Yet another review thread

Welcome to the club, Chesh. Backwards Day (329000) is my a) newest b) weirdest, but anything in the sig is fair game if you've a mind.

(also you wanna toss your arcs on my thread?)

The Tangled Weave
ID: 338575
Author: Operative Tracks (I believe his global is @FrederikSvanberg. I hope they revert the names thing at some point, it bugs me).

No real "Before I start" comments on this one, so...

In Progress Thoughts

Mission 1:
-The intro dialogue is very quick and to the point - nothing wrong with that, but it means you've probably got the space to throw in a bit of formatting to make it more visually striking.
-Hey! Arachnos are actually FRIENDLY to me while I'm working to them for once. Considering how my VEAT's outfit looks identical to the Bane Spider LTs (Which I copied the colours of exactly), she sure gets attacked a lot by them.
-I'm a bit confused here - am I being mistaken for the traitor or am I ACTUALLY the traitor? I know this is meant to be a substitute VEAT arc, which would suggest the latter (Because of the rather command-chain defying things you do when you start as a VEAT), but some of the dialogue seems to suggest that the hostile mobs are trying to set me up (Or Jenkins, but they change their mind when they see me). Maybe it will make more sense in the debriefing.
-Ah, okay, it was an inter-departmental misunderstanding. Oh that Arachnos Bureaucracy.

Mission 2:
-Now I'm off to kill snakes - seems a bit disconnected from the first mission but judging by the title of the arc I'm assuming everything will tie together at some point
-Whoop, misread the intro text. Snakes are on my side - I'm fighting Legacy Chain.
-Blarg, defeat all. The mission map isn't too big or confusing, and it makes sense given the context of the mission, but just fair warning that some people are going to shriek in terror and 1 star as soon as they see the words in the nav bar.
-Hmm - that was it? This mission seemed kind of dull - maybe it will play into the plot later, I obviously can't make that call at this point, but even if it does, not a lot seems to actually happen.

Mission 3:
-Taking down a rogue... well I guess everyone is "Rogue" in CoV, but taking down a "Crazy" Destined One now.
-Nice use of allied boss spawns for "Dead" RIPs - I'd had the idea to do this before but never came up with a situation in an arc that needed it.
-"Find a cardboard box" is kind of a weird objective - I guess that ties into the warning about the glowie bug mentioned in the intro dialogue so the player knows what to look for, but it kind of comes off as "What's so special about a cardboard box?"
-Ah, I thought the map was bugged - turns out you have to go inside the building. You might want to make this more explicit in the intro dialogue - I was ready to give up and mark the arc as bugged until I thought to try the doors on the buildings - either that or pick a different map.
-Nice use of mechanics on this mission - though a question, is the box a required objective or all you need to do is lead the captive out? If it's meant to be "Optional", you might want to just drop the Navbar text for it entirely and let the NPC dialogue clue the player over to it. And if it's NOT optional, there's the potential for some weirdness if the player leads the escort out first and then opens the box. (P.S. I just dragged the escort over to the truck anyway - though I'm assuming the "Mission failed" dialogue is probably pretty similar to the "Mission success" one in this case).

Mission 4:
-I'm starting to get the unfortunate feeling that nothing is going to end up tying these missions together, which is too bad because so far they've all had a very polished feeling - but a string of disconnected missions is just a string of disconnected missions and ends up not being very interesting. I'll comment on this more in my summary.
-Another defeat all - again justified by the story, but again some people are just going to hate this by default.
-Nice custom mob here - though given how people make characters, she's probably no more out of place in Paragon than she is in the Rogue Isles

Mission 5:
-"Encouraging" some scientists to work for Arachnos now.
-Hydra! A bit out of place in the Rogue Isles, but I'm assuming they aren't actually Hydra but are instead some sort of "Science gone wrong" creation - you could maybe drop them into a custom group and give them custom names and descriptions to be more fitting.
-I just scoured the whole map with the escort in tow, trying to find "Recruit the last scientist" to bring them both to the exit at once, only to realize "Oh wait, that's probably referring to the guy I've got following me..." Everyone makes mistakes, right? That said, it doesn't strike me as particularly necessary to make him an escort - there's no ambushes or backspawns so all you really end up doing is walking him to the door. I suppose it's meant to differentiate him from the one that runs off on his own, but maybe throw in a boss that spawns in the front or something to give the player something to run into.
-Aaaaand it's over.

Summary

This arc ended up disappointing me - it's always the pretty ones that break your heart I suppose. The missions are all solidly designed, the mechanics are used in very clever and creative ways, and while the contact dialogue is a bit dry and to the point, the NPC dialogue is well written enough that even though each person only makes one appearance, they're all characterful enough that they don't feel thrown in. Hell I didn't even spot any typos which has got to be a first.

The part I find disappointing though, is the fact that there's no story. I hate to rip off Venture's thing, but this is a perfect example of "Just a bunch of stuff that happens" (I promise I won't get all tropey in my reviews). It's like the contact just has an errand list she needs done and you happen to be around when she gets down to the next item - it all raises the question of "Well I suppose this stuff is all important Arachnos business, but why send me specifically on all of them? Anyone could do this." There's nothing tying the player to the contact or the missions, and there's nothing tying the missions together.

What this arc is currently is a great skeleton of an arc - it's got an amazing level of polish for so having had so few people run it, but without a story it's not a real "Story arc". At the moment, I'd say it's a 3 star arc - it would be a 2 if not for the aforementioned brilliant level of polish and creative mechanics, which make it interesting as a demonstration of what you can do with the MA if nothing else, but I could see this arc easily being a 4 or even 5 star arc if the story has the same level of polish and presentation as the mission design - but without a story it's not there yet. I honestly can't make any specific recommendations to tie the missions together, since they're all so different from each other and there is literally nothing there right now to build on, but given that you don't use any clues and the contact dialogue is all very short, you've got lots of room to insert whatever story you think would make it all fit - and I look forward to giving it a run once you've done that.

*Quick Edit* I just want to mention that based on the description you offered, it sounds like each mission is meant to be a reference to a current in-game mission or story arc - which is clever but not made very explicit at ALL (I don't even know which one most of them are meant to tie into). Even with that, the arc still needs its own narrative arc - any good story arc should still be interesting when viewed in isolation.

Thanks for your advice. Unfortunately I've already gone in a different direction with this arc, and your favourite mission had to go. I might use it again later in another arc though, since I liked the mechanics but couldn't get them to work properly. The arc is updated now and if you feel like checking it out again that would be great. Changes are mostly in mission 3 and 5, and some minor stuff in mission 4.

Something Comes to Yarmouth
ID: 58812
Author: @Oliin

Not much to say before I start, other than that the concept looks like something that will interest me.

In Progress Thoughts

Mission 1:
-This is heroic right? "If need be, break through the longbow blockade" sounds a bit iffy for something a hero would do - if they had a good reason, sure, but we just met this guy, right?
-Are we meant to know what Coralax are? The mission entry popup seems to describe them in very generic terms, suggesting our character is unfamiliar with them. If that's the case, it might help the atmosphere if you plopped them into a custom group and gave them names and descriptions that better reflect the fact that we don't know what they are. If we ARE supposed to recognize them, you could just replace the "Creatures made of rock!" line with "the Coralax"
-Sgt. West has a typo in her dialogue: "gonnadie"
-The map seems a bit large for the number of objectives - I get why you have to use an outdoor map, but is there no smaller one available? Alternatively, you could throw in some patrols or other optional objectives (I noticed you had one battle but that seemed to be it) to make it more interesting.

Mission 2:
-You should set the native group to "Civilians" or "Yarmouth citizens" or something in the captive objective fields - they use whatever their normal "Civilian" group happens to be - which sometimes can be something very out of place (I've made this mistake too)
-Glowie hunts on city maps are usually kind of a pain, especially with the "Rubble" object you've chosen to represent your objective. I'd suggest switching the "Required" clue to one of the captures citizens to make it much more visible, and leave the glowies to just be red herrings.
-Again, rather a large map for so few objectives - though I don't think the outdoor city maps come in any smaller flavours - maybe use an indoor map instead?

Mission 3:
-Typo in the contact's still busy dialogue "what are the doing to everyone?" (Yes, I read the busy dialogues)
-The captives say "Somebody. Help!" The period should probably be a comma (Or maybe just no punctuation at all)
-There were two captives in the room with Geneva, who said "Geneva? They took her further inside" with her standing right next to me. You should set them to spawn in "Middle" so they won't spawn in the back room with the escort.
-The transition style map fits this mission well, but maybe use a transition to sewers? My thinking is that the Coralax would drag people through the sewers out to the ocean, rather than just down into a cave.
-I notice Geneva's group is MAGI - is this intentional or just the model's default? If the latter it might be good to change it, otherwise players might interpret it as an important clue.
-"it seems the Mayor of Yarmouth very well might be the one responsible for what has happened to this town." scans really weirdly - I'd suggest rephrasing it to something more like "It seems the Mayor of Yarmouth is the one responsible for what's happened to this town"
-Geneva's clue after you take her to the doors is redundant with her NPC dialogue - I'd already taken out the cop while taking her back to the door. You can probably just remove the clue.

Mission 4:
-The custom LTs all having a self-rez is kind of a pain - it's not like freaks where it's a random chance, they do it EVERY TIME.
-Munoz seems to be taking this AWFULLY hard - he was particularly detached beforehand so all of a sudden breaking down in tears seems like it comes out of nowhere - this is kind of tricky to fix because it goes to characterization, which you can't do just by changing one or two lines - if he's meant to have an emotional breakdown you need to write his dialogue to be more emotional in the first place.
-This mission and mission 5 seem to jump up to a 54 cap for some reason - probably because they don't have the Coralax to bind them down to the usual level range. I'd suggest manually setting your level ranges in this arc to make them more consistent.

Mission 5:
-I can see why you chose another transition map for this one, but it feels kind of like a repeat of mission 3. I think it would be more effective if you just used a "Standard" office map to represent city hall - sometimes the natural is more menacing than the supernatural when used in the right context (Though it's too bad we can't use the city hall map from the Reichsman TF yet - that would have been perfect).

Summary

Overall this arc has an interesting concept and has the potential to be a great horror story, but it's held back by lacking atmosphere and needing some polish. I'm giving it a 3, but it's got the potential for more.

Essentially, the key to telling a good horror story is atmosphere, which is what this arc is lacking - the basic ingredients for an interesting story are there but I didn't particularly care about the town or the characters, because they seemed to be just kind of... there, rather than having a life of their own. The contact especially needs more characterization - he's the lens through which we view the story - if all he does is give exposition, we're going to be as detached from the story as he is. Likewise, having Titus turn out to be a Coralax is A: Kind of obvious, and B: Doesn't really hit at any emotional notes like it should - because I really only met him the one time and he didn't make much of an impression on me when I did.

A good "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" type of story like this one mines all the drama it can out of the fact that you have to turn on your former friends, because they've become one of "Them" now. It should be meaningful that we have to beat up all these civilians but it doesn't really feel like because there's no emotional weight attached to it. It also uses the whole "Could be any one of us" aspect to really ramp up the feeling of paranoia, which also lends to the general horror atmosphere - a great way to sell this in a mission arc is to use the betrayal feature for escorts and allies (Note - don't do it on a required escort unless you want the player to fail the mission).

The mission design itself could also use a bit of work - there's nothing broken about it (Except for the glowie bit in mission 2 which I mentioned already), but it's very bare bones - you've got large maps but they feel very empty because the only thing on them are auto-spawns and required objectives. Filling them in with some patrols, optional bosses, battles, etc. is a good way to make the town feel more "Alive", by making it feel like the mobs have things to do other than stand around and wait for you to pull them - and the more alive the town feels, the more people will care about what's happening to it. Optional objectives are also a great way to fill in the "fluff" information on the town - the clues you'd get from them aren't required to understand the story, but they'll give you a bit more insight into the workings of the town and the people that live there. A good example would be say around mission 4, you find notes or e-mails from the mayor detailing his insane ramblings about Merulina - it would help to add to his character and make him a more meaningful encounter when we meet him in mission 5.

Telling a good horror story in the MA is hard, but you've got the groundwork here, you just need to sell the emotional side of it.

Also, for those that might be interested in this sort of thing, I've been keeping track of what ratings I've given out in the OP. Note that these don't always match my in-game ratings - I might award an extra star in game if I think an arc has potential for improvement, because of how getting anything less than a 4 can sometimes doom an arc to oblivion which just isn't fair for an arc I just thought needed some work rather than one I actually didn't like.

So far It seems like I've given out mostly 3's - which is a pretty good indication of how I rate. As I said, I'm a harsh rater, but that's mainly because of the fact that if all you do is give out 4s and 5s, then A: Why even bother having the 1-3 range available at all, and B: it makes giving those scores out meaningless, because anything even half-decent will get them - my intention isn't to review the whole range of arcs available on the MA here, my intention is to review the ones by authors that actually care enough about them to request feedback, which means I need a different metric to compare them than I would use if I was looking at "Average" arcs (For example, every arc I've reviewed thus far would have gotten 4 or 5 stars if I was scoring that way).

So, what I'm trying to do is to make the whole range of star ratings meaningful in my reviews - getting a 3 or even a 2 doesn't mean "Your arc was crap", it means "Compared to the other top 5% of arcs, you're on par/slightly below average". Anything outside of that top 5% gets a 1, but if an author honestly cares enough about an arc to request a review, they care enough about it to have put enough work in to keep them out of that range anyway (Unless they're EXTREMELY incompetent - but fortunately I haven't had to tell anyone that yet).

It's been a while since I've asked for a review, and I like this thread, so I'll request a review for:

Matchstick Women #3369
lvl 25+ (all custom fire mobs)
You come across a mysterious flame that draws your attention like a moth. It has a story to tell, one of destruction, fire, and pain. Follow the smoke to the source and reveal the secret of the Matchstick Women.

And now for something completely different...

Meet your reviewer!


Dr. Ellen Timmit, PhD - also known as "Firanima"

Formerly a university professor, then Possessed by the Circle of Thorns, then a university professor again, now a superhero (But also still a professor) - Dr. Ellen Timmit has spent years compiling notes on superheroic culture which she hopes to some day turn into a book - but it turns out "Will write a book some day" doesn't pay the rent, so instead she's spent most of her time teaching classes during the winter and working for Architect Entertainment as a reviewer in the summer.

Though she managed to shake off the Oranbegan spirit that possessed her through an enchanted thorn in the heart, she managed to keep the thorn and thus all of the magical power it afforded - though with no formal magical training prior to her "Induction" into the Circle of Thorns, she's only been able to master the fire spells she used as a fire mystic during that period. But hey, everything burns right? There's no such thing as a problem that can't be solved with liberal application of fire. And since the Mission Architect is an entirely virtual environment, she doesn't even need to concern herself with making sure not to burn things TOO badly - making it a much more suitable environment for her talents than traditional hero work (Which is a bit lawsuit-y).

Years of grading papers have given her the eye for detail needed to take a critical look at the various story arcs she's tasked with reviewing - though she was always somewhat of an "Absent-minded professor" type (Explaining how she got kidnapped by the Circle in the first place), she can focus her attention like a laser beam if the situation requires it. Perhaps her one weakness as a reviewer is that she might be a bit too friendly to write a particularly mean review - which means she doesn't quite draw in the numbers of her peers because let's face it, everyone loves a train wreck. However, that fact is more than compensated for by her earnest belief that everyone is capable of improving through good, honest feedback - something else she learned from her many years of grading papers.

She's quite enjoyed her run so far, and is looking forward to seeing what else people have in store for her! Her one complaint thus far seems to be something about "Fire armour mobs". We can't really tell what she's saying but she seems to mutter that a lot on her way from the hospital teleporters to the mission entrance.

(I was bored and it's too late for me to do a real review - so there's the character I've been running these with - fire/fire/fire blaster, lots of emphasis on AoE, more ranged than blappy).

The Long Road Back
ID: 340454
Author: Onyx Monolith (Don't know the author's global)

This one was taken down for a little while apparently, but it's back up now so giving it a go.

In Progress Thoughts

Mission 1:
-OSI? Someone watches the Venture Bros :P
-"Egor" should probably be "Igor" if that's what you're going for.
-The contact could use a bit of text formatting to make the briefing more interesting - at the very least the title could be in a different colour (And possibly bolded/sized up) to make it stand out from the briefing itself. I harp on this with a lot of people but that's because so few people actually seem to want to make use of that feature. Protip: It doesn't count against the field size limit when you publish, so you can actually break the character limit if you apply formatting LAST (It does make it a bit trickier to edit - though you can just remove the formatting to make changes, then reapply when you're done). If you've run my "Tomorrownauts" arc you can see how much colour I jammed into that first briefing - it's sitting at like 1500/1000 characters and still publishes no problem.
-Maybe Symens should be a Vahz Eidolon instead of a custom? Though if she comes back later in the arc this note might end up being invalid depending on how she's written.
-I'm not sure you really need 3 desks with notes in this mission, given that as a multi-objective, you get the clue on the first one. What you could do if you want the player to have to cover the whole area is instead of making one objective that spawns 3 glowies, you could make them 3 separate objectives that each give their own clue - it would make them more interesting. Though this mission is quite text-heavy considering the size of the map - some editing down might help it. The contact is well-written so he's not just spewing exposition at you which is nice, but there's a lot of information to take in right off the bat.

Mission 2:
-Timed mission, so my notes may be rather short on this one.
-Am I supposed to know who Escobar is? The contact mentions him as if he should be familiar to me but I don't recognize the name. I was kind of able to gather who he's meant to be by the description, but by tossing a name at the player it implies familiarity. If he's just meant to be some top lieutenant, you could just put "He's sending one of his strongest enforcers" rather than the name. If I am meant to know who he is, a brief description in the intro couldn't hurt.
-The timer wasn't too bad in this mission, short enough to be a concern but long enough to finish with time to spare. Though I don't run with EBs on with my blaster so it's possible it could be too short if someone was running on higher difficulty than I do. One note: He does warn you about the time limit, but highlighting that warning in a different text colour would be a good idea. It's kind of easy to miss details like that if everything is the same colour.
-Should "Debit" card be "Credit" card? Usually company cards are the latter rather than the former. If you have a fixed budget expense account, then the former applies, but his description seems to imply a more fluid limit (Minor nit, I know, but I write what catches my eye).

Mission 3:
-"Divident" should be "Dividend"
-I'm guessing from the clue that my character is actually trying to make an honest attempt to go clean - I'm hoping that the next few mission take this farther, it's a good plot thread to run with.
-"Brazil" is spelled as "Brasil" in the named Huntsman's description - I know both of them are technically correct but you should try to be consistent about which one you use in the arc (Unless the Huntsman is meant to actually be Brazilian in which case he'd use the native spelling, but his dialogue doesn't really imply "Portuguese" what with being in english). Also, his enemy group is "-Yawn". Is that intentional? If so, I'm not sure what it's supposed to imply.
-Also, my usual warning about defeat alls applies - Personally, I don't care so long as it's justified by the story (Which it is), but some people will hate it just by default.

Mission 4:
-The "Accept" text here is just the default, I'm assuming that's probably just an oversight since the rest of the arc thus far has used custom text.
-Hmm, this one seems kind of a downgrade in "Shadiness" from the previous one. Yeah, I suppose you are operating on US soil but you aren't killing anyone this time around (Well, depending on how you intepret what you're doing to the security guards).

Mission 5:
-Bit of a jump up now from the last mission. Maybe reorder these so it goes 4 3 5 instead of how it is now? It would be a more consistent escalation.
-Those orphanage matrons sure are nasty with their katanas - it seems like a bit of a weird disconnect there. Maybe instead of using customs, take a member from an existing group of "Civilian-ish" mobs and rename them? I guess it's kind of justified by the description text, but it still seems a bit silly. The extraction team costume design is nice though.
-Good job also on the orphans, although their description is set to the default "Minion" description - you might want to fix that. Random aside: Being a critic is fun. *Casually guns down orphans* "Oh BTW you should probably fix their description text"
-Took me a little bit to find all the glowies - maybe lower the count to 3 instead of 5? The map is pretty small.

Summary

Overall I thought this was a pretty decent arc that just needs a bit of work done on it - I'm going to call it a 3.5 rounded to a 3. The contact is well written, though also pretty verbose, so there's a lot of reading which kind of contrasts with the relative short length of the missions. Likewise there were quite a few clues, and most of them didn't seem to be strictly necessary seeing as how the connecting plot thread is about the agency rather than anything you do in each individual mission (For instance, do I really need to know about the Vahz research being done in mission 1, let alone 3 separate clues about it? It's never referred to again).

The issue I think with a lot of the plotting and clues is they put emphasis on the wrong elements - it seems to imply that the stuff you do in each individual mission is where the story is, when the story is actually about the overall "slipping back into old habits" your character goes through in their missions for the agency - I think it would help to stress the cognitive dissonance of this a bit more - there's a good bit in one of the clues about "Good thing I'm 'not a villain' anymore", but that seems to be the only mention of what (at least what I interpreted as) the arc is about. There's a lot of pathos to be mined out of the whole idea that the character has "gone clean" but is doing the same thing as they were before... but it's okay now because they're doing it for the "good guys", right? On that note, I think using OSI might not be the best choice for that feeling, going with an existing group that already comes off as a bit ambiguous (Maybe Wyvern? Though the last mission is way too villainous for them) might help to attach the story to something players would be more familiar with - with OSI, they seem to come off as "That crazy offshoot of the CIA that's basically Malta in different uniforms".

On a different note, I think the writing would really benefit from some use of formatting. As I said, the contact is pretty verbose, so without any use of font or text colours it just comes off as a big wall of white, which is a bit difficult to read sometimes. It's broken up into paragraphs, at least, so there's something.

Overall I did like the arc, it's not perfect but given that it's fairly new most of the flaws are forgivable for just not having had enough feedback on it yet. I'm hoping this review will help with that somewhat.

Thank you for the review. I appreciate you taking the time to do so.

Quote:

-OSI? Someone watches the Venture Bros :P

I'm not sure what the Venture Brothers is. I've used OSI (the Office of Scientific Intelligence) in a lot of my tabletop games since about 1988. The organization, (at least my version of it... there actually WAS an Office of Scientific Intelligence, but it probably bore little resemblence to what I've morphed it into), has its creative roots in King's The Shop, a secretive government entity involved in all manner of evil stuff. In King, the organization probably featured most prominently in Firestarter, which was also a movie with Drew Barrymore, during her child actress days in 1983-4, and David Keith.

My OSI probably draws some inspiration from shows like The X-Files and Dark Skies, as well as roleplaying games like Dark Conspiracy. None of these are detail types of inspirations though... more a mood and a general perception of what this agency is to be. I suppose you call also draw some parallells to The Malta Group in the game, which the distinction that The Malta Group doesn't have the legitimacy and government sanction that OSI does, nor does it have OSI's emphasis on the weird and the paranormal.

Quote:

-"Egor" should probably be "Igor" if that's what you're going for.

In the original book by Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein did not have an assistant. In the various movie versions, the assistant character has alternately been called 'Igor' and 'Egor depending on what version you are watching. If Savage had watched just the right one, he might have referred to Symons as 'Fritz,' although that one isn't nearly as much a part of the collective unconscious of the culture as the other two.

Quote:

-The contact could use a bit of text formatting to make the briefing more interesting - at the very least the title could be in a different colour (And possibly bolded/sized up) to make it stand out from the briefing itself. I harp on this with a lot of people but that's because so few people actually seem to want to make use of that feature. Protip: It doesn't count against the field size limit when you publish, so you can actually break the character limit if you apply formatting LAST (It does make it a bit trickier to edit - though you can just remove the formatting to make changes, then reapply when you're done). If you've run my "Tomorrownauts" arc you can see how much colour I jammed into that first briefing - it's sitting at like 1500/1000 characters and still publishes no problem.

I honestly have no idea how to do this.

Quote:

-I'm not sure you really need 3 desks with notes in this mission, given that as a multi-objective, you get the clue on the first one. What you could do if you want the player to have to cover the whole area is instead of making one objective that spawns 3 glowies, you could make them 3 separate objectives that each give their own clue - it would make them more interesting.

This is a valid critique and a good idea. I implemented this change and it strengthened the mission.

Quote:

-Am I supposed to know who Escobar is? The contact mentions him as if he should be familiar to me but I don't recognize the name. I was kind of able to gather who he's meant to be by the description, but by tossing a name at the player it implies familiarity. If he's just meant to be some top lieutenant, you could just put "He's sending one of his strongest enforcers" rather than the name. If I am meant to know who he is, a brief description in the intro couldn't hurt.

I intended to do this, but ran out of space. I will probably re-edit this section once I finished the overhaul of mission 4.

Quote:

-Should "Debit" card be "Credit" card? Usually company cards are the latter rather than the former. If you have a fixed budget expense account, then the former applies, but his description seems to imply a more fluid limit (Minor nit, I know, but I write what catches my eye).

I'm honestly not sure. An agency like OSI would probably use whichever version is easier to hide, since they don't really want to be found out to be providing an expense account for a known villain at this point in the relationship. I used a debit card because it seemed to me that it would be tied to a bank account somewhere that could be opened up under anyone's name and be relatively anonymous, but a credit card would perhaps be less secure, but I honestly don't know enough about the financial world to claim that is true.

Quote:

-I'm guessing from the clue that my character is actually trying to make an honest attempt to go clean - I'm hoping that the next few mission take this farther, it's a good plot thread to run with.

Well, the only assumption I am making about the player's character is that he/she is choosing to work with OSI for SOME REASON. The commentaries like this one regarding things of this nature... the fact that he/she is doing the very same things he/she was doing last week can be read in several different ways... anger at the truth of it, sardonic amusement at the truth of it, world weariness and self-satisfaction that the 'legit people' do as much evil stuff as he/she ever did... etc.

Eventually, simply by the nature of the way COH arcs work, the character will make the choice to stay. I can't completely avoid pushing some actions onto the player. The player, if he/she wants to finish the arc, will enter the final mission. That very thing implies that he/she is going to stay with OSI. But whether the motivation for that is because he/she really wants to go straight or not is completely up to the player.

Like I said, I am trying to avoid the phenomenon of writing in motivations for your characters. All I am assuming is that in this moment in your character's personal journey, he/she has a compelling enough reason to listen to OSI and start down this particular path in life.

Quote:

Mission 4: -The "Accept" text here is just the default, I'm assuming that's probably just an oversight since the rest of the arc thus far has used custom text. -Hmm, this one seems kind of a downgrade in "Shadiness" from the previous one. Yeah, I suppose you are operating on US soil but you aren't killing anyone this time around (Well, depending on how you intepret what you're doing to the security guards).

Mission four is being completely overhauled. To be honest, I was never particularly fond of this mission. In a later arc, I might explore the political aspects of OSI in greater depth, but it seemed out of place to me that they would trust a complete freelancer with something this vital to the agency's continued existence. Removing this mission and replacing it with something stronger might help the entire arc bind together more cohesively.

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Those orphanage matrons sure are nasty with their katanas - it seems like a bit of a weird disconnect there. Maybe instead of using customs, take a member from an existing group of "Civilian-ish" mobs and rename them? I guess it's kind of justified by the description text, but it still seems a bit silly. The extraction team costume design is nice though. -Good job also on the orphans, although their description is set to the default "Minion" description - you might want to fix that. Random aside: Being a critic is fun. *Casually guns down orphans* "Oh BTW you should probably fix their description text"

Believe it or not, I've spent more time tweaking the Heatherford Home cast than anything else in the creation process. They were too weak, then they were too strong, then they kicked my brute's tail, then they were too vanilla... etc... trying to build what are essentially 'normal people with a lot of hand-to-hand training' is very difficult to balance in this game.

Logically the orphan matrons should not be able to challenge the sweeper that OSI sends in. I agree with that. But unfortunately, the few powersets that can simulate the 'trained fighter' rather than the 'superhuman' seem to deal inordinate amounts of damage.

I will continue to tweak.

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Likewise there were quite a few clues, and most of them didn't seem to be strictly necessary seeing as how the connecting plot thread is about the agency rather than anything you do in each individual mission (For instance, do I really need to know about the Vahz research being done in mission 1, let alone 3 separate clues about it? It's never referred to again).

Hopefully, the revamp of mission four will go far in dealing with the disconnect between the individual plot threads and the throughline of the arc. It is difficult to balance certain things, because there are obviously a lot of things going on that an agency like OSI just flat out would NEVER tell a freelancer.

On that level, I have to be careful about balancing annoying the player by creating an arc that looks like just a jumble of seemingly disconnected missions and having my organizations of scientific super-agents be dumb-dumb enough to blab to this passing stranger why they've hired him/her to these things.

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On a different note, I think the writing would really benefit from some use of formatting. As I said, the contact is pretty verbose, so without any use of font or text colours it just comes off as a big wall of white, which is a bit difficult to read sometimes. It's broken up into paragraphs, at least, so there's something.

Like I said, I have no idea how to do this within the MA interface.


Thanks again for playing the arc and for your feedback.

The Venture Bros OSI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bZwBzITyk (Not what you were going for).

As for text formatting, there's two ways. Highlight an area of text and right-click - if it's a formattable field (Everything except in-mission NPC dialogue and clue titles I believe), it will pop up with some options like bold/colour/etc. Alternatively, you can use the HTML codes to do the same (e.g <b></b> for bold, etc.). The right-click formatting does this for you automatically, but sometimes it bugs out and throws in more tags than you strictly need, other times it REALLY bugs out and I don't even know what it's trying to do when it spits a bunch of text out. Most of the time it works okay, though. The one advantage to hand-coding is you can use the full spectrum of colours rather than just the 8ish they have in the menu (Those are just defaults, you can look up any colour somewhere like here and get the hex value to insert into the tag. If you want to use formatting to "Break the limit", you have to use the right-click method, as the fields stop allowing text input as soon as you hit the limit (But still publish okay so long as the number of VISIBLE characters is under the limit - you can't edit the raw .marc file to get more text, it won't publish, but you can put in as much formatting as you want).

Also, I gathered that you weren't trying to write a person's character for them, but still, a few assumptions can be made about anyone running that arc:
1) The character is trying to go clean, otherwise they wouldn't have started working for OSI in the first place (Well, money maybe, but there's WAY more money to be had in crime than black ops)
2) They may or may not feel comfortable with the shadier aspect of things - but even true villains can have limits of what they're willing to do.
You're probably safe writing assuming that those things at least are true about the character running the arc.

The comment I made about the orphanage matrons wasn't so much that I found them too difficult (My blaster was able to handle them fine), but that it just seemed odd that there were like... ninjas running an orphanage. The impression I got from that mission was that the orphanage was sort of a "School for Gifted Children" (In an X-men kind of way), so I was somewhat able to understand that, but it still struck me as silly on first impression.

Also, Frankenstein wasn't even a Dr. in the original book, he was just a student :P (I just read the thing like a week ago so I really SHOULD know that). I've just always seen it spelled as "Igor" so that's why I made that comment, it seems to be the most popular spelling.

As for the overall plot thread, if there is a connection between each mission, I didn't spot it (But then I assumed while running it that it would be made more explicit, so I wasn't really trying to put all the clues together to form a working theory). If the player is meant to figure out what the connection is, you should have the clues point them in that direction - don't flat out TELL them what the connection is, just tell them that there IS one. The trouble now is that it's not clear whether or not there's anything there to be figured out, so as a player I didn't put in the effort trying. A good subtle way to clue them in would be to just drop a hint in one of the clues that it might be related to a thing you've found in a previous mission - basically give them one piece of the puzzle so they realize that there is, in fact, a puzzle. Or, if there really isn't one, you can probably ditch a fair number of the clues, as while they're interesting on their own, they don't add much to the greater story.

As for my complaint about mission 4, it wasn't so much that it was out of place period, just that it was out of place following mission 3. I actually did the same thing when I wrote one of my arcs (The Beating Heart of Astoria), but caught it before I published - my original design had the player first trying to sacrifice some people to the monster, then failing that, try to kill it, then failing that, nuke the whole thing. The trouble was, morally, sacrificing people is kind of worse than just trying to kill the monster - so it screwed up the "Moral Decline" aspect of the missions. I swapped them and I think it works better now. That's the same problem with sticking mission 4 where it was - planting some evidence to force a Senator into retirement is WAY less evil than massacring an entire base, plus an ambassador. Just swapping those two missions would give a much more logical moral progression to the arc - giving the feeling that OSI is trying to push you farther into the moral gray area just to see how far they can, rather than just "Here's a mission, here's another one".

New review probably later today, (Currently working on writing my own arc but I've got a lot of free time today). I've decided to change my review format a bit though - I'm still going to have the "Stream of Consciousness" followed by a summary section, but I'm ditching the star ratings aspect of it - I think it distracts from the point of my doing these reviews (Even a 5 star arc can always improve, after all), and it's just so arbitrary that it's been bugging me lately. I'll still give an overall impression of whether or not I LIKED the arc, but quantifying that just seems pointless to me - I've been pretty strict with my scale but even then it's so loose that it's almost meaningless.

Backwards Day
ID: 329000
Author: @GlaziusF

Sorry about the slowness in getting to this, between school, writing my own arc, and general "I don't feel like using my brain today" feelings I haven't been very keen on writing reviews. That said, my queue is pretty short and it is still open, so if anyone wants some critical feedback on an arc, post here and I'll add you, and get around to reviewing it EVENTUALLY.

Also, for something related to the arc, I'm running this on my brute instead of my usual blaster. No, the review will not be in-character, and we can all be thankful for that.

In Progress

Mission 1:
-Just a note here: I'm never a big fan of using ((OOC: SOMETHING IMPORTANT)) in contact dialogue - it breaks immersion and there's almost always a way to spin it so that the contact can give you that information in character. In this case it's tricky because of the nature of the contact (I already know what this arc is about because I read PW's review before you posted it here), but even then I don't think it's impossible to fit in "Speak to me again, I have more to say" somewhere. Additionally, the "Clue numbering" thing probably doesn't have to be pointed out at all; not everyone does it but it's pretty intuitive so it's not like people are going to complain about "What's with the 'M3' in my clues?"
-It is kind of odd that Maros gives you the pendant to start and you go "Well, better go to the cave and get that pendant!" anyway.
-Found the pendant in the first pile I checked, but I'm running around the rest of the cave anyway just to see if there are any other optional clues
-It's a nice touch that each pile of rubble gives a different system text response when you search it.
-Well, okay, not ALL of them have different text. But there's at least a bit of variation.
-Found some slag piles left from what seems like it was a battle. From the NPC dialogue I guess they were fighting DE?
-There's quite a lot of extra "Stuff" in this mission - if they all get followed up on later, that's quite a few plot threads for an already kind of confusing arc, and if they don't, the cave isn't really large enough to require so many "Flavour" objectives.

Mission 2:
-Oddly enough, my brute being a speedster, catching artillery shells for scrap actually IS pretty reasonable.
-Well, at least the stuff from last mission is being followed up on, so that's better than just being random one-off stuff.

Mission 3:
-Well now that the mission briefings are synced up the plot will be a bit easier to follow - though with my memory I'm going to forget the briefings for 4 and 5 by the time I get to those missions.
-At this point one thing that's been bugging me is that there isn't really a lot of motivation to actually help Maros other than "Diviner Maros is weird and interesting".
-Hmm, I found the required NPC near the front of the mission, rendering the rest of the map kind of redundant. Is he set to spawn to "any" or "middle"? Maybe he should be set to "Back" instead.
-Sgt. Jack has a typo on his dialogue: "5 years ago, you've have been no match"

Mission 4:
-Hmm, didn't really have any thoughts on this one. I guess I should say SOMETHING... The impostor foresight bit was clever, I thought.

Mission 5
-The Maros fakes get a bit repeditive - maybe set them to separate objectives and give them different dialogue? I gather the repetition might be intentional, but it's not like it's hard to spot the fakes anyway (What with them attacking me as soon as I get close)
-Hmm, a thought that struck me, maybe the note in the first mission about blue text being optional should go in the mission 5 briefing, as this is the first time there actually IS an optional objective, and since that's something that would normally go at the beginning of the arc, it ties into the "Backwards" premise as well.

Summary:

Overall I liked this arc - it was pretty confusing, but intentionally so, and the yellow text helped make it clear what I was supposed to be doing in each individual mission, so there was never a moment where I was just doing "Defeat all" because I had no idea what I was actually SUPPOSED to be doing (Though I did continue to clear some missions to check for optional objectives after finding the required ones very early on - if I wasn't writing a review I wouldn't have done that but I wanted to be thorough).

There are a few weak spots I think - the side characters are entertaining enough to be decent one-shots, but it's still kind of disappointing that they disappear by the end of the arc - one of them makes sense, but the others just... don't show up anymore. I think a great way to bring them back would be to have them be the summoned allies in the final mission rather than the alternate Maroses (Marii?); it would provide some closure rather than just having them drop out of the story (If you felt like you needed to justify it being them, you could have Maros claim that he reached into your "recent past" for allies or something).

There also isn't a lot of in-character motivation in the arc - basically the only reason to run it is to see it to the end. Your character does get a magic pendant, except it's only really useful for the particular situation where you happen to acquire it. There's also the ethereal "Ultimate Knowledge", but that's only mentioned near the end of the arc and it's not the kind of thing that's going to motivate a fair number of people. It kind of suffers from the typical "Predestination" time-travel storyline where the only reason you do things is because you're "Supposed to" or "Have already done them". Since you HAVEN'T already done them, and not everyone takes warnings like "It will unravel the timeline!" particularly seriously (If time is that fragile it would have broken AGES ago with all the time travel people seem to be doing), there isn't a lot of reason for a character to think "I don't need this headache" and go knock over a bank instead.

Those are just a couple nitpicks though, overall the arc feels very polished and the story is interesting and well written enough that I wanted to see it through to the end.

Hm, save your live file locally and check out the custom critter data. It's possible that it might be loading in more customs than you're using, depending on how you organize your custom groups. Then all you'd need to do to fix it is change up your custom groups some.

It is possible that you're at 100% just because of text though - there's a LOT of text in the arc.

Hey, if you could review my arc 'Loyalty to an Emperor I: Proving Your Worth' (ID: 341671) I'd really appreciate it.

It's designed as a small introduction to GR from the eyes of the Loyalists with some pretty non-standard missions.

Thanks

Matchstick Women
ID: 3369
Author: @Bubbawheat

Running this one on my brute again, both because since /elec got a self heal she's actually ENJOYABLE to play now, and also because fire mobs were mentioned, which probably means fire armour, and those are just a pain with my fire blaster.

In Progress

Mission 1:
-This is a pretty minor nitpick but I've found the compass text always looks better without a period, so "Stop the fire from spreading." should be "Stop the fire from spreading".
-Likewise, "Destroy the bomb!" looks funny with the comma following it - exclamation marks are fine when there's only one objective, but with multiple objectives the commas between them look weird. As far as I can tell you can't seem to guarantee what order the objectives will be listed on the compass, either, so you can't really force it to be the very last one.
-It's kind of odd that you DESTROY the bomb - wouldn't disarming it make more sense?
-Nice use of the fire hydrants - the water spray when they're destroyed actually kind of looks like a sprinkler going off.

Mission 2:
-Good custom group design, by the way. Varied powersets are always better than "Fire blast on everything". One issue though, is aside from the healers (Which have the green hands), it's difficult to tell the other types apart. Maybe a bit of variation in the costumes? (I noticed that there is some, but it tends to be drowned out by the various fire effects, and the overall basic costume design uses the same pattern).
-The phrasing in the clue when you rescue the "Peculiar woman" is a bit odd. "It doesn't matter I feel powerful, I want to help!" is kind of unclear about what it's supposed to mean; should be be "It doesn't matter, I feel powerful; I want to help!"? Or "It doesn't matter that I feel powerful, I want to help!" (Which is a bit of a weird thing to say, so I'm assuming the former).
-Typo in the boss clue: "ot" instead of "of"
-The burnt match has an individual compass objective: "Stop the Matchstick Collector" - maybe you reversed them by accident?

Mission 3:
-Nothing in particular struck me in this one, so er... good use of the face options for Emily's scars.

Summary

It's hard to summarize my thoughts on this one. I thought it was an okay arc, but not great. It was well written, and decently designed, but not particularly interesting. I understand it's hard to have a big plot in a short arc, and I do appreciate that it wasn't stretched out into 5 missions since that would have been tedious. Still, I feel like the plot could have been better; my issue is that the story never really grabbed me - I'll fully admit to being a tough audience, but I really didn't care about most of the people in the arc one way or another - I didn't hate Emily, nor did I feel pity for her, she was just kind of... the "end boss". The clues in mission 3 gave some insight into her, but I felt like they kind of came too late in the story - what I would suggest here is maybe take some of those clues out of mission 3 and spread them around in missions 1 and 2, so that Emily's character is built up over the course of the arc rather than just fully given to you at the very end.

The contact is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much it really adds to the story - there's no real explanation by the end about what it's supposed to be, which would be okay if there were some hints at it during the arc, but there's none of that either - the contact is just kind of... there. A good contact is really key to grabbing someone's attention, because they're going to be the person that gets the most characterization (Or in the case of "Object" contacts, the most text) in the arc. The contact fits the arc thematically, but just seems totally disconnected from the story other than being "The thing that tells you what to do next". There's potential to spin it into something more interesting though, say a fragment of Emily's personality (Perhaps herself before the accident, realizing the monster she's become and trying to stop herself), or maybe something related to the "Peculiar Woman", who shows up twice but really doesn't have any impact on the story.

Design-wise the arc is actually quite good - aside from the occasional difficulty in telling the different types apart, the custom group is nicely balanced, and I didn't find the arc too easy or too difficult running as an elec/elec brute on +0/x3/bosses/noAV. The 2nd map is a bit big, but I've used that map before in pretty much the same way so I supposed I don't have any right to complain about that - my one suggestion would be maybe give the bosses an animation that makes them more visible (Like one of the "casting" ones), since on my difficulty I was getting bosses in normal groups as well, so it was very hard to tell at a glance which groups had the "Named" bosses and which were just normal spawns. The captives were easy enough to find, although because I've used this map before I kind of knew which corners the game likes to tuck them into - some people who haven't tested this map to death might get frustrated trying to find them all. Still, most outdoor maps have the same problem, and this one is at least nice and open so it's easy to look around and see most of the spawns, so it's probably the best available option.

Thanks for the review. You and Lithrei have helped give me some more direction to help make this arc the best I can make it. A few quick changes I made today:

Choking Matchsticks (troller powerset) have a cloud of choking grey smoke to help them stand out more.

Matchbook Collector and Burnt Match have their own new costume, and bios with some additional backstory and explanation for those looking for it.

The Peculiar Woman (typo fixed btw) has a new bio in her second appearance stating that possibly the Matchstick Women started the fire in order to unlock her latent powers.

Good looking reviews, Chesh..
Do you take requests?
/em beg

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Yes, but you need to tell me which arc you want reviewed.

Mm. I know you said origin stories are a pet peeve of yours, BUT. . . how about a lil' something to get into a holiday spirit? Might I make a request that you try "City of Ho Ho Ho, or A Claus in Paragon" when you have time? It's arc 18775, by @Tubbius. It's short, easy-going fun for 3 missions, levels 5-20.

If you would rather not, there're no hard feelings, of course.

--

Edit to add: Thanks for the willingness to try it out!

Edit for content: Minor adjustment to wording so as not to make it look like the title had a question mark in it