Talen Lee

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I was just thinking about a Dr. Moreau arc myself gotta check it out. Maybe I'll do a villainous one.

[/ QUOTE ]Oh, and don't think you've gotten out of your review.

So you can make a minion a boss...? that's interesting. And useful.

Arc 87974 - A Witchy Welcome
Rating: ****

We're going to touch now, hopefully tastefully, on the subject of titillation. See, I am a fan of breasts, and it's probably not to anyone's great surprise that, as a fan of breasts, I've become awfully enamoured of the Magic pack stuff. So when I did this arc, it was half as a fun romp through custom mobs and half getting to ogle the really nice new costume pieces.

The arc's premise is simple; a bitchy cabal leader wants to establish her coven in the Rogue Isles, and is hiring you to help out. Part of my enjoyment of this arc comes, I think, from the ridiculous nature of the contact; she's petulant, bitchy, high-strung and very much a classical villainous sorceress. It might be an homage, it might be for comedy, but for whatever reason I found myself laughing to myself as I did her arc.

Character really was the driving force. The arc doesn't push the engine to its limits, but it does have a clear tone of character, for the NPCs (whose dialogue is almost always awesome), and for the little things, like the dialogue you get clicking glowies. Some of these glowies seem to serve no purpose but for badge credit (and that's good, it gives the badgers more reason to do this kind of thing without making obvious farms), but you should click them all anyway because the author has made them really funny and enjoyable. Also, interrupt yourself just to see that text.

There was some stuff in here I actually found really fun. There are minions capable of stealth, which means they have amazing AoE defence - defence that means normal AE strategies have to adjust. You can't just Flashfire, then kill, you have to pay attention to who comes out after the flashfire. The defeat-all had a purpose behind it that was explained in the mission briefing. This isn't a hero doing something with police backup, it's a villain doing something to prove a point, which I see as a good use of the technology.

There are two problems I see with the arc at this point. The map choices available in the arc all feel very clearly like a section of Paragon City, which feels out of place since it's a Villain arc. The outdoor maps available redside might serve better, but this is a minor, stylistic thing.

Second, the arc feels like it should be somewhere around the 30-40 range, not the 30-54 range. I like the arc, but I couldn't help but feel this kind of business is more the work of the 30-40 characters, the kind who are able to establish things, fight off alien invaders, make beachheads, and force people to pay attention to them. Unfortunately, since the arc features carnies...

Ther's a third thing, which I wouldn't call a problem as much as I'd call it a stylistic difference; I'm not a fan of using NPC support to balance difficult challenges. Talking with the author about it, she assured me that their purpose was to assist squishies. Considering it, I know I had fun using a shivan shard as an empath, watching a Fortitude'd shivan wreck house, and so I felt this was reasonable.

A great fun arc, with a lot of character to offer. Go forth and enjoy.

Arc 1438 - A Jaunt Into Dataspace
Rating: ***

The funny thing with these mission architect arcs is that, now I'm playing lots of characters across their level ranges, they're all levelling up. This means that I actually pushed really close to the end of this level range on one character. Instead of soloing this one, I and my wife took this arc with Laurel (Katana/Dark scrapper) and Knight Rain (Storm/Dark defender). Very different perspective on events, lemme tell you.

The arc isn't too long, and while it features a defeat all against a custom enemy group, the explanation is reasonably acceptable. You need a sample, and a sample can't be gleaned from a few key entities. It'd be nice if we could have a 'defeat the majority' function, but that would lead to thorough people finishing up in the first 51% of the map.

The story then wends on to what has become something of a typical story; the Doctor wants you to do some technological frippery and remind you that yes, the entire AE system is nothing more and nothing less than a free-to-play MMO with sinister intentions, which is, I suppose, what the devs are going to do with it ('Ahah, it was all a nemesis plot!'), not something I want to be reminded of. It's like poking a sore. It also puts a face on the Doctor, something I find myself reluctant to enjoy. I kinda like the image of the Doctor as a faceless, remote hacker - and if she's giving herself a face in cyberspace, then she's gotta be really damn hot, as seems the way of girl geniuses. Or am I wrong in that a girl who is capable of representing herself any way at all might possibly embellish the truth a little?

While the plot unfolds predictably and enjoyably, none of the contact dialogue particularly stood out to me as being exceptionally good; it seems the best dialogue was saved for the second mission, which had me and my wife laughing quite hard.

On a mechanical level, things get a bit ugly. The custom enemies are a problematic; in one case they're a pack of dark blast-kinetic corruptor-things. The opening alpha would make Dark Regen not hit, and would then be followed up by a damage-sapping debuff alpha. That's nasty stuff and required more caution than a scrapper with defender backup expected. Too much? I dunno. My wife plays pretty casually by comparison to me, so while I felt it was an overly-dangerous bad guy, and she found it very frustrating to play through, I can imagine a genre of players who explicitly want the bad guys you have to split up.

A good, solid arc, with a spectacular highlight in the second mission that unfortunately doesn't take the rest of the arc's lead and continue getting better.

Arc 2050 - The Outcast Outcasts
Rating: ****

When I first heard about the Mission Architect coming over the horizon, one of the ideas I had was using it to fill in holes in the badge-verse. Making arcs where heroes could fight Longbow, heroes could fight Goldbrickers, and where Villains could fight Outcasts, all leapt into my mind. I recommend more people look into this, by the way. These blank spots in the game continuity are rich with fodder for possible additions to the game.

This arc is a good demonstration of what painting in existing space in the game can do. The Outcasts are one of the only mutant groups in the game, and one that drops off, sharply, at level 20 after being the most important thing in the world for most Hollows-like folk. Frostfire defines a lot of lower-level characters... and then, boom, nothing. You don't encounter later Outcasts, or even former outcasts. I feel that's one of the waknesses of the Outcast myth arc. Surely they could show up villainside somehow?

Well, Xaphan produced a really good explanation for this. The arc is sensibly offered by a good contact; it deals with the Outcast s and explores their themes and their concepts well, and uses interesting, diverse maps.

So, perfect arc, right, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, because the arc is so solid in a lot of ways, the places where it falls down are all the more maddening. Outcasts are highly homogenized as it is, so homogenized bosses make things worse. The dorky outfits and dialogue work well enough, but on the other hand, there's this awkwardness about it...

The arc is a really strong 4, and a little polish is going to push it into the 5 category.

Arc 1152 - The Doctor Returns
Rating: ****

When you review a friend's arc there's always possibility you might be providing it with something undue because it's connected to a friend. I know that I find Fred's sense of humour as similar to mind and when he makes a pun, I usually get it, so chances are that this arc - which uses humour amongst its serious plot - gets extra thumbs up from me for that reason. Plus, it's the kind of story I like, with a handful of useful tips and tricks amongst it, a few jokes at the expense of both the Mission Architect and those people who use it, and a twist ending that I really enjoyed.

The twist won't suit everyone, I can see that. Despite that, I still think it was a good, well-written conclusion and I really enjoyed it. There's a school of thought that every different bit of MMO writing that says everything needs to be able to fit every character for every continuity, but anyone who's ever run a pen-and-paper RPG will know just how ridiculously unfeasible an idea that is. Some characters will fit this arc really well, some won't. And some people will come up with their own conclusion to the story. Just don't act like the author's somehow deficient for not making everything perfect.

There's another element to it - I really enjoyed the level of combat the mission threw at me. At one point I was given the option to click four glowies in quick succession and deal with four stacking ambushes at once. Now, I loved that, revelling in beating down a big, impressive gang of guys all in one. Other people might want to be more cautious - I can imagine stalkers aren't happy with it.

The arc's not perfect. Some of the formatting could be tightened up. I didn't mind the spam jokes, or the references to The Doctor - after all, she's an established point of lore. Some of the briefings felt very 'chunk of text' - just big enough to be harder to read, but not so big that there were obvious places for text breaks. There were other minor formatting errors, too, but the author has noted that they're worried by potential UI issues when they try to alter that kind of thing. The arc uses an established canon character, but exists in a level range - at some points - that predate that established character. There's also a cool trick in the same mission but I fear I don't want to spoil it for people, so they can feel clever when they work it out.

The arc also does touch on the open sore that is the Mission Architect system itself. I'm not a fan of having to explain everything in-universe, so this arc was already running uphill. Fun, funny, in need of a bit of refinement, and using jumping level ranges, the Doctor Returns is a good arc, falling a few editorial errors and a bit of polish away from being a great arc.

Can I have my purple IOs back now Fred?

Arc 45525 - Effrego Quartus Parietis
Rating: *

The first thing I notice is that the level range dances all over. I consider a consistant level range to be a kind of final lick of polish on a work, something that refines it. Partly because a level range is often tricky to create with the tools that are available to us it represents a willingness to use an awkward tool with care.

The whole arc is constructed on a rather unfortunately meek premise of a lone individual who thinks the game is in fact, a game. Given that this is a virtual reality simulator within the game, he's really quite onto something, but it's that kind of fourth-wall painting that just ruins my sense of immersion. I don't want to be reminded none of this game is real because I'm not the kind of person who needs that information. The arc then goes on to commit a number of what I - and others - consider cardinal sins, even when performed by the developers - a surprise EB, a surprise timed mission and an Elite Boss chasing you around hoovering up the tickets.

The arc schizophrenically tries to introduce and expand on items in the same breath, which means that it can feel a bit like three or four plotlines barged into one another all at once, and that obviously leads to problems when you consider that the tools used for advanced exposition - things like Clues - are eschewed entirely.

If I had to summarise this arc simply it would be A simple concept, execued simply. There's nothing refined, nothing clever. There's a lot of stuff that seems to be using the tools in the game purely because they're there. There's no clear sense in my mind that the arc had any greater purpose beyond 'let's see what I can do,' and the writing seems to reflect that.

Compound this with bad map choice, unimaginative use of enemies that I've fought a lot - and I do mean a lot - and you have an arc I didn't even bother finishing. If there's going to be an amazing twist at the end that Makes It All better, I'm afraid the arc building up to that was too much for me to bear.

Dude, imps + Fulcrum shift are still imps. They're not scary.

It'd hurt farming too.

On the other hand, some people like the end-game oriented levelling style.

I succeeded. Without enhancements, too.

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Isn't the Magi vault actually in Galaxy?

Nobody blames Gregor though.

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Cause you never bring the items to Gregor or even talk to him unless you're a magic hero starting in Galaxy. Most players probably forget he exists, if they ever knew that he did to begin with.

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Arc 2409 - The Mystery of the MAGI vaults
Rating: ***

One of the tropes I recommend people reinforce on their characters is to not roleplay out the grind of levelling up. The nature of this game, with its arced storytelling means that - well, prior to Mission Architect - people would generally always do a few of the same arcs a few times, and the arcs were not written to explicitly say 'Oh, you've done this, like Dave last week and Carl will next week.' That's a problem when people don't take that into account, because it means that everyone who's done anything for Azuria, whose starting arc features an object going missing, seems to think it's hilarious to represent her as losing a few thousand items daily. This paints a starting contact as slightly retarded, and new characters as the meaningless odd-job men of a busywork dispensing incompetent.

I am, perhaps obviously, not a fan of this representation of Azuria, as it relies on a player assertation that the game doesn't support. On the other hand, I can take a joke as well as the next man (kinda), so loading up this arc was done with caution. I didn't want to grade a perfectly acceptable arc because it had a premise I disliked.

Once completing the arc, I tried to work out what my feelings were. The arc feels like a lowbie arc. Now, I don't know what others think, but I think that's a good thing. There isn't a large amount of lore, enemy groups aren't listed like you know them all already - the arc very literally treats you like you're new-ish to the game. Not necessarily appropriate for the Mission Architect, but I think it's worthy of attention. There's no huge slabs of text, there's no 'here, let me explain something that you couldn't have known about before now,' exposition. At the same time, the arcs behave sensibly. You're sent searching for something, and rather than it being in The Last Place You Look by definition, it can be right at the start. This might be against some people's 'why did I bother zoning in' meter, but for me it makes it feel more like a thing you're doing than a course you're running.

So, while I don't like the premise per se, the arc is competently put together, uses the tools presented to it well, builds an atmosphere and an attitude and doesn't force you to do stuff that's not on the label of the mission. There's a lot of use of monster emotes, too - enemies behave like they're there. They talk, they mutter amongst themselves. My only complaint about this is that if this was an early-game arc I'd wonder where all the effort went after this point.

I did find it kinda funny that the arc sends you 'all over the place' - Galaxy to Perez to Atlas, etcetera, even though you don't actually have to do it, thanks to the architect datastream malarkey. It also takes advantage of the ease of creating custom bosses in that almost each character with a name is made to be a bit more distinct. I didn't feel like I was meeting a bunch of someone's alts but rather, dealing with a large group of different members of a gang. In essence, this is what I would have expected the official missions to be like, if the developers had had the time to do it.

So, a solid arc with a flawed premise that makes really good use of the MA Tools and is appropriate to its level range. Three stars.

I think people underestimage how much fun it is to cause AE carnage. I mean, I 'farmed' Dark Astoria, the Hollows, Crey's Folly and Perez Park on several of my characters, never once going into a mission and doing this just to blow the living hell out of large groups of bad guys. Annoyingly, level 40, there really isn't any open-zone way to do this.

I find it kinda weird that the behaviour of which I speak is okay, encouraged, and easy to do and find at level 1-40, but the devs seemed to let it trickle off after 41. Maybe they figured nobody was doing it. Shame, really.

Arc 38226 - If you teach a man to make a fish
Rating: ****

This morning I'm doing arcs while waiting on other stuff to start happening, so it was a nice relief to find some shorter ones in the queue. I'm actually surprised at times to see the low number of runs some arcs get (should I advertise mine again now? Naahh), when you have some of the DC and Hall of Fame crap with literally over a thousand runs. Still, not everyone is there for the same kind of thing I am, so I pick through the less populated end of the spectrum, finding arcs like this one. With only one rating to its name, and a level range that Gallows might soon be escaping, I took it upon myself to do this arc before I outlevelled it and felt sour I wasn't getting any XP.

This arc would have been a three; it's competent, simple, and short, depicting Mad Science depicting its own downfall. Instead I edged it up to a three because it does two things that I haven't seen done well in MA arcs yet; it involved the contact in a mission without making him annoying, and it included an entirely legitimate-feeling Defeat All mission. The enemy groups were well-selected, appropriate to the level range and not overused.

The thing is, the arc doesn't overstay its welcome. It's solid, it's robust conceptually, it doesn't throw you against any unreasonable challenges or wear its concept out. We're doing Mad Science here, we don't want to bog ourselves down with measuring out the phlebtonium. Run it, it'll only take you a few minutes, and you'll have fun.

A short review for a short arc, so the tl;dr: Play it, it's fun.

Arc 43636 - Find Jack's Hair
Rating: *

There are times as a reviewer I get this occasionally inflated ego that lets me think that by reviewing something that's good, I'm bringing it up from the mire of obscurity. I dialled this arc up and saw immediately, a comical opening. Ho boy, this is going to be rough, I think. With Operative Gallows this time, I drew his knobbly phallic object and started the arc. Then, I read the opening dialogue... this isn't really a story, no. This is it seems, much more about the author fiddling with things. Part of me thinks it might merit no stars, but I just as much suspect it's just another humour arc that I'm not going to find funny.

There are some basic formatting errors - the first mission objective has a period at the end, and the boss name sits in the bar like a squat frog as the author failed to realise what that entry actually does if left blank. The dialogue is brief, the writing sparse - in general, this arc is, well, barely there. I don't want to write a ranting tirade against it because it's not like it's bad, but it's also very much not good, either. At hest, it can be seen as inoffensive, or unpresent. Like an atom or our solar system, it's mostly composed of nothing, but nobody's going to [censored] that either of those two things aren't still relatively effective at their job of giving astrophysicists something to do.

I give the arc one star, not because it's a 'bad arc', but because there's not really much of an arc here at all. I very much got the feeling this is an arc Clouded created to get to grips with what the mission architect could do, and, failing a better reason, just made a brief joke and stretched it out for five pages. It's not high art, and I wouldn't recommend any one emulate it, but the failings of this arc feel like those of ambivalence. The author made a joke, made an arc to fulfill that joke, and it does its job (and I did laugh at points).

This arc is a Bugs-Bunny, 4-minutes-before-the-movie style joke which is polite enough to not overload itself with 'because I can' objectives. I'd love to spend pages ripping it apart, but it doesn't actually have many in the way of failings. Maps are different from point to point, missions are structured in a not-too-annoying fashion, and there's a bit of metahumour I found funny without it being annoying. The arc didn't try to do much, and my god, did it succeed at reaching those goals.

In the end, complaining that this arc is badly written and simplistic would be like [censored] that a twinkie isn't a balanced, substantial meal.

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(I swear there was a name for this, where the community in general benefits most from a resource if everyone uses it sparingly, but there's a net gain for each individual when they take up more of the resource, so everyone ends up taking up as much as they can and nobody wins. No idea what the name was, though.)

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Tragedy of the commons. I think.

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Ah, thanks, that was it. (Google is sadly unhelpful where all you have to go on is "that thing with the cows and the shared pasture".)

[/ QUOTE ]I heartily agree. I don't mean to sound like I'm all special and stuff, but when someone wants me to review an arc with 30+ plays I wonder how interested they are in what I actually have to say.

Part of why I keep an eye on this thread to avoid doubling up overmuch with what venture's touching on. Unless I seriously disagree with him - he thought Hero's Halo was decent, I thought it was utter drivel - I'm not going to bother making an issue of what I think when he's providing guidance and useful information to people for both finding arcs to play, and finding arcs to avoid. So yeah, posting a review request in my thread, and then in his, it becomes low priority for me.

Oh, and I don't have a queue. I have a pile.

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Thank you very much for the look and review. I think you got the tone and flavor of the arc down perfectly. Most all of your comments are dead on and while some of the things you dislike I did on purpose and like myself, I am glad to hear them all pointed out, it means I conveyed the idea at least, even if you feel it is a lame idea.

[/ QUOTE ]That's a good, and possibly undervalued point, and hopefully one I'm able to treat fairly. When you do something I don't like or send a message I don't like, I'm going to rate it accordingly, but knowing that you communicated that instead of communicating something else that I disliked is very important. As long as the arc satisfies your criteria, then it's doing its job.

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give me some reason why my character needs to do a defeat all

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I don't hate defeat all missions unless they are overused. I guess to me, clearing out all Council invaders in a city business is something a Hero would do, since it is so close to residences and such. I know, in theory, the local PPD/Longbow could take care of it and I could let the player choose how they want to roleplay it. Maybe I will alter it, but I am inclined to leave it as is.

[/ QUOTE ]Well, isn't it a crime scene? If there are still council troops there, shouldn't there be a bunch of barricaded up PPD troops on the outside, possibly armed with hardsuits and whatnot? If it's a crime scene where the cops have had enough time to work and get out, then why the computers? Are the council sneaking back? Why isn't the evidence you seek in police custody?

I'm trying to get a clear image of what that first mission is supposed to be. I was assuming it was a place that had been broken into fairly recently, and this was already investigated by the police and then discarded, which called for a hero to ask you to pursue further study. The troops weren't sneaking around, they didn't speak of things as though they had just returned, and I was getting info from mounted computer terminals with a sense of permanence to them. Perhaps I should be rummaging through the owner's property and work to try and work out what the council troops were looking for?

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I suppose the idea of dragging together an all-women independent mercenary group, a secret coalition of antisupers who want to purge the world of metahumans, and an all-male organisation of fascist supersoldiers seems like a good idea on the face of it, but I just doesn't work for me

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I am not entirely happy with how the battles function works in MA. While it was an interesting idea to allow the game to have enemies actually fight each other, I think I preferred the old way, where they just appeared to be fighting each other. That way the player could see the battles (many battles are over before the player even gets to see them, in my experience). The fact that the groups are not working together well and that only some members of each organization have betrayed their standard values was supposed to be evident from the battles and the dialogue in this mission. I also wanted the Gray Knight to speak more, but his rescue dialogue and clue text were very limited in space. Perhaps, I will add some more commentary from him in the form of a letter as part of the return to contact text after mission 2.

[/ QUOTE ]Getting three major groups to turn on their ideals and subjugate themselves to someone who explicitly flies against those ideals is very very odd to me, straining belief to the point of snapping it. Simply put, it doesn't sound like it could be done. I suppose the battles might have made it clear, but I really, really can't see how. You are dealing with hard-bitten, military men, people who have indoctrinated themselves to an ideal and a concept with such ironclad ferocity that they are willing to kill and willing to die for it... to turn on that and pick up another one easily would require something breathtaking, and you've presented nothing that really feels like it has that scope.

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It calls together enemy groups who are pretty much diametrically opposed and only linked in that they annoy players or use technology, and it kinda 'squishes' them all together without some amazing, idealistic leader to draw things together. And in the end, there's not really much of a conclusion.

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This commentary is so familiar to me. This is a terrible flaw I have in creation of a story, not letting the players in on all the information, because they likely would not have it all.

[/ QUOTE ]That vice is quite terrible because it doesn't just look like you didn't explain something, it makes it look like you can't. It makes it look like you're wallpaper over a problem area of the story and hoping nobody will notice it.

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While it makes sense and is realistic,

[/ QUOTE ]You overvalue purist realism in a world with psychic policemen.

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Did you read the clues? I have a feeling most people ignore them, and I put a fair amount of information there, but still probably not enough, and I should consider that people ignore the Clues tab often.

[/ QUOTE ]I Possibly. I make a point to read clues when I can, but for the life of me, I can't remember any from your arc. I remember reading Gray Knight's and knowing 'what' was going on, but I never felt the 'why.'

Hope this has been useful.

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Wellp... eh, why not.

[/ QUOTE ]That's the kind of attitude I want out of someone who wants me to spend time and effort on their work!

More seriously, if you actually want my opinion on your work, my opinion, then please, submit away to this thread. I'm happy to do so and will want to do so. But if you're just doing it to get any attention, probably pimp it elsewhere. It's not like it's bad to 'just want hits,' but I really don't think I'm going to give you the attention you want. Anyway, I'm taking this statement in good faith, which is to say, you want to hear what I have to say, but you're not sure how to approach that.

Part of my attempt to spread around my advice - yes, advice - and hopefully improve the idea of story arcs in general has been to maintain communication with the arc authors as well as posting a review. I also try to avoid spoiling too greivously. With that in mind, I'm thinking that any advice I offer for an arc is advice that the author can turn on the rest of their work... and if they don't, well, honestly, I don't care enough to fix them. I figure most of you people who are genuinely interested in improvement can consider what I've had to say in light of other arcs (and can just as much go 'hell with what Talen has to say').

With that in mind, I'm going to start trying to limit myself to authors I haven't done arcs for, for a while. With that in mind, I've got a handful queued up, blatantly favouring people I know. Today has been a bad day for playing - I was trying to help friends, we've lost a pet in the family and it's really been an upsetting few weeks. So, I apologise for the minimal output today as I try to work on other stuff as well.

On the other hand, I will ask - do people think they're getting too long, too sprawling? I'm letting my article-writer's habits kick in, and that kind of thing can be entertaining to read, but also might not have that crucial factor of offering entertainment alongside advice.

That would be a chew-toy if the universe pisses on them, a buttmonkey if the characters piss on them, a woobie if you're supposed to feel bad about their plight, and... damnit, trying to remember the Mary Sue inversion. There's another type who basically do everything a Sue does while the Suethor tries to tell you how ugly, plain, and unpleasant they are. You could consider most everything that Frank Miller's ever done in that category.

Arc 1044 - The Empire - One Alliance
Rating: **

As I understand it, the numbering of the arcs started at one thousand, meaning this arc was the forty-fourth to be uploaded. That makes its 15 reviews somewhat disheartening and giving me more reason to believe that a large number of views and rates is as much a function of how hard and how aggressively you pimp your arc (like, say, 29262, Hopeless, be the villain you always wanted to be and delve into the mindset of the truly mercenary monsters that plague the Rogue Isles, rate me 5 and I'll rate you 5*), rather than how good it is or how long it's had a chance to penetrate the market. Because discerning users like, say, me, will hold things up to careful scrutiny and high standards, it means arcs with problems will find themselves drowned out by 5-star farmers and the opinions of complete and utter clods. People wonder why I hate them and this is more or less the reason why: They have such potential to be good, such a scope for wonderful and brilliant art, and yet most of them will be happy as hell if you draw a pair of [censored] on the back of an outhouse door. And then fart. Not because they're stupid, but because they let themselves think they are. At this point I think I've gone past 'introductory paragraph' and well into the realm of 'ridiculous manifesto,' so I'll stop before I start talking about my plan to set up lemon zesters on people's foreheads so I can let them know when I don't approve.

The level spread of this little outing, cited by the forums' own Strato 'Fire Control Is Overpowered' Nexus, has the hallmark of being created by someone who I have yelled at, which constitutes roughly 99% of the planet, and I therefore owed it in the tradition established on my high school reunion to yell at all his metaphorical children in turn until they cried. Reaching for something large and compensatory to beat the arc with, I loaded it up, on D-38, my level 46 ss/fire brute. He's heavily IO'd - lots of Crushing Impact, Knockback Protection, bonus HP, and Tough.

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An Aside: Hey, just as a note, people, when you use the title and chapter functions on your arcs, I recommend making that title-chapter text a different colour. It then feels more separated from the narrative itself.

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The contact didn't appear for me. Was it supposed to be the contact hologram? That's a bit weird... The scope of the first mission seems a bit off for the rest of the arc. The arc is 40-50, but the opening of the arc is a simple break-in. Either the arc itself should lurk in the low-level ranges due to its humble beginnings, or there needs a better motivateur to start the first arc. Perhaps make it a bit more unsubtle, reveal hidden evidence - or indeed, if the contact has some reason to believe the player's high-level capabilities are required for a 'mere' break-in, have him explicitly mention 'I know this seems beneath you, but...' or maybe suggesting that there's the connection to higher-level Council stuff. Or maybe he could be honest with you up front and tell you the guy in question isn't 'just' an auto tech, and that's why they're asking someone of your calibre to go in, discretely.

Yes, I know, I'm spoilering, but here we go: THIS ARC HAS COUNCIL MOBS IN IT! And you're going to get to see them because you're going to spend the whole first mission searching for a large number of glowies, and then, killing all the council on the map! Because we lead out with a defeat all! And I have to ask myself: Why? This is a routine break-in scene, council computers are around - is it to encourage people to hear patrol dialogue? Surely there's a better way to force that behaviour than making me hunt down every last butthead on a map full of buttheads I've butted heads against before. Why? Why why why why why why WHYYYYYYYYYYYY? Police lockdowns, key cell leaders, retrieval of information - give me some reason why my character needs to do a defeat all, don't assume it's du jour. Hell, if I'm searching for information, surely it's worse to do a defeat-all, since that will very clearly tell people what I'd done and they'd be sifting through their manifests to try and work out what information and the like has been exposed to the public. Cue whatever it is I'm looking for being moved! Grrrr.

Okay, okay, first impressions. Deep breaths, moving on. But I will say, due to level range of the arc coupled with the in-continuity weirdness of a defeat-all that's supposedly about retrieving information from ... a robbery site? Why did they set up computers on the site of the robbery? It seems very odd to me, really, since surely the police would have turned up at the site... anyway.

I still had no contact after zoning, so I figure that's probably a clientside issue, and I'm probably just not getting something, so moving on to the rest of the arc, I think the contact's dialogue, is, so far, the strongest thing; I like the feel of the Malta group (Knights Templar) facing off against the Council (connected to the Italian fascist movement, and therefore, the Catholic church). There's something in there, and the addition of titles like 'The Grey Knight' make me more interested and inspired. I'm hoping this strong start will lead somewhere interesting, despite the fact the mission itself was tedious. The problem is, these elements are thrown together in a box, without any feeling of connection or drive. I understand that someone - nobody, in this case, remember, the contact isn't appearing - wants me to investigate something, and that the Council and Malta are dealing with a 'third side' introducing itself, and then it's also including extradimensional explanations. Fortunately, the author resists - the third side is one we've seen before in game (if you're paying attention), rather than dragging together 'LOOK AT MY NEW FACTION' and then using the 'Tell, Don't Show' method to make them seem intimidating.

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An Aside: This is the problem that plagues a lot of condensed writing. It's tricky to depict something as having the right tone in a compressed environment, but 'tricky' just means there's a trick to it. Once you develop a few tricks for showing people what things are and how they work, rather than simply telling them, you'll be able to use those tricks again and again and not have people complain much.

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Mission 2 rounds out with a simple fact-finding mission that mercifully restrains itself from simply being 'go here and kill stuff,' but it also synthesises together Malta, Knives and Council, which is to say, three groups that pay host to really, really annoying mobs and are tedious to deal with. Caltrop swarms slow down the rescue of the prisoner, and the waves of ambushes slow down killing the boss. All told, it's nothing special. I suppose the idea of dragging together an all-women independent mercenary group, a secret coalition of antisupers who want to purge the world of metahumans, and an all-male organisation of fascist supersoldiers seems like a good idea on the face of it, but I just doesn't work for me, so I'm viewing this whole thing as mind-control or cynically perceiving it as someone who doesn't actually understand the enemy groups trying to write for them. I'm hoping the former rather than the latter.

Mission 3's briefing has that dread phrase 'I'll meet you there.' This especially worries me because it means the contact that I haven't got a face for is going to turn up in the mission. Holding my breath, I plunged in, expecting a repeat of the Powerstrike nonsense. She's only a boss, though, she's not terribly overpowered-seeming, and, most importantly, I can ditch her. Though I did find myself wondering if her costume glitched - she has a bare 'fire stripe' line that goes up to a hood-like headgear, effectively meaning she glued on shoulders, gloves, and a hood then left everything from her neck to her navel completely stark bare. A bit odd, that.

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An Aside: One reason multiple-dimension plots tend to fail for me is because the nature of the infinite-branches world means that any change I've made is meaningless, because there's a guarantee that there's a universe where the change didn't happen. This means that any cross-dimensional empire has both automatically succeeded, and automatically failed, and is infinitely large and infinitely small. This kind of quantum nonsense is just ignored, and the 'other dimensions' are just treated as being a different apartment complex.

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Due to the nature of interdimensionality, you succeed and you fail and you don't get to quit either. The last mission has fully 13 things to do, and they spawn ambushes, which is good if you want to give a fever pitch, and was fine enough for a brute, but I can't imagine it'd be fun for a team unless they're really steamrolling. And it fails to cover the worst thing about conclusions in that it doesn't feel like a conclusion! I have seven bosses to hunt out? Well, five bosses down, I've covered the map - Hell with it. I quit the arc and give my rating, and quietly sigh to myself about how much a jerk it must make me look.

The arc has some minor formatting errors, things like a singular crate just being listed by 'a portal crate' rather than something like 'get the last crate,' and the missions are dense with necessary achievments that don't feel like they really achieve much. It calls together enemy groups who are pretty much diametrically opposed and only linked in that they annoy players or use technology, and it kinda 'squishes' them all together without some amazing, idealistic leader to draw things together. And in the end, there's not really much of a conclusion. I didn't read the final mission text, either.

So now I actually feel quite bad because I was actually expecting a decent to fair arc, hence my bombastic opening. I was hoping I could come out of it with 'and I was pleasantly surprised,' but I wasn't. I was unpleasantly surprised. Contrary to what one might expect, I don't actually like bellowing at people over the internet and I certainly don't like having arguments with people where there's no clear way to convey my meaning without it being muddied under my words. That meant all the pomp and bombast of my opening was supposed to be the lead-in for a laughable joke as I point out that StratoNexus is a good guy who's made a good arc... but he hasn't. He's made a tedious arc, and he's used enemy groups badly, and he's done it all in an arc that even seems buggy. There's no sense of cohesion, no sense of accomplishment, and there's a very clear distaste in my mind for the style of story being told. That it's time-consuming as well just makes it worse. And the thing that drops a cherry on top is that it's not bad mission text! The actual weakest part of the arc is the mechanics and the mission itself! The flavour text, the writing, the tone of the NPCs, the wonderfully ironic statement made by an NPC pet in the later part of the story? They were great! Which is why I feel so disappointed.

Hence the rating. I feel that with spit and polish, this arc won't just graduate up to three stars, but potentially up to four. But right now, it's a bad arc.

* You'd best know this is a joke, so I'm underlining that fact for all the thickies.

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You suckers are lining up for Talen to insult you, while I get it for free.

Suckers.

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I'd rather someone tell me the truth bluntly than lie to me sweetly.

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This. The blunt truth you can work with, sweet lies or "Eh, it's okay." is useless.

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My thoughts exactly. That is precisely the reason I submitted my arc both here and in Venture's thread. I'd LOVE it if someone played my arc, thought it was total crap, one-starred it, and then gave me a half page list of ways to improve.

Because that is way better, and will help me make a far better story, than the single, no comment, four star rating it currently has.

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Amen to that.

Of course, all the [censored] had to say about my arc was "it's not even a story".

[/ QUOTE ]It's hard to speak with my mouth full.

I actually intend to review Eis' submission as an object lesson to people. Don't worry, I'm rough.

And then there's the 'sleeping, eating, bathing, shopping' stuff I have to do as well, don't forget.

No, that would be the other, sillier extreme. Mary Sueism is about attitude, intent, and execution. There are a number of ways you can check for MS Status without it needing a hard, laid-down set of rules to prove the Sueish or Unsueish nature of a character. For a start, does the character actually demonstrate virtues, or do people or narration merely claim they demonstrate those virtues? Does the character have a clear reason to be sympathetic, or are we told to be? Is the character more important and more powerful than anyone else?

Now, I actually resist the idea of using Mary Sue in fiction since it's a fanfiction phenomenon. What you call a Mary Sue character in an original fiction is 'awful,' it doesn't merit a specific term.

Wow, that's annoying.

Oh well, these are the constraints we agree to work with.

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If nothing was different but the name of the AV, it would still have been bad writing. It just wouldn't be a Mary Sue, at least not as I define it.

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What DO you define as a Mary Sue, then? TVTropes defines it as a (female) character that is just perfect, wonderful, is great at everything, has no flaws, and is just the best! That doesn't seem like Tanya Atta to me.

[/ QUOTE ]Mary Sue is like Porn. It's something many people are sensitive to, even oversensitive to, apply in the wrong place, and can't define well. Doesn't mean I can't put my finger on it when I see it.

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Arc 5073 - The Bravuran Jobs
Rating: ****
I finished the first mission and found myself with only one clue... figuring the other mentioned clues would show up in the other missions, I moved on. Hope that's not a mistake.


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I'm not sure what you mean about other mentioned clues. The "got clue" noise makes the same sound as the "got badge" noise, which is a bit odd, but not exactly something I can prevent.

[/ QUOTE ]The opening briefing notes that you get multiple clues, keyed and numbered to the mission they're in. What I understood that to mean was that the first mission would feature five clues, each of which would be the explained impetus for the other four missions in the arc. Obviously, I was wrong, since those clues show up in the later arcs themselves.

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This is a problem with difficulty settings for Broad Sword - I can either give him the same two attacks that a minion gets, or five attacks plus build-up. Fortunately, Shield Defense doesn't actually get the status-protection power until it's set to Extreme, so you can still knock that Mr. Problem back or hold him still.

[/ QUOTE ]Guess my stuff just didn't proc. That happens. Still, I'm very glad you've been considering these things.

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I think I'll have to tone him down while the devs put in a reasonable intermediary between minion and Mack truck. I think in other weapon/offense sets the short-term damage boost only comes out in "extreme" difficulty, and I'd rather not give him a mace or axe because then he'd be chaining stuns/knockbacks.

[/ QUOTE ]Both of which I can deal with more easily than just dying, but I'm not sure how universal that appeal is.

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The fourth mish has one thing I've become fond of - an enemy spawning based on something else happening. The problem is, the hint for where to find the newly-spawned badguy is totally unhelpful because it seems to be wrong.

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The lobby is the first floor of a hotel, isn't it?

[/ QUOTE ]Yes, actually, the lobby is the first floor, and is a waiting area which flows through to the rest of the building (I used to manage a motel). Going back there got me bupkis - I needed to actually stay on the 'top floor' of the building and go to what you might know as the two-tiered book-and-office room? So the clue to go to the lobby wasn't that useful to me. I was stealthing it - I've taken to doing so so as to see the majority of the story without slowing myself down killing Carnie #God Only Knows.

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Oh, wait, I used a random map for that. Were you on one of the ones that starts you off at floor 5 and goes down? Hmm. Well, either I'll bite the bullet and use a specific map or genericize the hint but I have no idea how to make it both generic and still helpful.

[/ QUOTE ]Aye, one of the constraints of writing, I'm afraid.

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In the end, what did I think? Well, great dialogue, and a story that covers a range of interesting enemy groups and only really gets weird when you have to deal with the level range issue.

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I actually had a broader level range on test, but there were some issues with using 1-54 versions of certain enemy groups. Perhaps they've ironed those out, I'll have to see. Unfortunately I can't manage to fit the Legacy Chain and Carnies in the same arc without at least a little level strain, but the lower-tier Carnies they made for CoV are IMO suitable for fightin' at 20, if not before.

[/ QUOTE ]I've been fighting carnies redside for a good long time, and I've never found them scary. My dominators tend to make missions with them much faster and more brutal than normal, so I don't see them necessary to show up in the 30+ range per se.

If I had to cut something from the arc, it would obviously be the carnies, though, due to their being the odd-man-out of the level range...

Could you make mish 3 feature a lone hostage of an enemy group that scales up to 30 and no further, effectively 'locking' that one mission at level 30?