Heraclea

I ignore it.

The more interesting a story is, the likelier it becomes that someone will dislike it. People are just going to like and dislike different things. Trying to please everybody is a recipe for boredom.

The more innovative and strategic you make your gameplay, the likelier it is that the player just sent to the hospital will quit in disgust and give you a rating born of anger and frustration.

Badges won by ratings are nice, but I expect my progress is going to be slow.

A Gothic cathedral

The suburbs

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Post Deleted by Moderator_08

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Now, the original intent was not to evangelize for a political opinion, only to play with the forums theme of Lesbian Hellions. Politics only appeared on the scene when I was forced into explaining why this story was not in fact some kind of attempt to stir up hate for lesbians or anybody else.

I don't think that serious themes are off limits in MA, either. Tongue in cheek humor is more my shtick, but "Who is Kidnapping the World's Great Philosophers" has a serious as well as a funny side.

I think that boughten items like the Magic pack automatically are turned on at MA when you buy them for characters. I know I didn't have to buy them with tickets. It doesn't work the other way around, though.

Customer service is exactly right. I would never publish an arc in which heroes beat up lesbians because they were lesbians. These, of course, were Lesbian Hellions, doing the sort of things other gangs in the city do - mostly kidnapping and recruiting.

And it turns out - if you got far enough into the story to get to the last mission - that the heroes who were "converted" by lesbian hellions ended up not minding all that much. This was one of the running gags in the story, telegraphed by one of the victims in the first missio as well.

FWIW, in my next story ("Cathedral of Mild Discomfort") a few reformed Lesbian Hellions appear during the jailbreak and sewer missions - as allies. If you read their descriptions, you will learn their ultimate fate, which is not too bad. Since they aren't enemies, if that story gets banned on account of their presence, some new rationale will need to be invented.

Right now, that arc has been pulled - I replaced it with "Jerk Hackers!" Here, you just get to beat up Americans. They do even more to deserve it. I will, one day, want to cycle Lesbian Hellions back in, and it was one of my most polished and well received stories.

I tend to put very brief jokes into my mob descriptions. F.E. in my most recent arc, one enemy is an "American Woman". Her description? "Stay away from me!"

Clues seem to be team unfriendly: they are readable by the clicker, but do not appear for anyone else as far as I know.

This is why I consider the mission exit popup to be the single most valuable piece of text property in the MA. I always try to make mine contain a brief synopsis of the significance of the mission you just finished. It pops up for everybody, who has to look at it just to click it to make it go away.

Arc Name: Jerk Hackers!
Arc ID: 162482
Faction: Heroic
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Heraclea
Difficulty Level: Moderate; custom mobs, no EB, no AV
Synopsis: Don't let them go to the Americans!
Estimated time to play: 3 missions. Less than an hour.

I went ahead and pulled "Monstrous Regiment of Lesbian Hellions" late tonight. It wasn't doing anybody any good in its current state, though I hope some day to be able to republish it. Like I've said before, at some point I am probably going to have to start cycling stories anyways.

The replacement tale is "Jerk Hackers!" - a serious moral fable where you learn of the grave consequences that follow when Jerk Hackers start duping rares and gold. Don't let them go to the Americans! You are of course invited to play it and let me know your thoughts.

You can buy TOs at all levels. You can, if you wish, buy level 50 TOs, which no longer exist in the game otherwise. 41-49 TOs make good tokens for AH inf transfers.

Line breaks in mission intros are automatically turned into <br><br>, I believe. All you have to do is put them in while typing in the windows. I suppose they could be inserted manually also.

An interesting idea. I *think* it is possible to spawn some things by collections rather than by defeating something. Not sure if the possible targets include other collections.

It would have to be a *very* small map, as well, otherwise you may force the player to backtrack to find the next clue, given the unpredictability of front/middle/back.

I think that creating a map requires defining an enemy group: so you would have to fill every possible spawn point with friendlies.

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However I did think that the story could have been offensive to lots of people. It wasn't over the top enough to be immediately identifiable as parody.

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Well, if this is true, perhaps it's not worth the trouble.

I did have a response waiting for me this afternoon, though. It appears that the story was "inappropriate content that involved going out to defeat enemies because of their sexual orientation."

Seen through that lens, obviously I never would have made it myself. The fact that they're also Hellions scheming to take over the city apparently makes no difference. Much less, that it was based on forum lore - not everyone is familiar with it and no one can be expected to know it.

I may send a note to Niviene about this. Not sure what else can be done, except perhaps for one of the devs to notice it and like it. I apparently still can unpublish it, but will leave it sitting until I have something to replace it, in the odd chance that someone will take notice and achieve a happier ending. I thought about importing one of my old Test stories there, but all of those are longer and have playability issues for squishies.

And there is a point that is larger than my silly little story. The procedure set forth by Positron apparently requires the writer to put one of his slots at hazard if they seek review of complained-about arcs by the announced procedure for having them reviewed. This seems unfair, at least to authors who are not creating exploit missions but trying in good faith to create the sort of material that Positron seems to want.

It is true, it used to be different - but it was changed several patches ago, not in the most recent patch. Don't remember it being in a note, either.

If I'm soloing in the MA, I always use a tanker or scrapper.

I'm a bit confused here. I don't think you can select lieutenants or minions from supplied non-custom characters to be the must-defeat character in a boss event. I think you can do that with custom characters in a custom group. For non-custom characters in custom groups, I'm not sure off the top of my head but don't think so.

I'm not sure what this has to do with flavor text, though. NPC chat is readable by all players who choose to read it. This includes boss chat. When I want mobs to speak flavor text, I create patrols, which will speak it reliably.

Mission exit statements are a powerful tool. I try to add a brief synopsis explaining the significance of the previous mission to every mission. This way, the player has to click it to make it go away, whether they read it or not.

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To be fair that arc did have a fair bit of suggestive content

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I'm not sure it had all that much more suggestive content than a number of bikini ninja arcs I've played and enjoyed. At least the Lesbian Hellions wore more clothes.

But those, of course, were heterosexually suggestive. And I'm not about to start griefing other people's stories with hypocritical complains in the name of equal treatment.

If that's what's going on, I'm willing - aye, eager - to raise a humongous stink about it.

The problem with that is that the front / middle / back selections are very unpredictable, and don't work at all on some maps. You might be making the player backtrack quite a ways finding the next item.

It is possible to chain boss fights exactly that way, but you still run into the problem of sending the player looking for the boss.

Like I said, I knew the story was not for everybody, and am not really surprised that some people complained. But if the Lesbian Hellions joke can go on for several months on these boards, I didn't figure that a story depicting Lesbian Hellions would be "inappropriate" in the MA.

An arc of mine ("Monstrous Regiment of Lesbian Hellions, 27178) showed up banned last night. The notice said that it had been banned by a GM, for "inappropriate content."

While the arc had several complaints, from people who didn't like the story --- and some of the old complaints had been taken into account, and used as the basis for improvements --- as far as I can tell no new complaints had been registered. With the same number of complaints, the arc is now banned where it was not before.

It was my understanding that complaints automatically banned arcs after a certain number had been received, and that republication cleared the ban and flagged it for human review. This arc, though, was banned one day and clear the day before, without any increase in complaints. I have petitioned the ban, and gotten no substantive response. I can only conclude either that:

- The ratio of complainers to players has been changed; or
- The technology to pull arcs automatically was not implemented until yesterday; or
- The arc has in fact been reviewed by human reviewers, and filing a petition about it is just spitting into the wind.

My concern, simply is this, from Positron's most recent post:

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Q) “What if people who have a grudge against me complain about my arc and get it banned? Why should I permanently lose a slot over that?”
A) The first time your arc is pulled because of complaints, you do NOT lose the slot. If you get an arc banned and you do lose the slot, your only option at that point is to contact Customer Support. They are the gatekeepers to the slots, and can give you your slot back if it was banned in error.

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If I republish the story, and it is reviewed (either again or for the first time) and determined to be "inappropriate", does that mean that I permanently lose a slot because the first ban was not "in error?"

This is not some exploit farm mission; it's a story that some players didn't like. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in it that violates the ToS. There is no explicit sex. Some thought it was "gay-bashing", when in fact it is making fun of anti-gay propaganda, and the whole "recruiting" business. Some people with this complaint might not have played far enough into it to see that. Some may not have grasped from the title that you'd be fighting Lesbian Hellions in the arc.

Other complaints were obviously meritless, like the one who claimed that "children" should be shielded from the mention of lesbians and gays. If this is the case, not only my story but a large number of super groups on my home server (Victory) are in danger.

In short, while the arc's perspective and humor may not be for everyone, as far as I can tell I did not clearly violate any explicit policy I knew of. The arc seemed to be generally well liked and positive feedback outweighed the negative. Even if several of the complainers zero-starred the arc, it still had a four star rating.

I fully acknowledge that the final decision is not mine. If after actual review the arc is determined by Paragon to be inappropriate, I'm prepared to take it down - if I still can. The current problem is: the current stated policy suggests that if you republish to seek review of an arc with complaints, and the complaints are found to be valid, you automatically lose a story slot, and will only get the slot back if the ban was "in error".

I have other stories I want to publish - at some point I'm going to have to start cycling them - and do not want to risk this. I need some assurance here that I will not be running this risk by following the stated procedure after a complaint-generated ban.

I got four or five email notices to my registered address that said that I had new private messages here, and to log into the forums to see them.

When I was finally able to log in here, there is no trace of them.

Steal the candy from Baby New Year. Beat up Gandhi and Mister Rogers. Then go kill Santa Claus.

She's a contact - so she can be used as a hostage but not an ally.

If you want her to fight you or fight alongside you, she's fairly easy to remake with standard issue costume pieces.

Arc Name: The Cathedral of Mild Discomfort
Arc ID: 153712
Faction: Heroicl
Creator Global/Forum Name: Heraclea
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Synopsis: What mad scheme could motivate the 5th Column and its Roman allies to attack the world's greatest warriors?
Estimated Time to Play: 1 hour

Felicem diem natalem tibi spero!

I haven't been vain enough to make a thread devoted to any one of my arcs before. But this one has a poster!

Fairly straight-up superheroics in this one, with a few recurring characters from previous arcs, though. This is a long, task-force style arc. Team is recommended, with a survival oriented melee character involved. Contains archvillains and elite bosses.

I too would like fake fights. I tend to use battles mostly on outdoor maps that I am depicting as battlefields.

I do not expect the players to be trying to clear these maps, only to grab the named targets and move on. The battles are mostly for color, for decoration, and to establish some characterization on the NPCs, and as ways to display text that will potentially be seen by players other than the mission leader.