Venture

Simply put, none of the other people who have commented on the arc had any of the complaints you've had. That's including people who didn't like it. Of course, none of them made multiple errors of fact in their comments, either.

Now, you did say you would lay bare all of my faults. I have four more playable arcs for you. I'm perfectly prepared to watch you humiliate yourself over those, too.

No one else who reviewed it thought so.

They are explained. You didn't read it.

They aren't "tiny" maps. "Tiny" is not even a size option for those maps. I chose "Small" maps so the player would not have to go grovelling over hell's half-acre to find a few glowies. Most of the objectives are set to spawn anywhere. The game decides where they actually go.

The Rikti attack on Steel Canyon is explained twice. The Boomtown attack is also explained. You didn't read it.

Explained twice with an additional hint in Ja'Dar's first /info panel.

He needed Doc Science's help with the machines recovered in Act I. Doc Science tipped off Vanguard, which is the agency officially tasked with responding to Rikti attacks.

I don't fear criticism. It's an important part of improving your skills.

I fear Taser even less.

No one ever said that they were. Of course, not all tropes are good, either. Many tropes are nearly impossible to use positively in any serious work. I can't think of a positive use of (e.g.) Mary Sues or the Idiot Ball outside of satire or comedy.

There is nothing new under the sun, so if this is your metric you fail as a critic.

Bring it. But please use the commentary thread for the individual arcs in the MA forums, rather than continue to derail this.

Of course they rely on tropes. Tropes are tools, not cliches. There is no such thing as a tropeless tale.

I did not employ any cliches. You will have to show your work to claim otherwise.

Yes. But that isn't saying much.

The arcs send you to learn about trainers at level 5. LEVEL FREAKING 5, MAN, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? THAT'S RIGHT, EVERYTHING!

This is not unnecessary scrutiny. Everything these arcs teach is taught too late. Even your example, the difficulty adjustors: you are sent to them by these arcs in the 15-20 bracket, but in the 10-15 bracket you are forced to go talk to one by your Contacts! The arcs don't teach about Detectives or Brokers until 15-20, too, by which point the player, assuming he didn't already know about them, will have missed two Safeguard or Mayhem missions he can never make up without begging for help. For villains that means missing pieces of an accolade with +5% HP. Tailors are in the same bracket, except you're told about them as soon as you leave the tutorial. You get a lead on the invention system in the 10-15 section, except the trainers tell you about it when you train level 10 and you get a pop-up Contact with a tutorial mission. And on and on and on. Failing at the putative purpose of the work is legitimate grounds for condemnation, as it turns out. We don't even have to go into the litany of sins committed by the actual stories, such as they are.

This is aside from the fact that anything these arcs have to teach could have been done more effectively with Pop-Up Help. Remember that? The devs didn't.

I already have. Seven of them, in fact. You just can't play three of them thanks to the crackheaded text filter. I would daresay, actually, that of the 150 or so arcs I reviewed in MA, very few were actually worse than these.

Not an excuse. He's using a live-fire scenario to "test" the Shining Stars. It's sheer luck (authorial fiat) that no one got their head blown off or otherwise hit in a way that prevented Medicom from kicking in.

That was discussed at length near the end of the open beta. A small legion of apologists defended it.

The arcs fail at their jobs is insignificant?

It doesn't have to be "a matter of life or death". How about if the tutorial arc sets actually succeeded at being tutorials? How about if they actually taught the player things he needs to know before he needs to know them and not after? Is that asking too much?

The writing around here is so bad and so absurd that it is no longer possible to tell the difference between things we're supposed to take seriously and self-parody.

The problem with the whole "who's the mole" thing ("I always preferred the term traitor" -- Andrew Schmidt, The Closer) is that it appears to have been written by someone who's heard of the least-likely-suspect mystery genre, but didn't bother to learn how to write one.

Of course, this is just one of the tutorial arc set's problems.

This is about the only situation in which I would accuse someone of cybersquatting, and even then I wouldn't expect NC to do anything about it. Certainly it's annoying, but I'd be ecstatic if it was the worst problem I had to deal with.

Oh, and as for names of Time Manipulation characters, I didn't even try to get something with any variation of "time" in it. My DP/Time (hero) Corruptor on Exalted is Dr. Liam Impossible, displaced Victorian "gentleman adventurer".

While I think a (effective) $10 price tag is a bit much, there is nothing out of line with PS selling power sets. We have gotten some new sets for free, yes, but many were sold as part of CoV or GR. The company has to make money on this so they have to make judgements as to how much new stuff they can give away as part of an "issue" and how much has to have a separate price.