Lazarus

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Um, hate to break it to you, but if I'm reading the text files right the system "grabs" the critter description for a Boss detail by repeating it. It's not saving you any space by recycling the existing description.

So, while it may be annoying that you have to fill in the Contact info by hand, it's not going to save you any space to wait for the system to do it for you.

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I've found that when entering the description into a Boss or Hostage in the detail, the file usage does go up. Try it yourself and remember that the way things look in the text file are not exactly how it gets read into the game when it loads the file. Go ahead, paste the critters description into the Description field of that detail and see what happens.

I don't know what's going on with your files but looking in mine, if I don't input a description for a Boss then there is no description line at all in the file for that detail, yet they still have a description when you right-click -> info while playing the mission.

If there is any duplicating going on, it would have to be happening after the game downloaded the file from the server and parses it to load on your end.

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Pff. As long as it's a small map it's no big deal.

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Anyone who can't handle a kill all in the Midnight Club map fails at life.

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you could almost make this a heroic or neutral mission too if it's done In The Name Of Science or something (not that you should, but it's worth noting the option.)

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You think it'd be heroic to rescue a woman who's solution to dealing with a traitor was to mass-murder everyone else in the lab without even trying to find out which one of them was guilty?

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Maybe I missed a line saying that I'd only have a limited amount of time there when I read the mission description.

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There is a warning but it's in the Mission Send Off, it wouldn't make logical sense in the Intro part. I really wish I could have the timer begin after you enter instead of right away. Anyhow, the timer is there to imply some danger and the timer is so short so that those who for whatever reason cannot find the 3 glowies (hint: they've always been at City Hall) won't be stuck forever. Also the only thing that changes is that the success debriefing acknowledges you finding Posi's helmet in a humorous way.

Still, it doesn't look like people are enjoying this mission much so I'm already considering a replacement.

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On a similar note, I almost expected the last mission to be timed. The contact stated that something implying that there was roughly an hour's gap between when she left the dimension and when I first checked out that dimension's timeline. I was sort of looking forward to filling in that gap of an hour, so it was almost a letdown to find that I wasn't racing against the clock (not enough of a letdown that I think a change would be necessary, mind you.)

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Problem is that I already have 1 failure condition, the escort. I cannot write a different debriefing for you if you let the time run out so I'd have to make the debriefing even more generic if I have a second way to fail it.

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Regarding that last mission, there were a lot of goals. Fun goals to be sure, but lots of them. I started feeling a tad "Battle Weary" as I went through them. The only part that really bugged me, though, was the final "defeat Raid Leader to escape" mission goal. I expected him to spawn between me and the exit, thus blocking my way, but instead I had to track him down (passing the mission's exit with the hostage I was rescuing once or twice) until I finally tracked him down on the top floor so that I could defeat him and escape (until that point, all of the Agency's spawns had done a good job of tracking me down. Granted, ambushes work differently than bosses.) Incidentally, I finished everything in under an hour, so even with the confusion about the final boss an hour timer wouldn't be out of the question. :-)

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If the Devs would get the "Return to Exit" objective into MA then I wouldn't have to keep jury-rigging it this way. The Raid Leader also provides more information on Alina when you fight him that may have you questioning if rescuing her really was a good idea, despite the money you're getting for it. Sorry that he spawned out of the way this time, it's just that it's so hard to find a close match for the map in the previous mission, which is a map that works well so changing mission 4's map means changing mission 5's map and...

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My only other suggestion would be a reqest that you add some information to the "Ask about this contact" field. That was the only place I looked for information expecting to find it only to find the Architect's default responses built in.

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I'm getting tired of that one. Here's the thing, Ask About this Contact is barely working and not working right. It only started working in the last week of i15 beta. Any other detail, Boss, Hostage, Ally, Escort will grab the critter's description automatically. Ask About this Contact DOESN'T. It doesn't even do it for regular in-game contacts like Percy Winkley or Kalinda. That means I need to use up extra space, that I barely have, to put in the description a second time. I'd rather just wait for the Devs to fix it, hopefully soon.

Well there were a lot of extra crates in mission 3, since you could already blame the ransacking on the PPD whose to say that you didn't keep some of whatever was in them?

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I saw the Contact's plot reveal, rescue the mother. I still feel she could show some concern at the remains I brought back, rather than smoothly going on to her idea.

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Cobalt's a Cloud Cuckoolander, as her dialog and actions should imply. Besides, the remains show that her mother never left the bunker, which is why she immediately gets and idea of what time to reset the portal to. You're just not seeing all of her thought processes being displayed in the open.

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If you mean Inf and XP, I would get more from a farm. I'm looking for another chapter in my toon's story. Hence my selfish request for motivators.


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And like I said to someone else who brought up a similar complaint in "The Portal Bandits", I don't know what motivates your character and if I write your motivations for you then I get people complaining about me doing just that. It's up to you to decide why you're doing this. Why did you answer the ad in the first place? Are you here just for the money or is it out of curiosity as well? I'm just trying to make a fun arc along the style of Vernon von Grun, it's up to you to decide why you keep doing the missions.

Changes made to "Of Futures Past":
* Addressed most of the typos.
* Changed the glowie order slightly in mission 4.
* Gave the Ubermensch boss in mission 4 more dialog.
* Made a few plot points more obvious.

Mission 1:
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The last line of the intro indicates the 'doctor is in', which means a doctor is on-the-job, or could mean he was in that lab, or surprise that the Doctor was in a lab that he wasn't supposed to be... not sure which it is yet.

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Yes, they were not expecting to run into Aeon himself. I don't see how to make it more obvious without ruining the dialog by spelling every little thing out.

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"But I won't require it" at the end of send-off suggests Cobalt is capable of bossing me around. Darn, I thought she might be a chummy villain contact for once.

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You're the first so far that didn't find her chummy. And the full line of dialog is " Take this device and just plug it into the lab computer, just like you would a flash drive. It'll do the rest. Then go and punch Dr. Aeon in the face if you feel like doing so. It'd be nice but I won't require it." She said that it's up to you if you want to fight him, and technically you are paid extra if you do since Aeon will be dropping XP/Inf/Tickets.

As for the dialog of the Nagans, they're not supposed to be very fluent in English to begin with.

Mission 2:
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I don't know how many villains would subscribe to this "be a guinea pig, I don't feel like using robots for that".

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Well you are being paid and can quit at any time. I could try to make it more obvious that she doesn't trust sending a robot, as it would not have the intuitions and decision making abilities of a live person.

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Popup says I return in 15 minutes. Timer says I have 10 minutes.

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How long were you standing outside the mission after accepting it?

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So either I'm in the Rikti dimension, or I'm in my own dimension in the future, or Rikti have started invading other dimensions

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Door number 2: You're in a possible near future like the one seen in the Operation: DESTINY arc where you fight Recluse in the future.


Mission 3:
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Okay, so then an errand. A bunch of stuff needs to happen. Okay, I'll go get it. Oh, and Anna will be there? Then why on earth am I going? Probably Anna should not be there. Oh, actually, I'm not stealing it. Perhaps mission description could point out I'm going to Cobalt's base, which explains why Anna is there...

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Should have been obvious, why else would Cobalt have told you that she'd tell Anna you were coming?

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There's a barrel of "DHMO" - I think that's from the other arc.

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You fail the Dihydrogen Monoxide joke.

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Or else you could highlight that contact must come from somewhere else, "but where?", since her base lacks and gear for making time travel devices.

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It's implied that every time you talk to her you're at her lab. This place was just a safehouse where she was keeping some extra supplies.

Mission 4:
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Ubermensch: development -> developments. Described as a juggernaut, perhaps should be Huge body type

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Juggernaut just refers to being hard to stop, not being big and bulky. Besides, I hate the Huge body type myself.

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Okay, having trouble finding the Backup Generator. I do find a Mainframe objective that apparently isn't ready for me yet. Don't know if you have control over that dialog, it might suggest I need power first. I do find the generator in the end, but the Mainframe is still not ready for me. Need to find access to the network. Ah, another objective has come alive. And then it's the mainframe. Now 4 terminals.

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I think it's just going to take people a while to get use to the new ability to turn glowies on and off in sequence. I was hoping it would make the mission more interesting and memorable.

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So, my contact acknowledges my conclusions. So the remains were her mother's - she's astonishingly uninterested in that fact. Instead, she gets an idea. If the contact is meant to be this ruthless, it might have been foreshadowed in her earlier dialog too.
But nonetheless she wants me to rescue her mother anyway. Yay? Complicated girl. Doesn't really make sense, and I'm less likely to be sympathetic.

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I think you missed an important line: "This whole project has been to find a way to get her out of there as well."

Mission 5:
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Anyway, I'm off to rescue a mom who has the resources to blow up a building. At least I'm getting paid for sure this time.

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You've been paid for every single thing you've done so far.

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I cop some abuse from Mom when she gets left behind. It makes it more practical to feed her to a patrol I'd overlooked. The Shocktroopers were fairly efficient, if drab in their execution.
11:54pm: Failed. Return to contact.
I got my money. Cool.

I hope my decision at the end there didn't ruin the story as you'd intended.

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Actually you went right for the "bad ending". As such you only saw half of the final mission and missed a lot of details. I wish I could have given you a different souvenir to reflect it.



You raise a lot of good points but you also bring up some maddening ones, as they seem to be complaints over missing details that were provided but you somehow didn't see. You point out a lot of errors in dialog, but at the same time miss lines that already answer many of the questions you asked.

Looking at the Sci-Five arc and the groups involved, I really recommend that you go in and edit it so that every mission starts and caps at the same level. Going from 20 to 15 to 50 to 34 is going to be really annoying if I play a high-level toon, and suddenly being jumped to 29 in the last mission would be just as annoying for a lowbie as I'd be fighting above my level without a mentor and lacking the enhancements that the mobs would be balanced around.

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These things just gave me the creeps when I played Doom.

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I hated those things, they're called Cherubs.

Ugh, spiders. If I saw something like this on my wall I'd reach for the shotgun, not the broom.

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who doesn't like beating up on Nazis? But to me they're just Council in dress uniforms, and I've fought enough Council for 5 lifetimes.

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Ironic as 5th Column preceded the Council, who usurped most of their units and added just a few of their own (Galaxies and Ascendants).

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If you mean that you don't like being a level 20 character in one mission and a level 40 in another only to drop down to level 30 for the third, well, I apologize for there being a bit of that this time around.

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That is exactly what I mean. Every mission should have the same minimum and maximum level unless there is a good story reason for it, like in "Hero Therapy" for example. With the mission min/max levels having been added to the Mission Parameters in issue 15 there is no excuse for that nonsense anymore. Before issue 15 i wouldn't consider knocking off points for it but would still consider it a sign of lazy design, now I will be much more harsh about it.

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They don't need a HQ, they just stand around in the zones day in and day out training people. Hell, they don't even move when the Rikti and Zombies attack.

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Well all that stuff's grey to them, no XP.

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Hopefully purchasable story slots will be available soon so I can offer up my time travel related arc as well.


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And they're here! "Of Futures Past" (254599) is up for your perusal.

Quick Review

Arc ID: 233720
Arc Title: A Close Encounter
Author: @Baler
Morality: Heroic
Length: 4 Missions
Description: An under-funded and short-staffed government agency needs your help with an investigation.
Quicky Review: When the contact mentioned a paramilitary at the crash site I of course expected Malta. Instead I got a custom group I got something called the Eagle's Talons, which were a lot easier than Malta but still had issues of their own, like minions spamming Web Grenade at me and most of themseem to have forgotten to bring guns. Also, isn't "Earth for Humans" one of Vanguard's old slogans? Regardless they're not interesting or fun enough to sustain 4 missions. Also change the objective text in mission 2, the "Secure the Warehouse" part implies defeat all but the mission ended when I found the last glowie instead.

Mission 3 introduced the group that the alien in mission 1 was from. Unfortunately they're no more interesting than the Eagle's Talon and even more annoying. It wouldn't hurt to at least have SOME dialog from them in that mission to give them personality, and having two critters with control powers is overkill. Controller/Healer minions with sets as quickly-recharging as Gravity and Empathy are especially annoying.

The resolution at the end of the arc comes rather out of nowhere with no build up to it. I can see that the author made an honest effort but right not I have no desire to play it again in this state, much less recommend it to anyone.
Rating: ***

For those who want a critical review but haven't given feedback on one of my arcs yet, I just put up a fourth one and would love some feedback on it.

W00t! Finally able to purchase more slots and publish my new arc. This is the one that runs parallel to "The Portal Bandits."

Arc ID: 254599
Arc Title: Of Futures Past
Morality: Villainous
Length: 5 Missions
Level Range: 40 to 54
Description: Cobalt Stinger needs an enterprising and reliable villain for a series of well paid jobs. Meet otherwordly people, travel through time and the multiverse, and discover some interesting things about your employer. Apply within today!

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I think it's hilarious that we can have Hami Mitos and the LRSF version of Ms. Liberty that uberbuffs herself every ten seconds but not the generic villains and heroes from Mayhem and Safeguard missions.

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I most vehemently concur.

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An ex-Boxer possessed with a corrupted version of Mjöllnir that allows him to use lightning and smite enemies with the hammer itself... WarMace/ElectricAssault AV...

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I think I like this idea. He could fit into the arc with the War God pretty well.

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Just go easy on difficulty scaling and do a lot of testing because I think it may be very frustrating to be hit by a WarMace and be drained by Electricity

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I think as long as the powers that do -recovery are avoided it may work. Some only drain a small amount of end while others totally shut down your end recovery for a short time. The detailed info will tell you which ones have -recovery.

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The cutthroat backstabber. In a Villain group, there's always one who wants to get rid of the boss and rule in his stead.

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Troped!

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The only issue I noticed was that the nav text for the penultimate mission said I had 6 books to find, but after just the second one, the mish completed. Not that it was a problem, it's a big map and I was trying to ghost it (as well as one can without a stealth power, which means flying like hell until I hear a glowie. Speaking of which, the 'extra' glowies in this mish were rather irritating. When I heard one I stopped and fought the baddies only to discover it wasn't a bookcase I heard. But that's just a hazard inherent in the way I was trying to complete the mish, not a design flaw.)

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That's why the mission intro pop-up tells you about the books being in the library at the end of the map (either passage goes there, it's the same distance either way). Also only 1 bookcase has the book you need, the "6 Books to Read" thing is there for people who didn't find it first try and are wondering if there is another to look for.

I'm sure there are members of the tl;dr crowd who find that mission annoying, but screw them. It's a story arc after all.

Anyhow, updates made today to "The Portal Bandits":
* Added Mission Start Clue "Dossier: Naga Obscura" to mission 2.
* Removed Superadine Lab from mission 3, needed the space elsewhere.
* Removed the Vanguard vs Rikti battle from mission 4. It was originally there to force the arc into levels 35 to 50 and had little story relevance. It's not needed anymore and the briefing has been adjusted to reflect it's absence. Also I needed the space.
* Totally redid the clue that Naga gives upon defeat in mission 4. The original justifications she gave did not work well so I changed them entirely. The new clue is much longer as well.
* Redid the arc souvenir to reflect the new clue that Naga gives.

Perky Female Minion
Engimatic Minion
Punch Clock Villain

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Don't panic. Your arcs are fine.

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I was about to say, nothing has changed with mine.

Tried to correct some of the issues brought up with "The Amulet of J'gara." Mostly dialog and briefing/debriefing changes to make the plot flow a bit smoother.

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Yes, I know that the plot needs work. Unfortunately I'm at a bit of writers block and people only tell me "needs work" but never give any actual suggestions as to what could improve it.

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What would really make this an excellent story for me, is if I got to know Obscura better, really got to know her motivations. When I say I want to know her backstory, I want to know her story, not just the Nagan in general. Why does she want to be a Robin Hood?

You also said yourself that you dislike stories that are part of a series that don't stand on their own, so making a villain arc to parallel your current arc shouldn't be required to understand Obscura's motives, it should enhance an already solid plot.

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Actually the other, yet to be published arc, has little to do with her, it's more about what the unseen character Cobalt Stinger is up to during this entire event and why she was helping them, much to Anna's chagrin.

I'll have to see what I can do in this one. Hard to fit much more in when at 99% of the filespace.

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I would like to have seen custom backstories for the Midnighters.

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I do hear this one time to time, but not sure if I will ever follow up on it. Just coming up with names for characters that I didn't design to begin with was hard enough. Those are just generic Midnighters. Even the names of the Agony Mages are pulled from ParagonWiki as they are used in other arcs and in paper/scanner missions.

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The living armor was a great addition! I don't know if it's your custom character or a stock Midnigther, but it worked well. Is there any way to set it to an initial position of something other than cowering? That seems very unlike a suit of armor.

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I take it that you never played Darren Wade's villainside arc, you'd be rather familiar with the Living Armors then. Unfortunately issue 15 reset a lot of animations to Default for some reason and I haven't had to chance to scrutinize all my arcs and find every instance that has been changed.

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Mindskewer's backstory was short, but suggested interesting plot/character developments.

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Some things are just meant to remain mysterious. Perhaps in a future arc...

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"Pain has a face, allow me to show it to you. . . . Such sweet pain." These were good, chilling lines.

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I'm surprised that no one has brought up yet where some of them were quoted from. I thought it'd be a rather obvious shout out, but they seemed so appropriate.

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In the bookstore mission, I wasn't quite sure what to do when the nav window said "Escape!" I spent a lot of time trying to make sure the hostage was following me, only to find that "escaping" meant defeating the void demons. Perhaps say "Defeat void demons to escape."

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I had this issue before in MacGuffin Delivery Service. Most people seemed to figure out what I intended right away but there is someone who didn't. I wish there was a "Return to Entrance" objective that some CoV missions use but for now I have to jury-rig it. I'll try to make it more clear that you need to get back to the front and defeat the Pain Elemental at the door.

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It starts off slow (but then, I suspect that's true for pretty much every arc) but after the Midnighter Club mission I found myself eager to find out what happened next.


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Yeah, I wanted it to feel rather routine at the start before things turn out to be much more serious.