I promise not to say anything about this arc*. I hope it's okay to point out some rare typos.
Pyrolich description: it's -> its
Chief of medicine decription: needs ? on the end
Clue Bad Drawings of Superheroes: hopsital -> hospital
* This is not feedback. Just bugs.
Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
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Chief of Medicine's bio is fine - it's making a demand of you, not asking you nicely. 
As for the other two, thank you very much for catching them! I'll fix them right now. Much appreciated.
Edit: Fixed!
This is the kind of feedback that helps. Not 'you have commited unforgivable sins against my sensibilities/radically change or delete your arc to fit my whims. Good, objective stuff helps better us all. =)
Qr - 90% of all feedback on michael bay movies is positive? What rrview sites does Venture frequent?
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
|
If Venture thinks I'm as good as Michael Bay, I'll take it as a compliment, man. The dude is absolutely loaded and gets to blow things up all day. Say what you will about his work, but the fact remains, his job is probably fun as hell, and he has tons of success and a massive audience that line up for his unique brand of terrible ham-fisted dialog and mindless explosions enough to shower him with money.
...Basically what I'm saying here, is, shower me with money, people. 
Bay's films are reasonable fun to watch, sure, but i wouldn't 5-star any of them. Venture was mistaking attendence (or plays, in an arc cintext) with feedback. I' not sure how mych of Venture's cherry-picking of points to refute and refer to is willfull and how much an unconscious side-effect of his monomaniacal nature.
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
|
Oh, I agree, Bay's stuff isn't exactly the pinnacle of literature, but, like you said, it's generally pretty fun to watch things explode for a few hours, and really, at the end of the day, that's enough to get at least a 'pass' from me.
McDonalds isn't the pinnacle of hamburgers, but a lot of folks eat there.
I'd say don't alter the story to suit a minority. Yes, a minority isn't liking it. Many players do. It happens. No use turning something subjective into a forum flame war.
Live arcs: 517377 and 517381
Virtue: Quickshot. Swiftwind. Aliuneidis. Gizmodeus. Dasher. Fiver. Inuit Acer. Daniel Darke. Cerebral Flame. El Halcon.
Intel Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz 4 GB RAM**NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT set to 1280 x 1024**Windows Vista 32 bit
[ QUOTE ]
If I may deconstruct this a little, you seem to be ignoring a lot of things here.
Pet peeve: this is reductionism, not deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is taking a text (which doesn't have to be an actual text) and re-interpreting it so that it says the opposite of what it was intended to say (or, really, anything the interpreter wants it to say).
[/ QUOTE ]
How many pet peeves can one person have?
[ QUOTE ]
This was done specifically with this contact, and for this reason, because there is precident in the actual game for the exact same thing happening with this exact same sort of anagram, and, it hints that something is wrong to the observant right away.
The devs do not have papal infallibility. It's not right just because they did it. It is not a "hint" that something is wrong, it is a flat-out declaration, and it mocks the player because there is nothing he can do about it other than refuse to play the arc.
[/ QUOTE ]
An anagram is a declaration? of what? even if I had noticed it, I would not have leapt to conclusions based on its presence.
[ QUOTE ]
Quoting Arcanaville from my first review thread:
[ QUOTE ]
By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.
The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.
[/ QUOTE ]
[/ QUOTE ]
I generally respect Arcanaville, I will assume that this quote is somewhat out of context... more along the lines of perspective from the fact that I didn't feel betrayed by this arc at all (and again, the indicated quote has nothing to do with anagrams).
[ QUOTE ]
Rubbing the player's nose in an obvious Nemesis plot (or any other type of screw-the-player plot) constitutes terminating that contract with extreme prejudice.
[/ QUOTE ]
The only contract I have with the mission writers out there is: They have offered a story, I have entered it. If I am somehow offended by it... I can click 'quit' and go try another story. For me, the presence of an anagram and the sudden presentation of Lord Nemesis hardly constitute anything rising to the level of 'quit' - for me. Its a type of story that clearly isn't everyone's cup of tea. But by all means, , click 'quit' and let it lie.
[ QUOTE ]
If you actually read the mission dialog, the clues state you very carefully incinerate the canister, anything it came in contact with, AND the surrounding area. And then when you leave, you and the contact send in biohazard clean up crews in case you missed anything. It's right there in the mission text.
Yes, I read it the first time, and it is completely wrong. If those cannisters contained biohazardous materials and one was found to be leaking, the response would not be to blithely assume incinerating a few things would fix the problem. It would be more like OMFG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE RED ALERT ALL HANDS ON DECK BATTLESTATIONS DEFCON ONE! The cannister could have been leaking all the way from the Rogue Islands, it could have infected any number of people, including the player, the bioagent could have leaked over any amount of terrain and if it is an airborne agent it is already too late for the city. All of Atlas Park, if not the entire city, would have been quarantined on the spot until CDC, SERAPH, whoever, had figured out what they were dealing with.
[/ QUOTE ]
It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival? It had to have been leaking "all the way from the Rogue Islands"? Let the author write his story. Not yours.
[ QUOTE ]
This is literally the entire point of the arc. If you don't like it, that's fine, but giving 1 star for personal bias is a little extreme. The whole arc was deconstructing and pointing out the insanity of the entire superhero mythos and how absurd it would sound to a 'normal' person.
Which is kind of like complaining that ships in Star Trek travel faster than light. We already know it doesn't work, that's why it's taken as a genre convention.
[/ QUOTE ]
Its a classic - classic - story technique whether you like or not. Been mentioned in the thread with more than one example so far and I can think of as many more on top of that. The fact that it may not be an original idea in that respect does not detract from its execution with the toolset within AE. Its well done.
[ QUOTE ]
In an architect completely overwhelmed with farms, impossible to read grammar, broken enemies, and worse, this is really the unforgivable sin of arcs?
Yes.
[/ QUOTE ]
The problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie. You get into an extended discussion and argument on how your conclusions and advice are the only solution. That is never true. For anyone.
City of Heroes was my first MMO, & my favorite computer game.
R.I.P.
Chyll - Bydand - Violynce - Enyrgos - Rylle - Nephryte - Solyd - Fettyr - Hyposhock - Styrling - Beryllos - Rosyc
Horryd - Myriam - Dysquiet - Ghyr
Vanysh - Eldrytch
Inflyct - Mysron - Orphyn - Dysmay - Reapyr - - Wyldeman - Hydeous
Great arc, reminded of the already mentioned Buffy episode. 5-starred it.
Just wish I weren't in the 5th difficulty, my Stalker took forever to take down the AVs...
[ QUOTE ]
Great arc, reminded of the already mentioned Buffy episode. 5-starred it.
Just wish I weren't in the 5th difficulty, my Stalker took forever to take down the AVs...
[/ QUOTE ]
Same here. First time I did it with my PB on lvl 4, took them all down ok.
Then I tried with my scrapper on lvl 5 and Mako got me.
Now Im off to try Uncreation.
-Largo
Founder of A.G.O.N.Y. Supergroup on Victory
Member of Thought Sanctum VG on Victory
Member of St0rm Batallion SG on Guardian
Post deleted by Moderator 08
An anagram is a declaration? of what? even if I had noticed it, I would not have leapt to conclusions based on its presence.
No one accidentally picks a name that anagrams to Lord Nemesis. In fact, if a name completely anagrams (using all the letters) to anything at all it's likely to be significant.
It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival?
It could have but no competent HAZMAT worker would make that assumption. They'd assume the worst because they'd have to.
Its a classic - classic - story technique whether you like or not.
I'm aware of numerous examples of its use. Many of them provide a definite answer to avoid cheating the audience. Some of them do not, and they tend to be controversial at best. From what I have seen there is really not much respect for this kind of story in the way it is done here in critical circles because it is too easy. As I said before it's the kind of thing you see in high-school English classes.
he problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie.
From my perspective, people won't let my review lie. It was OK for people to post BEST ARC EVAH without showing their work but as soon as I said I didn't like it I was accused of being a troll.
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"
[ QUOTE ]
The real answer, I think, is that it's impossible. At least, I believe it's impossible to write a truly excellent story where the protagonist is interchangeable with any other protagonist. Character is inextricable from plot. As one critic stated (sorry, I don't have the source available at the moment), "What is character but the determinor of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" This is actually a wonderful thing in fiction, but it's a problem in MA.
There are ways to avoid this issue, but I find neither of them fully satisfactory. First, one can do what Witch Engine does in "Blight."
...
The other strategy is to accept that MA arcs, as a literary form, are different from "stories," i.e., prose fiction or other narrative works, and to accept that they must sacrifice some literary perfection in order to remain accessible to the majority of players. That is, details that would enhance the plot of a story, or even the characterization of characters other than the protagonist, have to be left out or sketched more broadly than they would be in other literary forms.
[/ QUOTE ]
I think there is a third option, actually: use the NPCs as the primary sources of character development. The risk here is that too heavy-handed an application of this will produce Mary Sue stories, but there is a middle ground where the PC is central to the story, and the main protagonist, but his or her actions drive character development in everyone else.
The best MA arc I've played (aside from my own, which I dismiss as bias) is M for Malta, and one of the reasons I love it is that it shows a deep development in the character of the contact. In fact, at the end of the arc it even allows for a tiny bit of player choice through the trick of allowing the character to fail or not fail the final mission - a trick you probably can't use too many times before it gets worn out, but which is used to great effect there.
The Faultline and RWZ arcs use the same basic principle of showing complex interactions between NPCs, and allowing them to grow.
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
[ QUOTE ]
It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival?
It could have but no competent HAZMAT worker would make that assumption. They'd assume the worst because they'd have to.
[/ QUOTE ]
You're talking about a game in which we defuse bombs by shooting them with powers (including fire and electricity), dispose of dangerous chemicals by shooting them with powers, and save the Hydra from the Rikti by.. shooting them with powers.
The game in which all the buildings fail both OSHA and Accessability standards.
I think Paragon City's HAZMAT team is about as reliable as Azuria's vault. 
Live arcs: 517377 and 517381
Virtue: Quickshot. Swiftwind. Aliuneidis. Gizmodeus. Dasher. Fiver. Inuit Acer. Daniel Darke. Cerebral Flame. El Halcon.
Intel Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz 4 GB RAM**NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT set to 1280 x 1024**Windows Vista 32 bit
The most interesting thing about this arc is what the reactions people have to it say about those people. This is a "people-watcher's" dream thread right here. Please, do continue! The insight into everyone's psyche is enlightening and entertaining.
As a side note, I enjoyed the arc immensely. The use of "its a Nemesis plot!" as the delusion of a mentally ill person was perhaps the best use of it ever. Certainly this style of story has been done before and it will be done again because of one very important thing: it challenges our perception of perception. That is an entire branch of philosophy and one very will suited to being explored in an RPG or game setting.
I've never seen Buffy but one example that jumps to mind is "12 Monkeys", a movie I very much enjoyed. It is superficially very similar, the contrast of 'reality' with 'hospital' and continually asks the viewer "what is real?" These kinds of stories challenge the way we perceive the world around us and that is a very scary and difficult idea to tackle. Our responses when faced with these questions can tell us a great deal about ourselves. I think this arc has done an admirable job of bringing up these issues (I offer all the discussion and reviews here as proof) and I wish there were many more arcs like it out there.
[ QUOTE ]
No one accidentally picks a name that anagrams to Lord Nemesis. In fact, if a name completely anagrams (using all the letters) to anything at all it's likely to be significant.
[/ QUOTE ]
As a total aside, my RL name ("Tabitha") anagrams perfectly to "Habitat" so what does that say about me? Let us never forget that (though it it not the case here) coincidence does happen and nothing is significant till proven to be so!
[ QUOTE ]
he problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie.
From my perspective, people won't let my review lie. It was OK for people to post BEST ARC EVAH without showing their work but as soon as I said I didn't like it I was accused of being a troll.
[/ QUOTE ]
I said I didn't like it, too, and somehow nobody jumped on me for that.
Of course, I can recognise the difference between "I don't like it" and "this is a bad arc which does not deserve the praise it gets (and everyone who likes it is probably not as clever as me)".
Character index
[ QUOTE ]
Post Deleted by Moderator_08
[/ QUOTE ]
It's taken you this long to put him on ignore? I flagged him issues ago and the forums have been better for it.
Craft your inventions in AE!!
Play "Crafter's Cafe" - Arc #487283. A 1 mission, NON-COMBAT AE arc with workable invention tables!
"From my perspective, people won't let my review lie. It was OK for people to post BEST ARC EVAH without showing their work but as soon as I said I didn't like it I was accused of being a troll."
it's not you saying you don't like it that gets you called a troll; its your 'dictates delivered from on high' style of expressing your opinion combined with a lack of any suggestion of good humor.
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
|
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If I may deconstruct this a little, you seem to be ignoring a lot of things here.
Pet peeve: this is reductionism, not deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is taking a text (which doesn't have to be an actual text) and re-interpreting it so that it says the opposite of what it was intended to say (or, really, anything the interpreter wants it to say).
[/ QUOTE ]
How many pet peeves can one person have?
[ QUOTE ]
Quoting Arcanaville from my first review thread:
[ QUOTE ]
By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.
The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.
[/ QUOTE ]
[/ QUOTE ]
I generally respect Arcanaville, I will assume that this quote is somewhat out of context... more along the lines of perspective from the fact that I didn't feel betrayed by this arc at all (and again, the indicated quote has nothing to do with anagrams).
[/ QUOTE ]
The context of the quote was actually talking about the degree to which the players can "affect" the plot of a mission arc. Obviously, they cannot affect it at all in the literal sense: the entire arc was scripted before the player ever entered it, and nothing they do can change the story of it (at least in the current incarnation of the architect). However, even though the player is on railroad tracks, a good author will try to disguise this fact in many ways. Key to this deception is to strictly minimize the number of times the player questions the direction they are travelling in, because their steering wheel doesn't actually do anything.
This leads to my quote above: if you intend to write an arc where a mission contact will betray you in some way, you have to somehow get the player back on the tracks immediately, because if you put the player into a situation where the obvious smart choice is to abandon the contact but that choice isn't actually available, the tracks suddenly become very visible. Basically, you shouldn't say "gotcha" to the player when the player was dragged kicking and screaming to the gotcha.
I haven't played the arc in question yet, so I don't know if in my opinion the arc suffers from this problem. But I'm intrigued enough to play it for myself and see, at my next available opportunity. As to Venture's criticisms in general, I tend to agree with Venture that the problems he describes are in fact problems worth resolving whenever possible, but I don't always (or usually, actually) agree that those problems exist to the same serious degree he perceives them to in actual arcs. That's a highly subjective aspect of good storytelling and Venture happens to exist on one (relatively) extreme end of the scale. But I'm quite certain that there is an unbroken continuum of players that connect Venture through the average and out to the far extreme of happy-land.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
[ QUOTE ]
Oh, I agree, Bay's stuff isn't exactly the pinnacle of literature
[/ QUOTE ]
Bay is a director, He's not a screenwriter. None of his work can be remotely called literature at all. It's film. An entirely different medium.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival?
It could have but no competent HAZMAT worker would make that assumption. They'd assume the worst because they'd have to.
[/ QUOTE ]
You're talking about a game in which we defuse bombs by shooting them with powers (including fire and electricity), dispose of dangerous chemicals by shooting them with powers, and save the Hydra from the Rikti by.. shooting them with powers.
[/ QUOTE ]
I don't know what game you're playing but generally we defuse bombs by clicking on them. Anyhow...
Mission 1:
Typo in send off: Deactive -> Deactivate
If it is so critical that the canisters do not leak, why am I not just clearing the path for the Hazmat team instead of dealing with the canisters themselves? Or planting some kind of force field generator on them to form a containment field? What about using the teleport beacon trick and teleporting them away after I click them?
Why are they destructibles at all? Just because the Devs did it once with a stupid mission where you remove the threat of a tank of poison gas by punching the beejeezus out of it doesn't make it ok. This is just silly.
Nice to see Ms. Liberty standing around doing jack all as usual.
So a cannister is already cracked and leaking, but the clue tells me that the released amount is impossibly minute and nothing to worry about. There's that idiot ball I heard of.
So how did I incinerate the thing like the clue says I did? I don't remember be given a supply of thermite and napalm before starting this mission. I'm just a Mace Brute smashing these because the contact told me to.
Knowing that this mission technically fails anyway, you might as well just make the cannisters defendables and the objective to stop the Arachnos from carrying out their orders to open them. That would have made more sense and probably wouldn't need much change to the writing tying missions 1 and 2 together.
More idiot ball as I don't tell the contact about the cracked container.
Mission 2:
Nothing to complain about in this briefing except for this: THIS IS ATLAS [CENSORED] PARK! THE CENTER OF PARAGON CITY! How does nobody know what has been going on in there for days now?
Why did they wait a week to call me as well? Why does this place look like it was hit with a nuke and who brought the Megamechs? You're telling me they couldn't see all this with air and satellite surveillance?
Also when did Ms. Liberty turn into a Katana Scrapper? At least she's much easier to beat than the regular Ms. Liberty.
Mission 3:
Synapse ran off and spread the disease? Considering what a wimp he is really stopping him shouldn't have been any issue for Statesman, or anyone else.
Oh, and how do we know that Mako made it anyway? That just came out of nowhere with no explanation.
Not much variety with these infected. The ones in the Arachnos base look the same as the ones in Atlas Park. Actually, they all look the same aside from the Pyrolich.
Why would the Clockwork King be at Phoenix Medical Center anyway, shouldn't he be in the Zig? Also since when does Mako have command of the Arachnoids?
Mission 4:
Right, so apparently Paragon City doesn't exist and the guy here with the Nemesis anagram name is a psychiatrist. It probably is a Nemesis Anagram because I doubt it means any of these things. At least the name the author tries to give me is unisex enough, since the character I'm using is a girl.
Why did the Chief of Medicine refer to me by my character name? Should a doctor really be indulging a patient like that when they're trying to keep them grounded in reality? The nurses are instructed to do that by the drug prescription but that doesn't explain the doctors.
Why is one of the zombies here? If it was a normal person reacting in fear and having the name Screaming Undead it might have worked, but it shouldn't look like a zombie as well.
Nice to see that the Doctors do not bother with passwords on their computers. Apparently HIPPA doesn't exist in this world either.
Also why have The Screaming Dead and Surgeon started following me around? Better check their settings. Actually, all of the ally spawns are following me now.
Typo in Chief of Medicine's description: Not just missing a ? at the end, there is no punctation at the end of that sentance at all.
The contact tries to tell me that everything I saw was real and blah blah blah. Or it could easily be a tech lab with a bunch of actors in it.
This can only end in one of two ways: either I've really been character-jacked and this is the truth or it's all a Nemesis plot with no apparent reason to it yet. The sad thing is, the Nemesis Plot would be more interesting and more believable.
Wait, if my mother admitted me then why could she not be allowed to visit me? Maybe I'm wrong, but how can the hospital forbid you from coming to visit your own child?
Mission 5:
Statesman, Lord Recluse, Paragon City are all constructs based on people and places from the hospital and my past? So why didn't I see any of that in the last mission? I didn't see any doctor named Marcus Cole or such.
Anyhow, time to smash my way out of this place and of course it's the poor man's silent hill hospital map.
The ending is ultimate unsatisfying. The author tried too hard to have it go both ways when they should have just picked one ending and focused on it.
The Verdict: 3 stars
Clumsy story telling, too many idiot moments in the plot, and an ending that tries so hard to be vague that it ends up being stupid. Doesn't help that I've seen this plot handeled before and better so many times. Heck, Star Trek even did it twice in The Next Generation and Deep Space 9.
[ QUOTE ]
I've never seen Buffy but one example that jumps to mind is "12 Monkeys", a movie I very much enjoyed. It is superficially very similar, the contrast of 'reality' with 'hospital' and continually asks the viewer "what is real?"
[/ QUOTE ]
Except that 12 Monkeys is clearly real, especially when we get to see events from points of view outside that of the main character. Had the entire movie been seen from the eyes of Bruce Willis's character then you'd have a point.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I've never seen Buffy but one example that jumps to mind is "12 Monkeys", a movie I very much enjoyed. It is superficially very similar, the contrast of 'reality' with 'hospital' and continually asks the viewer "what is real?"
[/ QUOTE ]
Except that 12 Monkeys is clearly real, especially when we get to see events from points of view outside that of the main character. Had the entire movie been seen from the eyes of Bruce Willis's character then you'd have a point.
[/ QUOTE ]
The 'fact' that Willis is time traveling isn't at all clear (until perhaps the very end) as there are allusions to it all being a delusion of his memory. That's the point. Is he really traveling through time or is he just a mental patient who has pieced the story together from things he's seen and heard (from the TV, the other patients, etc)? The movie waffles back and forth and at various points can be interpreted both ways. By the end there is enough evidence that he is time traveling and of course the tragedy is that its too late. Similarly by the end of this arc, its clear that you are a mental patient, though there is enough evidence the other way for it to be ambiguous still.
The core idea still is what is real, what is memory, what is perception? If you see your character as real and sacrosanct, then these are themes you probably won't like exploring in a story arc. For similar reasons I basically have a disclaimer in my arc warning that is it a surreal and philosophical story, I figure I'll get less complaints that way.
Certainly this style of story has been done before and it will be done again because of one very important thing: it challenges our perception of perception.
Actually it doesn't. These stories are not profound. They're just cheap shots. That's why they're so commonly done by adolescent or amateur writers.
I've never seen Buffy but one example that jumps to mind is "12 Monkeys", a movie I very much enjoyed. It is superficially very similar, the contrast of 'reality' with 'hospital' and continually asks the viewer "what is real?"
As Lazarus points out 12 Monkeys plays games with the main character's head but plays fair with the audience. Good luck with that in a MA project.
I think this arc has done an admirable job of bringing up these issues (I offer all the discussion and reviews here as proof) and I wish there were many more arcs like it out there.
Controversy does not equate to profundity. The entire field of postmodernism brought about no end of controversy but had very little actual content. Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore could fart into a microphone and cause two weeks of arguments.
As a total aside, my RL name ("Tabitha") anagrams perfectly to "Habitat" so what does that say about me? Let us never forget that (though it it not the case here) coincidence does happen and nothing is significant till proven to be so!
What would we get if we included your last name, using all the letters? My guess is you couldn't make anything out of it without leaving out letters. It is much more likely that an anagram in a name found in an arc is the result of deliberate choice than mere coincidence, so it is proper for the player to assume it is going to be significant until shown not to be.
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"
You're right results do matter, and I think the results speak for themselves. Overwhelmingly people like my arc, so therefore it must be successful. Ultimately, that's the only way we can really measure success in the AE. No one person holds all the cards in an arc's viability.
Do most people like it? Is it popular? Is it well recieved? With this arc, by and large, that seems to be the case, so your review, while valid to your own personal biases and extreme viewpoints, isn't really indicative of the general playerbase. At the end of the day, I'm happy with my results, as are most players thus far who've played it, at the time of this post. Changing something many enjoy to appease a single person doesn't make much sense, no matter how much they rail against the 'sins' it's commited.
If anything, my 'results' show you're out of touch with many 'average' players in regards to this arc, and my point that I can disregard you as a statistical anomaly, for now, remains valid.
As with anything, simply saying that might cause people to play it and genuinely hate it, moods may change, they might vote it up or down out of some personal agenda, they might even like the arc. But for now, at least, it seems some people like it, so really, that's all I can do. Make something that people enjoy, and create an experience for them that maybe they haven't considered or tried, and ultimately have them take something from the whole ordeal. The bottom line is if people are playing it and having fun, then it's done its goal.