The Winner of Dr. Aeon's Challenge!

Congrats Minimalist, and best of luck getting your arc to be repeatable! Actually, not meaning to damn with faint praise. Your other arcs are brilliant, and I look forward to playing this one too. Do post here if you get a timeline on fixing any problems with the Grandville map!

Commiserations to anyone who might feel their arc did not get played, perhaps you also live somewhere that doesn't generate enough revenue to be considered a first-class citizen. Hopefully Dr. Aeon's next challenge will provide more paper trail to allay this concern for entrants. The competition is still a very good idea in theory, and I hope Dr. Aeon persists.

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Congratulations minimalist. I especially enjoyed the DE office map, it looked perfect with your customs and the Lanaruu. I also spent about 20 minutes just wandering around the first mission checking out all the festival goers and trying to find that beer tent.

p.s. I used the Grandville map for my last mission of this challenge. In all my runs through it (and I ran through that mission more than any other), I did have a failed boss spawn, but just once. I have hardly anything on the map, so maybe that lowers my potential for incident.

Nuts. Yeah, that might be it, Eva -- I originally had the same problem with the first map (considering all the stuff I had going on in it!), except that the problem was consistent there, rather than occasional/random in this case.

I'll remove two battles and see if that helps. At the very least it may reduce the frequency of the bug (by freeing up 2 more non-broken spawns).

Thanks!

It'll tell you how many allowed bosses/battles/etc you'll be allowed on a particular map, just make sure you don't exceed that total.

Yeah, that was definitely the problem with the first map for a long time until I figured that out. The counter at the top would continue to list plenty of allowed boss objectives (close to 20!), and yet the Interlopers would never spawn.

It pretty much goes down your list, I think, since when I moved the Interlopers to the top of my objective list, they'd spawn, but they'd push off another 'flavor' boss or two.

I believe that was a problem with both the Carnival of Shadows - Commercial map (which I'm using now) and City Map 02, which I previously used.

edit:

\/\/\/\/\/\/ Yeah, but at least once, Neutrina failed to spawn (rescue). I'm removing one of the Grandville citizen rescues as well, to see if that helps too.

Battles use rescue or "any" locations. Not boss locations. Just an FYI.

Just to confirm, Dr. Aeon did play through all the arcs, and did not leave individual feedback on each arc (or a rating necessarily).We want to have more of these types of challenges, increasing the amount of work for each challenge is counter productive to that strategy.

I sympathize with those who have doubts and frustrations, but making sure all entries are judged fairly is very important to us and we wouldn't skip arcs that have been entered.

Auto-reply FTW. Easy, cheap, non-labour intensive. Do it.

On the subject of map spawn points, reading this thread has really taught me a few things. I've got a buggy first mission which played fine 5 times out of 5 for me, but two other players couldn't complete it due to a failed destructive object spawn. Think I might go take out a few zombies!

Earlier today I reduced the number of battles and 'Grandville Citizen' rescues by 1 each, and that seems to have done the trick. Everything spawned properly eight times in a row.

Hopefully that takes care of it.

You know, I wonder if that's the problem that mine was having on the last mission... the fact that the numbers stated in the map don't equal the reality. This bears further investigation.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

I would add that I sent in an arc as well, and was mystified that I didn't receive an acknowledgement of my entry.

So I sent in an email asking if my arc had been received, and I got no reply.

Lastly, I expected to see an announcement of the contest winner on the main CoH page, and it never appeared.

Those are all things that should be changed.

As for the winning entry, aside from congrats to the author I have two complaints for the judge.

One, the winning arc was already an award winner. Shouldn't arcs that have already received an honor be disallowed in competitions? I mean, I can already imagine the outcome of the next contest ... "Write an arc that makes humorous use of internet memes."

Two, didn't anyone else find the winning arc hugely implausible? I didn't finish it, partly due to bugs, but also because I lost interest. I thought the use of Dr. Aeon didn't work, I thought the "perpendicular dimension" concept didn't work, and I thought getting shoehorned into an "evil" act without exploring other recourses was the wrong move.

Here's my view ...

Heroism is a selflessness, a willingness to sacrifice one's own needs and desires for others. Evil is the opposite: a self-centeredness that typically causes others to sacrifice for your own needs and desires.

That's part of what makes a vigilante interesting story material, in that he says he's doing justice (for the greater good), but one wonders if he is merely exerting his own will upon others (selfishness)?

Now as far as I can see, the idea of a "hero who does evil for the greater good" isn't actually a reference to doing evil. Because you can't be selfish for the greater good. Anything you do for the greater good is ultimately selfless. So what we're really talking about here is a hero who breaks the law, who does something "bad" in the name of the greater good. He may pay a price for his good deed, if he comes under judgment, or he may gain acclaim yet feel torn by guilt. He might bear down and do the dirty deed to take the guilt upon himself so others might retain their innocence. He may also do the bad deed simply because it needs doing (for the greater good).

There are several permutations of this, as it's a common theme in literature. Heroes are tested to see if they have the courage to persevere in serving the greater good even if it means losing everything, including their reputation. Typically, the writer uses this conflict to heighten interest, and then bails the hero out at the end by providing something unexpected that saves the hero from having to pay the price. After all, we usually want a happy ending, we don't really want to see the hero lose everything.

I didn't see any of this sort of thing in the arc that won. As a hero player, I first off would not have allied myself with the notorious Dr. Aeon. I would not have been able to trust anything he said or did. If I took his claims of danger from a perpendicular dimension seriously, I would have contacted scientists, mages, and heroes higher in the chain than myself, as I was utterly ignorant of the nature of the problem and was being led by the nose by a villain. As for choosing to take the only option that Dr. Aeon gave me, well ... stupidity itself isn't evil, and neither was Dr. Aeon's preposterous solution to the problem. I figure that if there was information at the end of the arc (I couldn't finish it) about how wonderful the other dimension was, and how bad it was that it was destroyed, it would still only be tragic, not doing evil. Tragic, like a necessary operation on conjoined twins that takes the life of one of them, but not evil.

And if it turns out that Dr. Aeon was just using me to get me to do evil work ... well, if you don't realize you're doing something bad, it's not evil. It's a misfortune.

Anyway, that's my two inf.

N.B. I have not played the winning arc (or any of the arcs publicly mentioned as entries).

Quote:

Heroism is a selflessness, a willingness to sacrifice one's own needs and desires for others. Evil is the opposite: a self-centeredness that typically causes others to sacrifice for your own needs and desires.

This view of good and evil isn't likely to bear up under many real-world conditions.

Quote:

Now as far as I can see, the idea of a "hero who does evil for the greater good" isn't actually a reference to doing evil. Because you can't be selfish for the greater good. Anything you do for the greater good is ultimately selfless.

Consider a medical researcher trying to find a cure for, say, cancer. He decides to go the "mad science" route and uses techniques that will kill thousands of subjects. He's not doing it to heal the countless millions who would otherwise die without his cure. He's not even doing it for the money his research could earn him. He's doing it for the fame, even if it's infamy: "they can hate me until the end of time, but they'll have to remember me to do it".

Curing cancer is a greater good, but it's really hard to put a spin on our hypothetical researcher's motives to make them anything but selfish. Nor is it really possible to describe the totality of what he's doing as any kind of "good", even though people have gotten away with similar actions in the real world (members of WWII Japan's "Unit 731", which performed atrocities in the form of research on humans for bioweapons, were able to trade their findings for amnesty from war crimes prosecution). I think this example firmly challenges the notion that "anything done for the greater good is ultimately selfless".

Now, just to throw in a plug for my own stuff , while "The Christmas We Get" (#356477) wasn't written for the challenge (I had another arc in mind but RL got in the way; I might get back to it), it does have the kind of moral issue that was requested. I'd say it's more a case of "doing good for the greater evil", but I'd certainly be interested in your take on it, in light of your position....

I didn't think that the actions we had to perform in the winning arc were evil either. It was a matter of self-defense, as far as I could tell; I only played the arc once on a team so the details were a bit blurred. We had to destroy another dimension in order to survive.

We're not even sure if it was for the greater good, considering that our own dimension isn't exactly perfect. Maybe the other dimension was AWESOME, filled with great people and love and puppy dogs and kittens, with no evil and no bad people, no disease, old age or anything like that.

If so, we performed a great evil for a lesser good, but it was still self-defense. And under very few circumstances can anyone be blamed for acting in self-defense.

I think with something as subjective as the topic, and with one person's sole judgment, we're going to have this problem.

I knew that when I signed up for it, that it was basically a crapshoot if what my definition of the concept in question aligned with Aeon's. Going forward with other contests, it's going to be the same way. I don't have a problem with that, because having it defined any other way will result only in cookie cutter arcs and a stifling of creativity.

As a response to the last poster, no selfless=good, selfish=evil, is NOT a definition I accept. Even if the mad scientist did all that and gave the cure away, the ******* is STILL evil. Why? Cause there are dozens if not hundreds of folks doing LEGAL selfless work to cure cancer and are not killing folks.

So no, I do not agree with that definition. Definitions of good and evil are not that black and white in reality.