to play a game. I think we spend that much at least to help these people.

All I guess I'm saying is there are a lot of emergency organizations and food agencies and medical agencies that will be working in Haiti in the near future. I guess try to find one and give what you can.

These people need our help.

The fastest Positron TF I ever ran was about an hour or so. I ran it by myself when that was still possible.

Edit: And looking through the posts here, it looks like it is again. It's been well over a year since I've run a TF of any kind. I used to solo Posi just about every night for rare recipes after the others in my guild went to bed.

So tonight I decided to try "The Alien Tyrant" by Hound.

As it turns out, this arc is listed as a sequel to his newer arc, even though this arc was apparently published first. I am not entirely sure why, but if you play this one first, be warned that the beginning of this arc assumes a tiny bit of foreknowledge about the overarching event that combines the two narratives on your part.

At any rate, both arcs are drawn from the alien invasion of a paranormal universe that we've seen done many times in the past, including the Rikti invasion right here in City of Heroes. Stories like this have deep roots, including works like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Card's Enders Game series, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, to more modern works like Independence Day and Signs. Even really recent works like both Transformers movies owe a small nod to this sub-genre of science fiction.

Unfortunately, the further we go into the well for good invasion stories, the weaker, in many respects, they become. I will step up on my soapbox for just a moment, because my upcoming rant will... at least in a small way... relate to my thoughts about this arc.

I've always considered Independence Day and Signs to be two of the weakest invasion movies I've ever seen. Why? Stupidity. Not necessarily stupidity on the part of the creators. I don't assume anyone that can carry something through from beginning to end and do it in a cohesive way to be stupid. It's more a sort of implied stupidity, in the case of Signs on the part of the alien invaders, and in the case of Independence Day, a belief by the creator that the audience of his work is stupid.

Signs is much easier to explain. The aliens are, without a doubt, the most moronic, obtuse and ridiculously stupid ever conceived. Why? Simply put: They are allergic to water. And this isn't a mild allergy. This a 'water will kill you in seconds' allergy. They choose to invade a planet that is 80% composed of the substance that will kill them all. If that is not sheer stupidity, I don't know what is.

Independence Day takes a little more explaining and a lot of my friends argue with me on it. I think Independence Day is a movie that sort of requires the audience to 'go along with it.' But going along with with it requires you to be stupid. Or at least accept stupidity in its rawest form. And I don't think it's so much intentional on the creator's part. The creator needed mechanisms to reach specific points. Someone had to figure out that the aliens were about to blast us all into smithereens. So Jeff Goldblum's character, who is a computer genius, figures out that the aliens are using our satellite network to piggy-back on for their countdown. -blink-

These things drove all the way across the galaxy in their super advanced starships and need our satellites to count down from 24 hours?

Like I said, it's a 'go along with it' movie.

In the end, Jeff Goldblum manages to bring down the impenetrable shields of the motherships by introducing a computer virus into their computer systems. -blink- The aliens use Windows? DOS? Our computers can inherently interface with the aliens' computers?

So anyway, my friends usually humor me for a few minutes when I talk about Independence Day and tell me to 'just go with it.'

So anyhow, off my soapbox.

The reason I mentioned all of that is because this arc suffers a little bit from the 'go along with it' syndrome. For example, at the outset, the author needs a justification for how it is we know where it is we need to go to bring the fight to the aliens who have invaded our world. And that is all fine. Except he starts out by establishing that Recluse, the guy who wants to rule our world, is sharing portal technology with the aliens to want to rule our world, so they can come back and try all over again to take over everyone... including presumably Recluse.

I think this can be done a little bit better. Or perhaps you might dispense with the 'portal' aspect period. The Rikti by and large already use portals as their mechanisms for invasion. If you are going to tread the same path as the devs, then you want to make your alien race as unlike their alien race as you possibly can. And truthfully, it would be nice if some aliens in CoH actually drove across the reaches of space in their ships to do their invading instead of everything always being part of this pan-dimensional, multi-earth concept that the devs have developed over the years.

Just a thought.

At any rate, once your character knows where the aliens are, your superiors decide that it is time for humanity to go on the offensive. And taking down the alien empire turns out to be surprisingly easy. Not as easy as, say, transporting a single nuclear weapon to their world and detonating a la Battlefield Earth, but it turns out that toppling an alien empire can be accomplished in only 3 easy steps.

Which is a bit too easy in my eyes.

The major problem I found with this arc is that it is not big enough to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. I talk a lot about big stories and small stories. I think this story wants to become a big story. It's just not there yet. I just don't think toppling a communications tower, killing some heavy duties on the street, and then taking out the emperor is quite enough to topple a galactic empire that's presumably been around for quite some time now.

My thoughts:

- Your contact's briefings tend to be a little terse. You appear to have quite a bit of room to flesh things out, which is good because right now the story is pretty skeletal. It's the framework of a story, not quite a full story.

- Mission one is very, very short. It took my about 15 seconds to complete it, which means your arc is really only 3 missions long. I know lots and lots of people will tell you that shorter is better and largely I agree with that sentiment. But there is a happy medium between, "Jeez this is long" and "Huh? That's it?" You need to find that with this mission. It's part of the reason I didn't buy the whole portal thing. It seemed pretty contrived.

- I'm not sure if I see the correlation between taking down the tower and riots occurring in the streets. Was the comm tower generating some sort of psychic wave that was pacifying the population? Or was it more an inspirational thing?

- Mission three did not look like a massive revolt in progress. It looked like a minor revolt that had been brutally curbstomped by the powers-that-be. This was mainly because there were only 3 revolutionaries left and all three were captured. If this is what you want to convey, that's cool. But if you want to convey the people rising up against the brutal regime, then you need to have some running street battles and so forth.

- I tend not to give specific mechanical type advice, but in the last mission, I would put one of the royal guards at the front of the map to separate him from the other. At the moment, it is very easy for one to aggro on you while you are fighting the other and 1-shot you from a distance with what appears to be a shuriken.

- The alien race has a good look and by and large seems pretty balanced. The EBs tend to hit much harder than normal EBs created by the devs, but that's pretty true of nearly any custom EB created in AE.

- Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. Other than the blind side shot that took me from full to 0 by the other royal guardsman who was way across the last room from where I was fighting, I had no problems. I was going to say something about the emperor's ambushes, but the guy is the head of a galactic empire. It makes sense that he has flunkies.

Overall, I would just just say that you need to give this story some scope and flesh it out a lot. I think the beginning is pretty contrived and suffers from the 'go along with it' syndrome and that weakens the narrative. There is the core of a good story here. I'd keep working on it.

My thoughts are posted in my One a Day thread. - S12

I think at the start, you start with three questions:

1.) What does Nemesis want?

This should be the big thing. Once you decide what he wants, you can start deciding things like how he's going to get there.

2.) What does Nemesis want the player's character to think that he wants?

This is almost as important, because the only way he is going to conceal #1 realistically is to make #2 nearly as valuable. So #2 has to be a plausible thing. And he needs to try nearly as hard to conceal #2 from the player as he tries to conceal #1. He must make the player's character believe that the character has really uncovered the 'Nemesis Plot.' That way when the character acts to prevent Nemesis from acquiring #2, the character will feel a sense of accomplishment, thereby solidifying that #1 will remain concealed until it is much too late to stop Nemesis from getting it.

3.) What ridiculous trappings is he going to surround the acquisition of #2 with?

This should be fairly convoluted, because Nemesis is cognizant of the reputation that he has. As long as he can make the 'plot' look silly, overly complicated and, truthfully, fairly stupid at face value, then the overwhelming likelihood is that his true goal will never be revealed. Again, at least not until it is much too late to prevent him from getting #1.

Writing an intelligent villain can be tricky, but it's not impossible. As long as you always know #1, #2, and #3 and keep them first and foremost in your mind while you are writing, the rest is just writing events and dialogue.

Mr. Phatstax.

Before I took my brief hiatus, I agreed to play PENGUIN by Tubbius, so when the MA Team guys sort of convinced me that I was being a little bit hasty, this is the first one I decided to do when I came back.

Introducing a character that an author likes is always sort of a tough proposition in this setting because there's always the propensity for the cool character that the author likes to sort of hijack the story away from the player's character. In a game setting, where the player is actively a part of the narrative, I think it's pretty important that the player's character to be, if not the central focus of the story, at least pivotal to the progression of the plot.

I am not saying that the author is guilty of doing the opposite in this arc, but it is pretty evident from the first mission that this is essentially the origin story for Waddle - a genetically altered penguin in the mold of other humanoid animal types such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By this, I mean actual animals that have been somehow altered, not human with animalistic powers.

Comic book stories come in all shapes and varieties. Some authors, (read S12), prefer to write in a style that's more reminiscent of the modern graphic novel, while others tend to write for what is obviously a younger audience. At least in tone. And I don't think either has any inherent superiority over the other - as long as the intended audience is entertained by what they experience.

And I think this arc accomplishes that.

The character gets to foil a Crey plot. The character also gets to help out and save Santa Claus. And the character is also partially instrumental in the origin story of a new hero who has the potential to be pretty entertaining for kids. I think each of these things has value, especially since so few arcs are particularly suitable for younger audiences that I've seen in AE.

Of course, to be honest, I haven't been looking for them, but this is one of the few I've come across that I'd advocate my nephew playing.

My thoughts:

- Crey is not my favorite high level faction. The combination of minions with high resistance levels, lieutenants with high resistance levels, and bosses with high resistance levels means that by and large, they are a faction that inherently slows down your game play. The combination of the ice armor minion and the lightning armor minion also seems to give my preferred style of character more problems than most other arcs. It's not quite like fighting Knives of Artemis in terms of being grindy or fighting Vanguard in terms of ow, but in the normal game, I tend to avoid Crey.

- Winter Horde are fine. I have absolutely no problem with them. And since they are sort of a niche faction, like the Luddites or the Ghost Pirates, you don't see them very often, which makes them a nice change of pace.

- Strobe, in the second mission, has a tendency to blend into the warehouse background for some reason. I must have passed him five times, and since I was on my widow, I did not aggro him, which meant I wasn't really sure what the key card clue was instructing me to do. I believed I was supposed to be looking for a glowie. The mission would have been short otherwise.

- Overall, this arc has plenty of room to grow if you choose to go that way with it. However, if you decide that your intended audience is kids, then you might leave it exactly the length that it is. It seems about the appropriate length for that audience's attention span.

- Played it on my widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. No problems with anything in it. One custom character that doesn't seem to hit especially hard. The rest is Crey and Winter Horde. In the final mission, you get the assistance, (probably unneeded), of two AI allies.

Overally, this was a pretty straightforward and fun arc centered around an origin story that was probably aimed at an audience on the opposite end of the spectrum from stories I normally favor. I think the overall effectiveness of this particular narrative will be determined by what the author chooses to do with Waddle in the future and whether the audience intends to develop him further.

At this point, we don't have a great deal of actual interaction with the penguin in question to judge him by.

On the whole, well done.

I haven't read the thread. I am just answering the question posed in the title.

I would pvp if pvp had a point. By which I mean, some sort of narrative point within the structure of the game.

When I was still doing this, I reached the point where if I couldn't 5 star an arc in-game, I'd post my thoughts and not rate it at all.

Intuitively, I believe WN has a valid point.

However, my own experience really doesn't support it. Until the last review, "The Long Road Back" was sitting at a 5 star average for three months with 5 plays. It did not drop to a 4 star average until the last review happened. That means that, by and large, the few who'd played it to that point were either merciful or honestly didn't think it sucked.

Mathematically, it's pretty easy at 5 plays to figure out how many 'points' I had. There were 5 plays. It had a 5 star average. A 2 star rating dropped it to a 4.

As I understand it, anything between a 4 and a 5 is a '5' according to the rankings. This means that I had either 21 or 22 points at that point. 21+2 = 23 or 3.83. 22+2 = 24. That's a straight 4. So there are a few ways to reach those point combinations. Most likely, I had a couple of 5's and 3 4's. Both AE guys rated it a 5, so it's pretty likely that everyone else rated it a 4. Either that or there were 3 5's, a 4 and a 3.

Either or. The game rating to that point was a '5' and the arc was still not being played at all, despite getting 2 5 star ratings from the Aentertainment Tonight reviewers. So what does that mean?

So that basically, to me, means that it actually doesn't much matter what the rating average of the arc is. The system itself is broken. There are presumably more than 340,000 missions now. The chances of any arc emerging from that large a pool, no matter how good or how bad, is diminishingly small.

Well, that and the devs pretty much decided they didn't want people using MA anymore. But that's another issue.

Having not seen the run in progress, it's hard to really pin down what happened, but I'd guess from your limited description that the majority of the issue centered around aggro management. I've beaten the TF several times with my SS/Inv brute serving as essentially the main tank. I failed it several times before I finally succeeded at it, but the usual brute tactic of 'go in and wail' generally doesn't work well. You need a brute who can also tank fairly well if you're going to go that route with it.

Luckily on the hero side, I play a tank who is basically a mirror image of my brute. Doing a lot of the normal 'tank' things with whoever you assign the main brute role will help a lot here.

It also helps to assume that at some point, the brute is going to lose aggro. That's why soft capping the defense and keeping the defense soft capped until at least four are down is pretty important.

A tray full of purples and explaining to folks how and when to use them judiciously helps a lot during this mission.

I usually go Numina -> Sister Psyche -> Positron. That order tends to solve a lot of problems.

Are you certain about those numbers? I've never seen any character churn out damage like my Widow does.

Edit: I just ask because the chart above lists them as a little above the middle of the road.

I'll be taking some time off from doing this for awhile. My state of mind really isn't there to do it anymore and it would be unfair to any author whose arcs I'd be playing. I'm pretty soured on all things MA and I think it's probably that my reactions to other people's work would skew negative because of that.

It has a lot to do with being torched by a review that I'd been waiting a long time for and was looking forward to, but it has a lot more to do with only receiving 6 plays over a four month period. If I'd received more reviews and more plays, that one review probably wouldn't have reached such a position of overblown importance in my mind. I've pretty much concluded that this is a waste of time, (at least for me, if not for others), but I'll leave the door open to returning to it at some point in the future if my opinion of it improves.