Lazarus

Arc ID: 2019
Arc Title: Have a Blap, Blap, Blappy Day Kids!
Author: @Wrong Number
Morality: Heroic
Length: 4 Missions
Description: Beloved kids TV show host Blappy is missing and the police are assuming the worst. Should anything happen to Blappy the kids of Paragon City would be heartbroken! You need to find her as quickly as possuble before world leaks out she is missing.
Quicky Review: It's amusing to see the Television contact being used for a hero arc for once, however this arc suffers from some clumsy writing and mechanics. The plot starts out decently and despite the "oh no, a Nemesis Plot" I was curious as to what he wanted with a TV show host. Unfortunately that plot gets dropped with no explanation and it spirals into increasing confusion. It also suffers from cameos for the sake of cameos (a little more explanation for the appearances of these bosses would help) and a monotonous custom group with balance issues (Super strength minions, Mace/Shield Lieutenants with Build Up.) More clues would have helped as well and I wonder if some dialog was cut out because the briefing of mission 3 referred to something that Bright Angel mentioned in mission 2, except that she had never mentioned it when I played through.
Rating: ***

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I think the size of i15 has less to do with CO and more to do with being sandwiched between i14 and Going Rogue.

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What, didn't you know? Champions Online (And Jack Emmert) is at fault for EVERYTHING. They forged the magic bullet, hired John Wilks Booth, spearheads the Illuminati, the free masons, and the NWO, caused the dissaperance of Emilia Airheart, was responsible for the troops not finding WMD's in Iraq, Killed Jimmy Hoffa, stole the contents of Al Capones vault, runs Area 51, bombed Pearl Harbor, eats babies, kicks puppies into the sun, tears the tags off of mattresses, and was responsible for Troy Hickman not winning an Eisner.

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Hey, there is no proof that they kicked any puppies into the Sun.

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If a story focused arc can't outdraw a map of 6 city blocks with demons on the corners and the middles its probably not that good. Matter of fact if it can't get 1K ratings out of 100K subscribers the author most certainly hasn't made the effort to promote it, that they should have.

The solution isn't to hurt the parts of MA people do like, its to find ways to allow story tellers to do more interesting things with MA

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It doesn't help that the Search system it launched with is broken as all hell and farms clog the results. At least the Search in issue 15 beta is a big step forward.

I don't care how good the story is, if there is no reward then I have little motivation to run it when there is so much else in the game that does give rewards and I say that as someone who has 3 published arcs of their own.

Quick Review!

Arc ID: 120475
Arc Title: Just Say No!
Author: @Mr. Mud
Morality: Villainous
Length: 3 Missions
Description: One of Paragon's old school criminals is fed up of sitting on the sidelines, watching other villains selling the designer drugs that put his traditional wares ouf ot business years ago. He wants your help in getting back in the game, all you need is a product.
Quicky Review: Good premise, but bad execution. While the story is amusing and generally fun, the arc begins a downward slide in mission 2 and continues to do so in mission 3. Having every Ultradine addict being Energy Assault and/or Energy Melee not only makes them monotonous, but also creates a mezz-hell situation for squishy ATs who do not have protection against all the Stuns and Knockback that will be stacked on them. I also saw some Lieutenants using Power Boost, which makes that even worse.

In mission 3 there are three Elite Bosses who are advertised as "solo-friendly" but they are most certainly not unless you happen to be a Brute. Two of the EBs (1 Psi, another Ice) can easily take half your health in a single attack and you have no backup. The third is an Archery/SR with so much +Perception that a Stalker simply cannot approach him without skipping the assassin strike, he appears to also resist Placate and deals a lot of DoT.

The author also abuses text highlighting in the mission briefings and debriefings, particularly the color red, which unfortunately makes it HARDER to read.

Overall this could be a good arc, I wonder if the MA changes a while back unbalanced the mobs and the author never tried to rebalance them. Hopefully he will do so for issue 15, and maybe drop the EBs to bosses as them being EBs (which you go against with no backup) adds nothing to the story.
Rating: ***

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my main offense was too many unique maps

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Too many unique maps? Is he running out of things to complain about?

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Oh joy, another 'ban the farmers thread'. Is ti just me, or has anyone else gotten tired of responding intelligently to these thigns? I think Ill take a page from the WoW boards, and keep it blunt and pithy from no on.

qq moar, n00b.

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Um..... what? I must be missing something. No comments about farming in this thread until your post, sir. Did you post in the wrong thread by accident?

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lrn2pst!

Now that the arc file bloating issue is fixed, I've gone ahead and published a new draft of "The Portal Bandits" on test, ID 22800. Sadly I didn't get to show you how things performed under the previous version of Custom, and hope that the new one arrives soon once they change some things like moving the extreme attacks out of Standard for bosses. Still, I'd like some feedback, especially on the four new customs present in this draft.

I added three new members to the enemy group:
Nagan Radiologist (Radiation Blast/Radiation Emission Minion)
Nagan Gravitist (Gravity Control/Kinetics Lieutenant)
Nagan Psionicist (Psionic Assault/Pain Domination Boss)

Also added a bonus optional boss to mission 3:
Raikou Shingai (Electrical Melee/Dark Armor Boss)

Also lowered Anna and Vikki to Boss rank, as well as taking Entropy Shield and Build Up off of Naga Obscura. Also reduced Iron Samurai to boss and took away Build Up.

These existing enemies gained some extra powers:
Nagan Archer - Poison Gas Arrow
Nagan Duelist - 1,000 Cuts
Nagan Shockfist - Jacob's Ladder
Nagan Roboticist - Repair

I didn't get around to writing much new dialog, so anything new that you hear is just a placeholder.

If you do play it, be sure to include what AT, level and powersets your character was so that I can put feedback on the critters into focus.

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I agree that the only difference between 'professional' & 'amateur' is the cash. I've got a lot of friends that sing and play music as a 'hobby'. A few of them play 'professionally', but when they're not up on that stage, they spend many hours playing for the pure enjoyment of making music with friends. Some of those friends that are only amateurs are as good if not better than some that play professionally. Just because they're not pros, it doesn't mean they are any less talented at what they do. The one thing that they all have in common is their talent and love for music. I don't make a distinction between those that play for money and those that don't. They all love to play music and are very good at what they do for fun.

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I'm not sure just what it is you're suggesting here. Are you really trying to tell me that in general, amateurs and professionals have little difference in terms of the quality of their work?

Hypothetically speaking, do you take law advice from a buddy who read up on some law books instead of an actual lawyer? Do you take medical diagnosis from Yahoo! answers made by some pre-med student instead of an actual doctor? Do you take financial advise from a family member who dabbles in the stock market instead of a fully licensed Financial Advisor? Yet when it comes to the various fields of art, the seperation between professionals and amateurs is all the sudden less relevent? I would certainly hope that's not what you're claiming.

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Because advice from an amateur artist is not very likely to wind up leaving you bankrupt, in prison, and/or dead.

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...The basic idea behind my suggestion is to no longer allow players to create custom minions, custom lieutenants or custom bosses....

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"Normally occur" might not fit in with what other writers want to publish with MA; normal occurances already occur in game so why mirror pre-exisiting molds?

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The game is already loaded with standard enemies who ignore the archetypes, so why should MA customs be forced to stick to them?

The only difference I've seen between Aggressive and Defensive is that the former has a somewhat larger aggro radius. They'll still attack enemies on their own even if they are not attacking you first, and if they have Ranged sets with a snipe power even Defensive allies will suddenly start pulling foes.

Made three arcs, but until it is confirmed that I can get more slots without having to hope for a Dev Choice (which I probably won't want since it locks the arc for editing) there is little point in writing any further ones.

Anyhow, I bet that they're putting off new DC picks until after issue 15 for the reason that it introduces a lot of new improvements to MA and a lot of authors will be annoyed if their arcs were already locked.

It's a bug and they're working on it already.

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When Positron went over some of the numbers early on, if I recall correctly, over 70% of the missions created featured custom critters?

That's a lot of users to tick off.

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It's pretty well known that the demand for custom critters is one of the major reasons why MA was delayed for so long and pushed out of issue 13 and into an issue of it's own.

The worst case of this nonsense that I've seen recently was on a Silver Mantis TF. Pickup group, started the TF, and in the first mission we're all fighting the first spawn except for the leader, who is nowhere to be seen and it not answering on the team channel. Then we notice that the leader for some reason has run to the end of the map and is still not answering requests from the team as to what the heck they're doing.

Finally we find out that the leader had recruited the team to grind the TF as fast as possible for merits and didn't even think to tell us all that. Apparently he had assumed that no one came to actually play through the TF, despite how many people on the team were only about 20-22 and would be getting a lot of XP from a normal run. The team disintegrated moments afterward.

Also some maps have there Front and Back for glowies set backwards. Using Random could lead to some very messed up missions.

All three of my arcs have consistent level ranges, every mission has the same minimum and maximum. They're in a link in my sig below.

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One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop.

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Uh, what? Anything you do isn't supposed to have any effect on people already playing your mission -- everything should be loaded for them already.

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See above bold. Let me try to be more clear. It is true if someone starts a mission and then you start working on your customs it will have no effect. However, if they go to start the next mission in the arc and you have a character that is featured in that mission open it has not appeared in a previous mission in the arc, they will crash to the desktop.

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I have never seen that once and I've edited my live arcs between missions when I saw something really wrong that I wanted to fix so the next person wouldn't deal with it, and that includes tweaking customs. The changes still don't show up unless you restart the arc.

A note on the CoT crystals, all the maps have a random chance of having them. I've chosen maps for testing, gone in and found no crystals, restarted the mission for another run and the damn thing was filled with crystals.

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I wish I knew how to make the character views that I've seen other people post on the forum so I could show them here.

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I think Venture made them each by using a character slot on test and taking a screenshot of that, then trimming it down in another program.

Otherwise you could try doing it using the new "Invisible" feature in Test Mode in issue 15, which makes it so that enemies in your missions do not react to your presence.

It might help that in issue 15 you can flag your mission as "Work in Progress" (default), "Looking for Feedback", and "Final".

Though to be honest, I never consider any arc to truly be final. Unless it's locked like a Dev Choice there is always possibility for change.

I've done massive edits live before, usually I do them in increments. The only BIG one was when I added a whole extra mission to Amulet of J'gara and that was after I tested the mission so that I knew what to do in the live copy. Didn't take long to splice it in.

You can make a bunch of incremental edits with nobody noticing. The odds that someone may start the arc in the middle of your edits is rather slim.

Course in my case I had 50 ratings, so I was very adamant about not unpublishing.

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It's odd...I tend to think that redside becomes MORE interesting after 35 because the villain content gets better. There is St. Martial and I don't mind Grandville all that much.

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Agreed. Conversely 35 is where my heroes tend to stall out.

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My low-forties Scrapper: Hunt 100 Crey mission. Seriously, ONE HUNDRED? What the.... I don't think that hunt missions should ever be more than 25.

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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.

Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 50.

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what folks of similar interests to you liked .

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I would like to see a new feature that after completing an arc you get present with a list of other arcs that the author recommends and/or "people who played this arc also played..."