Venture's Reviews II: The Nightmare Continues
By
Aisynia,
Posted on: 2009-05-16 24:40 in Mission Architect
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Russian_Babes, there's a limit to defending your arc. You've posted in this thread nearly as often as Venture has, it seems.
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Venture has posted about 90 times. Rightfully so.
I have posted now 15 times in this thread. I have posted a total of 23 times in 18 months.
I would have been happy with just 4 posts.
My first 2 posts were defending Venture's arc against MrCaptainMan's comments.
My 3rd post was in response to you... I just added the comment that Venture was working on his own arcs and reviewing arcs on test.
My 4th post was in response to Venture's review. I have not bothered him since. nor do I have any intention of doing so.
I have no axe to grind with Venture, I just think he missed some things.
My next 11 posts were in response to other peoples questions and comments. If they had not asked the questions or made the comments there would have been only 4 posts in this thread. Don't blame me for being polite and responding.
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Whiny. If you respond to this you're proving the point.
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That makes no sense at all. LOL
Anyways, I should not tell you this, but I'm going to let you know why this is important to me.
I won't be here much longer. Hopefully.
I will be dead.
I have many health issues.
Have you ever experienced a "charlie horse" aka muscle cramp, where your leg muscles contract so much they feel like steel and the agony is so much that tears start coming out of your eyes? That would best describe the pain level from the nerve damage I suffer down my spine, legs and feet. Every second of the day. Neverending.
I sleep, if you can call it that maybe 30 minutes - 1 hour a day.
I have had multiple heart attacks in the last few years.
My vision is starting to go and my hearing fades in and out.
But 18 months ago I found something that briefly takes me away from my reality... this game.
In this game I can become what I am not.. healthy and strong.
It takes my mind off of suicide.
Then came the Mission Architect... I can enjoy seeing what other people have created.
I read the forums and especially the review section with Venture and the others. I like playing arcs that to me sound interesting. It saves me the time I would be wasting going through all the crap farm missions.
Also the MA allowed me to try and create something I hope others could enjoy... after all it's the only thing that will survive me.
I want feedback. I want to improve my story. If I have made a mistake I will correct it. If I am told my theme/moral is not clear and someone actually offers a constructive idea on how to make it clearer that would be good.
I view my arc as a work in progress. Hopefully with I15 I can make it better.
If everyone who plays my arc hates it, then so be it. At least I made the effort to make it better.
If anyone actually plays my arc, be honest... I don't need or want a pity vote.
Actually, I think I'm going to unpublish the arc and work on it and then republish it.
In any event, this will be my last post here. I am sick and tired of being made out to be something I am not... some egomaniac who thinks his arc is great... I don't... that is why I am looking for ways to improve it.
Respectfully,
Well, I feel like an [censored]. My heart goes out to you. I hope the game and the AE give you some escape.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
Meh, I use Ventures reviews just like I use any movie reviews. I read the basic plot summary and then if it's in the genre I like I decide if I will go see it. Venture is just like any movie reviewer.
Some reviewers will go see a movie that has drama, depth, amazing performances and unbelievable special effects. Then they will give the movie a low rating because the actors accent was distinctly a New Jersey accent when he was supposed to be from New York. Heck, when Big Trouble in Little China first came out Siskel and Ebert gave a bad rating because it was too unbelievable.
Venture is the same way with his "Tropes" and especially with time travel. And I have seen him ranting in VU2009 over how difficult an arc is and how he has died 15 times so far. Then I run through the same arc with no problem. Different play styles, different likes and dislikes. A review isn't an actual indication of how good or bad your arc is. It's just one persons opinion. And Venture's opinion holds no more weight than that of anybody else. It's only level of importance is that which you assign to it.
Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!
I'm going to take as read you saw no issues with act 1, unless the Freakshow 101 comment meant that it was a little too remedial to require explanation, but as a school teacher I know that the average person is not the brightest person. Better to spell it out sometimes, and introduction is the best place for exposition.
It comes off as condescending more than anything else. Players probably know basic facts about the canon. If they don't know they can look it up. If they can't be bothered to look it up they probably don't care they don't know in the first place.
Act II, it is mentioned in the intro that the nano-tech is neutered.
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure I was only told O'Leary's nano wasn't weaponized and only told that after the mission.
Act III, is it clear by now they needed the excelsior so that the effected would survive transformation?
Nope, didn't get that.
'm going to change Act IV so that destroying the computer spawns the bombs. Without the control signal from the computer they're useless and inert. I'll also make that clear in the debriefing.
And if someone comes along later and re=broadcasts the signal, perhaps from a backup computer the cops didn't know existed? The kind of weaponized nanotechnology you're postulating is far too dangerous to just blast out into the environment no matter how "neutered" you think it is. Better to say the bombs are confiscated for safe disposal later, or narrate the player being given some blue goo to use on the bombs.
The theme itself is this villain presenting a lose-lose situation to the player. Allow Faraday to win, and doom Paragon City, or defeat him and allow him to sacrifice himself, furthering his deification among his followers.
A literary theme is some kind of statement or question about the human condition. I don't see how this qualifies. It looks liks just a plot development to me. Obvious themes I could see being developed in this arc are what drove Faraday to become a doomsday prophet and/or why people were willing to follow him once he did.
I guess I want to know what you'd want from this arc to call it 4-5 stars.
Development of a theme and fixing the typos and plot issues.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
I'm not sure what difficulty level you played at because many of the things you are describing NEVER happened in over 50 test runs of the mission. (I've only tested at lvl's 1-4 difficulty).
I played the arc with Agent Cerulean on Justice, a level 36 (now 37) SoA specced as a Huntsman on CL2. His build on my web page is current, if you have Mids and want to see it.
I thought warning people BEFORE they play a mission was the correct thing to do?
The problem is that the warning was necessary. It's basically advertising that the arc's difficulty is over the top. I've squishy-tested all of my arcs (well, "Why We Fight" hasn't been squishy-tested yet but despite what the nav bar says at times there's nothing bigger than a Boss in it) and in some cases I've run them with characters below the intended level range just to be sure. I ran "Blowback" (e.g.), a level 41+ Malta/Rikti arc, with a level 32 EB/Dark Corruptor successfully, without extreme set slotting, Shivans or any such advantages.
While I don't expect Architects to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of mob strength (making arcs suitable for the near-mythical pure Empathy Defender, for instance, or eschewing all use of AV-level mobs because of Controllers and PToD issues), there is really no reason to turn it up to a point that the Architect feels non-melee builds need to be waved off.
Well Mistress was wearing a full body dress (yes a sexy one), so I fail to see the problem here. Women have different sizes and shapes, she represent one of them. You seem to be misrepresenting what her "special gift" was (although you don't find out what that gift is until the end of the arc)... immortality.
If you put the character's sexuality out front that's what people are going to respond to. (On a related point, an open dominatrix calling me "darling" is not comforting. It is a cause for great concern.)
In case you missed it ... " I have observed you for a long time and I think you might be someone I can work with" , she was looking for someone she could trust and had a similar morality. She was recruiting for the Order ultimately.
I saw the line but that's not what it said to me. To me it just looked like she thought I'd make a good mercenary sub-contractor. A lot of your response to my review is coming from the fact that things that are obvious to you as the Architect are going to be interpreted in vastly different ways by the player, who does not have access to all the assumptions and axioms that you left unstated.
As for typos... you didn't point any out and I had hoped I had caught all of them. I apologize for any that slipped through. I'll have to double check. Also are you thinking that some words are spelled incorrectly? I'm Canadian and we tend to use British spelling.
I somehow managed to lose my notes (which is why I didn't list them in the first place), but off the top of my head I'm pretty sure I saw more than a few cases of "your" being used for "you're".
KillerBunny is supposed to be tough, but I had lowered her SR to below ELUDE level so she shouldn't have been that hard to hit. Also her attack was on STANDARD. She is the only custom enemy you need to face in the arc. Every other enemy is stock COV.
Claws (particular on a custom mob) is a high-DPS melee set, and she was an EB, meaning she had inherent resistance to Immobilize, plus Quickness, giving her extra running speed and resistance to slows, and in a tight indoor map with no way to fly overhead and limited roon to kite. These factors make her a more difficult kill than you might think for builds that rely on keeping mobs at a distance.
Mistress determined that KillerBunny knew nothing of the Order and changed her memories so that she wouldn't remember who defeated her. Is that not a smart move for her to do rather than kill a superhero and have KillerBunny's SG out looking for her killers?
I didn't complain about that, but since you ask it's kind of a toss-up. If for any reason Bunny gets suspicious about the mindwipe there are potentially plenty of folks with superscience or magic that could undo it, or divine what really happened in some way. Getting ahead of myself, this is the kind of thing that could lead to the exploration of a theme, as the Order would have to deal with the consequences of their choices.
As for the werewolves, well depending on your toon's powers you could just "stealth" and just kill the werewolf leader and click on the box.
And get next to no reward for the mission. Rewards for arcs come entirely from fighting mobs, so making maps that are so difficult or tedious as to encourage people to avoid fighting and skip to the end is counterproductive.
But until the Mission editor will allow us to group 4 captives into a single rescue objective (thus leaving only 4 rescues needed), I'm stuck at 16.
Well, you decide how many hostages there are to rescue. That's not the system's fault. If implementing the story results in a nightmare of tedium then the story has to be rewritten.
My testing (except for lvl 4 difficultly) NEVER had more than 3 people guarding a captive (1Lt, 2 minions at the worst). There were no bosses to fight in any group.
The most common spawn pattern on CL2 or CL4 is one LT and four Minions. Spawns with fewer mobs will be one level higher than the base for the map. As of i15 it is now possible for a CL2/CL4 spawn to have one Minion and one Boss, too. I don't know if this is a bug or an intended change in the rules (yes, I bugged it in beta). Because captive/escort details spawn in addition to regular map spawns it is easily possible for their guard mobs to overlap a map spawn (or even another detail). As a result between overlapping spawns and the size of the spawns I often had to deal with two or three spawns at once when freeing hostages. This meant sometimes having five or six debuffing zombie-summoning Shaman to deal with at once. It also meant that sometimes I had to peel away surrounding spawns so I wouldn't be dealing with four or five spawns at once.
Adamastor should have been relatively easy to kill with your ally's help. (personally I never needed the ally's help).
As I said, I did not release the ally until the end of the mission. The ally would have made things much, much worse.
Has the Mistress lied to the character at any point?
Technically the player has no way of knowing if she's lied at any point.
What part of her actions would lead you to believe that she might be lying (which she isn't)?
Villains are naturally suspicious. Furthermore, none of the people the Mistress (allegedly) displayed mercy towards had the kind of information on the Order the player is about to have.
Also no bosses spawned during my tests, no group was larger than 3 or 4, only the final Boss Gunslinger group had a sapper spawn. I didn't find it that hard.
The final Gunslinger spawn had the Big Bad and two LT Gunslingers, plus a few other mobs. I knew I'd never survive all of that (all three Gunslingers effectively ignored my defenses) so I concentrated on taking out the LTs before I got killed so I could get the Big Bad on the rematch.
The Arch-Magi are as the developers designed them, I'm sorry you find them so boring. But they are part of the cannon mobs in COV, so deal with them.
I'm aware they're standard mobs. As I said I used them myself. But "they're canon so deal with it" is not a valid answer. That's why I stopped using them and invented custom CoT Bosses instead. They're poor designs. Essentially they are lower-level mobs artificially scaled up to higher level by tacking on a 75% resistance to everything. The Arch-Mage of Death is particularly odious as he stacks -ToHit and -Damage on top of that, and then adds a powerful self-heal. None of them have attacks powerful enough to make them likely to win, it's just that you'll spend all day whittling them down. They're no fun to fight.
The ally spawns in the MIDDLE, not the back and you must pass her on the way so you should not be able to miss her.
If by "middle" you mean "the room before the last one" you're right. That's where she spawned. She was behind all four of the Arch-Magi and one room ahead of Baphomet, who spawned in the very last room. Unfortunately the system has pretty silly ideas about what "front", "middle" and "back" mean. If you want to ensure one detail can be found before another you need to choose your map and spawn regions carefully.
Your ally flys, so she should not "fall" into anything.
Mobs that can fly don't always do so when it would be useful. Furthermore, the ally's pet did not fly and would fall into pits or get stuck. One one occasion it fell into a part of a room I hadn't bothered to clear and agroed more mobs, so the ally suddenly reversed course and ran back to help it. Allies and their pets are basically morons that often behave in frustrating ways.
You apparently didn't read the clue for the defeat of the Archmage Of Death.. it said you recovered the files from him.
If that's what it said then mea culpa but as others have already noted, the clue spam had already convinced me long before that point that the clues weren't worth close examination. It looked like another "you have just done that thing you did" clue.
The contact was honest and straightforward with the character the entire arc. She was looking for someone who could kill when needed, show mercy when appropriate, could follow orders, and was trustworthy. Characteristics that your character shows to her during this week.
None of this was really impressed upon me at any point.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ilHasStandards
All throughout the arc the contact has been advising you not to kill innocents. The Order is devoted to peaceful coexistance between humans and vampires. All of these are moral choices. So I think your way off base on that statement.
Tropes are not themes. What you are describing is just a trait of the Order. It could lead to the exploration of a theme, but that's not what you did. I'm standing by this charge: if you meant for the arc to have a theme you failed to develop or convey it adequately.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
"Lemon", it should be noted, is Johnny Sonata, presumably on assignment "deep undercover" in St. Martial. Try to imagine Frank Sinatra being revealed today as actually an FBI Agent in the 1960s, reporting directly to J. Edgar Hoover while palling around with the mob -- wouldn't that have made him the greatest "double agent" in all of history? That's my idea for Johnny Sonata.
I'm guessing you haven't played his arc.
Due to file size limitations, I was able to pack only 12 characters into my custom-made group "Malta Prisoners". But, oh what characters they are: "Sunshadow" a Nictus Melee/Nictus Aura Warbringer..."Kid Chernobyl" a Radiation Debuff/Radiation Emission Tank..."Atlantic Bob" a Water Blast/Water Manipulation Blaster...etc, etc...all in all, the "ten new powersets and two new EATs" promised on my Mission Profile page, ALL "impossible" new power combinations -- the idea being, there are dangerous new power combinations emerging in both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles...and the Malta Group has taken it upon themselves to police their emergence...
There's a quote from one of my best friends' mentors I pass on a lot: "You can glue feathers on a rat but that won't make it a swan." Calling Dark Melee "Nictus Melee" doesn't make it so. These mobs weren't even "characters", they were just video game enemies. Basically you did the one thing that is probably least likely to impress me in an Architect project: you mistook costumes and FX for actual story.
I meant this mission to be largely a smash-the-five-computer-terminals-and-then-get-out stealth operation. The Mission Info even says "Avoid the Malta Prisoners." Should I have highlighted "Avoid the Malta Prisoners."? I thought the fact that they spawn as Lts./Bosses would be enough of a deterrant from engaging them in combat...
Since you don't control where things spawn (especially on an outdoor map, where regardless of what the editor says all points are Front) it is entirely possible for a detail to spawn too close to mobs to be clicked without combat. Consider also that some builds won't have either stealth or flight.
On the other hand, some builds just won't be deterred by spawns full of Bosses. The character I used for this has passed the RWZ Challenge (three +4 Rikti Bosses plus attendants, no inspirations used). It wasn't that I couldn't deal with the spawns, it was that it was much more tedious than the story warranted for me to want to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible this mission would make a good farm, doubly so since it's the first in the arc so you could clear it and reset quickly.
Edit: furthermore, the fact that people can and will take down these "level 51" supers with "new and dangerous powers" even en masse subverts the entire claim that they're so dangerous in the first place. If Malta and the Phalanx think these guys are such a threat and I can defeat one, never mind swat them four at a time, why aren't they after me?
When's the last time you saw a group of heroes in the Hive? That's where I'd go to hide out if I was involved with a top secret conspiracy -- in one of the most dangerous places in the world!
On Virtue? Twice a week at least.
Whether or not there are heroes isn't the point. What's the solution to the "giant monsters stepping on your base" problem? This is like hiding from the Army on a firing range. "Ha, they never send patrols out here! Hey, what's that noise?"
I figured, defeating "Delta 4-51" in less than ten minutes could be tough,
Anything this side of the near-mythical Pure Empath should be able to defeat a Boss in less than ten minutes. Finding it is another matter, and an ally is counterproductive in that pursuit.
Most people think "Area 51" has something to do with aliens. The Secret of "Area 51"? "Area 51" actually has nothing to do with aliens, but as a prison site, has something to do with all of us being unable to attain that last single XP point we need to hit "Level 51" in-game...thank goodness for that!
Yes, I got that, the problem is that it isn't as funny or clever as you seem to think it is.
But...Malta IS a top secret quasi-governmental security organization with "unlimited resources". Like, the CIA hasn't been flying terrorist suspects out of commercial airports for the past 30 years, albeit on their own airplanes?
Malta is an illegal conspiracy that has to operate in secret. Whatever you may think of the CIA's activities it is a legitimate agency of the federal government that operates openly with the power of the law. CIA agents with the right piece of paper can walk into Newark Airport and put a terrorist suspect on a plane to Cairo. Malta can't do that, especially on a daily basis. They'd get noticed. Of course, your arc goes on to state that Malta is working with the Freedom Phalanx (and thus Longbow, which is a division of the Phalanx, which means Lemon's involvement in this is problematic) thus implying at least silent complicity by the government and invoking a level of Canon Defilement that I can't properly describe without getting modsmacked. (It would involve at least a case of roofies.)
Which is why I very deliberately included potentially 60 allies (20 separate spawns of at least three "Malta Prisoners" defeating Malta Group hostiles on an outdoor map) to help take down Synapse...and, if you gotta pull a member of the Freedom Phalanx into a friendly mob for help, wouldn't it be best to pull superspeedster Synapse after you, rather than Statesman or Manticore or somebody else who just jogs along after you?
This is kind of like asking if you'd rather be murdered by Ted Bundy or Charles Manson.
I didn't even realize the Malta Prisoners were set to Ally. The last time I saw them they shot at me. I assumed they were on Rogue.
The theme I was trying to develop with this story is, Things are often not what they seem when you scratch beneath the surface of any given situation, you may think you're the good guy, but maybe you're actually the bad guy when two worldviews come into conflict... OK: I was going for the twist ending!
Since practically nothing about the arc makes any sense what you got was a Wall Banger.
THEN, on a rather downbeat note, "Lemon" concludes, "Venture, I advise you to forget what you learned today, etc..." which the player can take any way they want, but which I HOPE they recognize as food for thought, sort of an ironic send-off from any "authority figure" such as a Longbow Intelligence chief.
As noted above, Longbow is part of the Freedom Phalanx's organization so Lemon has just had you investigate his own employers. The only way to even try to make sense of this is to assume he didn't know about the "Area 51" operation and inadventently stumbled upon it. The problem is that the resolution of the arc means both you and he now Know Too Much, and things just go downhill from there.
And the gold standard for reviewing ANY artistic endeavour is: What were they trying to do? How well did they do it? And, was it worth doing in the first place? How would you score me on those points, then? Still 1-star?
Yep.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
First off... thanks again for the review and your follow up post!
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I'm not sure what difficulty level you played at because many of the things you are describing NEVER happened in over 50 test runs of the mission. (I've only tested at lvl's 1-4 difficulty).
I played the arc with Agent Cerulean on Justice, a level 36 (now 37) SoA specced as a Huntsman on CL2. His build on my web page is current, if you have Mids and want to see it.
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You know, I don't think I tested at lvl 2 difficulty. I can't remember. I know I tested at Levels 1,3,4.
BTW, I have looked at the COX page you have in your signature, it states he is lvl 31. Or are you talking about a different page?
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I thought warning people BEFORE they play a mission was the correct thing to do?
The problem is that the warning was necessary. It's basically advertising that the arc's difficulty is over the top. I've squishy-tested all of my arcs (well, "Why We Fight" hasn't been squishy-tested yet but despite what the nav bar says at times there's nothing bigger than a Boss in it) and in some cases I've run them with characters below the intended level range just to be sure. I ran "Blowback" (e.g.), a level 41+ Malta/Rikti arc, with a level 32 EB/Dark Corruptor successfully, without extreme set slotting, Shivans or any such advantages.
While I don't expect Architects to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of mob strength (making arcs suitable for the near-mythical pure Empathy Defender, for instance, or eschewing all use of AV-level mobs because of Controllers and PToD issues), there is really no reason to turn it up to a point that the Architect feels non-melee builds need to be waved off.
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Fair enough.
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Well Mistress was wearing a full body dress (yes a sexy one), so I fail to see the problem here. Women have different sizes and shapes, she represent one of them. You seem to be misrepresenting what her "special gift" was (although you don't find out what that gift is until the end of the arc)... immortality.
If you put the character's sexuality out front that's what people are going to respond to. (On a related point, an open dominatrix calling me "darling" is not comforting. It is a cause for great concern.)
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LOL... so Doms scare you! I can see that.
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In case you missed it ... " I have observed you for a long time and I think you might be someone I can work with" , she was looking for someone she could trust and had a similar morality. She was recruiting for the Order ultimately.
I saw the line but that's not what it said to me. To me it just looked like she thought I'd make a good mercenary sub-contractor. A lot of your response to my review is coming from the fact that things that are obvious to you as the Architect are going to be interpreted in vastly different ways by the player, who does not have access to all the assumptions and axioms that you left unstated.
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Yes I can see different people interpreting it in different ways.
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As for typos... you didn't point any out and I had hoped I had caught all of them. I apologize for any that slipped through. I'll have to double check. Also are you thinking that some words are spelled incorrectly? I'm Canadian and we tend to use British spelling.
I somehow managed to lose my notes (which is why I didn't list them in the first place), but off the top of my head I'm pretty sure I saw more than a few cases of "your" being used for "you're".
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Ah... I'll have to look for that. thanks for making that clearer.
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KillerBunny is supposed to be tough, but I had lowered her SR to below ELUDE level so she shouldn't have been that hard to hit. Also her attack was on STANDARD. She is the only custom enemy you need to face in the arc. Every other enemy is stock COV.
Claws (particular on a custom mob) is a high-DPS melee set, and she was an EB, meaning she had inherent resistance to Immobilize, plus Quickness, giving her extra running speed and resistance to slows, and in a tight indoor map with no way to fly overhead and limited roon to kite. These factors make her a more difficult kill than you might think for builds that rely on keeping mobs at a distance.
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Yup... she is quite the handful. She's one mean bunny!
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Mistress determined that KillerBunny knew nothing of the Order and changed her memories so that she wouldn't remember who defeated her. Is that not a smart move for her to do rather than kill a superhero and have KillerBunny's SG out looking for her killers?
I didn't complain about that, but since you ask it's kind of a toss-up. If for any reason Bunny gets suspicious about the mindwipe there are potentially plenty of folks with superscience or magic that could undo it, or divine what really happened in some way. Getting ahead of myself, this is the kind of thing that could lead to the exploration of a theme, as the Order would have to deal with the consequences of their choices.
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Well my take on it was that the memories changed would basically include a memory of her getting overwhelmed by the 4 groups and left for dead. But I can see what you mean. I just envision that vampires are exceptionally good at protecting their secrets. They need to be in order to survive.
Great suggestion on the theme BTW! That's exactly what I was hoping someone would do... offer me suggestions.
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As for the werewolves, well depending on your toon's powers you could just "stealth" and just kill the werewolf leader and click on the box.
And get next to no reward for the mission. Rewards for arcs come entirely from fighting mobs, so making maps that are so difficult or tedious as to encourage people to avoid fighting and skip to the end is counterproductive.
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I didn't make it for stealth. I just wanted to point out that that was a tactic that could be used. I had already looked at your COX page and seen you used a SOA, I just wasn't sure if you picked a stealth power. I've have always fought my way through. And run away screaming with some toons! "The big bad wolf is after me!" LOL
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But until the Mission editor will allow us to group 4 captives into a single rescue objective (thus leaving only 4 rescues needed), I'm stuck at 16.
Well, you decide how many hostages there are to rescue. That's not the system's fault. If implementing the story results in a nightmare of tedium then the story has to be rewritten.
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I already have done so. since the only 2 people ... Dragonslayer & yourself to have given me any feedback have the same opinion. They are "twins" now, so there are only 8 rescues now.
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My testing (except for lvl 4 difficultly) NEVER had more than 3 people guarding a captive (1Lt, 2 minions at the worst). There were no bosses to fight in any group.
The most common spawn pattern on CL2 or CL4 is one LT and four Minions. Spawns with fewer mobs will be one level higher than the base for the map. As of i15 it is now possible for a CL2/CL4 spawn to have one Minion and one Boss, too. I don't know if this is a bug or an intended change in the rules (yes, I bugged it in beta). Because captive/escort details spawn in addition to regular map spawns it is easily possible for their guard mobs to overlap a map spawn (or even another detail). As a result between overlapping spawns and the size of the spawns I often had to deal with two or three spawns at once when freeing hostages. This meant sometimes having five or six debuffing zombie-summoning Shaman to deal with at once. It also meant that sometimes I had to peel away surrounding spawns so I wouldn't be dealing with four or five spawns at once.
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Ah... I was wondering what was happening. Now I know what you meant. I agree the summoning shamans could sometime cause problems. Since I reduced the number of rescues, I found my test run was much easier.
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Adamastor should have been relatively easy to kill with your ally's help. (personally I never needed the ally's help).
As I said, I did not release the ally until the end of the mission. The ally would have made things much, much worse.
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LOL... we did the same thing then. I only release Jacklyn at the end as well.
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Has the Mistress lied to the character at any point?
Technically the player has no way of knowing if she's lied at any point.
What part of her actions would lead you to believe that she might be lying (which she isn't)?
Villains are naturally suspicious. Furthermore, none of the people the Mistress (allegedly) displayed mercy towards had the kind of information on the Order the player is about to have.
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This is perhaps the pivotal moment for my other theme (I think the most obvious theme): "Trust is earned, not given". Because up to this point the character should realize that the Mistress hasn't told him any lies yet (that he knows of) he decides to trust her. Because the character trusted her and because of his actions and the fact she cares for the character, she entrusts the character with the secret of the "Order".
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Also no bosses spawned during my tests, no group was larger than 3 or 4, only the final Boss Gunslinger group had a sapper spawn. I didn't find it that hard.
The final Gunslinger spawn had the Big Bad and two LT Gunslingers, plus a few other mobs. I knew I'd never survive all of that (all three Gunslingers effectively ignored my defenses) so I concentrated on taking out the LTs before I got killed so I could get the Big Bad on the rematch.
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Ouch... bad luck for you on what spawned!
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he Arch-Magi are as the developers designed them, I'm sorry you find them so boring. But they are part of the cannon mobs in COV, so deal with them.
I'm aware they're standard mobs. As I said I used them myself. But "they're canon so deal with it" is not a valid answer. That's why I stopped using them and invented custom CoT Bosses instead. They're poor designs. Essentially they are lower-level mobs artificially scaled up to higher level by tacking on a 75% resistance to everything. The Arch-Mage of Death is particularly odious as he stacks -ToHit and -Damage on top of that, and then adds a powerful self-heal. None of them have attacks powerful enough to make them likely to win, it's just that you'll spend all day whittling them down. They're no fun to fight.
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They are very tough. The Arch-Mage of Death is by far the toughest I agree. The ally if you have her with you makes it much safer and faster.
I found they were more than powerful enough to kill my characters on occasion.
I guess fun is subjective. It's a tough fight. Some people will appreciate that, others won't.
Btw, I played your arc with the COT customs? Good job! But I personally found them too easy to kill.
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The ally spawns in the MIDDLE, not the back and you must pass her on the way so you should not be able to miss her.
If by "middle" you mean "the room before the last one" you're right. That's where she spawned. She was behind all four of the Arch-Magi and one room ahead of Baphomet, who spawned in the very last room. Unfortunately the system has pretty silly ideas about what "front", "middle" and "back" mean. If you want to ensure one detail can be found before another you need to choose your map and spawn regions carefully.
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I'm sorry your Mission instance produced such a weird placement!
I'm not sure why she spawned where you say she did. She has always spawned in the same place for me, which is around the midway point in a chokepoint (It would be impossible not to pass her).
Anyways, I have changed this and made her spawn at the beginning. So hopefully this will make the last mission much easier, since she will be with you in every Archmage battle.
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Your ally flys, so she should not "fall" into anything.
Mobs that can fly don't always do so when it would be useful. Furthermore, the ally's pet did not fly and would fall into pits or get stuck. One one occasion it fell into a part of a room I hadn't bothered to clear and agroed more mobs, so the ally suddenly reversed course and ran back to help it. Allies and their pets are basically morons that often behave in frustrating ways.
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True... so true... what the AI does sometimes is frustrating.
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You apparently didn't read the clue for the defeat of the Archmage Of Death.. it said you recovered the files from him.
If that's what it said then mea culpa but as others have already noted, the clue spam had already convinced me long before that point that the clues weren't worth close examination. It looked like another "you have just done that thing you did" clue.
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Yes it was there. But I have removed all the reminder type clues so that has been corrected.
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The contact was honest and straightforward with the character the entire arc. She was looking for someone who could kill when needed, show mercy when appropriate, could follow orders, and was trustworthy. Characteristics that your character shows to her during this week.
None of this was really impressed upon me at any point.
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Now that I15 id here and I have almost 29% extra space now! (doing the happy dance!), I can hopefully make a lot of stuff clearer now.
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ilHasStandards
All throughout the arc the contact has been advising you not to kill innocents. The Order is devoted to peaceful coexistance between humans and vampires. All of these are moral choices. So I think your way off base on that statement.
Tropes are not themes. What you are describing is just a trait of the Order. It could lead to the exploration of a theme, but that's not what you did. I'm standing by this charge: if you meant for the arc to have a theme you failed to develop or convey it adequately.
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Well I'm sorry you missed the theme(s) , they are there. But I can obviously work to make them clearer.
Start of edit: You have commented twice (your review and this response post) on the part in Mission 4 where the character trusts the Mistress and takes the mission even though he knows everyone who reads the files has to die. Because he hasn't been lied to by the Mistress, he takes a leap of faith and does the mission. In return he is entrusted with the "Order's secret by the Mistress. She places all her faith in the character. At the end of mission 5 she stated "you have earned our trust" and she offers the gift of immortality. This I think is VERY clear. This is the theme "Trust is earned not given". There is a theme.
I'd like to make a suggestion, I don't know if it would be helpful or not, but I'll offer it.
Should authors when asking you to review their arcs point out what they think their themes are in their request to you?
That way it could be in the back of your mind and you might see... or not see that theme in the arc. Then you could provide a little constructive piece of advice.
I think it might be a good idea.
End of edit:
Thanks again for your time and thoughts and suggestions.
Respectfully,
There isn't much use in long replies to Venture's reviews. The reason he's a go-to person is he lists EVERYTHING. The things everyone thinks is wrong, the things someone thinks is wrong, and a few things only Venture thinks is wrong. THAT's the kind of reviewer you want .. not one who leaves out a crucial bit.
You edit what you think is important, and the stuff that despite criticism you - as an artist - still wan't as-is, you leave unchanged.
(This is a general observation, not aimed at any one specific poster)
//AtCbM// www.crystalblue.dk
Victory - Mare,Dagger of Pain,Keep,Hogun and Bloodpetal
The Keep-Arcs: 164260, 188373, 192610, 196090 and funny side-chapter 218575.
Mender-Arc: 266163
OK, I thought I had some ideas that were both creative and clever (Johnny Sonata as Longbow Agent "Lemon"; "ten new powersets and two new EATs"; my empathy defender Auntie Biotic in civilian clothes as Longbow Agent "Pistachio"; "Area 51"; the mechanic of using the Malta Prisoners to take down an Elite Boss for you) but now I see the problems with all of these ideas (using Johnny Sonata breaks canon; the Malta Prisoners are just a special effect, not story; Auntie Biotic is a distraction, not a buff, and worse yet, an ego-driven insert; "Area 51" is not particularly clever, and grossly canon defiling; and, having everybody fight everybody else on the last mission is just spectacle, not story, serving no larger purpose.)
One star rating it is, I can accept that.
I'm gonna have to check out some of those storyarcs you rated 5-star, and see what I've been missing. They must be quite something. 
Pistachio was not an "ego-driven insert". There is nothing wrong with using your own characters as long as they are only putting in a cameo or guest appearance. It's when they start hogging the spotlight that you start drifting into Mary Sue territory.
Likewise there was nothing bad about having "everyone fight everyone" on the last map in and of itself. The problem was the story that brought it about. I have similar scenes in "Blowback" and "Two Households Alike" which I've gotten a lot of praise for.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
Someone let me know when it's back to Venture reviewing arcs and not other posters wasting page space trying to defend their arcs
As it happens I anticipated this complaint. I am retiring this thread and starting a new one:
Venture's Reviews IV: The Search for Part III
The new thread has a policy change I expect to be controversial.
I consider this thread retired and will no longer post reviews or commentary to it.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
Russian_Babes, there's a limit to defending your arc. You've posted in this thread nearly as often as Venture has, it seems.
Whiny. If you respond to this you're proving the point.
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