Eva Destruction

Could you hold off on 161629 until tomorrow? I'm doing some tweaks to it today.

I've seen it once. I didn't expect it either, but it made sense in the context of the story.

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Well when we only get three slots each, many authors want to make each one count. Personally a single-mission arc feels like a waste of a slot to me. If we didn't have that limitation then I would make some short ones as well.

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While that is the case, there is such a thing as too much. After all, there're quite a few people who think Robert Jordan stretched out the Wheel of Time too far.

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Yes, he did. Because he put in a bunch of boring crap that nobody cared about and had nothing to do with the main story. If you make a 5-mission arc and mission 3 and 4 go off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the main story, then you have the Wheel of Time of MA. But if every mission builds on the one before, every mission contributes to the story, then there's nothing wrong with using 5 missions.

I think the keyword here is "unlike most people." We really need to have AVs and EBs automatically show up in the description. So many people don't bother to warn about them.

Yay for challenge, I say. I totally fight these guys on squishies. I love being able to say "My blaster pwns Malta." Only solo though. On teams you usually end up with seven people ganging up on the lone sapper and then wondering why half your squishies are spending the whole fight doing the drunk-walk. Those ginormous AoE 30-second stun grenades are just...ugh.

There is that too. So many people feel their epic has to culminate with an AV fight that everyone comes to expect ALL long arcs will have one. I specifically put "solo-friendly, no AVs or EBs" in the description for my 5-mission arc that doesn't have them. If I see this in someone else's arc (or if I see that the author has a different arc up that is "not solo-friendly" and warns about it) I will be more likely to play it, especially if I'm on a squishy.

I just played "Future Imperfect". I'd just like to mention here that the author takes his own advice on custom groups. They're not overpowered, they're varied, and they don't have multiple stacking "annoying" powers. I'll PM you a more detailed critique.

Argh, that thing about the settings I did not know. I don't want the escort to be failed, since it'll fail the whole mission, and combat allies tend to be dumb aggro magnets....

Maybe I'll make her passive, say that she's been wounded by her captors and that's why she can't fight, and just suggest to the player that they should beat her up. Give you the option of being a big jerk.

Oh good. The custom group is pretty much all set to Standard, all smash/lethal/energy damage without heavy debuffs or mezzing, they're not meant to be too tough, it's the AV I worry about. The last patch gave him Total Focus, on Standard, at level 25. He does more damage than he used to, my own test Scrapper had to guzzle insps to win.

Ok, I don't owe you, but I'll run it anyway. People who give other people feedback and exposure in these review threads deserve at least something in return, IMO.

I didn't know they followed you. Thanks. The mission will have additional objectives, and the escort will be in the front, and it's a villainous mission, with the escort only helping you because she believes that "the enemy of the enemy is my friend," it would be pretty easy to establish through the dialogue that you are in fact just as evil, if not worse than her captors and prompt her to turn on you.

I'm trying in this arc to include villainous alternatives to "beat the tar out of everybody and hope somebody talks."

It's also not available until you enter the mission. So you have to wait for the leader to read, and then they have to wait for everybody else to read.

In response to some of your comments:
1) "Stop looking at me like that" refers to the fact that setting up a base in a volcano is stupid and cliched, the contact knows this, the player knows this, the villains for some reason don't seem to. (note that my VG base is in fact in a volcano). It's hot, it's stinky, and the one on Striga isn't completely dead either. You're right though, it should be reworded.

2) Burkholder is present because at some point because at some point in my myriad revisions between conception and publication he was far more relevant. I left him in mostly to tie in to the Hess TF, and because your ability to solo him used to be an indication of your ability to solo the end AV. The first mission is the next up for revision, I might take him out entirely, and make the main goal extracting the captive.

3) The Hess reference refers to his thinly veiled (in retrospect) hints as to who he's actually working for, at the end of Burkholder's TF. I don't want that particular group's dirty pawns all over my giant robot, but I felt they might at least deserve a mention.

I'm glad you liked it, thank you for commenting on the parts that could use fixing.

I realized I owe you a play and some feedback, based on an earlier post you made, so I will do that some time in the next few days.

We are constantly told we have interrogated the boss we just beat up, actually read whatever we found in a blinky, let a hostage go, etc.

I know it'll be tricky to pull off. I wanted essentially a boss defeat where the boss talks before you beat them up, rather than after, but I guess that's not doable.

Is there any way to make defeating the escort a required mission objective? I'm trying to make a mission where instead of the escort betraying you, the wording has you betraying the escort...but it doesn't work so well if the escort attacks you and the player chooses to run away.

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Yeah, but a Rikti with cat ears is just gonna look weird, y'know?

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I've always thought that Rikti: No Sense Of Humor. The Rikti forces are all dressed the same in those nice armored uniforms... then look at how the humans dress. That really has to drive the Rikti military commanders nuts, seeing a bunch of goofballs in tights and cat ears walking all over them.

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Yeah and then look at how the human military dresses. If we ever get to go to the Rikti homeworld, I demand to see Rikti in tights and cat ears!

Wait....do the Rikti have cats?

Most of the single mission joke arcs are lazy. They're essentially paper missions, only instead of beating up a guy because he's evil or called you out you're beating him up because (insert joke here). They don't bother to go beyond that, thinking that the joke is enough to carry what is essentially a bunch of guys waiting to be beaten up.

Yeah well, you know what? I'm a player. I play long arcs. I prefer to play long arcs. It's easy to keep me interested for one mission, but if you can hold my interest throughout your five-mission epic, you've done a good job, and I think you should be rewarded with a play and a good rating.

If we're going to be catering to the tastes of the majority of the playerbase, I guess we should all be writing single-mission joke arcs full of Rikti, 5th Column and easy custom critters with cute costumes and funny bios. Since that seems to be where the tastes of the playerbase lie.

Yeah, but people who might normally think an arc where you solve riddles is cool might automatically skip any arc flagged as a "challenge." And if you don't flag it as a challenge and then throw in an ambush with multiple bosses a lot of people will rate it low.

You don't need justification to beat on Hardcase I'd say he's definitely a melee, possibly DM/WP or DM/Invul.

As for Dark Watcher, yeah, the ParagonWiki article does imply that he's Illusion/FF.

I believe there is a bank building in the North end of Cap, which the WSPDR map is a piece of. Not sure if the bank is actually on the map, but it would work. The Steel Canyon hero statue map could also be said to be near a bank, since Steel is a business district, although the actual Steel Canyon bank mayhem/safeguard map is pretty far from hero statue area.

I'm pretty sure that cap is per mission, not per arc. If it's per arc, it's shouldn't be. If it is per mission, the fact that people think it's per arc is problematic in and of itself, possibly stemming from the fact that "mission" and "arc" are so often used interchangeably when referring to the MA.

Ok I've worked in some of your suggestions. I've got two custom Crey minions of the guys in black suits with machine guns variety happily pushing my file size up to the near-limit I'm used to working with, and I'm crossing my fingers that the custom group doesn't get messed up at some point. I also added a non-required Crey boss to that mission, just to have him complain about the KoA scaring off Crey's target, and changed the Malta boss's text to complain about Crey's incompetence. Also tweaked the KoA dialogue in the second mission to make it clearer that they don't know why the Freaks are there and aren't happy about it. It has been pointed out to me that just because I know Crey hires the Freaks doesn't mean everyone else knows.

The "Men in Black" in the title actually refers to the Malta...who technically wear blue, but I think of it as comic-book black. I wanted to call it "Freaks, Geeks and Gunslingers" but the stupid swear filter won't let me use "slingers" in a title. Which is stupid.

I'll also be working in some of the other stuff, to give more background as well as some closure. This is why it's good to get some perspective from someone who doesn't normally get into this kind of story; just because you don't like Malta doesn't mean your team leader doesn't, and I want to make this as enjoyable for everyone as possible, without losing the basic feel of the story.

Maybe if it was made more obvious that later missions in a longer arc give more tickets, it would give people randomly sifting through arcs some incentive to try the longer ones.

My need to do actual arcs is so far overriding my need for badges. I think also as the novelty of MA wears off and people start using it less for badging and more for levelling, longer arcs may become more popular, especially as there are more and more ways to promote the ones we actually put effort into. I know I've been doing more of them, mostly ones I find through the forums and the SFMA tag.

AH, that's what it is. Does this apply to self-only powers as well?