Dr. Graves hurts my brain...

I'm guessing this particular instance is someone trying to follow the non-rule of "never end a sentence with a preposition".

Actually, it was written for the standard type of Villain - just like the new Mercy content is written for the standard type of Villain.

Non-rule, indeed And, really, as a non-native speaker, these just aren't things I should be holding people to task with as most of the time I'm simply told "that's just how some people speak." This one, in particular, stood out to me as the last in a long line of other such poorly planned sentences sprinkled throughout the arcs' briefings, clues and most notably dialogues. It may be nit-picky of me to be annoyed by these, but they make the arc come off as unpolished, crude and rushed, which drastically lowers my tolerance for the other, more subtle and subjective shortcomings.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The arcs fail at their jobs is insignificant?

Would that they were fun missions, but that's the final nail in the coffin - they aren't fun. Like the new tutorial, the actual missions are a waste of space because they don't allow me to do anything. Half of them are entirely and solely dialogue and the ones that aren't only have a couple of spawns in them. Other than the couple of showdowns with Zephyr and Dollhouse's mansion, almost all of them take place on tiny maps with a handful of spawns an tons and tons of fiddly objectives, one of which I managed to break by speaking with a Skull captive before the game expected me to do so.

As missions, neither Dr. Graves' nor Twinshots' arcs are any fun. They are slow, plodding, gimmick missions that have me read text for hours on end and hide all the action from me. The only fun to be had with them is the narrative, and when that narrative is insulting, there's nothing else left in the arc to enjoy. The combat certainly isn't any fun, since I have to wait half an hour just to run through five spawns of something.

I praised Veluta Lunata's arc recently, and the contrast couldn't be sharper. All Veluta ever required me to do was go inside a large instance and then find a boss or an objective and either kill it or click it, respectively. What happened in-between was pure City of Heroes - solid, balanced fights that didn't interrupt the action with more gimmicks. THAT was the game I fell in love with.

For all their talking, it's amazing how neither Twinshot nor Dr. Graves spend much time talking about the game's mechanics that they're supposed to be teaching. I'm starting to feel like I'm watching TNA Wrestling here.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Easy now, I don't think anything in this game is /that/ bad.

No, no, no, of course not! Nothing is as bad as a two-hour wrestling show with six minutes of wrestling in it

No, but I mean that in the sense that little by little, the talking time is starting to encroach on the wrestling time in City of Heroes in a similar way. I like complex game mechanics as much as the next guy, and I do - believe it or not - really appreciate dialogue trees. But I also want action out of my gameplay. You know - a little less conversation, a little more action, please. I don't mind long talking scenes if that's what a story demands, but I'd also like to see long gameplay scenes in-between, and the newer style of mission design doesn't really seem to account for that.

I can understand this being the case in a tutorial arc if much of this talking... If the talking were about tutorial stuff, but it's not. And it worries me that this is considered great design because the development team has started outright removing older missions from the game and replacing them with new ones, and if more talking than action is to be the standard of new arcs, this has me REALLY concerned. Especially if said talking makes my character sound like a hollow-head caricature of a proper person written by someone who wanted to make me as low-brow as the rest of the intentionally-contemptible cast.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Or maybe you giving it unnecessary scrutiny is the problem?

I'm sorry, Venture and Sam, but you guys aren't the barometer for how the normal playerbase will like and accept these arcs.

It was never set up as a "DO THESE ARCS AND YOU WILL CHANGE CLASSIC ROCK FOREVER" type deal where you leave knowing the game in and out. They were set up as arcs that put you headfirst into story arcs with different kinds of objectives (which they have), different kinds of boss encounters (which it has), and also sends you to some places that a lot of new players might not know about.

Sure, you and Sam know where to go to change your mission difficulty. But maybe the new players coming won't. And this teaches them at just the right time in their leveling career to use it so they aren't putting themselves on +4/x8 at level 4.

May I recommend you guys write a better arc? Because I have yet to see anything you two have written that's even on the same level of fun this arc provided for me.

And there is the problem: they weren't fun to YOU.

I had a blast doing them as a level 50. I liked the new characters. I liked interacting with people doing actual villainous things for a change in Mercy Isle. I liked that there was a telegraphed twist at the end instead of just another Longbow EB like so many villain arcs have.

I'm sorry it didn't meet some huge checklist of expectations you had in your mind, but you are but one player. And I am one player. So both of our opinions cancel each other out.

Also: you have spent longer ranting about this arcs than it takes to actually play them. You could have spent this time doing something, you know, fun. Unless ranting about insignificant things is how you find fun.

I loved them too - I really like NPCs with personality

Since when are Sam and Venture people being paid by Paragon Studios to write arcs?

This is a case where they can actually back up their words and prove to us they can write a better arc with better characters instead of hiding behind a keyboard and ranting because a preposition is in the wrong place for 3 pages.

So I'm saying it: put up or, heaven forbid, shut up.

You've been around these forums for how long, now, that you question this?

You mean that ranting about insignificant things isn't why most of us made forum accounts in the first place?

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I made mine to interact with outher players - I don't do ranting

I'll buy that, it's not so much ranting as trolling in your case.

In any case, I said "most of" so it doesn't disprove my statement at all.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

What, with the AE that is currently broken on so many levels, censors common, everday words, and has about 60% LESS tools than the Devs have at their disposal?

Give me their damn toolset and I'll make arcs for FREE, ANYTHING to get rid of some of the dross that's still in game. And that's not even mentioning the railroading in Graves.

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.

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

Okay, now I have to make the companion thread to my "Which story arcs/missions do you find most emotionally engaging?" thread... and this time find out which ones people think just outright SUCK (in terms of writing). Just because I'm sadistically curious to see which ones top the list (and why).

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

The arcs send you to learn about trainers at level 5. LEVEL FREAKING 5, MAN, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? THAT'S RIGHT, EVERYTHING!

This is not unnecessary scrutiny. Everything these arcs teach is taught too late. Even your example, the difficulty adjustors: you are sent to them by these arcs in the 15-20 bracket, but in the 10-15 bracket you are forced to go talk to one by your Contacts! The arcs don't teach about Detectives or Brokers until 15-20, too, by which point the player, assuming he didn't already know about them, will have missed two Safeguard or Mayhem missions he can never make up without begging for help. For villains that means missing pieces of an accolade with +5% HP. Tailors are in the same bracket, except you're told about them as soon as you leave the tutorial. You get a lead on the invention system in the 10-15 section, except the trainers tell you about it when you train level 10 and you get a pop-up Contact with a tutorial mission. And on and on and on. Failing at the putative purpose of the work is legitimate grounds for condemnation, as it turns out. We don't even have to go into the litany of sins committed by the actual stories, such as they are.

This is aside from the fact that anything these arcs have to teach could have been done more effectively with Pop-Up Help. Remember that? The devs didn't.

I already have. Seven of them, in fact. You just can't play three of them thanks to the crackheaded text filter. I would daresay, actually, that of the 150 or so arcs I reviewed in MA, very few were actually worse than these.

But are they really better?

Yes. But that isn't saying much.

No.

You would like to think so, but your arcs rely on just as much cliche and tropes as you are attack the writer of these arcs of using.

Of course they rely on tropes. Tropes are tools, not cliches. There is no such thing as a tropeless tale.

I did not employ any cliches. You will have to show your work to claim otherwise.