Talen Lee

So we're all stupid?

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But I've been playing other games -- console games and "lightweight" MMOs -- lately, and attack rooting just isn't fun. I mean, nothing else thus far offers the comprehensive benefits package that is CoX, but I do feel like parts of the game could stand to be made more fun.

[/ QUOTE ]'Just isn't fun' isn't an argument. It's an opinion. Rooting lets the animations feel like they make more sense; it adds a feeling of tactics to combat; it gives developers another balance point to work with. It would either require a massive graphical overhaul, a complete rejigging of every power in the game or willingness to release a product that looks like [censored] to achieve.

I don't see 'just isn't fun' beating that. It's like stamping your foot, it doesn't actually do anything.

54, incidentally.

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Really, when you get right down to it, with as many people submitting arcs as there are everything will seem to be done to death.

[/ QUOTE ]Nonsense.

It's not like you need actual information to speculate.

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Its way too soon to consider it a buff.

[/ QUOTE ]Oh shut up.

Woo hoo!

But then the nasty question lurks in my mind: Should the power then bother letting you enhance the knockback with knockback sets?

And yet, after just taking them out for a spin on Battlebriar, who has a full Kinetic Crash socketed, the creepers just did knockdown, not knockback.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy about that...

I'll take it for a spin on battlebriar, see what I learn.

Hey, is my birthday Dominator Christmas?

I've written one arc that utilised a friend's character because I loved how it interacted with the story. I'm wondering now if that player's going to get criticized for self-insertion into a story they didn't write...

Why are you listening to us?

Have your own bloody fun.

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One of the biggest attractions of this system is to be able to run your character's origin stories in actuality rather than just in your head. That's not exactly a vanity story.

[/ QUOTE ]That's one of the biggest attractions?

Really?

Of late, the review pace has slowed, as I'm sure you've noticed. This is for two reasons. The first is that my life has stepped up some stuff - Branches are being Shut Down, records are being tidied up and people are preparing to flee to greener pastures, leaving me holding the bag. A pet passed on, and his replacement pair are having a hard time being accepted by our senior pet. My birthday's coming up, my family want to see me more, and an early birthday present of a Nintendo DS has left me caught up in a sea of OBJECTIONS and HEEEEEEEEEEEELP. Anyway.

The other reason though is that I've been playing fewer arcs! After D-38 hit 50, I decided to start looking into playing my lower-level villains - Ideally, my Bane Spider and my Crab Spider. And you know what I found? For the most part, arcs aren't being very carefully controlled for level-range.

Now, think about the game canon. How many game missions can you do, at level 50, that behave and scale down to level 1? You can't do your origin arc after about level 10. You can't stop the Clockwork after about level 22 - because you dealt with them. You can't run around punking Malta Gunslingers at level 12, to go in the other direction.

The game uses level scaling to represent heroes who pursue a variety of ends. In some cases, it doesn't work well - after all, comic books notoriously scale ridiculous pairings together, often in the name of popularity. Deadpool and Wolverine work fine alongside one another, but Wolverine and the Silver Surfer aren't even on the same page for the style of power they're dealing with.

So when I start a level 40-50 arc that features Malta, and I'm told to investigate a building that's been robbed, I wonder why. I'm a 40+ hero here. I'm a one-man army in a warzone. I've had a chance to oppose a giant robot in its construction, I've travelled back in time to the origin of power, I've duelled with demigods on the steps of their own pantheons, and I've yes, beaten up signature heroes. Why am I going to check out a robbery? Isn't that the kind of thing for lower-level guys to do?

The same problem arises in level jumping. I recently did an arc that I really enjoyed, which I found exasperating because of its unlevelled nature. I know Safeguards and Mayhems scale up to 50, but for the most part, they're some of the most incongruous parts of the game; A level 40+ Villain should have a moonbase or a doom fortress or something like that, and should not be taking regular infusions of dosh from a different country's well-protected banks. That's just stupid. Even in the late 30s, bank heists beggar the imagination; why would I go to a heavily-traffiked area of the hero community and rob a bank when there are, in theory, banks here I could do it with? Well, to curry favour with an oddly identical mindset that perpetuates through all my brokers. Whatever, maybe Stella The Mouth has a fetish for destruction as well as his obvious fetish for crossdressing.

If an arc changes my level throughout it, it reminds me that my level isn't really important. It reminds me of that fourth wall and it breaks immersion. If the scope of an arc at the level range it's at is inappropriate, it does the same thing. Is there a hard-and-fast rule for when something becomes inappropriate? Not really. Is there a general feel? Yeah, and you can see it in the enemy groups.

From 1-10, you're dealing with street gangs, petty crooks and minor drug dealers. From 11-20 you start getting more serious, dealing with threats to peoples' lives and livelihoods. You can get involved in organised crime families, to start dealing with people with support networks and special powers. 21-30 is about when the 'normal' stuff ends - you start seeing ghosts commonly, you fight werewolves and vampires and hordes of zombies. You can face down Manticore's personal buttbuddy group, or butt heads against the coralax. These groups have a certain scope of power and then, reflect that in how they both rise in importance and then fade.

There is of course some weirdness. The council, thorns, and longbow extend from 1-54, and in Longbow's case, they barely ever change. You get stronger nullifiers at the high end and that's pretty much it. I think this is more of a bad design decision than anything else. Try to find a heroic group you can fight, and the list is basically Legacy Chain (15-30), Wyvern (15-30), and Longbow (1-54). What the hell?

Anyway. This has had me thinking and wanting to offer this advice as I assemble more reviews: Make sure the scope of what you're dealing with is appropriate to the types of heroes who have to solve it. If I'm fighting pushers and penny-ante thugs, it's probably 1-10. If I'm fighting drug cartels, probably 11-20. If I'm beating down the ghost of the first man to die of the drug, who is possessing every member of the cartel to try and spread his soul's influence, 21-30. If I'm doing all this in space, 31-40. And if I'm doing this on fire it's probably 41-50.

I'm only slightly kidding.

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Why are we talking about him? Is someone seriously going, 'Well, this worked for SHAKESPEARE...'? 'Cos I've been checking around and at last check, no, nobody is Shakespeare. Well, except one guy, and he's not really into the forum discussion thing. He's dead.

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Anyone who puts in the effort has the chance to be the equal of Shakespeare; plus I was mainly just riffing off the "million monkeys with typewriters" idea in the first place.

No need for anyone to get huffy bout the Bard, he and his works can take care of themselves.

[/ QUOTE ]It's not huffiness per se, but I will say that it is like if someone tried to drag up Douglas Adams' TERRIBLY undisciplined writing schedules as an example of why they should do it too. There are some real, epic geniuses out there, but their genius forgives their bad habits, not justifies their repetition.

He also invented a bunch of words because the Nobles wouldn't want to look stupid by not recognising them, and the common folk would assume they'd just gotten some edjercated.

Fun stuff, Shakespeare.

Why are we talking about him? Is someone seriously going, 'Well, this worked for SHAKESPEARE...'? 'Cos I've been checking around and at last check, no, nobody is Shakespeare. Well, except one guy, and he's not really into the forum discussion thing. He's dead.

My main complaints about Dominic Deegan are better summarised by others. Check out this amusing analysis.

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There hasn't been an original idea since the Greek poets. So skip that cliche.

What is over done are missions that can only be tanked (bruted???) by 50s max'd out on their purple IO sets. Really, play test your missions with more than one type of toon before you publish them and preferably one that isn't 'uber'.

[/ QUOTE ]This is why in my review suite, I have two characters I use routinely:<ul type="square">[*]D-38, a level 50 SS/Fire Brute, with Crushing Impacts, Adjusted Targeting, knockback protection, and a bag of chips. Very strong, very capable at herding things. He's quite powerful and my generaly yardstick for the difficulty he's doing at level 40+. He's what I break out for arcs that might contain EBs and Defeat Alls.[*]Operative Gallows, A level-pacted Bane Spider with a nothing but common IOs and a single knockback protection IO. I consider Gallows the low-end of melee characters, and because he has stealth, it gives him the freedom to try out missions as brute-fests where you kill everything in sight, and also to see if it's possible to use stealth to achieve your goals. Plus, he's a Bane, which I'm told suck.[/list]I have a purpled out Spines/Dark. I have permadoms. I have Fortunata and Widows who could do this. But I don't think that gives me real perspective on the arc in general. At this point I'm considering adding a claws/WP scrapper with just SOs to the pile.

Arc #12034 - To Live In Infamy
Rating: ****

Concept is sometimes a fickle, monstrous creature that can intrude on the fun. Players start to slavishly devote their time to serving the concept without ever pausing to ask themselves would this idea be fun? Yeah, to all those amongst you thinking it's a great twist to have the contact back-stab the player, because that's never been done before, or those who want to touch on that the AE is a virtual reality system, or so on and so forth, most of the time these concepts never go beyond that. They're established in the author's mind, so the plot arc itself is merely bolting stuff around it to get to that point, rather than

Now, when I was, say, ten, I assumed this what good writers do; they visualise something neat, or imagine a great bit of dialgue, then they hammer the whole story around it to make sure that that thing can be said or seen. If you want to see the kind of crap that gets made when this is your ideal of Good Writing, well, here, gorge yourself full on it.

It's not enough to have a good idea, you have to have a good story. An idea is only a place to start from. When you have everything built as an idea delivery vehicle, you can't lean on the strength of the idea to carry it - you have to make sure every thing that connects to that idea, that delivers it, is as well-constructed and well-conceived as the idea itself. For without that, it is merely gaudy trappings on a lone idea, wasting the potential the story has. There are many such stories, many of them even in the game lore*.

This arc is not one of those arcs.

I suppose I shouldn't put the ratings at the top for this kind of setup. It ruins the dramatic tension if I start setting up an arc as being arsebiscuits in my opening, to draw the mind's eye to What Not To Do then dash those thoughts upon the rocks only to remember that I told you guys way up where that the arc's a four-star. I plow on, undaunted, because let's face it, there's more important things than my ill-executed dramatic tension. Like lint.

The arc is a premise I, surprisingly, haven't seen done a dozen times. The idea is simple enough; the contact wants something and knows of you as someone who might do them. The arc even gives you a clear point to 'break' the plotline and leave it alone, as you've 'done your bit' - at that point, to continue in the plotline, the character makes the decision to continue. This is good, this is useful. This is a way to make sure that the movement of the plot, the direction, is not simply, You are a mercenary who does what he's told. In this case, you have some professionalism - some standards - if you want to continue. If you take the money and run, well, that's exactly what you do, and that is a completely reasonable way for the story to end.

The theme, which I suppose I should stop avoiding mention is Revenge. The arc doesn't shy from the word 'kill,' either, which is a pleasant change and one I hope the GMs don't crack down on when they feel they've run out of important badge farms to nuke. The scheme makes sense, your motivation is made quite clear, and it's made known that you are the person doing things. There's a custom enemy faction that while they weren't explained, did give me a desire to know more and weren't seemingly heavily overpowered. I am reluctant to try the arc again on a dominator, though; I did it on an (almost entirely) Un-IO'd bane Spider, and found the arc very doable on a moderate difficulty.

It was a fun arc. It definitely needs some polish - at times, the dialogue feels like it's filling in to a word-count, and leaves an NPC saying things just for the sake of saying things, and there are other points where the compass text - the bane of mission architect arcs everywhere - gets weird. It's still a good arc, a very good arc, and by keeping itself to a level range, it makes the work feel appropriate to that level range. There's no jumping from rescuing schoolchildren in an abandoned warehouse who got lost, to rescuing planets from marauding spacejunk. It is, in essence, a well-positioned plot, with a good direction, and a good idea behind it, all supported with good map choices and good NPCs. There's a loose end or two, but in this case they served to make me curious about what would come next, what would be seen later from this same contact - they didn't leave me with an unsatisfied sense that I'd somehow missed something that was bloody important.

Give the arc your time, and read everything carefully. The minor formatting errors and a few unavoidable irritations (How long before Tar Patch expires, come on already) are not enough to dull this otherwise brilliant arc. A bit of spit and polish away from being a clear five. Like a good arc in a comic book, I wanted to see what happened and was glad to see it from the side I saw it.

* I'm of the opinion that 'It was a nemesis plot' is in fact, a fine example of this, where the idea of a super-clever, super-genius, super-villain was itself the point, and nobody ever bothered to pause and go: Wait, can we pull that off?

I thought you had me on ignore, man. Kinda... childish to ignore me, then complain about what I say.

Ah well, moving on.

*laughs* This just in: Player asks for review, is told he won't get a review, puts me on ignore.

I'll post more shortly. What a day.

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tl;dr version: If you don't have something TO SAY at all, then you shouldn't be allowed to "say" nothing with just a vote.

Because just the vote with nothing behind it DOESN'T HELP.

[/ QUOTE ]I think that this is a silly idea.

The voting system is not just for your benefit; it is for anyone who wishes to look at the arc in the search and see what is doing well. The rank is for you and for them; the feedback is for you.

Polish is taking something that's good, and making those parts of it that are good great. It's highlighting text, it's using mission popups creatively, it's making sure dialogue times and paces right. Refinement is the process whereby you take the core idea that lies underneath the story and get the crap off it.

Sounds like a lot of work for minor customization.

Oh well, if I had infinite unsinkable ponies, I'd probably put this on the list.

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One of the reasons I'm looking forward to the CoH competitor coming along (Cryptic's new MMO), is because I reckon it won't have these garbage maintenance windows smack in the middle of peak Australian playing times, or they won't take down ALL the servers at the same time.

[/ QUOTE ]I was on your side until you got to this point. You don't need to shake a sabre and threaten comparisons to a game that not only isn't out, but won't be out until 2010 as if you know anything at all to try and 'scare' a response out of the higher ups.

I'd like server maintenance to be less regular and to be positioned more appropriately for my playtimes. But good grief man, what the hell.

4336 - No Honour Among Thieves
Rating: ***

The reason most movies end well is because years of cinematic science have taught people that the last part of the movie is the part that people remember the most vividly. You can have eighty-five minutes of crap and if the last five minutes represent a good enough twist or a clever enough idea the audience will wander out crowing to themselves about how the first eighty-five were neceessary to make the last five. Nonsense, but whatever.

This is why a well-written, well-plotted arc with a cool idea and good use of maps can still have a player tearing their hair out because it involves hunting a glowie all over the [censored] of some map that's entirely appropriate and yet really annoying. Of such an arc I speak now.

The plot is almost perfectly positioned; it falls in a good level range and uses enemies that should be relevant. It puts a degree of forward momentum on the player and makes them the focus of the storyline without calling upon the people around him to treat him (or her, of course) like an idiot who'll do whatever they bark at him. It does use a more British tone of voice for the contact - Lieutenant Chalmers - than I remember him having in the game. Despite that, I found it quite entertaining and fun, and I wouldn't mix up Chalmer's dialogue for anyone else's.

However...

Oh, you just knew this was coming, didn't you? Look, the arc uses an enemy group which deserves attention, it focuses on a reasonable addition to the game lore (not that I think it's entirely appropriate), and it makes sense and handles its storyline well. The mechanics of this arc are what let it down. There's an important boss with funny dialogue who can be accidentally killed before you get to him, there are a pair of surprise-but-not-required AVs, and there's a mission on a oh-god-why-this-map map that had me and my wife wiping out routinely. The level of nooks and crannies for mobs to get lost on, or patrols to get confused by was far too high, which really broke flow. As did the dying a fair bit.

There's one thing that a vanishingly small number of players have a means to deal with as a power, and that is blindness. If you want to try and deal with it, you have to use yellows, which are not part of a typical inspiration loadout. Just want people to bear that in mind.

The arc doesn't need polish at this point, it needs some refinement. There's some great stuff in this arc and I really do recommend people give it a shot. All the most annoying elements are in the last mission, and all the EBs are optional. On the other hand imagine how much better this arc could bloody be if it didn't have these problems. Also, the level range jumps. It shouldn't bug me, but it does.

Also, it was nice to see 'Honour' spelled correctly.