Sister_Twelve

Pro Payne is in the level range to play "The Union of the Mask" - my entry into Dr. Aeon's contest.

#352400

My thoughts are in my One a Day thread.

Tonight's arc was "The Christmas We Get" by Venture.

Essentially, this arc is about the importance of recognizable symbols and how different types of rulers, (or would-be rulers), attempt to manipulate those recognizable symbols in different ways. The author indicates, though I am not sure if this is canonical, that Christmas has basically been suppressed in the Rogue Isles because Recluse does not allow the people to celebrate it under Arachnos Rule. Your basic task is to assist a breakaway Arachnos soldier in ensuring that the people of Port Oakes, at least, have the opportunity to celebrate the holiday.

It is later revealed that the breakaway Arachnos soldier is not necessarily doing this out of an abiding love for the holiday but because, whereas Recluse does what he does to crush the spirits of the people, the would-be new ruler of the Isles is doing what he is doing because he basically believes they are a bunch of superstitious simpletons and that manipulating them will be much easier once he has gained their hearts and minds.

To a certain extent, the soldier's plan is certainly more sophisticated.

I had a soft spot for this arc from the outset because the contact and my Widow, Ariadne, have very similar origins. Both are ex-Arachnos. Both are extremely politically motivated. Both have essentially rebelled against the current power structure of the Rogue Isles, even if they go about it in different ways. If this were one, large shared world that all of the MA stories came from, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the contact and Ariadne were contemporaries and that they probably, at some point, influenced each others' thinking and philosophies while both were still in the organization.

However, at a certain point their philosophies diverge. While Ariadne moves forward to embrace the writing of Marx and the leadership of Lenin, the contact essentially remains either a fascist or a warlord, who assumes that it is not the centralization of power in one person that is the problem in the Isles, but only the person in which that power currently resides... ie, Recluse.

On that level, it is likely that once beyond this current incident, Ariadne and the contact would likely become adversarial to each other.

However within the context of this narrative, even though she is a communist and has no particular sentimentality for the holiday herself, Ariadne would probably support the notion of giving the downtrodden and oppressed a symbol to which to cling. After all, like Recluse and this ex-soldier, she too understands the power of symbols in people's lives. She understands that eventually, in order for the people of the Isles to rise up and reclaim their land and home, there will have to be a match to light the flame of revolution.

And that match might be Christmas.

On all of these levels, this is a very meaningful arc. The actual writing of it, however, is strained in places. It could stand with a lot of fine tuning if the author decides to go that route with it.

My thoughts:

- I don't often say this, but 3/5 missions are probably too short to have much impact. The story is good, but the story has to work within the framework of a game and in order for the arc to be enjoyable, it has to play well as well as read well. The mission where you free your Longbow colleague and then defeat the boss took me approximately 18 seconds to finish for example.

- The arc is essentially more about the contact than it is about the hero. I am not sure if the author intended this or not, but without Ariadne's backstory to bolster my liking of this narrative, I am not sure if any of my other character's would relate as well or at all.

- No glitches or bugs, all of the map sizes are small, I think. There was some amount of mission variety and no complex mechanics to speak of. There were a few typos, but they were not distracting.

- Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. If you can defeat Arachnos and Council, you will have no problem with this arc. There are 1 or 2 ambushes along the way, but nothigng that really wails on you.

Overall, I think this is a pretty strong arc and I liked it... mainly because of the character I brought into it. I think some work could be done to expand it out to have some greater appeal. It wasn't perfect, but if the author wrote it in a single night, it could probably stand to be looked at and worked out after a few more beta plays.

- S12

"The Long Road Back" is pretty much where you are level-wise, but it's a villainous arc, so I'm not sure if you'd want to 'break character,' so to speak, to play it.

#340454

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

So tonight, I played "The Seeds of Chaos" by Ashcraft.

Writing good villainous arcs, I think, tends to be a little bit tougher than writing good heroic arcs because villains, by and large, tend to be more proactive in their activities than heroes do. Heroism, by its very nature, is a reactive type of thing. There is a threat. You do your best to stop the threat.

Villains, on the other hand, like to feel like they're in control of their own activities. Unless a player really likes to play the 'thug' or 'flunky' type of villain, if confronted with someone who immediately assumes an air of superiority and begins to deliver orders in a peremptory tone that defies you to disobey their sublime commands, the villain player is more likely to extend the person the finger and go about his business unless one of two factors is in play:

1.) They really think they're going to get something good out of going along with this guy.

or

2.) This guy really can kick the snot out of you in a heartbeat and for that reason, it is best to humor him.

This arc runs into this problem from the very beginning. The contact of the arc is Requiem of the Fifth Column. I don't know about you guys, but of all the villains in CoH lore, Requiem does not top the list of villains that intimidate any of my characters. I've beaten him rather handily on several occasions with a variety of characters and never had much trouble doing so.

So that leaves me with the conundrum... why would I go along with his orders? There is an implied reward, but Requiem never bothers to tell the player what that reward might be and, in return, you are to 'assist him with bringing forth a dark god' that presumably will rain havoc down on the world and destroy a good portion of it in the process.

Now, if your villain is certifiably crazy and thinks this would be a good thing in and of itself, I suppose doing so would be its own reward. But if your villain is someone who is essentially out to make his/her life easier/better/more enjoyable, having no world in which to bask in your ill-gotten gains is probably a pretty self-defeating action.

So I guess the first thing the author needs to address is to somehow make the player want to do this.

The second thing that immediately struck me was the outro of the whole thing, which was confusing to say the least. The arc claims to be written for villains, but Requiem's final lines assume that the character is playing a hero. At least that's what I got out of them.

So I guess the second this for the author is to decide who you intend to be playing this arc.

My thoughts:

1.) The intro/outro dialogue is so sparse and so non-specific that the only thing that defines this individual as Requiem is the reference to the Nictus in the early parts. This could be generic Master Villain A hatching this plot and it would be no different.

Flesh it out and make it Requiem-specific.

2.) I am not entirely sure why there are Circle of Thorns surrounding Naylor in mission two rather than Arachnos other than it takes place in Nerva.

3.) The Regulators are pretty bland and seem to only come in about three varieties. The group could probably be expanded out some if you have the room.

4.) Frankly, I am not sure why my character doesn't just turn around and leave when Requiem does the 'ha, ha, ha, I outwitted you... you were my target all along' thing in mission 4. There is nothing really stopping the player from doing that other than the ephemeral desire to finish the arc. In the flow of the narrative, it makes no sense. And more importantly, if my villain has the opportunity to leave and has absolutely nothing to gain by staying, why would the villain stick around to stop all of this?

Especially if the villain has already displayed a lack of any real concern about the consequences of any of this by going through with parts 1,2, and 3 of the plan?

5.) Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Bosses/No AVs. Lots of customs, which means that occasionally they hit pretty hard, though the Fifth Column in this seemed to be hitting harder than the customs for the most part. Maybe they were hard ambushes. At any rate, I made it through without any deaths and without feeling any real moments of desperation.

- Mission 1 is fairly monotonous for what you actually have to do. You could probably do with a smaller map to make the feeling that Requiem is using you as his flunky seem a little less tedious to go along with the condescension. The player character is probably at least close to level 50 at this point and has probably smacked Requiem upside the head more than once. Being reduced to Requiem's errand boy is probably not a good way to start the working relationship, especially after he starts off the whole thing with his spiel about 'respect' and having 'watched you all this time.'
- Mission 2 can be done as slowly or as quickly as you want it to.
- Mission 3 I'm fairly sure has a mention in the intro that the boss is inside the building. I'd make that stand out a little bit more because I forgot for a bit that you can actually enter the building on the Warburg map. Brutal Justice seemed fairly balanced for an EB type.
- Mission 4, ther than the whole "why am I staying here" thing seemed fairly balanced and presented no real difficulties.

Overall, this was a pretty vanilla arc. There is perhaps a decent story lurking there somewhere if a lot more time and energy are devoted to making Requiem unique, giving the character some reason to want to involve himself or herself in all of this, and eliminating some of the internally contradictory things that happen.

- S12

There was no triad concept in D&D. "Aggro" was largely a function of how the gamemaster perceived that any given opponent would react to any given situation. Almost every class had ways to mitigate damage. Every class was capable of delivering similar amounts of damage, (or capability of defeating specific types of enemies in the cases of clerics versus undead, etc). Every class was capable of healing because the majority of healing was, at least in my groups, a function of items, not necessarily a function of class. The cleric usually had other things to do.

I suppose the cleric class was the closest nod that D&D had to today's triad model because of the inherency of their healing spells, but by and large, clerics had other, more important things to do in a given encounter than stand back and heal the rest of the party like a healer does in a modern MMO.

In fact, pnp D&D, at least the way we played it, was a lot closer to what Sam is describing than any MMO, including CoV.

Edit: All of that being said, since this game is evolving to the point where the specialized classes are becoming more and more 'niche' with each development, I would say that the empathy defender and the entire tank AT probably need some sort of look-over as to what they actually do... especially if, as many suspect, the tank will probably be replaced by the brute in desirability for teaming after GR drops.

1.) Humor arcs, especially gimmicky humor arcs, (metahumor, arcs with 'ironic' humor about the genre, arcs that seem to draw inspiration from the 'Scary Movie' school of comedy), I typically will not play. The reason for this is simple. A humor arc generally has nothing to sell it except for the humor. If I don't think it's funny, then I have no choice but to rate it down. I don't like to rate things down out of hand, because it's not fair to the author if other people ARE finding it funny. So I typically just leave them alone.

2.) I don't mind defeat alls as much as other reviewers, but with a couple of caveats. If you are an author, you need to learn which maps lend themselves well to defeat alls and which don't. Small linear, mono-levels maps like the smooth cave and warehouse maps without the large room at the end do the trick. Even if your map size is small, if the small area utilizes a lot of multi-level arrangements, then it tends to become grindy. In addition to that, there are certain factions that work better with defeat alls than others. Factions with flyers who will flee like Longbow and Clockwork do not. Midlevel Circle with the spectral daemons that both fly away AND disappear as they are doing it especially do not work well.

3.) If you assume that the opponent is smarter than my character, prove it contextually within the mission. Don't just tell me he/she is. If I have been contextually outmaneuvered and see no way I could have avoided a specific outcome, I will not squawk about it. If suddenly in mission 4, I 'lose' as a plot device because the opponent is 'smarter than me,' I will squawk because until I'm shown that he/she is cleverer than I am, I have no verification of that.

4.) Throwing powersets on custom factions that are particularly devastating when used in concert. I have more forgiveness for this than other things because many custom factions are designed conceptually and the powersets selected have more to do with concept than with game effectiveness in mind initially. But test your stuff. And modify according to your playtests.

If your custom lieutenant wails on a character and hits for 75% of the character's health bar on the first pop, it's too much. If the group of minions simultaneously blinds, slows, holds, and drains the character of his entire blue bar, it's too much.

5.) I agree with much of what's been said here. Searches for single glowies that blend into the background on massive farm maps. Chained clues that don't necessarily need to be chained. Laziness in writing.

Things like that.

I did not rate it based on today's playthrough. In a team, if you were not the leader, the story was more or less impossible to follow. Since I rate primarily on the strength of the narrative, I didn't think it would be fair of me to rate this arc based on this particular play. It might be well-written, it might not, at this point I just don't know.

And I will agree that the sudden inclusion of the fire creatures in the final mission was a bit of a sudden jump. Maybe it is explained in the text somewhere.

CoH's chat system is so aggravating if the person you are trying to reach is not standing directly in front of you. Who should I try to send a tell to to get an invite to the team?

Alrighty. I'll decide which of them I want to move to Triumph then.

Would it be cool if I transferred one of my unused 50's for this and exemped her or are you looking for specifically new characters?