One A Day

For the record, it was my interference that screwed up that mission.

So today, along with the MA supergroup, I ran "A Night on the Boardwalk" by Mercedes Lackey.

Although, I think this is probably relatively pointless, since it is highly improbable that Mercedes Lackey will actually read this thread, the arc did make a few things occur to me as we were playing it, so I decided to go ahead and put this into my thread. Usually, I try to direct my thread to the mission author in hopes of helping them try to make their arcs better. I doubt that any revisions will occur to this narrative.

However, a lot of modern day ficition features the voice of the 'sharp and witty, takes no crap narrator,' who is unafraid to tell anyone what he/she thinks about anything. Brust uses this sort of narrator with Vlad Taltos. A lot of comic books feature this type of character... Wolverine, for example. This type of character is so common, in fact, that the character has become almost a caricature of itself.

The character usually works fairly well because all of the other characters in the narrative are also creations of the author, which means that the character against whom the 'sharp and witty' narrator directs his or her acid tongue generally deserves such treatment. The audience recognizes that the character deserves that sort of treatment and that the rest of the world either is too afraid of the character in question to say such things or are too oblivious to notice what the character deserves.

Therefore the 'sharp and witty' character is actually a device used by the author to forge a connection between the author and the reader, saying, in essence, 'yes, I get it too. I see what you are seeing. The deserved comeuppance for this character who deserves to be talked to or about is on its way.'

The problem with this arc, however, is that the 'sharp and witty' character doesn't come across as so 'sharp and witty,' so much as she comes across as 'crappy and nasty.'

The reason for this is pretty simple. Instead of directing her 'sharp and witty' comments at someone who deserves it and creates identification with her in the mind of the audience, from the very beginning she starts directing the nasty commentary at someone she does not know... someone controlled by the very audience with whom the author is attempting to create a connection.

So you see...

In short order, the audience in question could care less about the story unfolding because every time the audience member talks to the contact, she assures you that you are completely incompetent and that another hero could be doing everything that you are doing and doing it better. And this happens in EVERY INTRO and EVERY OUTRO. I imagine if I'd been able to speak to the contact to see what the busy text was, it would have been a comment about how much my character sucks and how much better this other hero is than I am.

So having utterly succeeded in alienating the player from the start, it's a little bit pointless for me to proceed further into the narrative, but to be honest, there's not much there. Things revolve around a ghostly temp service, A tiki lounge singer, and an adversary named Evil Old MacGuffin. Or MacGruffin, depending on which spelling you as a reader decide to go with.

There are a bunch of passing references to some pop culture artifacts like Star Trek and Scooby Doo and then the 'story' or what passes for it is done. The contact takes one more pot shot at your hero and sends you on your way, scratching your head and wondering exactly what just happened.

The long and short of it is that you just took a bunch of pointless abuse for no apprarent reason.

My Thoughts:

- Missions 1 and 2 take approximately 30 seconds each. Since half of the customs are reward borked, if you solo it, you will probably receive a maximum of about 10 AE tickets for playing these two.

- The customs don't have massive alpha strikes. The reason for that is simple. They have offense taken away from them, which means they are AE reward borked. However, I'd say that almost any AT will be able to handle them.

- Played through it on my Tank at whatever settings WN was on and did not sweat anything. I hardly took any damage at all. Even against the AV. I walked into the middle of his mob and yawned.

Overall, I would say that aside from farms I have walked into by accident, this was the single worst MA arc I have played to date. I did not crack a smile the entire time. If it was supposed to be funny, then I guess I just don't get it. Having my character personally insulted repeatedly over the course of an hour isn't amusing to me. References to Trek and Scooby Doo don't equal a narrative. And calling a character MacGuffin doesn't make him one.

Mechanical issues from the guest authors I can deal with. Obviously they are not used to the ins and outs of the AE interface. Therefore I can forgive the lack of rewards and the rest of it.

I can't forgive the horrible writing in this and I can hardly believe that someone with the reputation of Mercedes Lackey actually wrote it.

I've played a few arcs that had the Kif Kroker syndrome before. While it might be funny to see Kif constantly being berated by his under-appreciative boss, some writers seem to forget that there's a difference between looking through the window and sympathising or having a moment of schadenfreude on Kif's suffering, and actually having to experience an under-appreciative boss, which is made only worse when the player has no way to retaliate beyond just quitting the arc,

Some of the characterization was probably because of the fact that Lackey was using an old character from her novels as a contact. Since I've actually not read any of her novels, I have to assume that the contact is just being consistent in her characterization in those novels. Setting aside the fact that Ms. Lackey is literally my dear ol' mother's brand of SF, there's nothing in this character that would say, "Boy it'd be great to read 200-300 pages of this person!"

Regardless, the acerbic bitchiness of the contact was grating. I was really hoping that I'd have a chance to smash in the face of Unbelieveable Man (the hero the contact is repeatedly trying to replace you with) just to prove myself better than him. I also vaguely conjectured that the contact herself was Unbelieveable Man's "needy girlfriend" that was eating up all of his time (and whom was probably hiding from her).

Otherwise, the arc was meh. A Scooby Doo tribute with some light humor. I had some difficulty with it as I was running a psi/MM blaster (set to +1/x1, boss ON) and the BP mobs are resistant to Psi. The MM/ critters were also highly annoying, particularly the final EB. After losing the ally in the final mission, I had to call in a friend to help me take out the boss. With a full rank of Necro Pets against me, it was pretty much going to be impossible without someone who can do a different type of damage.

I think I gave it a 3. 4 at most.

They feature in one of the random radio missions iirc, where you have to save the reporter.