The_Cheshire_Cat

Since you mentioned you were going to run it for fun anyway, I'd like to request a review of Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today! (Yes, the exclamation mark is part of the title). ID 337333.

I ran Teen Phalanx Forever! a little while ago and sent you some feedback on it. General impression was that it was very well written, kept the humour consistent throughout (Though the Vista vs. XP joke was a bit cheesy), and I was pleasantly surprised when the story actually came together - my big worry about the arc was it would end up being just be a loose, unconnected series of missions driven mostly by jokes, but this wasn't the case.

*I've also been meaning to give Talos Vice a run but I've been pretty caught up in writing another arc for the last little bit - momentum is like that*

New review probably later today, (Currently working on writing my own arc but I've got a lot of free time today). I've decided to change my review format a bit though - I'm still going to have the "Stream of Consciousness" followed by a summary section, but I'm ditching the star ratings aspect of it - I think it distracts from the point of my doing these reviews (Even a 5 star arc can always improve, after all), and it's just so arbitrary that it's been bugging me lately. I'll still give an overall impression of whether or not I LIKED the arc, but quantifying that just seems pointless to me - I've been pretty strict with my scale but even then it's so loose that it's almost meaningless.

The Venture Bros OSI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bZwBzITyk (Not what you were going for).

As for text formatting, there's two ways. Highlight an area of text and right-click - if it's a formattable field (Everything except in-mission NPC dialogue and clue titles I believe), it will pop up with some options like bold/colour/etc. Alternatively, you can use the HTML codes to do the same (e.g <b></b> for bold, etc.). The right-click formatting does this for you automatically, but sometimes it bugs out and throws in more tags than you strictly need, other times it REALLY bugs out and I don't even know what it's trying to do when it spits a bunch of text out. Most of the time it works okay, though. The one advantage to hand-coding is you can use the full spectrum of colours rather than just the 8ish they have in the menu (Those are just defaults, you can look up any colour somewhere like here and get the hex value to insert into the tag. If you want to use formatting to "Break the limit", you have to use the right-click method, as the fields stop allowing text input as soon as you hit the limit (But still publish okay so long as the number of VISIBLE characters is under the limit - you can't edit the raw .marc file to get more text, it won't publish, but you can put in as much formatting as you want).

Also, I gathered that you weren't trying to write a person's character for them, but still, a few assumptions can be made about anyone running that arc:
1) The character is trying to go clean, otherwise they wouldn't have started working for OSI in the first place (Well, money maybe, but there's WAY more money to be had in crime than black ops)
2) They may or may not feel comfortable with the shadier aspect of things - but even true villains can have limits of what they're willing to do.
You're probably safe writing assuming that those things at least are true about the character running the arc.

The comment I made about the orphanage matrons wasn't so much that I found them too difficult (My blaster was able to handle them fine), but that it just seemed odd that there were like... ninjas running an orphanage. The impression I got from that mission was that the orphanage was sort of a "School for Gifted Children" (In an X-men kind of way), so I was somewhat able to understand that, but it still struck me as silly on first impression.

Also, Frankenstein wasn't even a Dr. in the original book, he was just a student :P (I just read the thing like a week ago so I really SHOULD know that). I've just always seen it spelled as "Igor" so that's why I made that comment, it seems to be the most popular spelling.

As for the overall plot thread, if there is a connection between each mission, I didn't spot it (But then I assumed while running it that it would be made more explicit, so I wasn't really trying to put all the clues together to form a working theory). If the player is meant to figure out what the connection is, you should have the clues point them in that direction - don't flat out TELL them what the connection is, just tell them that there IS one. The trouble now is that it's not clear whether or not there's anything there to be figured out, so as a player I didn't put in the effort trying. A good subtle way to clue them in would be to just drop a hint in one of the clues that it might be related to a thing you've found in a previous mission - basically give them one piece of the puzzle so they realize that there is, in fact, a puzzle. Or, if there really isn't one, you can probably ditch a fair number of the clues, as while they're interesting on their own, they don't add much to the greater story.

As for my complaint about mission 4, it wasn't so much that it was out of place period, just that it was out of place following mission 3. I actually did the same thing when I wrote one of my arcs (The Beating Heart of Astoria), but caught it before I published - my original design had the player first trying to sacrifice some people to the monster, then failing that, try to kill it, then failing that, nuke the whole thing. The trouble was, morally, sacrificing people is kind of worse than just trying to kill the monster - so it screwed up the "Moral Decline" aspect of the missions. I swapped them and I think it works better now. That's the same problem with sticking mission 4 where it was - planting some evidence to force a Senator into retirement is WAY less evil than massacring an entire base, plus an ambassador. Just swapping those two missions would give a much more logical moral progression to the arc - giving the feeling that OSI is trying to push you farther into the moral gray area just to see how far they can, rather than just "Here's a mission, here's another one".

I've been looking for some feedback on Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorronauts of Today, ID: 337333, especially since I tightened up the pacing a bit. Though you still might not finish it if you're really impatient :P

The Long Road Back
ID: 340454
Author: Onyx Monolith (Don't know the author's global)

This one was taken down for a little while apparently, but it's back up now so giving it a go.

In Progress Thoughts

Mission 1:
-OSI? Someone watches the Venture Bros :P
-"Egor" should probably be "Igor" if that's what you're going for.
-The contact could use a bit of text formatting to make the briefing more interesting - at the very least the title could be in a different colour (And possibly bolded/sized up) to make it stand out from the briefing itself. I harp on this with a lot of people but that's because so few people actually seem to want to make use of that feature. Protip: It doesn't count against the field size limit when you publish, so you can actually break the character limit if you apply formatting LAST (It does make it a bit trickier to edit - though you can just remove the formatting to make changes, then reapply when you're done). If you've run my "Tomorrownauts" arc you can see how much colour I jammed into that first briefing - it's sitting at like 1500/1000 characters and still publishes no problem.
-Maybe Symens should be a Vahz Eidolon instead of a custom? Though if she comes back later in the arc this note might end up being invalid depending on how she's written.
-I'm not sure you really need 3 desks with notes in this mission, given that as a multi-objective, you get the clue on the first one. What you could do if you want the player to have to cover the whole area is instead of making one objective that spawns 3 glowies, you could make them 3 separate objectives that each give their own clue - it would make them more interesting. Though this mission is quite text-heavy considering the size of the map - some editing down might help it. The contact is well-written so he's not just spewing exposition at you which is nice, but there's a lot of information to take in right off the bat.

Mission 2:
-Timed mission, so my notes may be rather short on this one.
-Am I supposed to know who Escobar is? The contact mentions him as if he should be familiar to me but I don't recognize the name. I was kind of able to gather who he's meant to be by the description, but by tossing a name at the player it implies familiarity. If he's just meant to be some top lieutenant, you could just put "He's sending one of his strongest enforcers" rather than the name. If I am meant to know who he is, a brief description in the intro couldn't hurt.
-The timer wasn't too bad in this mission, short enough to be a concern but long enough to finish with time to spare. Though I don't run with EBs on with my blaster so it's possible it could be too short if someone was running on higher difficulty than I do. One note: He does warn you about the time limit, but highlighting that warning in a different text colour would be a good idea. It's kind of easy to miss details like that if everything is the same colour.
-Should "Debit" card be "Credit" card? Usually company cards are the latter rather than the former. If you have a fixed budget expense account, then the former applies, but his description seems to imply a more fluid limit (Minor nit, I know, but I write what catches my eye).

Mission 3:
-"Divident" should be "Dividend"
-I'm guessing from the clue that my character is actually trying to make an honest attempt to go clean - I'm hoping that the next few mission take this farther, it's a good plot thread to run with.
-"Brazil" is spelled as "Brasil" in the named Huntsman's description - I know both of them are technically correct but you should try to be consistent about which one you use in the arc (Unless the Huntsman is meant to actually be Brazilian in which case he'd use the native spelling, but his dialogue doesn't really imply "Portuguese" what with being in english). Also, his enemy group is "-Yawn". Is that intentional? If so, I'm not sure what it's supposed to imply.
-Also, my usual warning about defeat alls applies - Personally, I don't care so long as it's justified by the story (Which it is), but some people will hate it just by default.

Mission 4:
-The "Accept" text here is just the default, I'm assuming that's probably just an oversight since the rest of the arc thus far has used custom text.
-Hmm, this one seems kind of a downgrade in "Shadiness" from the previous one. Yeah, I suppose you are operating on US soil but you aren't killing anyone this time around (Well, depending on how you intepret what you're doing to the security guards).

Mission 5:
-Bit of a jump up now from the last mission. Maybe reorder these so it goes 4 3 5 instead of how it is now? It would be a more consistent escalation.
-Those orphanage matrons sure are nasty with their katanas - it seems like a bit of a weird disconnect there. Maybe instead of using customs, take a member from an existing group of "Civilian-ish" mobs and rename them? I guess it's kind of justified by the description text, but it still seems a bit silly. The extraction team costume design is nice though.
-Good job also on the orphans, although their description is set to the default "Minion" description - you might want to fix that. Random aside: Being a critic is fun. *Casually guns down orphans* "Oh BTW you should probably fix their description text"
-Took me a little bit to find all the glowies - maybe lower the count to 3 instead of 5? The map is pretty small.

Summary

Overall I thought this was a pretty decent arc that just needs a bit of work done on it - I'm going to call it a 3.5 rounded to a 3. The contact is well written, though also pretty verbose, so there's a lot of reading which kind of contrasts with the relative short length of the missions. Likewise there were quite a few clues, and most of them didn't seem to be strictly necessary seeing as how the connecting plot thread is about the agency rather than anything you do in each individual mission (For instance, do I really need to know about the Vahz research being done in mission 1, let alone 3 separate clues about it? It's never referred to again).

The issue I think with a lot of the plotting and clues is they put emphasis on the wrong elements - it seems to imply that the stuff you do in each individual mission is where the story is, when the story is actually about the overall "slipping back into old habits" your character goes through in their missions for the agency - I think it would help to stress the cognitive dissonance of this a bit more - there's a good bit in one of the clues about "Good thing I'm 'not a villain' anymore", but that seems to be the only mention of what (at least what I interpreted as) the arc is about. There's a lot of pathos to be mined out of the whole idea that the character has "gone clean" but is doing the same thing as they were before... but it's okay now because they're doing it for the "good guys", right? On that note, I think using OSI might not be the best choice for that feeling, going with an existing group that already comes off as a bit ambiguous (Maybe Wyvern? Though the last mission is way too villainous for them) might help to attach the story to something players would be more familiar with - with OSI, they seem to come off as "That crazy offshoot of the CIA that's basically Malta in different uniforms".

On a different note, I think the writing would really benefit from some use of formatting. As I said, the contact is pretty verbose, so without any use of font or text colours it just comes off as a big wall of white, which is a bit difficult to read sometimes. It's broken up into paragraphs, at least, so there's something.

Overall I did like the arc, it's not perfect but given that it's fairly new most of the flaws are forgivable for just not having had enough feedback on it yet. I'm hoping this review will help with that somewhat.

I was actually kind of hoping for a bit of description of why each arc was chosen to win in each category - though it's possible they might have done this at the banquet when they announced them (Remember that our information on the winners was just what people who were present posted - so they might have just posted the winners and left out the discussion because hey! Way too much typing for a cell phone). I think that kind of information would be helpful to everyone, because like Dr. Aeon's "I'm going to run one random arc and review it" thread, it shows us what the professionals look for in terms of quality.

Astoria in D Minor #41565 isn't exactly "Halloween", but I've been told that some people found it pretty scary.

I'd actually never heard of "Uncreation" before now :P I just gave it a run and I can see what you mean about them being stylistically similar, I think it's context that sets them apart though. Astoria in D Minor is (Ostensibly) grounded in reality, so having it all crumble in mission 4 has more of an impact than in Uncreation where reality falling apart is the starting point. D Minor also has reality come back together in mission 5 but... wrong. It's all essentially a mindscrew much like Uncreation, but it's meant to tie into the story rather than just being weird for the sake of weird.

Fun story, mission 4 didn't actually exist when I first wrote the arc. I helped someone else test their arc and they used the Ruladak caves, and I pretty much went "What map is this? I have to steal it." Mission 5 was meant to be the original "WTF?" level, but the caves were just too perfect for Dark Astoria to pass up so I consolidated two missions (Originally meeting Schism and rescuing Haley were two separate missions - but they really didn't have to be) and wrote the "Mausoleum" mission to make use of that map. It seems to have pretty well overshadowed mission 5 which was meant to be the original point of the arc (that being how a shift in context can change everything - how all of a sudden doing the same thing you've been doing the entire arc now feels "Wrong"), but hey, so long as people still like the arc I'm happy.

#1, #4, very much #7

Though with a few simple re-writes, I think I could get Tomorrownauts to hit all 7. I know what I'm entering next year!

And now for something completely different...

Meet your reviewer!


Dr. Ellen Timmit, PhD - also known as "Firanima"

Formerly a university professor, then Possessed by the Circle of Thorns, then a university professor again, now a superhero (But also still a professor) - Dr. Ellen Timmit has spent years compiling notes on superheroic culture which she hopes to some day turn into a book - but it turns out "Will write a book some day" doesn't pay the rent, so instead she's spent most of her time teaching classes during the winter and working for Architect Entertainment as a reviewer in the summer.

Though she managed to shake off the Oranbegan spirit that possessed her through an enchanted thorn in the heart, she managed to keep the thorn and thus all of the magical power it afforded - though with no formal magical training prior to her "Induction" into the Circle of Thorns, she's only been able to master the fire spells she used as a fire mystic during that period. But hey, everything burns right? There's no such thing as a problem that can't be solved with liberal application of fire. And since the Mission Architect is an entirely virtual environment, she doesn't even need to concern herself with making sure not to burn things TOO badly - making it a much more suitable environment for her talents than traditional hero work (Which is a bit lawsuit-y).

Years of grading papers have given her the eye for detail needed to take a critical look at the various story arcs she's tasked with reviewing - though she was always somewhat of an "Absent-minded professor" type (Explaining how she got kidnapped by the Circle in the first place), she can focus her attention like a laser beam if the situation requires it. Perhaps her one weakness as a reviewer is that she might be a bit too friendly to write a particularly mean review - which means she doesn't quite draw in the numbers of her peers because let's face it, everyone loves a train wreck. However, that fact is more than compensated for by her earnest belief that everyone is capable of improving through good, honest feedback - something else she learned from her many years of grading papers.

She's quite enjoyed her run so far, and is looking forward to seeing what else people have in store for her! Her one complaint thus far seems to be something about "Fire armour mobs". We can't really tell what she's saying but she seems to mutter that a lot on her way from the hospital teleporters to the mission entrance.

(I was bored and it's too late for me to do a real review - so there's the character I've been running these with - fire/fire/fire blaster, lots of emphasis on AoE, more ranged than blappy).

Also, for those that might be interested in this sort of thing, I've been keeping track of what ratings I've given out in the OP. Note that these don't always match my in-game ratings - I might award an extra star in game if I think an arc has potential for improvement, because of how getting anything less than a 4 can sometimes doom an arc to oblivion which just isn't fair for an arc I just thought needed some work rather than one I actually didn't like.

So far It seems like I've given out mostly 3's - which is a pretty good indication of how I rate. As I said, I'm a harsh rater, but that's mainly because of the fact that if all you do is give out 4s and 5s, then A: Why even bother having the 1-3 range available at all, and B: it makes giving those scores out meaningless, because anything even half-decent will get them - my intention isn't to review the whole range of arcs available on the MA here, my intention is to review the ones by authors that actually care enough about them to request feedback, which means I need a different metric to compare them than I would use if I was looking at "Average" arcs (For example, every arc I've reviewed thus far would have gotten 4 or 5 stars if I was scoring that way).

So, what I'm trying to do is to make the whole range of star ratings meaningful in my reviews - getting a 3 or even a 2 doesn't mean "Your arc was crap", it means "Compared to the other top 5% of arcs, you're on par/slightly below average". Anything outside of that top 5% gets a 1, but if an author honestly cares enough about an arc to request a review, they care enough about it to have put enough work in to keep them out of that range anyway (Unless they're EXTREMELY incompetent - but fortunately I haven't had to tell anyone that yet).

Something Comes to Yarmouth
ID: 58812
Author: @Oliin

Not much to say before I start, other than that the concept looks like something that will interest me.

In Progress Thoughts

Mission 1:
-This is heroic right? "If need be, break through the longbow blockade" sounds a bit iffy for something a hero would do - if they had a good reason, sure, but we just met this guy, right?
-Are we meant to know what Coralax are? The mission entry popup seems to describe them in very generic terms, suggesting our character is unfamiliar with them. If that's the case, it might help the atmosphere if you plopped them into a custom group and gave them names and descriptions that better reflect the fact that we don't know what they are. If we ARE supposed to recognize them, you could just replace the "Creatures made of rock!" line with "the Coralax"
-Sgt. West has a typo in her dialogue: "gonnadie"
-The map seems a bit large for the number of objectives - I get why you have to use an outdoor map, but is there no smaller one available? Alternatively, you could throw in some patrols or other optional objectives (I noticed you had one battle but that seemed to be it) to make it more interesting.

Mission 2:
-You should set the native group to "Civilians" or "Yarmouth citizens" or something in the captive objective fields - they use whatever their normal "Civilian" group happens to be - which sometimes can be something very out of place (I've made this mistake too)
-Glowie hunts on city maps are usually kind of a pain, especially with the "Rubble" object you've chosen to represent your objective. I'd suggest switching the "Required" clue to one of the captures citizens to make it much more visible, and leave the glowies to just be red herrings.
-Again, rather a large map for so few objectives - though I don't think the outdoor city maps come in any smaller flavours - maybe use an indoor map instead?

Mission 3:
-Typo in the contact's still busy dialogue "what are the doing to everyone?" (Yes, I read the busy dialogues)
-The captives say "Somebody. Help!" The period should probably be a comma (Or maybe just no punctuation at all)
-There were two captives in the room with Geneva, who said "Geneva? They took her further inside" with her standing right next to me. You should set them to spawn in "Middle" so they won't spawn in the back room with the escort.
-The transition style map fits this mission well, but maybe use a transition to sewers? My thinking is that the Coralax would drag people through the sewers out to the ocean, rather than just down into a cave.
-I notice Geneva's group is MAGI - is this intentional or just the model's default? If the latter it might be good to change it, otherwise players might interpret it as an important clue.
-"it seems the Mayor of Yarmouth very well might be the one responsible for what has happened to this town." scans really weirdly - I'd suggest rephrasing it to something more like "It seems the Mayor of Yarmouth is the one responsible for what's happened to this town"
-Geneva's clue after you take her to the doors is redundant with her NPC dialogue - I'd already taken out the cop while taking her back to the door. You can probably just remove the clue.

Mission 4:
-The custom LTs all having a self-rez is kind of a pain - it's not like freaks where it's a random chance, they do it EVERY TIME.
-Munoz seems to be taking this AWFULLY hard - he was particularly detached beforehand so all of a sudden breaking down in tears seems like it comes out of nowhere - this is kind of tricky to fix because it goes to characterization, which you can't do just by changing one or two lines - if he's meant to have an emotional breakdown you need to write his dialogue to be more emotional in the first place.
-This mission and mission 5 seem to jump up to a 54 cap for some reason - probably because they don't have the Coralax to bind them down to the usual level range. I'd suggest manually setting your level ranges in this arc to make them more consistent.

Mission 5:
-I can see why you chose another transition map for this one, but it feels kind of like a repeat of mission 3. I think it would be more effective if you just used a "Standard" office map to represent city hall - sometimes the natural is more menacing than the supernatural when used in the right context (Though it's too bad we can't use the city hall map from the Reichsman TF yet - that would have been perfect).

Summary

Overall this arc has an interesting concept and has the potential to be a great horror story, but it's held back by lacking atmosphere and needing some polish. I'm giving it a 3, but it's got the potential for more.

Essentially, the key to telling a good horror story is atmosphere, which is what this arc is lacking - the basic ingredients for an interesting story are there but I didn't particularly care about the town or the characters, because they seemed to be just kind of... there, rather than having a life of their own. The contact especially needs more characterization - he's the lens through which we view the story - if all he does is give exposition, we're going to be as detached from the story as he is. Likewise, having Titus turn out to be a Coralax is A: Kind of obvious, and B: Doesn't really hit at any emotional notes like it should - because I really only met him the one time and he didn't make much of an impression on me when I did.

A good "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" type of story like this one mines all the drama it can out of the fact that you have to turn on your former friends, because they've become one of "Them" now. It should be meaningful that we have to beat up all these civilians but it doesn't really feel like because there's no emotional weight attached to it. It also uses the whole "Could be any one of us" aspect to really ramp up the feeling of paranoia, which also lends to the general horror atmosphere - a great way to sell this in a mission arc is to use the betrayal feature for escorts and allies (Note - don't do it on a required escort unless you want the player to fail the mission).

The mission design itself could also use a bit of work - there's nothing broken about it (Except for the glowie bit in mission 2 which I mentioned already), but it's very bare bones - you've got large maps but they feel very empty because the only thing on them are auto-spawns and required objectives. Filling them in with some patrols, optional bosses, battles, etc. is a good way to make the town feel more "Alive", by making it feel like the mobs have things to do other than stand around and wait for you to pull them - and the more alive the town feels, the more people will care about what's happening to it. Optional objectives are also a great way to fill in the "fluff" information on the town - the clues you'd get from them aren't required to understand the story, but they'll give you a bit more insight into the workings of the town and the people that live there. A good example would be say around mission 4, you find notes or e-mails from the mayor detailing his insane ramblings about Merulina - it would help to add to his character and make him a more meaningful encounter when we meet him in mission 5.

Telling a good horror story in the MA is hard, but you've got the groundwork here, you just need to sell the emotional side of it.

I'd play it. Ironically, of course.

Stillll working on finding a good map for mission 3. It'll be a bit I think.

*Edit* Okay! It should be much better now. I was using an arachnoid tech map before but they seem to be all kinds of buggy. It's just a standard tech map now.

You might as well finish if you're just insterested in the story - it's basically unchanged. I'm still testing the changes to make sure all of the objectives still spawn in the right places, as well, so the changes may not be totally functional yet.

*Edit* then again, mission 4 is one of the worst offenders for backtracking, which is the biggest fix I made this time around, so if you haven't hit that one yet you might want not want to run it in its previous incarnation.

*Double edit* Oh wait you haven't done mission 3 yet? Yeah, you definitely want to restart then - that one even gave ME trouble finding all the objectives.