Tangler

I was under the impression that the character had to be an original creation of the author?

Anyways, grats to the winners!

You do realise you're describing CoV here?

I just want to pipe in that just because a dev has made a series of loosely connected events and decided to call it a 'story-arc', doesn't mean it is the gold-standard of how everyone should write their arcs. That said from what I recall of Kalinda's arc, it all revolved around explaining the politics of Mercy.

You can drag the missions around on the top of the gui to change their order.

I think part of the problem at least for me, was that there was no particular indication of funny business going on until I rescued Mr Goodman. Until then it feels like your standard player character hijacking, which really is not a good thing to remind players of given how bad they usually turn out.

I would say that it is because most people coming into this game are treating it as a role-playing game.

As a villain player, I can only approve of this grand theft ferrero of small children.

And I thought I had problems thinking up names for my characters.

As bug-proof as an author can possibly make their arc, bad spawning is still an unfortunate possibility. It's not like the official content is exempt from this issue either.

Damn. From the arcs I did play that gave this option, they always felt like you were doing some kind of evil either way though. I guess the problem here is that a lot of these options were choosing between "evil for the greater good" or "an immediate good for greater evil", when the only solution the hero is supposed to be given is the former?

I think the time is about right except for mish 5, but more on that later.

Given what is at stake in this arc I think the idea that you are fighting tough enemies do fit, but most of them have some truly obnoxious abilities including:

• M1 boss: I believe she was a runner? I managed to stop her before she reached the door, but I thankfully had ranged attacks. I'm not sure if I would have been able to do that if I were on my brute, and my slows and mez weren't really having an effect on her due to PtoD.
• M2 boss.: yikes, the burst damage of ice with all the slows that stop your own click offensive and defensive powers. Throw in double stack holds, confuse aura and a pet which replicates the AV's powers and again, the PtoD and you have one of the most deadliest combinations around. I died the most times fighting this guy.
• M4 boss: 1st round: 1 shotted with BU + Shuriken. 2nd round: fast swinging katana strikes cut through my purple fueled defenses easily. I finally got him in the 3rd round by over-stacking my defense.
• M5 boss: outdoor map, boss turns on his jetboots and flies far into the sky. I managed to bring him down thanks to hotfeet, though this is probably more unfair for less prepared melee-types.

I'd recommend taking out a few powers from M2 boss, either turn down the guy's burst damage or lay off on the controls since he's already slow/-recharge crazy. I would say take BU away from M4 boss but I'm not sure how that would effect xp adjustments, you may have to experiment with that one. M5 just needs to have his jetboots taken away from.

This next suggestion falls more into personal tastes, but I think 99% of the time most arcs that want a 'hard' opponent should just use EBs and not AVs. I don't find AVs to be 'challenging', just annoying as even on my brute I always get bored fighting AVs, since it always just comes down to me cycling through my attacks for a minute until the guy finally falls down, and AVs powered down to EBs still possess the obnoxious PtoDs that screw over most controls and debuffs.

I would recommend the Steel Canyon map myself, it provides similar aesthetics but is much more straight forward and easier to search through given the time limit. With the current map and time limit I feel that you're only going to find the AV in time with luck, which was the case for me when I was looking for the AV everywhere until my comp decided to crash on me, and then when I restarted the mish I found the AV in a much more obvious location.
Overall I found this to be a pretty cool arc: at first I found the PC dictations to be jarring, though in the end they weren't too bad and the little back and forth between the hero and the contact was neat. I still find some of the character assumptions to be way too specific though, such as my character having an immediate family, that she has a girlfriend, and so on.

I found the dreaded possible future that the contact predicts to be amusing given that I'm a fan of Kingdom Come, and I just recently read What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, And The American Way? That touched on this too.

I felt that this arc hit the criteria of 'doing evil for the greater good' the best out of all the entries I have played so far. While other arcs have placed my characters in a situation to make a difficult decision, none of them have placed my character in such a moment of painful realisation of what they have to commit themselves to in order to save the day. Sometimes it's the unspoken evil that that speaks the loudest.

In the end I definitely had fun. I would say this arc is at least a solid 4, though I gave it a 5 in-game. What stops it from being a definite 5 wasn't so much the problems I have already mentioned, but that there wasn't a sense of progression through the arc: the story moves along through the briefs, but the missions themselves are all just variations of the first mission of hit and recover.

Regardless, good luck on the competition.