The_Cheshire_Cat

Two spaces for the 3rd, three spaces for the 4th, etc.

Note that there is a bug in the MA where if you save the arc, close it, and reopen it, then edit one of the details with more than one space at the end, it will fail to count everything past the first space. So any time you open one of those details, you have to delete all the spaces (You won't be able to select them, but they'll still be counted in character count so you have to use "Delete" rather than backspace) and retype them. That's probably what's happening with yours.

Yes, but you need to tell me which arc you want reviewed.

A quick bump to mention that Astoria in D Minor was made the latest dev's choice arc.

I guess it's kind of silly for me to keep bumping this thread now.

Some changes made:

-Replaced canon Nictus with a custom "Nictus" faction with my own descriptions - had to replace "Mr. Boggs" with a standard NPC to make room, but his costume didn't really turn out how I imagined it anyway, so no big loss (It was the "Meat" I really wanted to keep in).

-Rewrote the intro and outro to mission 4 - Captain Skylark isn't possessed anymore, instead he comments on Kelly's possession (It wasn't really adding anything to the plot for him to be possessed for all of one mission).

-Added Captain Skylark as an ally in mission 5, along with the reprogrammable robots - hopefully he should be able to survive a little bit longer than they do against Baron Doomsday.

Thanks for the review! A few comments:

-The Nictus are actually meant to be the same Nictus as in CoH - think of it as like "Same universe, different earth". Hence why they have all the same abilities as CoHverse Nictus (Though I suppose the way I wrote them, they're a bit more feral). I would have liked to give them custom descriptions, but I actually don't have the space for another custom group, even a custom group composed of standard mobs with custom descriptions (The arc is sitting at 99%). Of all the customs I would have had to sacrifice, the Nictus were the easiest since they're the same anyway, and the descriptions would only reflect how the "Tomorrownauts" world would interpret them. If I managed to find a way to free up some room, I'd probably throw the Nictus in their own custom group with galaxies as well to mix up the mobs a bit - that said, I really wish the "Nictus" group would spawn the fluffies that normally come out of Cysts.

-As I mentioned, I was able to run it without trouble on my fire blaster. I've never done it on a controller so that would probably be a bit of a rougher ride - the arc DOES have "Challenging" in the tags, though (Also, I believe the claws/necro boss is the one that's set to "Extreme" that the warnings mention - though that could be pre-mission 5 Baron Doomsday. I can't remember. It's only one of the two, though - I'm pretty sparing with extreme settings usually).

-The Flesh Palace has a bit of a story behind it. Originally that was the last mission and the ending was completely different, but I didn't like the original ending I had because I felt like I threw out a perfectly good story, so I changed how that mission ended and added on the final moonbase raid - but I still liked how the Flesh Palace mission was designed so I left it in there (With some of the clues changed to get rid of a lot of 4th wall breaking that was part of the original ending). It might not be pulp sci-fi but it's very much pulpy horror, so I think it still fits. I was also tempted to throw "This is NOT what you were expecting by 'flesh palace'" in the opening popup but I don't think I had enough characters left to fit it. It does strike as a bit of tone whiplash, I'll agree there, but I still kind of like the mission and it is important to the plot (Revealing the watchers). Doomsday also shows up in mission 4 as an optional objective, just because I felt like he should be in every mission - it's played off as a joke by the time he shows up in mission 4 since you've defeated him so many times (And yes, he is meant to run away at 75% health, hence why he spawns next to the door). This mission probably COULD use some re-writes, but I like the customs I used in it so I'll probably stick with the basic concept.

-The Big Boss watcher is actually meant to spawn solo, but he seemed to REFUSE to do so when I set his surrounding group to "Empty" (Instead always spawning with a Nictus escort). I gave him a Rularuu group instead just so his helpers would fit thematically until I could get it to work properly.

-The messed up objective in mission 3 is just a quick joke related to the system text it gives when you use the bio-neural interface (And the captain comments on it when you get back) - the needle goes directly into your brain and downloads the information, and doing so tends to mess up your speech centre for a few hours (That's also why the clue has the weird "Level up!" text).

*Edit*

Also whoops, she's not supposed to have the longbow description in the 4th mission - I guess I forgot to change it to the "Tomorrownaut" version when I added her.

Matchstick Women
ID: 3369
Author: @Bubbawheat

Running this one on my brute again, both because since /elec got a self heal she's actually ENJOYABLE to play now, and also because fire mobs were mentioned, which probably means fire armour, and those are just a pain with my fire blaster.

In Progress

Mission 1:
-This is a pretty minor nitpick but I've found the compass text always looks better without a period, so "Stop the fire from spreading." should be "Stop the fire from spreading".
-Likewise, "Destroy the bomb!" looks funny with the comma following it - exclamation marks are fine when there's only one objective, but with multiple objectives the commas between them look weird. As far as I can tell you can't seem to guarantee what order the objectives will be listed on the compass, either, so you can't really force it to be the very last one.
-It's kind of odd that you DESTROY the bomb - wouldn't disarming it make more sense?
-Nice use of the fire hydrants - the water spray when they're destroyed actually kind of looks like a sprinkler going off.

Mission 2:
-Good custom group design, by the way. Varied powersets are always better than "Fire blast on everything". One issue though, is aside from the healers (Which have the green hands), it's difficult to tell the other types apart. Maybe a bit of variation in the costumes? (I noticed that there is some, but it tends to be drowned out by the various fire effects, and the overall basic costume design uses the same pattern).
-The phrasing in the clue when you rescue the "Peculiar woman" is a bit odd. "It doesn't matter I feel powerful, I want to help!" is kind of unclear about what it's supposed to mean; should be be "It doesn't matter, I feel powerful; I want to help!"? Or "It doesn't matter that I feel powerful, I want to help!" (Which is a bit of a weird thing to say, so I'm assuming the former).
-Typo in the boss clue: "ot" instead of "of"
-The burnt match has an individual compass objective: "Stop the Matchstick Collector" - maybe you reversed them by accident?

Mission 3:
-Nothing in particular struck me in this one, so er... good use of the face options for Emily's scars.

Summary

It's hard to summarize my thoughts on this one. I thought it was an okay arc, but not great. It was well written, and decently designed, but not particularly interesting. I understand it's hard to have a big plot in a short arc, and I do appreciate that it wasn't stretched out into 5 missions since that would have been tedious. Still, I feel like the plot could have been better; my issue is that the story never really grabbed me - I'll fully admit to being a tough audience, but I really didn't care about most of the people in the arc one way or another - I didn't hate Emily, nor did I feel pity for her, she was just kind of... the "end boss". The clues in mission 3 gave some insight into her, but I felt like they kind of came too late in the story - what I would suggest here is maybe take some of those clues out of mission 3 and spread them around in missions 1 and 2, so that Emily's character is built up over the course of the arc rather than just fully given to you at the very end.

The contact is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much it really adds to the story - there's no real explanation by the end about what it's supposed to be, which would be okay if there were some hints at it during the arc, but there's none of that either - the contact is just kind of... there. A good contact is really key to grabbing someone's attention, because they're going to be the person that gets the most characterization (Or in the case of "Object" contacts, the most text) in the arc. The contact fits the arc thematically, but just seems totally disconnected from the story other than being "The thing that tells you what to do next". There's potential to spin it into something more interesting though, say a fragment of Emily's personality (Perhaps herself before the accident, realizing the monster she's become and trying to stop herself), or maybe something related to the "Peculiar Woman", who shows up twice but really doesn't have any impact on the story.

Design-wise the arc is actually quite good - aside from the occasional difficulty in telling the different types apart, the custom group is nicely balanced, and I didn't find the arc too easy or too difficult running as an elec/elec brute on +0/x3/bosses/noAV. The 2nd map is a bit big, but I've used that map before in pretty much the same way so I supposed I don't have any right to complain about that - my one suggestion would be maybe give the bosses an animation that makes them more visible (Like one of the "casting" ones), since on my difficulty I was getting bosses in normal groups as well, so it was very hard to tell at a glance which groups had the "Named" bosses and which were just normal spawns. The captives were easy enough to find, although because I've used this map before I kind of knew which corners the game likes to tuck them into - some people who haven't tested this map to death might get frustrated trying to find them all. Still, most outdoor maps have the same problem, and this one is at least nice and open so it's easy to look around and see most of the spawns, so it's probably the best available option.

This isn't in the OP, so I figured I'd post it here:

I'd like to see the ability to have multiple objectives required to spawn an objective, rather than how it is currently where you have to pick exactly one.

Example:
-You start the mission with an objective: "Find Object X"
-Completing that spawns two objectives: "Find Object Y" and "Defeat Boss Z"
-After finishing BOTH of those objectives, an objective "Defeat the Final Boss" spawns.

Another random feature that I think would be neat is for allies/Escorts to have "Response" text - basically just have them say something when you complete an objective. It'd be the same as how betrayals work now, only they wouldn't turn hostile. Ideally, you would be able to give a particular ally/Escort as many responses as you want, rather than just limiting them to commenting on only one objective completion.

Some changes I've made in the last few edits:

-Added Banished Pantheon to maps 3 and 4 (Map 3 was previously just empty, map 4 had [Happy Friendly People], which is what I will use to refer to those mobs until I've had a few more than 2 people having played my arc)

-Reduced the number of mobs in mission 5, but boosted their spawn difficulty to "Medium" so the map wouldn't start feeling really empty. I'm not really sure if that will solve the problem people are having with this last map though - I really can't do what I want to do on that mission without making it a "Defeat all" (In a sense). If I could use a smaller map I would, but there's only 2 graveyard maps, and the other one is bigger.

I can't write novels. Any time I have a story idea, I'm finished by page 6.

I can't help it if I'm just so darned efficient.

I'd say given the level of the arc, leave it as a Boss/EB. As a general rule, TO range = boss max, DO range = EB max. It's not a hard and fast rule, obviously, but I find that pre-SOs, AV/EBs are really rough to throw at someone (And so, so overused - not every arc HAS to end with an AV fight! ...Or start with one. Or have one every single mission. You get where I'm going with this).

*Edit* Also, "Too easy" complaints typically mean someone's just running on too low difficulty. "Too hard" there's only so much someone can do to make it easier.

Plus, I don't think director's cuts are eligible for Oscars? I don't recall one ever being nominated.

I've gotten a few more plays on Astoria in D Minor, but I think most of those were because of the player's choice nomination rather than the official one.

Though it's entirely possible people are playing and not rating. I wish there was some way to tell that.

Hm, save your live file locally and check out the custom critter data. It's possible that it might be loading in more customs than you're using, depending on how you organize your custom groups. Then all you'd need to do to fix it is change up your custom groups some.

It is possible that you're at 100% just because of text though - there's a LOT of text in the arc.

Backwards Day
ID: 329000
Author: @GlaziusF

Sorry about the slowness in getting to this, between school, writing my own arc, and general "I don't feel like using my brain today" feelings I haven't been very keen on writing reviews. That said, my queue is pretty short and it is still open, so if anyone wants some critical feedback on an arc, post here and I'll add you, and get around to reviewing it EVENTUALLY.

Also, for something related to the arc, I'm running this on my brute instead of my usual blaster. No, the review will not be in-character, and we can all be thankful for that.

In Progress

Mission 1:
-Just a note here: I'm never a big fan of using ((OOC: SOMETHING IMPORTANT)) in contact dialogue - it breaks immersion and there's almost always a way to spin it so that the contact can give you that information in character. In this case it's tricky because of the nature of the contact (I already know what this arc is about because I read PW's review before you posted it here), but even then I don't think it's impossible to fit in "Speak to me again, I have more to say" somewhere. Additionally, the "Clue numbering" thing probably doesn't have to be pointed out at all; not everyone does it but it's pretty intuitive so it's not like people are going to complain about "What's with the 'M3' in my clues?"
-It is kind of odd that Maros gives you the pendant to start and you go "Well, better go to the cave and get that pendant!" anyway.
-Found the pendant in the first pile I checked, but I'm running around the rest of the cave anyway just to see if there are any other optional clues
-It's a nice touch that each pile of rubble gives a different system text response when you search it.
-Well, okay, not ALL of them have different text. But there's at least a bit of variation.
-Found some slag piles left from what seems like it was a battle. From the NPC dialogue I guess they were fighting DE?
-There's quite a lot of extra "Stuff" in this mission - if they all get followed up on later, that's quite a few plot threads for an already kind of confusing arc, and if they don't, the cave isn't really large enough to require so many "Flavour" objectives.

Mission 2:
-Oddly enough, my brute being a speedster, catching artillery shells for scrap actually IS pretty reasonable.
-Well, at least the stuff from last mission is being followed up on, so that's better than just being random one-off stuff.

Mission 3:
-Well now that the mission briefings are synced up the plot will be a bit easier to follow - though with my memory I'm going to forget the briefings for 4 and 5 by the time I get to those missions.
-At this point one thing that's been bugging me is that there isn't really a lot of motivation to actually help Maros other than "Diviner Maros is weird and interesting".
-Hmm, I found the required NPC near the front of the mission, rendering the rest of the map kind of redundant. Is he set to spawn to "any" or "middle"? Maybe he should be set to "Back" instead.
-Sgt. Jack has a typo on his dialogue: "5 years ago, you've have been no match"

Mission 4:
-Hmm, didn't really have any thoughts on this one. I guess I should say SOMETHING... The impostor foresight bit was clever, I thought.

Mission 5
-The Maros fakes get a bit repeditive - maybe set them to separate objectives and give them different dialogue? I gather the repetition might be intentional, but it's not like it's hard to spot the fakes anyway (What with them attacking me as soon as I get close)
-Hmm, a thought that struck me, maybe the note in the first mission about blue text being optional should go in the mission 5 briefing, as this is the first time there actually IS an optional objective, and since that's something that would normally go at the beginning of the arc, it ties into the "Backwards" premise as well.

Summary:

Overall I liked this arc - it was pretty confusing, but intentionally so, and the yellow text helped make it clear what I was supposed to be doing in each individual mission, so there was never a moment where I was just doing "Defeat all" because I had no idea what I was actually SUPPOSED to be doing (Though I did continue to clear some missions to check for optional objectives after finding the required ones very early on - if I wasn't writing a review I wouldn't have done that but I wanted to be thorough).

There are a few weak spots I think - the side characters are entertaining enough to be decent one-shots, but it's still kind of disappointing that they disappear by the end of the arc - one of them makes sense, but the others just... don't show up anymore. I think a great way to bring them back would be to have them be the summoned allies in the final mission rather than the alternate Maroses (Marii?); it would provide some closure rather than just having them drop out of the story (If you felt like you needed to justify it being them, you could have Maros claim that he reached into your "recent past" for allies or something).

There also isn't a lot of in-character motivation in the arc - basically the only reason to run it is to see it to the end. Your character does get a magic pendant, except it's only really useful for the particular situation where you happen to acquire it. There's also the ethereal "Ultimate Knowledge", but that's only mentioned near the end of the arc and it's not the kind of thing that's going to motivate a fair number of people. It kind of suffers from the typical "Predestination" time-travel storyline where the only reason you do things is because you're "Supposed to" or "Have already done them". Since you HAVEN'T already done them, and not everyone takes warnings like "It will unravel the timeline!" particularly seriously (If time is that fragile it would have broken AGES ago with all the time travel people seem to be doing), there isn't a lot of reason for a character to think "I don't need this headache" and go knock over a bank instead.

Those are just a couple nitpicks though, overall the arc feels very polished and the story is interesting and well written enough that I wanted to see it through to the end.

I just published another arc that would be fairly suited for halloween, Signal:Noise, ID #341194.

Note that it's still a bit rough around the edges since it's brand new, but I would appreciate any feedback on it! (The link to the thread is in my signature).

Some bugs I've noticed (This are finicky and really only show up if you're trying to do some really advanced stuff in the MA, so they probably don't affect too many people but it would be nice to see them fixed anyway):

-Allies set to "Do Nothing" or "Wander" will follow the player if the player runs out of range, then runs back and "Rescues" them again. They should continue to follow the behaviour they're set to rather than defaulting to follow after the first time. Something additional that would be nice is if allies set to "Do Nothing" would continue to loop their animation after being rescued - currently if they have a "Looping" animation, they'll keep doing it as normal before being rescued, but afterwards they'll go through one cycle and then reset to the default animation - despite the fact that they're still just standing there (And it's not like you could exploit this for exp since hostile/betrayal allies don't give any exp).

-This isn't so much a bug as a design decision (And part if it might be a bug, but it's kind of a good bug so please don't fix it or you'll break half my arcs :P) - The way the text input fields in the MA seem to work is they just stop letting you enter data when you hit the character cap, but you can still use right-clicking to enter formatting and break the cap. The arc still publishes fine because it seems that for publishing purposes, only visible characters are counted towards the character limit on specific text fields - that's the good part, don't fix that (And it's not that the count itself is broken, because the arc WILL be invalidated if you use more visible characters than the cap allows - so again, please leave this as-is, it's a really nice feature for people like me who use heavy formatting)! The part that I think should be fixed is that since publishing ignores formatting when it comes to the 1000 character limit on text fields (1000 is just an example number), editing those fields should ignore formatting as well; so that if we do "Break the cap" with text formatting, we can still edit the text without having to erase all the formatting first to bring it down below the cap.

-This is a weird one, but escorts/mobs set to "Pacifist" AI behavior (i.e. they can be damaged, but can't fight back) will charge into melee range with enemy mobs - as if they're trying to attack them but since their AI doesn't allow them to use any powers, they don't. For escorts it actually makes them a real pain to keep alive, and for mobs (Okay so you can't set mobs to pacifist, but you can make a hostile escort/ally and set them to that), it's just kind of weird. I've got a two-fold suggestion for this one:
#1) Mobs set to "Pacifist" should treat all other mobs as "Untargetable", so they'll still follow their AI behaviour of following the player but won't charge at enemy mobs like they've got some kind of death wish.
#2) As a corollary, they should also have their fleeing behaviour disabled so that they won't immediately start running away because they're being attacked and can't fight back.

I've been kind of going nuts with writing lately (I've got ANOTHER idea for a story idea after this one). This one just kind of, I don't know, flowed out of me; I managed to do pretty much the whole thing in two days, though I haven't gotten any feedback on it so I'd really like to hear what people think (Especially since I wrote it so fast - I'm sure there are errors somewhere).

It's another Dark Astoria story, and in keeping with my tradition with those I don't want to say too much about it until a fair number of people have played it (This thread is fine for spoilers, I just don't want to put any in the OP).

Signal:Noise
#341194
Author: Amplitude(@The Cheshire Cat once they fix that)

Dark Astoria seems like it's been completely abandoned - as if everyone just up and left in the middle of whatever they were doing. But there must be SOMEONE still around out there - and they might need your help. WARNING: You will not get much exp from this arc.

(Description copy/pasted from in-game)

Tags: Horror, solo-friendly

Also, it says "Very Long", but this arc could actually be finished quite quickly - you'll realize why once you start playing it. I would suggest pacing it a bit just for the effect, though.

Anyway, let me know what you think when you play it!