konshu

I still have a problem. I've done everything I can think of to fix it.

Every time the updater starts it wants to re-write some pigg files. When it gets to the geom.pigg file the updater crashes. Consistently.

It's not a file space issue or anything else I can think of. I've been able to access the test server just fine in the past, and I've accessed it since i15 came out. But that last bad patch seems to have done me in. I've reloaded the CohTest folder from my City of Heroes folder, made it past various hurdles (it still likes to erase all my pigg files the first go around), and then I finally get the updating to something manageable, like just under 300M, and it gets as far as geom.pigg and quits.

I hope the devs haven't stopped working on this updater issue, as I don't consider it resolved yet.

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First of all, reading and trying to understand that gave me a nosebleed.

But secondly, has anyone considered the possibility that Nemesis is just plain bat crap nuts? Or has dementia?

And to expand on that just a little bit. Alot of the greatest minds have little quirks about them. It's also been true that some of the most dangerous people in history have not be mentally sound. So it is at least a little possible that Nemesis is crazy?

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Crazy leaders of masses of mind-controlled minions seems like a staple of CoH. Maybe it's a prerequisite in the game for evildoers to be at least a little loony.

Another possible solution is that the Nemesi have a network where sometimes events have been broadcast and shared, while other experiences might require a peek into the cached data of another Nemesi (who might be busy and thus inaccessible to the network or might have been destroyed).

Also, I'm sure Nemesis in his various projections must have encountered legions of foes of similar appearance, some of which may have as many as 5 different suits and who make frequent visits to the tailor. "Uh, let's see ... purple tights, wedges sticking out of cowl, no cape, gaseous aura, big fist symbol on chest ... have I seen this one before? Seems familiar."

I'm just amazed that he can always get $name right.

Maybe this thread should be re-titled: "I'm a Leg Man."

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However, from day one the devs have always been pitching their wares to the farmers, and by habit or whatever they included a ton of openings and incentives for farming. And not just farming but obvious exploits as well. (Exploiters are not the same as farmers, but the distinctions can blur.)

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Agreed. And PLers can't miss the mission-entry advert that says "Mission Architect Tip: You can level 1-50 with Mission Architect," or words to that effect. It's a way of saying, "Skip the game content. PL, PL, PL."

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In a way, yes. In that those who are prone to PLing will look for opportunities to do so. It's the way they see things.

For many people, a natural part of playing a game is the "meta-game" where you try to find advantages for yourself that might sometimes be considered exploits. It's logical to assume that if you CAN do a thing in the game, then it must be legitimate, but sometimes it's a matter of the players being more clever than the developers and when that happens the advantage gained is called an exploit. Players have to use their own judgment to try to assess what might happen when the devs finally discover and repair the exploit, and I think the most common assumption is that the right thing to do when you find an exploit is to milk the heck out of it before it gets nerfed. This tactic is reckoned as being "smart play," and not only do players enjoy the heaps of rewards they receive, but they enjoy having found an easier path to success. It's an ego boost, and they're just following the path of least resistance.

Part of the difficulty with the MA is that players in closed and open beta had found out how to take advantage of the new system and saw that the devs were not acting to fix the exploits. The MA was ripe for exploitation the moment it went live and players used the system in a "smart" manner for maximum rewards. It looked almost like the devs were giving permission for the MA to be used in that way. It was even discussed on the forums and no red names commented on it. So when we were some weeks into i14 and Posi made his announcement of penalties for exploiting MA, many players felt like they'd been treated unfairly.

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I think it's pretty clear that Paragon Studios is experiencing some sort of difficulty with internal leadership, responsibilities relating to quality, and some developers have a poor knowledge of the game they're working on. Something along those lines has got to be the explanation for what's been happening. The turbulence in the development team has created some turbulence for the players, but hopefully they'll get it all straightened out.

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I'm not as convinced it's any kind of internal strife (though it well might be), as the kind of isolation you hint at.

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Strife? I have no idea about that. But in any group of people there will be divergent points of view, different levels of knowledge, and difficulty in getting everyone in step. I think it's probably more of an issue of chaos and incoordination at the office as opposed to strife, but I'm just guessing.

I understand i15 has content that accidentally portrays a hero NPC as a villain, plus a boss that has 4x the HP of a giant monster, and other bugs that would normally be found by simple play-testing in-house that evidently isn't being done, so it sounds like the incoordination continues.

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As for coming across players with level 50s and even level 50 epics who have no idea how to play ... they're just noobs.

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I have to take exception to this part. Broadbrushing all noobs as folks who want to buy (or PL) a 50 is a bit harsh.

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When I say "noob" I mean someone who is new to the game. Some might say "newb." Whether they're at level 1 or they PLed to 50 or MAed to 50 or bought a 50 or whatever, they're not experienced in the classic CoH game.

I've chatted with people new to the game who for some reason assumed that in order to have fun with it they needed to buy inf and levels from some dot.com company. When I explained that the game was really quite easy and they didn't need to do all that, they seemed surprised.

It's not like this game is hard - lol - or that getting to 50 gives you massive rewards over being at level 10. Personally, I prefer the low level game, and I'm often found running around with zero or expired enhancements. My game goals are typically: get temp travel powers, get costume slots, get aura, get TF Commander accolade. (My redside goals are similar.) If I have the option to do a mish that nets me a badge or a temp power, I normally take it. I rarely make any recipes before level 30. And I have fun, playing on all servers.

But that's my style of play and I understand different people play different ways and that's cool.

You've probably seen more responses on this (the OP) than you thought you would.

I disagree that MA has been trashed by the lazy masses. In a way you are right and I can see your point. The devs presented MA as a means for the storytellers to create stories for others to play. They said they were removing defeat badges as a safeguard against farming.

However, from day one the devs have always been pitching their wares to the farmers, and by habit or whatever they included a ton of openings and incentives for farming. And not just farming but obvious exploits as well. (Exploiters are not the same as farmers, but the distinctions can blur.)

I think it's pretty clear that Paragon Studios is experiencing some sort of difficulty with internal leadership, responsibilities relating to quality, and some developers have a poor knowledge of the game they're working on. Something along those lines has got to be the explanation for what's been happening. The turbulence in the development team has created some turbulence for the players, but hopefully they'll get it all straightened out.

i15 is bringing a tagging feature intended to help guide players to content. That may aid story-oriented players in finding story-oriented content. But it seems some large percentage of players - maybe 70% (???) - are completely uninterested in story. So don't expect MA story content to be as popular as other forms of content (basically farming).

Why doesn't CoH/CoV have more players interested in story? I think part of it is that the original game handled story poorly, and with the exception of the introduction of cutscenes in CoV in 2005, no features have been added to improve storytelling in the game. Also, few if any patches have been made to improve continuity; the patches have all been related to game mechanics. When it comes to priorities, the devs serve farmers and action-oriented players first, and story-oriented players get the bare minimum of attention. So, if there are potential story-oriented players out there, they have little incentive to play this game due to the lack of story-oriented features. Story just isn't an attraction here. Some might argue about it, but that's the way I see it.

As for coming across players with level 50s and even level 50 epics who have no idea how to play ... they're just noobs. There will always be noobs. We have to adjust, and accept that the level of a player's toon and whether it is epic or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether they can play. The only guideline will be the veteran badges, and even that is just a guide, since sometimes multiple people share a single account, and sometimes old players create new accounts.

As for the disgruntlement about people liking your arcs, even among people looking for stories there is a HUGE range of preferences and expectations. All you can do is make arcs of the type that you like yourself, and hopefully other people who like the same thing will find your material.

The MA is new. I imagine that over time we might see better player organization in relation to the MA. For example, if farmers have already organized and selected Atlas as their venue of choice, then maybe the story-oriented lowbie players should gather in Galaxy, Steel, and KR. Mid-level story-oriented players can gather in Bricks, Talos, or RWZ. Top level story players can gather in FF, while the farming players gather in PI. It's not that hard to figure it out, and eventually we'll all be following the ant trails to the hangouts for players with our particular interests.

As for your friend with the TF arc, what I've found is that many story-oriented people solo AE content, and those friends who gather together tend to go for the more casual story fare or they play each other's arcs. PUGs tend to be for farming. So I'm not surprised that at this stage it is difficult to gather teams for running a TF arc. It's just the way it is at this point, but hopefully it will eventually change.

I'd like to make a few TF arcs myself, but I'm waiting till we get more than 3 slots, since in my opinion a true TF arc would require 10 missions.

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Desdemona's voice is another problem. I was going for "foreign", possibly "latin american", but a few people have interpreted it as russian and in one case ukrainian. Desdemona doesn't speak like that in the game but then again she gets all of one sentence in her own voice and the rest of her dialogue is standard broker-speak. She was much worse before, I've toned it down a lot and I considered removing it entirely, but some people who's judgement I trust have told me that her voice makes her a lot more interesting.

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FWIW, I'd thought that Desdemona might have a British accent, as her sobriquet "the Glint" sounds to me like something a classic London sneak thief might use. Also, Desdemona is also the name of the wife of Othello in Shakespeare's play.

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Most literature doesn't package its meaning in simple morals or thematic messages.

If it doesn't have a theme, it's not literature.

What, for example, is the moral lesson or theme of "The Maltese Falcon?"

As Chandler put it in the (highly recommended) titular essay from one of the Seven Books That Contain All You Really Need to Know, The Maltese Falcon is "the record of a man's devotion to his friend".

Or "The Living Shadow," the first story featuring The Shadow?

I've never read it so I couldn't tell you. Maybe it doesn't have one -- maybe it's just a pulp fiction bit of fluff.

The Harry Potter books perhaps have a theme of making sacrifices in the fight against evil, but it's a rather broad theme adopted by pretty much all heroic literature.

The Potter books have various themes depending on the specific book. They tend to be simplistic and heavy-handed but it must be remembered that these books, no matter how popular they turned out to be with adults, are written for children.

I'd say that most literature doesn't dwell on themes so much to provide unity of story - and thereby avoid JABOSTH.

If the story doesn't have a theme, then what is the author saying with it? The answer has to be nothing. If that question does have an answer then there's your theme, but if the author isn't saying anything then what, exactly, about the story in question justifies the killing of even a single tree to produce the paper to print it? Generating suspense may sell books or movie tickets but it doesn't make a story into literature.

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My apologies if I'm jacking your thread. I just thought I'd offer my understanding of the situation with the hope it would be helpful to some forum readers.

(And if you are reading this and suffer from TL;DR then skip to the end. )

The point I was trying to make is that you don't have to begin conception of a story with a theme. You don't have to center a story on a theme. You CAN do this, of course, but you don't have to. Not everyone tells a story because they have "something to say." You can let the theme(s) arise organically from your characters and plotting, have fun with it, and let your story say what it will.

I tried to point out that there are well-known examples of literature that are theme-focused. They were written to communicate a specific message and perhaps elicit some form of personal or social change. There are also examples of fiction that do not appear to be thematically focused. I don't expect anyone to have actually read "The Maltese Falcon," it's just something that came to mind. But if anyone has read it, I think my point would be made. It doesn't come across as a thematically-oriented story. Hammett may have had "a record of a man's devotion to a friend" in mind, but what comes across is a specific literary tone of voice, guns, a babe, duplicity, and a struggle for wealth - spawning a whole genre of imitators who included those specific things. Some would not call Hammett's work "literature," as it lives pretty soundly in the realm of pulp fiction, but it certainly has proven to be iconic and has left an indelible mark on the minds of generations of authors and audiences. And it was not the theme that left the mark, it was the characterizations.

There is a similar situation with Superman, who is typically taken as the original subject of superhero fiction. He's iconic, the notion of Superman has made its mark in world consciousness, and it's the character of Superman (and the characters of those who accompany him) that give rise to themes in his stories. In reviewing the history of Superman's stories you can see the character concept develop and where new themes emerge as a consequence of characterization.

I'm not sure how you define literature, Venture - definitions can be a sticking point - but I define it broadly as storytelling, esp. the type that can or has been written down. It can be high brow or low brow, art or craft, a Greek tragedy, a tribal myth, a newspaper article, or whatever. So long as it draws the audience along willingly from point to point and entertains.

The problem, as I see it - and you may see it differently, which is fine - is that events that are not tied together in some manner to provide a unified story are JABOSTH. JABOSTH is like a to do list, a shopping list, in which the subjects are not well-connected, except perhaps as a sequence of A, B, C, D. But if you take the objects - say a hammer, nails, wood, and glue - and you present them to the audience as though they WILL add up to something, and then you do have a resolution where they come together into a house, or a chair, or whatever, then you have taken that list, put it into action, and in the process you've told a simple story. "A man bought these things and then built a house."

Then if you add emotional elements based on character, passion, motivation - like "a man's struggle to finally do something right" - you've got a theme organically grown to go along with your story. Add in a complication of some sort to be overcome, and you've added to the suspense and gained an opportunity to enrich the detail of the story. You could also add an air of mystery if you don't tell the reader what the man is struggling to make, but instead drop the occasional clue to engage the reader in guesswork and projection. The mystery adds to the suspense created by the complication, and all the forms of suspense, with their introductions and resolution, can be positioned to keep the audience's interest piqued and prevent the elements of the story from flying apart.

In this, an "arc" could be defined as the introduction and resolution of a suspense element. Typically, a story ends with the resolution of an arc that began early in the story, and thereby binds the beginning to the end.

So one can certainly start with a theme and select or prune characters to fit the shape of the theme. Or one can start with characters and let their actions and reactions to situations be dictated by their individual essences, and let the theme(s) arise from the interaction of character and plot.

On a practical level, a writer may find that if they start with a theme they may get too preachy with it, or lose it in the details, or as you write the story you may find the theme may change into something else. I think it works better to let your themes emerge on their own, when you can, as they then seem more authentic to the characters and events.

And if your story suffers from JABOSTH, then to fix it you focus on stitching together the parts of your story not just with a numbering system or flow chart (where this happens, then this, then this ...) but with arcs of suspense. You add emotional impact to an empty story by providing characterizations illustrated by choice, action, and result, which creates a theme.

Where people are running into problems with Venture's prescription to add a theme to prevent JABOSTH is that you can't just tack a theme on to an existing sequence of events and call it fixed. You have to build the story from the foundation up with the elements that provide unity of story.

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JABOSTH is the trope I have the most trouble understanding in practice as it applies within the MA. It seems like many, many of the canon arcs suffer from this problem, and while I have something of a spidey sense about it, I don't know that I can quantify what it really means.

While I haven't sat down and tabulated them all, I'd say the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of the canon stories are "just a bunch of stuff that happened".

Gotterdammerung had a good quote on the subject in the old thread:

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You're right in saying that avoiding JABOSTH is a very tricky thing to do, especially in a system where no assumptions can be made about the protagonist. However, I think Venture's right in placing such a big emphasis on this, because I believe it's critical to writing a good arc. The easiest way to do this is to look at your story and ask youself: "what question is this story asking?" If you're asking a question, you've got yourself a theme. If you answer the question, you've got yourself a moral. If you're really not asking anything, then you've got JABOSTH.


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I'd still advise designers to go the direction I sketched out, though each to their own.

Most literature doesn't package its meaning in simple morals or thematic messages. Sure, you get it happening in "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens, "Huckleberry Finn," religious or culture-defining parables, and Aesop's fables - and there's nothing wrong with having a strong thematic focus or message - but large swaths of literature follow a more complicated pattern.

What, for example, is the moral lesson or theme of "The Maltese Falcon?" Or "The Living Shadow," the first story featuring The Shadow? The Harry Potter books perhaps have a theme of making sacrifices in the fight against evil, but it's a rather broad theme adopted by pretty much all heroic literature. Frankly, a lot of stories involve us and move us, but don't move us in a specific direction.

I'd say that most literature doesn't dwell on themes so much to provide unity of story - and thereby avoid JABOSTH. Instead the most central focus of storytelling is a matter of introducing and resolving suspense, and there are many methods of doing this. One highly successful method is the digression, where you set up one situation and transition to another, leaving the audience hanging on in suspense for the resolution of the first situation. Novelists often use different points of view to break up a story into different parts told by different characters, where each new point of view acts as a new digression and the audience waits for the story to return to earlier characters. Another method is foreshadowing, which is successfully used in horror stories for example, in which the audience is led to predict an outcome and waits in suspense for eventual validation. Mystery stories rely on a similar device, where the audience races to develop a prediction of an outcome before the revelation occurs. With foreshadowing and mystery, audiences often appreciate it if the storyteller extends the suspense by adding a twist or two. Yet another method is the turning point or gap, where a decision has been made that changes circumstances for a character, and may prevent the character from returning to their original status - forcing them into new and unsettling circumstances. In this case, the audience is hooked either awaiting validation of their prediction on how it will turn out (foreshadowing), or they are hooked in trying to gather enough information to make a prediction (mystery).

In addition to generating suspense - which is essential for keeping the audience glued to the tale - for a story to be emotionally satisfying there must be emotional elements. This is not required, however. Some stories, like mysteries, are primarily intellectually satisfying. But for a classic "catharsis" you must have emotional elements that elicit an emotional response from your audience.

Themes can be a part of introducing and resolving suspense involving emotions. When you develop a character you give them passions which provide them with direction or motivation. As these passions culminate in choices, actions, and results, you not only introduce and resolve suspense, but you also introduce thematic material as a byproduct of the process. The themes are a consequence of the developing story, and not necessarily the original aim of the story.

For example, a character may feel very strongly about injustice. They may also be prideful (or as the Greeks would say, suffering from "hubris"). These passions can play out in circumstances where in the choices and the following results they become meaningful or thematic.

So, sorry if that was a bit longwinded, but if you have solid characterizations with passions and motivations, and this leads the characters to make decisions, and these decisions lead to consequences, in the process of creating unity of story and suspense you've probably also created a theme.

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Massive anger on the forum over game changes

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What did I miss? What changes are coming? I've been ignoring the Issue 15 Beta threads, is it involved?

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You should browse the i15 threads and decide for yourself.

I think it's safe to say, though, that however much outrage is expressed on the forums, for many players the coming changes are completely unimportant.

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Still feeling pretty down. As I like through the forums here, all the posts that actually discuss the game are commenting on things that are horribly wrong with it, how it will fail, and how much better Champions Online will be. Oh, and that i15 and the MA are failures and/or broken.

Don't even get me started on in-game, where when I try to form a team of people I don't know, I routinely get at least one, "Oh, this isn't an auto-sk to 50 farm? See ya." (Most of my SG friends have decamped to an new server for no apparent reason, where they tell me they spend all their time powerleveling.)

As I've said before, I suspect that i17 will see this game's last sunrise.

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I'd agree with anyone who says i15 is a small and stinky fish that should be thrown back. But this does not spell DOOM.

I think the Paragon Studio devs fall short of the mark about 9 out of 10 times, it is just amazing how they fail to choose the correct strategy over and over. But if we have our eyes open we see that this is a widespread phenomenon evident in all aspects of society: business, law, medicine, arts ... and so on. People just muddle through and enjoy the success of something going right about 1 in 10 times. In business, usually if a company survives past start-up it has developed a momentum and stability that requires some significant internal shake-up or extrinsic factor to bring it down. I doubt the other MMOs will provide this external factor, and ditto with the economic recession. It's more likely that the newbie MMOs will be weighed down by their own internal failures and not make it out of the start-up phase.

So ... did I out-pessimist you and yet provide you with some hope? lol

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JABOSTH is the trope I have the most trouble understanding in practice as it applies within the MA. It seems like many, many of the canon arcs suffer from this problem, and while I have something of a spidey sense about it, I don't know that I can quantify what it really means.

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I'm not sure I understand JABOSTH either. I wondered if my own arcs were guilty of this, but the one I had reviewed was not, so I'm suspecting I'm safe.

Now Venture may have a different take on this, but I think you can avoid having JABOSTH happen if your NPCs have complex motivations and feelings. This goes beyond a simple "RAH! Gimme money!"

Having said that, you don't have to go as emo as some player toon bios. Just add a bit more complexity, a setback in the story somewhere, and some emotional reaction on the part of the NPCs to the changing circumstances in the arc. After all, an "arc" goes up and down, not in a straight or flat line. An arc can also have several subplots or "sub-arcs," allowing one NPC's fortunes to rise while another's falls.

For example, if a NPC begins the arc with confidence, then maybe something could happen during the arc that causes them to express doubt. By the end of the arc you could tie this up with a validation either of the doubt or the confidence. At the same time, another NPC could be facing the results of their own, separate dilemma.

When people receive a story, one of the things they focus on is a situation where a person makes a choice. They want to know whether the choice was right or not, and it can be a source of suspense as they wait for the confirmation or resolution. In normal fiction, the choice-maker is usually the protagonist or central character, but in writing for missions, you can't really have the player be the choice-maker. It has to be one or more of the NPCs that are making the decisions that comprise the story.

So there needs to be more going on than just a series of staged encounters with fist-smacking stiffs. The NPCs need to have multidimensional motives, expressed passions, and decisions they commit to - with some sort of result coming as a consequence of the decisions: good or ill.

There might be more to JABOSTH than this, but I think if you follow this suggestion you'll steer clear of JABOSTH.

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It's a little ungraceful to leave such a dangling plotline unresolved at the finish of the arc, but I'm going to give it a try in order to satisfy your concern.

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I don't think all ends need to be tied in serial fiction, like comic books. I think it is acceptable and even preferred if the story leaves hooks all over the place for the author (or other writers) to continue the story in some fashion.

Personally, I like the idea of origin-inspired content, meaning that if you choose a Magic or Mutant origin, for instance, you would automatically unlock magic or mutant content.

Judging from the fossilized remains of the various origin contacts in Atlas and Galaxy, this was the original idea. However, the devs soon decided to contract their efforts into one chain of mixed origin content.

What I'd like is for the devs to rewrite and modernize the original CoH content, starting at level 1, splitting the various storylines into single and dual origin threads. This could be a continuing project, done a chunk at a time, with new content showing up every month.

I know many people would balk at the idea, saying it is a wasted effort, because all people play anymore is TFs, scanners, and AE farms, and all the devs seem to be able to crank out over the course of a year is 3 small TFs and maybe a half dozen small arcs.

But there are reasons why things are this way. The way I see it, the devs believe they should crank out a small amount of low-story farmable content because that's what datamining shows the players like. As a case in point, AE was created as a bone to throw to the small contingent of the player base that wanted story and RP, and what happened to it? Farm city.

However, I think that most players turn to farms and scanners primarily because the content is so uninteresting (including AE content). There is no realistic opportunity to mine statistics that relate to playing for story or RP, so the belief that players should get increasing amounts of low-story high farm content is self-fulfilling.

I know players and devs may not agree with me, but that's the opinion I formed within about a month of play in 2005 and everything I've seen since then appears to confirm it. <shrug>

To return to the OP for a moment ... lol ... I guess I'd say it's good to voice your opinions and ideas about where the game should go, but realistically, don't expect much to change.

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I have a feeling that about 6 months from now they'll find a way to do that for those that are putting out decent arcs that aren't HoF or DC material but still seem to be popular. It's to keep the interest up. If they feel that people are quitting CoX because they're tired of not having enough venues to share user created content then they'll create more slots.

Just as they gave us more character slots...

It'll just take time.

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Boy, I hope that's not the case. Three arc slots is TINY. It's like getting 3 character slots, except it takes me a lot longer to level up a character than it does to make an arc.

My hope is that it's trivially easy for them to create more arc slots, it's just that they want to data mine for a bit to get a sense of how popular arc creation is before they create a scheme to dispense more arc slots.

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Falling damage should only be able to bring them down to 1 health and no further.

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But if you fall onto a sloped surface and slide even a little, you can take that extra point of damage and die before you can do anything. It's happened to me many times - virtually every single time that falling damage has taken me to 1 hp, in fact. Presumably it would apply to PA as well. /e shrug

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Whooo, finally managed to copy stuff without crashing. Yay for huge reduction, the Mega Mech has 9 custom critters and was almost at the file limit, on test it's at around 77%. I'll probably be adding in a few more customs.

And using the "custom" power selections doesn't seem to be affecting how much space the critter takes up, thankfully. Yay for no more Total Focus at 32!

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Sweet! Thank you for confirming this!

I figured the devs could come up with a way to do some compression. 20% improvement is awesome!

Of course it may only apply to arcs that heavily use custom critters, but anything that makes customization easier is good news to me.

Oh ... as for the OP ... if I can think of anything to tweak based on any MA patch I go in and make my tweaks. However, at the moment I can't see how either of my arcs will be improved by this patch, except that there may be more room for customization when i15 goes live.

I'll also need to click a few arc description buttons, but I guess that applies to everyone.

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Ahh, the bane of badge developers; a long term badge that can be earned through natural play, isn't considered a "grind", and is still exciting to earn.

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I hope this is the general direction things go, and that the devs use some imagination and ingenuity in coming up with badge qualifications that both give players goals for play and also reflect the history of play for a specific toon.

I always thought their old method of qualifying for badges lacked creativity and was just an easy way out. Pretty much like all the hunt missions we got in the old CoH content. It was just a way of getting players to grind so they'd play for as much time as possible with as little dev effort as possible.

I15: "We wanted this to be something neat but all we have done are two very short TFs that have bugs and exploit issues. But don't worry, we've had dozens of people working for more than a year on some great stuff that we can't tell you about but it will be Coming Soon!"

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Is there anywhere in the game that explicitly states the automatons are steam powered? I would think Nemesis would use any technology available... especially considering one of the later arcs in which he's trying to construct an artificial brain - definitely not steam powered - cybernetic.

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I understand Nemesis is also building steam-powered dimensional portals so he can conquer other dimensions.

What this argument reminds me of is an old Flash comic book where the Mirror Master was in prison, and he somehow managed to make a device to teleport himself out using a cannibalized electric shaver and some earwax to polish his leather shoes to a mirror-like sheen. LMAO

I checked on this ...

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The Hellion leader turned out to be a custom mob, "Fire Fist", whose info said he preferred to use his martial arts training. He never got into melee range so mostly used Fire Blasts on me, did throw a shuriken once. When he got low an ambush wave spawned silently and hit me in the back, which made things "interesting" for a bit but I pulled it off.

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There actually is no ambush or any other trigger on Fire Fist. It must have been a patrol that came up behind you, hence the silence.

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Arc #49035, "A South Side Story"
tl;dr: 4 stars. Offenses: zero Clues, excessive AVs/EBs for the level range, problematic escort

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First, let me say thank you for the review! It's my first arc and first review, and I'm happy to see that really pretty much everything was experienced the way I intended for it to be experienced. Yay!!!

Clues were not overlooked. I'm just an anti-clue guy. I don't read them and I don't write them. I don't think they really fit in with this style of game. Maybe they would fit with a Neverwinter Nights type game, but IMHO they just don't flow in CoH/V/R. Now I know many of the people discussing Architect on the forums are in the clue camp, but when I'm in the game I sometimes quiz people I'm playing with about this or that in the backstory and virtually always the answer is "Huh, I never knew that." Even when they've been playing since day 1. Like when you do the mission from Peebles in Striga to free the Eastgate researchers and their "mysterious discovery." Well, no one seems to know that it is a Coralax body that the researchers recovered, and that's what the Council and Sky Raiders are fighting over. If the story was told visually, with a Coralax body in a blue tube (like the red ones in Arachnos bases), then it would be pretty darn clear. But since the information is secreted away in hidden scraps of text, the vast majority of players have no clue - hehe - about what's happening in that mission.

So, as a design philosophy, when I'm in the game I prefer to have as much shown as possible ... which, especially in the infancy of the Architect system, may mean a relatively lean story without a lot of frills. In "A South Side Story" I wanted people to SEE the gangs fighting, and ultimately SEE the characters of Johnny, Teardrop, and the Bone Mama facing off against the Petrovic brothers. And while a lot of the story unavoidably comes from Teardrop's expositions, basic information and motivation/emotion comes from NPC dialog too.

So if I lost a star for being "clueless" - lol - I can accept that. Some people like the clues, some people never see them, and I designed for the latter.

As for the excessive bosses, what I was aiming for was an arc that had more of a middleweight feel to it. Not the lightweight feel of your typical lowbie canon arc, nor the heavyweight feel of a task force, but something in between. So I configured it to give bosses, not lieuts., on heroic. I felt this was justified as you do encounter bosses on heroic in the Hollows as low as level 8. I had my two "master villains" make an appearance at the end as EBs, to represent toughness, and their defeat is not a required objective. None of the boss NPCs had defenses, so they were relatively squishy.

When I tested the arc after the ranged attacks were patched in, I used a plain old level 16 blaster on Unyielding. I died a few times - as the bosses had turned to EBs - but with regular powers, Nemesis Staff, and dropped inspirations, I was able to muddle through.

When I created the arc, I wanted to provide something for a team to play after they'd finished their second safeguard in Kings Row. I wanted it to be thematic to Kings Row, exposing both some new material and some under-utilized old material. In particular, I wanted to do what I could to show that Marrow Snap and Marrow Drinker were the actual founders of the Skulls and not just dime-a-dozen Bone Daddy lieuts., thereby correcting what I see as an "error" in the way the devs handled the Skulls missions.

For the game play I wanted the missions to be more challenging than the regular canon, yet doable. While I began with defeat alls and large maps, that proved to be too much, and I ended up downscaling to boss defeats and medium or small maps. I filled many of the maps with battle spawns not only to show the scale of the gang fighting, but to give the player(s) the option to either attack double-size mobs or wait for the battle to end and pick up the pieces. As much as possible, the rest of the mobs were set to patrol so as to reduce the number of standing, fist-pounding mobs. Pretty much all of the mobs in battle and patrol were set to Hard. I also wanted to keep the action spicy by adding ambushes, which I knew would make some players groan, but they were all set on Easy.

One person wrote me a comment that said, "Enough ambushes, doncha think?!" lol But it's really not that bad, only challenging. In fact, by far most people commented that they appreciated the level of challenge in the arc.

Two of the ambushes spawned on top of Venture as he played, which I think was possibly just bad luck. I did vary the directions of the ambushes according to who was ambushing and what position they should logically be at on the map. (In other words, invaders coming from the front door, defenders coming from the back.) If Venture had pulled toward the front door and then the ambush came from the front door, I could easily see how it could happen. And maybe there is an element of randomness in where they appear, in addition to "front, middle, and back." I've played the arc many times and had it happen maybe once or twice.

As for the undercover agent the player rescues from the Lost (who happens to be named Det. Krupke, as a tip of the hat to West Side Story), it doesn't matter to the plot whether he lives or dies. It is just a challenge the player can win or lose. The real story starts as this incident brings out the tension between Chico (aka Skullcracker) and Teardrop, and causes Teardrop to reveal her desire to be free of the Skulls.

As for the EBs in the final battle, it is set up for the player to believe they are there to defeat Cryptic, but the fact that you gain 3 allies upon entering the mission cues the player that something is up. The two master villains, the Petrovics - who have been mentioned in the story - are there to make a show before executing a tactical retreat in the face of your unexpectedly strong power. If the player happens to defeat the EBs, it's extra credit for the players and okay for the story, because they still somehow escape collection by the police ... which is an accepted tradition in superhero stories. Also, if any of the helper NPCs were decked during the fight, the final exposition explains they are recuperating at the Bone Mama's base. If there was a better mechanism for controlling the EBs' appearance and actions, I would use it, but with what we have at our disposal this method seems practical.

I guess the last note I have on this is that while I originally wanted to have it so the first contact was Det. Torres and have her pass the baton to Teardrop, I found we couldn't do that in Architect yet. So, seeing as it is mostly Teardrop's story, I put it all in her hands. Everything not given in her exposition is either shown or delivered through entry/exit pop-ups, NPC dialog balloons, or NPC descriptions.

Again, much thanks!

Probably my favorite defender is my first one: storm/elec. This combo gives kb, debuffs, a heal, a hold, aoe stealth, and pets (voltaic sentinel, tornado, lightning storm). It's also easy to conceive a toon with the combination of electrical and storm powers for rp.

This is what came to mind for Back Alley Brawler, as it is retro and has a good rhythm for punching. Maybe it's something he'd play on his iPod while out on patrol on a day when busting drug pushers is getting old.

Fly Away

I like the idea of adding switches, but I foresee one possible problem with it, and that is if we add switching to our contact dialog it will take up SIGNIFICANTLY more space. Not only will we have to insert the coding for the conditional switches (say, 20 characters per switch?), but we'll have to add the optional text as well.

Of course, how a person uses the conditional logic is up to them, and you always have to work within some sort of limitations anyway.

Also, conditional switches would be great for inserting more dynamic game play into missions. Not only could dialog be affected, but also potentially ambushes, patrols, and so on.

... And these would take up even more memory, but still the feature would be nice to have.

Nope. No defeat badges are earned through AE/MA play.