Eva Destruction

There is a Vigilante tip mission that does. That's it, as far as I know.

Does World Wide Red actually have a story? Yes, it does. Would it still have a story if you removed the giant robot? Yes, it would. Would the SSA still have a story if you removed the cheap gimmick of killing off a major character? Hmm, let's see...so far we have the Lost turning to magic to siphon off Synapse's powers...let's explore that shall we? No? Ooop, no. The arc is about killing off a signature character, not a schism within the ranks of the Lost. Ooo, a crazy Lovecraftian cult has shown up....shall we explore them, maybe? Find out why they've made themselves visible now, maybe find out what Rularuu's been up to for the last few years? Nope. Turns out they're only after Numina's proverbial bowling ball.

World Wide Red is a story. A story that could be told better with modern production values, as it were, but a solid story nonetheless. The SSA is a series of gimmicks. And it is in no way creative, since the very premise was stale years ago.

Except it doesn't work, because aside from the RWZ and Cimerora, there isn't any "current" content to do past level 30. Croatoa kind of exists in its own space blueside, so it's pretty much unaffected by recent developments, but it's still not enough to get you to 35. And if you consider the defeat of Hro'dtohz and the Honoree to be the end of the RWZ storyline, then that's already over and done with too, and the RWZ arcs are no longer current.

So, what is happening "right now?" The starter arcs, Graves and Twinshot, Death from Below, First Ward, the i17 redside clone arc, Vincent Ross, Roy Cooling, Admiral Sutter, Mortimer Kal, the SSAs, the Underground Trial and maybe the Keyes Trial. Cimerora deals with time travel so it might get a pass. Apex, Tin Mage, the i17 blueside clone arc, all the i18 Praetorian content, Lambda, and BAF are already outdated content. Your "current" career doesn't leave you with much to do, does it?

I have a backlog of lowbie AE arcs to run. That's what I'll be doing until level 5 with any new characters I make from now on. It'll also have the side benefit of allowing me to get out of Atlas very very quickly.

They can? Because when I did the mission three Midnighters pretty much kicked all their butts. I hardly got a chance to do anything. They had the advantage of surprise, so they managed to take out a few Midnighter goons and capture Percy (who hasn't captured Percy?) then got their butts thoroughly kicked once the Midnighters launched a coordinated defense.

Rularuu isn't stupid. He's going to wait until they free him, then he'll eat them.

We can dimension-hop, and he can't. So we're useful bugs. Rularuu has already tried to use our stuff, in the Dr. Q TF. So why not use our people too?

So, um, why not now? I get that you don't want to release them all at once in order to give each new DC a chance to be noticed, but let's face it, the majority of the playerbase isn't interested in a French arc. So we should have two this month. Or pick a German arc and make it three. Or four! More DCs!

Or start threads like this that are full of speculation and theories instead of complaining about bad writing. Some people might even want to use that Architect thingy I've heard so much about to expand on these loose ends themselves....it's funny how many of these "expanded storylines" involve having fire thrown at you though.

*Whistles innocently*

Praetoria is probably giving them ideas. Sure, there's that whole "a bunch of supers are in charge" thing, but once you get rid of the Praetors and start running the place yourself, those pesky commies won't stand a chance.

That's just another problem with all the new arcs; they're geared entirely for new players and have very little replay value. It's all "go here, talk to this guy, now go here, click this, read this, read this, oh, you finally get a mission, but it's full of more things you have to click and people to talk to and stuff to read." Once you've read it the first time, they're basically arcs full of the old and much beloved "defeat 30 Circle of Thorns and take the artifact to Azuria."

But you did imply otherwise. That's one part that does make sense to me--that Malta would use the Sky Raiders as cannon fodder or stooges. What doesn't make sense is the way they go about it. There should be no "Peter from Malta" or whatever the guy's name is, there should be no Zeus Titan. There would just be some mysterious employer who is never heard from again after your hero foils the plan, and any investigation as to his identity leads nowhere after numerous false leads....possibly with Indigo popping up and telling you to come talk to her when you're level 40 because if the people behind the plot are who she suspects they are it's too big for you to handle.

Malta? Neighborly? And maybe Recluse will do the neighborly thing and send all those Longbow at Agincourt a "welcome to the neighborhood" gift basket.

Malta tell you things on a need-to-know basis, and the Sky Raiders don't need to know. Besides, this arc clearly takes place after the Eternal Nemesis arc chronology-wise, even though it's before it level-wise (as in all instances where this happens, a bit of mental gymnastics is required), so Lockheart is gone. Nemesis may not be actively backing them at all anymore.

Silos is a flashback and wouldn't need to be rewritten. The only thing that would be at all difficult to rewrite would be Twinshot's arc.

Yes, because the Storm Elementals are very cool. The SSA so far has nothing to do with the Coming Storm.

So Nemesis, Requiem and Recluse walk into a bar....

The Sky Raiders are mercenaries. Nemesis provides them with stuff and uses them as pawns in some of his plots, but that doesn't mean they're in any way loyal to him.

It's worse.

It's because the new stories aren't engaging. There is too much yakking and people go on text overload. There are too many custom mechanics that put the action on pause for too long and too often. Praetoria had about the right mix of reading and killing stuff, fancy mechanics and straightforward maps full of bad guys, but the starter arcs and the SSAs are more "look what we can do!" than "how can we tell a good story and make it fun to play?"

Because I'd imagine the starter content has a crappy XP/time ratio. The people you see farming DFB are also the people who want to team, and the starter arcs are crap for teaming. The DFB is easy to find a team for, so people who want to team run DFB, so DFB is easy to find a team for, blah blah blah.

Level 20 was the "magic level" for so long that vets are probably still mentioning it, and new players might be picking up on that, maybe?

You can play with SOs, but you can't "win" with SOs, unless you are a really really good player. Completing all your missions on base difficulty is no longer the definition of "win," and I think more and more new content will be tailored to IO builds. Look at the problems people had with Trapdoor.

Considering how easy it is to fix textual errors in our own piss-poor AE editor, yes, yes it would.

And considering how quick many AE authors (amateurs, writing missions for their own entertainment) are to fix such errors when they are pointed out to them by a helpful commenter, the professionals who write missions for money have no excuse.

How....how do you talk in the big font in global channels like that?

Well he did write a book about them, and the first rule of Rulu-Shin is "you do not write books about Rulu-Shin," or something like that.
The SSA paints the Rulu-Shin as wanting to be eaten, whereas Darrin Wade at the end of his arc seems to think that Rularuu will reward him somehow. While being eaten might be a reward to a member of a crazy dimension-devourer-worshipping cult, Darrin doesn't seem particularly unhinged, just power-hungry.

This is entirely possible, since Rularuu likely thinks of everyone in our dimension as condiments.

No, I think it's a good example of why Posi's take on game writing is problematic. It takes a lot less work to just do the research and make sure new canon doesn't explicitly or implicitly contradict old canon than to revamp the entire freaking game.

It still doesn't make sense that they would go out themselves to meet the most powerful meta-human threats in existence and possibly be captured and interrogated when they have highly trained and loyal minions who can't reveal what they don't know to give those powerful weapons and gear to, such as Yosemite Sam in the RSF. Gyrfalcon is a last-minute kludge fix in a train wreck of a task force, and Director 11 is only there because the devs wanted to throw a difficult enemy at us. The mechanics wrote that plot, and I don't think Positron really cared about how out-of-character it was as long as the mine-layers worked properly.

They needed one new zone, with half hero missions and half villain missions. They could have even gone the SSA route and had mirrored content. Sure, we would have ended up with less content for any one single character, but overall it would have been just as much content. The only players who would have received less content would have been the ones who play one side exclusively, and that's entirely their own choice. With co-op content though, only heroes really get new content. Villains get to access it as an afterthought.

The portal back to the Rogue Isles does not vanish though. It's not strictly a meta-game thing. It is real, the contacts acknowledge it, and successful content would immediately provide answers to the question "why don't I take it?"

But the truth about the Rikti has been in the game from the very beginning. You just need to run the appropriate arc to learn it. If someone chose not to run the appropriate arc, and learn everything they could about an enemy group before incorporating the group into their backstory, no amount of openness with information is going to fix that. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it removes all the depth from the game world. This is Praetoria's problem. Everything is neatly wrapped up by level 20 and the world seems very shallow as a result. It's also why you don't see as many AE arcs about Carnies as you would expect, given the group's popularity; their story is done. When you tie up all the loose ends in a neat little bow, you leave nothing for future content to build on.

It isn't for the lulz. It is because they are utterly convinced that they know what is best. And that is why they are scary; you can't argue with a fanatic.

Because whoever is writing these missions is either totally missing the point of the Malta group and reducing them to a generic capekiller paramilitary group on purpose, either to "scare" your character or because they couldn't think of another enemy group to use in a specific mission, or just didn't do the research. Crimson and Indigo are old contacts, and are still talking about the old-school Malta group which is actually a really freaking scary concept rather than just another enemy group that is trying to kill you.

Edit: I didn't read Sam's post before replying but now that I have read it I agree with everything he said except the part about First Ward, which I haven't played yet.

You forgot "alot" (this may actually show up somewhere, I don't recall off the top of my head), and my personal (un)favorite, "rediculous."

"Internet grammar trifecta" is right up there with "Wheel of Time trilogy" as far as understatements go.

Really? Because unlike the SG channel, global channels will reach members who are playing on another server, on the other faction, or on a character who is in a different SG. I know of several SGs that have their own global channel for that reason.

Maybe the aspect in charge of the eyeballs is covered in them.

The clue in the SSA seemed to say that the eyeballs were simply the favored of Rularuu, which kinda makes sense. Sending them to our dimension is kinda like his version of the Food Network.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "official," so much as a symbol that instantly evokes Rularuu. Plus it is very creepy. Rularuu is watching youuuuu.