Thanks for taking a look at the arc, you were extremely generous in your rating, so I'll do what I can to make sure that the arc is brought up to deserve it. I find it hard to believe I left as many typos in the text as I did, but I'll be changing those ASAP.
As for your comments:
Mission One:
I'll be changing this around, including changing the crawl bar text (no one else has ever found it funny) and the boss encounter (a few tests reproduced your problem; which means it should be changed).
The contact talks about "Operating as part of a larger team" but I didn't actually see anyone from IE during the mission. .... His comment on the lack of paperwork when dealing with Arachnos is kind of weird? Wouldn't Arachnos want him and the other IE members dead, regardless of paperwork?
The "larger team" references the reason you're at the landing pad, that you're covering the escape of other IE members (offscreen) by sabotaging the flyers. As for paperwork, the contact means legal jurisprudence that would probably be required in Paragon City when a hero would have been fighting Arachnos. "Dealing with..." in this case meaning "thwarting the schemes of..." Probably should be clearer and I was sort of aware of the clunkiness of the statement. I just couldn't think of a intelligent way of saying, "Boy it's great that we can be fighting Arachnos without the court system and legal oversight! Wheeee!!"
Mission Two:
Good points on the objective titles, I'll tailor those. I thought that I had during one of the testing builds, but I noticed that other several changes had reverted when I ran the Arc when it was still a few slots down on your list. Some of these might be left-over uncorrected reversions that I missed.
I'm fairly certain I have a good amount of room on this arc, so I will try to put in some short clues to repeat the chatbox information on the collection of each of the Scrapyarders. And yes, you're absolutely right about SA's wife, that should give a clue - even if a narration of his reaction.
...so it would be understandable that the body bags don't update the objective.
This is a naughty trick I'm pulling on the player, causing you to expect that the body bags are the real objectives - while the actual objectives are different items. After all, Cage doesn't treat the Scrapyarders like humans when they are alive, why should they dispose of their bodies any differently? Only the Cage employees get anything like a proper burial.
...the mission had both Cage Consortium and Arachnos in it, and they didn't seem hostile towards each other.
Well, considering how reprehensible Cage is in canon, and how much they live on a Laissez-Faire attitude and keeping their heads down, I sort of figured that the remaining Cage guards would keep their mouths shut so as not to draw attention from their Arachnos overseers. Maybe a quick patrol text could insert something to explain this. Also, the clues in the next mission are supposed to suggest that only very particular Cage employees were targeted.
It's mentioned that Strange Attractor wants to join IE now; while this makes sense, I would've expected more reaction from him resulting from his wife's murder.
This was a conservation of space issue. There was only so much room in the debriefing to render information. Also, the contact is relaying this information to you second hand. You can imagine that SA's discussion with Mr. Perkins was a little more emotional.
Mission Three:
Once I arrive it turns out there's more IE members to rescue than just Pulsar Force; perhaps this should've been mentioned in the briefing?
It should have been, the briefing mentioned that TWO people used the transportor (i.e. Pulsar Force and Inhansa) when Pulsar Force hijacked Andrew Perkins' authorization codes.
As for the rest of the comments: yes, yes, yes. I know. This mission was the hardest one to keep the interest of the player as it is just a linked series of Fetches. Yet, I was trying to stuff in a lot of clues in order to bring the plot forward without resorting to an infodump. Everything in the mission and all the chatbox info is generally relevant. Unfortunately, yeah, the issue of backtracking has annoyed everyone (even if I thought it was clever that you didn't know the computers you passed would later be relevant). So, I might have to suck it up and jostle around the spawning points for the sake of convenience.
During the testing phase of the arc, I found that this mission ran out of steam pretty fast - which meant padding the action with more patrols and two Longbow ambushes. This was intended to reinforce that IE's actions ("heroic" they might be in intent) are not condoned by the authorities in Paragon City - which is less of a plot issue and more something related to the VG's RP Lore, which means that I might be able to dump it since it doesn't contribute to the plot (although I think it's a good atmospheric detail).
Mission Four:
Cryopulse is mentioned in the briefing as someone who went ahead of us and we lost contact to her; I kind of think finding her should be one of our initial objectives? Since we know she's here. Instead the initial objectives seem to be to link up with Strange Attractor and Pulsar Force. Why don't we have an objective to rescue the slaves? That is the ultimate goal of this mission, after all.
This was a judgment call. If you make Cryopulse the first objective, wouldn't that mean that the mission is over now? The contact didn't truly know if she was onboard or not, so he logically could not have asked you to find her. From a metaplot standpoint, of course the player knows that she's on the ship (otherwise why mention her?), but there's no way for the contact to have definitively known it. Also, I needed a way to justify that you didn't start off at the door with your allies and had to rescue them (fog of war & battle confusion being the reason).
I'll be changing SA's text (again), bowing to your better ear for language. "Acrimony" works much better, as does your alternate rescue text.
Okay, here's the issue with the allies and objectives:
1. Each of the allies has a job. Strange Attractor is Control and Defense buffing. Pulsar Force is some Ranged Damage with some Off-Tank potential. Filha De Inhansa is some Ranged Damage/Debuffing, Buff/Heal, and light Control. Cryopulse is straight melee damage and your tank.
2. There was a lot of testing on this mission, it was the second one I designed because it was the easiest. No clues were necessary to write and it's a rail shooter to the boss. Still, I couldn't control where the allies spawned in specific. I would have liked it to have spawned reliably where you get Ally #1, Ally #2, Ally #3, then Ally #4 all in a tidy chain with no backtracking in order to make sure you got them all.
When I did it like that, it never worked right. Someone always spawned behind you and most people would just keep plowing "forward" through the mish and come to the EB/AV without one of the allies and be at a disadvantage.
So, I decided to break up the allies into Ally A1, Ally B1, Ally A2, Ally B2. SA would tell you that he (in the battle confusion) saw Filha and knows where she is, and Pulsar would tell you that he saw Cryopulse further along (thusly confirming that she's actually there, also that he's a noob and can't remember to use people's codenames). And Cryopulse is last because I figured that it was best to have the Tank being as fresh as possible before the EB/AV
Aside: Lord, people loved to hate on Pulsar Force in the testing teams. I thought he had a cute Silver Agey/Bronze Agey origin story, but man the testers thought he was The Scrappy of the arc. Anyway.
So, the succinct answer is: MA mechanics. It was the most reliable way to make sure that a solo player would manage to get all the allies and have them with as much health as possible by the time to got to the end.
Kashira fighting Mako as allies watch with awe (or maybe slow-to-aggro AI...let's say it's awe)
Actually, it is slow-to-Aggro AI. Those Inhansa and Attractor (OTP!) are your support allies, so I have them set to Defensive so they don't run all over the map and get their butts fragged. Pulsar Force (in the background) and Cryopulse (whom I assume is just offscreen to upper right) are set to aggressive and operating as intended.
No actual slaves were present during this mission that I could see.
Correct! I believe the intro pop-up text says that you can hear them pounding to get out from inside the cargo containers. Those empty containers you saw? They used to have slaves in them, which is why Mako is talking about cannibalism in his pre-aggro text.
Overview:
I did think it was odd that IE is a villain group...seems pretty heroic.
This is a metagame issue. IE was founded back when CoV & CoH were still separate games from each other, and the players who founded it wanted to have an anti-heroic, terrorism-for-justice SG for their characters - but were all pretty much redside. So from an morality standpoint, they are sort of heroes, but with very non-heroic methods. It's not really seen here and is something that would be established with a PC who would be recruited into the VG from an RP standpoint (e.g. the RP team would be narrating that the enemy critters were vindictively murdered rather that "defeated" or "arrested").
I felt that mission 1 seemed rather disconnected from the rest of the arc...
Yeah, I know. It was important to me during the design stage to have a "first job" mish where the PC is given a basic task before they are entrusted with more important goals (unlike other Arcs where your PC is suddenly and automatically well respected enough to join the Freedom Phalanx or something). Because I knew that the plot was going to develop considerably after that first mission, it was also important to just get it overwith fast (thus the tiny, tiny map). One of the other changes while this arc was on your shortlist for review was to insert the "Souvenir from The Commander" clue - which mentions that the Commander was having a "Meeting with Cage Goons", sort of foreshadowing the rest of the plot.
I could drop the mish and replace it with something that better establishes IE's outlaw status with respect to the heroic community and such (maybe a mini bank mish to resupply the IE coffers), but that would be a pretty major overhaul in the MA editor (since we can't "overwrite" local files to the published live arc). Otherwise I could unpublish the whole arc and republish it (it has less than ten rated plays), but I'd feel like a cad asking you to rerate it.
Actually, I'd like your opinion. As far as that first mish: Should I:
1. Tailor the existing mish on the same map and somehow shoehorn in some dialogue about Cage?
2. Redesign the mish to be something that highlight's IE's outlaw status in Paragon and reinforce that they are pretty harsh "Robin Hood" meets modern terrorist organization?
3. Redesign the mish to start something out with Cage and the worker strike entirely? This would be more difficult because I'd have to find a good, short map that wouldn't be repetitive or troublesome. I wish the very small Sharkhead Scrapyarder Camp map was available, but I can't find it.
4. Leave things as they are?
As always, thank you so much for the detailed and extraordinarily helpful review and criticism.
