Night Calls The Weaver - Dr. Aeon's 2nd Challenge (Arc # 375420)

Level Range: 5-10
Morality: Heroic
Description: A chance meeting with an old woman on the streets of King's Row leads your hero into a plot 23 years in the making... and into the forgotten story of a heroine who deserves to be remembered.

Anyone who has a chance to give me a playthrough, I'd appreciate it.

- I haven't done the formatting yet. I will be working on that over the next couple of days, so you may if you run it, you may run into a 'half-formatted, half-not' sort of thing.
- There are a couple of custom Hellion bosses in missions 3-4. If they are too brutal, let me know.
- There will probably be typos. I haven't run over it with a fine tooth comb yet.
- Pay attention to the busy text. I am trying something with it in this arc I haven't tried before.
- Same with the narrative structure. It might tend to annoy CoH mission traditionalists.

Hopefully, you will have some fun with it and enjoy the story.

- S12

I really enjoyed this arc. It was fun to play, and I love the picture you painted of the Weaver.

I especially enjoyed what you did with the still busy text.

Great job! Good luck in the contest.

A few alterations based on playthroughs over the last few days:

- Altered the color scheme and the formatting of some of the text elements based on comments by StratoNexus. Hopefully, the new color scheme will be less harsh on the eyes.

- Scrapped all of the original Mission Begin clues and replaced them with the 'Still Busy' text from each of the mission. There was a lot of discussion about this during the long run through of the arc on Sunday. After seeing the reaction to the arc from various types of people, by far the most negative or indifferent reactions have been from people who were in teams, but not the team leader. This gives me the impression that the original 'Still Busy' text for each mission was more integral to providing context to the story than I initially believed it would be.

Strangely enough, I notice no drop off from losing all of the original Mission Begin clues, leading me to think that the text contained in those clues was probably irrelevant padding of the story.

- Fixed numerous typos, word repetitions, and other mechanical errors. Undoubtedly some still remain.

- Players have mentioned that they think the individual characters might be more memorable if I gave them supervillain names versus the real world names that they currently have. I think it's a stylistic type of difference, but if others mention the same thing, I will consider altering it.

- Tangler mentioned that one of the optional objectives in the 2nd mission might have been glitched because he could not find it. None of my playtests have encountered this problem. I also ran it 3 times tonight specifically looking for that and easily found both optional objectives on all 3 run throughs. If anyone else encounters this problem, let me know.

Thank you to everyone who has played it thus far. So far the run times have ranged from relatively short... 45 minutes... all the way up to 2 1/2 hours, which was greatly influenced by the fact we were running in a group that was providing lots of discussion and commentary along with looking heavily for typos. ((Extra thanks to the three in the MA group who did that runthrough with me.))

Interesting changes, applied as I was playing. Fed back in PM. Good luck in the contest!

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!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

Concerns raised by last night's playthroughs:

- Airhead notes that some of the color choices and textual formatting makes certain things hard to read. I agree. Unfortunately the number of color choices are fairly limited and about half of them, especially those that require you to place dark text on a dark background if you use them, are virtually unusable. Using red for anything denotes certain things to most players, most often 'DANGER.' So using red as a default is probably not a good idea. I will look at what's available.

He also mentioned that changing the newspaper articles to clues gave him the feel that the player was taking them. I am not sure. I don't necessarily perceive a 'clue' as something that is always in the character's physical possession, so much as something the character has learned. I do think the comment that he was not sure whether the articles actually belong as clues might be valid. However, like I said in a prior post, the majority of the less positive reviews were coming from players that were in teams, but not the leader. It might be coincidental, but I think the reactions were partially driven by the fact that the articles are necessary due to providing context the player would otherwise not have.

- Airhead also noted that there was a CoT patrol at the doorway of mission 3. I have not seen this, but I could easily see it happening. The only way to have 2 factions populating a specific mission is to have 1 faction as the default and have the other faction as several groups of patrols.

Since the Hellions are probably the easier of the two groups populating that mission, (as long as you are solo and there are no bosses, Damned are no joke at 5-10), it might be best to have the CoT as stationary and have the Hellions as the patrols.

- Another player mentioned that The Weaver was the original leader of Arachnos. I know. However the only references I can find to this character are a blurb in Paragon Wiki and in Recluse's description in the signature villains section. Both essentially say the same thing. A character called The Weaver was the original leader of Arachnos.

Obviously we are not dealing with the same character, but it's interesting to not that both my creation and The Weaver who was the leader of Arachnos seem to have emerged in the post-WWII world. These days, a lot of attention is paid to trying to make character names unique.

However comic books in general are replete with examples of characters with duplicate names. And I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that one person in the United States and another person in Italy both decided use the name 'The Weaver' independently during the same period of time.

As it stands, especially with Oroborous, there may come a time when the developers decide to expand and go back into the past and flesh out The Weaver who originally ran Arachnos. At that point, I may run into a situation where I have to decide whether to Donna's name or not. Right now, though, I don't think she's really swimming upstream against a bunch of history. She's basically only swimming upstream against a sentence. And I can deal with that.

- I am considering toning down the difficulty of the ambushes across the board. Right now, the ambushes are hitting pretty hard against all of the playtesters I've played with.

Some further ideas (no spoilers):

Colors

Colors are denoted in hexadecimal. You can create millions of colours this way. As examples:
magenta = #FF00FF = FF red, 00 green, FF blue
Also note that FFFFFF = white, 000000 = black. So making numbers higher makes them lighter. Reviewing our magenta, the red and blue is already maximum (FF - hexadecimal for 255 decimal). So we can consider raising the 'green' part:
FF33FF, FF66FF, FF99FF, FFBBFF, FFDDFF, FFFFFF
Use Microsoft Paint or other program to access a color wheel for quick color selection. Or simply experiment. I am experimenting here in the forum with 'preview post'.

If I use: --> [color=#FF00FF]magenta[/color]
This gives me: --> magenta
And I would use it in an arc in the format: --> <color #FF00FF>magenta</color>

The web also has lots of pages showing hexadecimal color examples, such as: this, then you can further tweak the color from a web example (as above) to get it perfect.

Patrol
This was a surprise, but not a problem. Being at the exit means I can run away

Articles
I guess I read my clues inside the mission, so the context given that I'm outside reading my clue was mildly confusing. But I also agree with making arcs team-friendly where practical.

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!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

YOU WON!

Aeon just posted the announcement a couple minutes ago.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite