PoliceWoman

7/13/2009

WN is right, I did in fact play through Death to Disco! again just before the July 4 holiday. I thought it was improved from the first time I played it, and ended up submitting an updated review with slightly higher rating on CoH Mission Review.

Friday night, I played April Fool (50 thug/TA mastermind) on a Barracuda SF with a Liberty Force SG team. Our team make up was:

2 corruptors (both rad, I think)
3 dominators
2 masterminds (thug/TA and robo/FF)

We got through most of it but stalled on the final encounter with Reichsman, where we suffered two team wipes before deciding to take a break (theoretically we might resume at some later date). Even with decent debuffs we couldn't seem to put enough of a dent in Reichsman's HP; partly because we were short handed (only 7 players) and partly because we simply couldn't survive the aggro from the mad ambushes (since we were mostly squishy).

On Saturday I spent a lot of time playing Samurai-ko (40 katana/will scrapper), gradually polishing up the samurai epic story arc that I've been working on for some time. I eventually published this arc as A Warrior's Journey - The Flower Knight Task Force, a level 45-50 heroic arc that I labeled "Challenging, Save the World, Magic". It kind of ended up being a remix of the Legend of the Five Rings game, the Last Samurai movie, and the Statesman TF. I rather like how it turned out, but possibly due to being targeted towards a very tiny niche of players, no one has played it at all so far. Or possibly this is because of the "Warning: AVs!" that I stuck on it; I'm still not sure if it's too hard. (I was able to solo it on Samurai-ko, but it wasn't easy.) Regardless, even if no one plays it, I like it. Samurai-ko also got a costume compliment from a passerby in the AE building; her outfit was basically a bright red and gold suit of samurai armor.

I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF, with a team mix of:

3 corruptors (?/cold, ?/therm, ?/kin)
3 scrappers (spine/will, bs/shield, MA/regen)
1 brute (SS/SR)
1 blaster (AR/nrg)

We blitzed through the ITF in 23mins 40sec for 28 merits (70.99 MPH) and I also got a very sweet Hecatomb (RCHG/ACC) recipe as a drop.

A stalker friend was asking for help against an EB-level Lord Recluse, which he was having trouble soloing, and I joined him with Schadenfreude (49 AR/pain corruptor). Our first try resulted in me catching aggro and dying, followed by him dying; our second try, we were joined by an AR/rad corruptor and Lord Recluse gave up and died almost instantly, causing the stalker to remark, "rad really is god in this game". We went on to play a few missions, including a Peregrine Island mayhem.

I took a break for a bit, then after I got back I played TokyoRose (19 sonic/sonic corruptor) on a Cap au Diable SF, with a team of:

4 corruptors (elec/kin, 2 sonic/sonics, fire/pain)
1 dominator (grav/elec)
2 brutes (elec/shield, db/nrg)

We did the SF the normal way, clearing most missions rather than stealthing; this went pretty well and we finished in 1hr 47mins for 12 merits (6.73 MPH), getting TokyoRose to level 20 and Stamina, which was really helpful because Disruption Field (the sonic hula hoop buff) is such an expensive toggle to keep going.

Learned a trick over LBX for how to use Ouroboros to quickly get to RWZ or Cimerora; just start a flashback of one of the arcs based there, then teleport to the contact and quit the arc.

I joined another Barracuda SF on Saturday night, this time on Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) with a mostly LEGION team of

4 corruptors (fire/rad, dark/rad, sonic/kin, ice/cold)
1 brute (SS/dark)
1 crab
2 dominators (fire/psi, mind/psi)

Everything went fine til the final fight with Reichsman, which was lengthy and gruelling. Our team was indecisive over whether we should focus damage on fighting the AV or fighting the adds; I think we finally overcame the encounter when the dominators mostly dedicated themselves to controlling the ambushes while the rest of us DPS'd Reichsman down. We finished in 1hr 44mins for 20 merits (11.54 MPH) and it was my lucky weekend for purple drops, as I got an Armageddon (DMG/END) recipe.

I spent some time crafting IOs for Yuki after that, slotting 2 sets of 5 Positron's Blast into her Ice Storm and Blizzard powers, for +18% global ACC and +13% global RCHG. Her total global RCHG is now up to 35.45%.

On Sunday, I solo'd Kashira (25 db/ninj stalker) through Warrior's Three, a story arc where you help a Mu Mystic fight off an incursion of Warriors who were trying to steal magical artifacts from the Rogue Isles. The arc was missing on details, had weird pacing and some plot problems; I ended up rating it 2 stars.

My main character, Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) got the Clubber day job badge from being logged off in Pocket D for a really long time. I checked on my Wentworth investments (I'm getting really close to a billion infl, but am not quite there) before moving to Warburg to park for my next day job.

I started a newbie mace/SR brute on Victory, with the name of Miss Scarlett; I gave her a red "dinner dress" (as a teammate described it) and a big wrench as a weapon. Her background, of course, is that "Miss Scarlett did it in the conservatory with the wrench." And now she's on the run from the law. Teamed up with a friend for the first few levels in Mercy Island, then spent some time as a lackey on a Demo Girls SG team on Victory, which got Miss Scarlett up to level 9.

Finished the night running a speed ITF; the team leader asked for a debuffer, so I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor). Our team was:

3 tankers
3 corruptors (*/kin, */rad, ice/cold)
1 brute
1 scrapper

We blew through the ITF in 27min 22sec for 28 merits (61.39 MPH).

This arc is 4 missions; might run a little over your 60 minute limit as a result. It should be soloable or duoable for anyone 15+.

Arc Name: Teen Phalanx Forever!
Arc ID: 67335
Keywords: Solo friendly, Complex Mechanics, Comedy
Synopsis: The Teen Phalanx is on a recruitment drive, and they've extended an invitation to a teen version of your hero to try out! Do you have what it takes to join Paragon City's most prestigious teen superhero team?
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 15-20, 20, 20-25, 29-30 (mission levels gradually increase to "level" you up)

Warrior's Three review (arc id 64855)
Keywords: Solo Friendly, Canon Related, Magic
Morality: Neutral
Level range: 20-29

The premise appears to be an invasion of the Rogue Isles by the Warriors. I played a 25 db/ninj stalker.

The contact looks like a Mu Mystic, but is named "Contact Hologram". You should give him a name.

Mission 1
The caption for this briefing should be in a slightly larger font, or perhaps be a different color or bolded, to stand out from the rest of the briefing. Also, you may want to come up with a snappier name than "Mission 1"; that's factually accurate, but giving it some kind of text name may help set the tone for your mission a little better.

Briefing: "For years the Mu Mystics have been uncovering magical artifacts throughout the Rogue Isles, we have been generally left to own devices." I think this should be separated into two sentences, and "to own" should be "to our own".

"Lord Recluse will occasionally send one of his Bosses around" ... suggest you rephrase this to "Arachnos will occasionally send an Arbiter over".

The contact goes on to say that three big named Warriors have been sent to set up a base in the Rogue Isles, and that they're after a crystal held by the Banished Pantheon. But then he says that I should "Smash the Warriors Three before they set-up their base"; the info here seems a little conflicting. Are we smashing the Warrior base or stopping them from taking the crystal? Make it a little more clear.

Mission title: "Defeat Warriors Three. Find Plans." sounds more like an objective list than the name of a mission. Perhaps "Smash the Warrior Stronghold"?

Mission objectives: "1 Warrior's Plan" should probably be "Find out the Warriors' Plan". "Arrow, Shiv, Thump" should probably be "Defeat Arrow, Defeat Shiv, Defeat Thump"; or possibly "3 Warrior bosses to defeat".

Speaking of Arrow, Shiv and Thump, every single named Warrior boss that I can think of had a name from classical Greek mythology. You might want to make your Warrior bosses follow this pattern as well, to seem more authentic to the player.

I found Arrow and he is in a group called "WarriorBoss". You might want to make him part of a custom "Warriors" group instead. (I15 now gives you the ability to disable named bosses from spawning randomly.)

[NPC] Arrow: Warriors Attack

This line seems too terse and not punctuated. I suggest maybe: "An intruder! Warriors, attack!"

I found a desk labeled "Warrior's Plan". Possibly you may want to rename this to be "Desk" and then find out it's the Warrior's Plan only after searching it. The clue revealed, "Assault plans", says that the Warriors have left for a Banished Pantheon cave. This is something the contact told me in the original briefing; so feels a little redundant now. You might consider removing this info from the original briefing, then having the player discover it here; then the contact can demand you do something about the Banished Pantheon next mission? That would help straighten out the plot some, and would address my earlier concern about the initial briefing being unclear.

Thump's description: "Thump is fearsome Hand-to-Hand Foe" should be "Thump is a fearsome Hand-to-Hand fighter".

The mission complete clue, "Plans for the Warrior Assault on the Artifact", seems redundant with the "Assault plans" clue; maybe consolidate them both into one clue. Also in this clue, "Assualt" should be "Assault".

This clue is also written like someone is talking to you...? Is it meant to be the contact? If so, you might want to move that part into the mission debriefing, or the briefing for mission 2.

Debriefing: May want to put some more text here, perhaps moving some of the text from the previous clue to here. Also, "repeling" should be "repelling".

Mission 2
Briefing: So now I'm sent to stop the assault on the Banished Pantheon coven.

Contact Hologram expounds on how the Power Crystal in the hands of the Banished Pantheon is manageable, but the Power Crystal in the hands of the Warriors would be doomsday. This doesn't quite make sense to me; the Banished Pantheon is a much more magically active group than the Warriors, so it seems like the Power Crystal should be much more dangerous in their hands? This needs additional explanation in order to be believable.

Second part of briefing: Being just half a sentence, this seems too short. Add some more writing here.

The mission title, "Defeat all the Warriors" seems more like an objective than a mission name. I suggest perhaps "Stop the Assault".

Mission entry popup needs a period at the end of the sentence.

It occurs to me, wouldn't it be simpler for me to just steal this Power Crystal myself, and let the Warriors and Banished Pantheon fight it out over nothing? As a result, I am not sure why it should be necessary to defeat all the Warriors? "Secure Power Crystal" should be enough, really.

I found the "Power Crystal", which looks more like some kind of altar. You might consider using the display case with the item inside as graphic for the power crystal, instead; or perhaps a treasure chest. Clicking on it, the progress bar is blank; add some text to it.

After successfully clicking the "Power Crystal", I get the clue "Power Crystal", which tells me I didn't find the Power Crystal. This makes the name of the glowy and name of the clue rather misleading. Maybe rename the glowy to "Treasure Chest" or "Display Case" (depending on what graphic you give it) and rename the clue to "Empty!" or "Stolen!" You might also generate a new objective of "Find who stole the Power Crystal" here.

I like the Warrior/Banished Pantheon battles you have set up. You might want to add more of them; as it stands it seems like there are a LOT more Warriors than BP in this cave, which is supposed to be a BP base.

I found Fearon, a BP boss with some zombies escorting him. I tried dragging him over a nearby Warrior spawn, hoping they'd fight each other, but they seemed to ignore each other. You may want to set them up to be mutual enemies (perhaps setting one of the groups to be Rogue).

I ended up fighting Fearon and he ends up saying:

[NPC] Fearon: Warriors still remain in the Cave, why are you attacking me?

...which is a little ironic considering I tried to get him to attack Warriors and he wouldn't. Why did I have "Defeat Fearon" as an objective anyway? The Contact Hologram told me it was okay to leave the BP in possession of the artifact.

I found it a little odd that none of the named Warrior bosses were in this mission; wouldn't an important Strike Force be led by at least one of them?

None of the Warriors have any dialog in this mission at all. You might want to have a patrol or a boss or something that says something about what the Warriors are doing here.

The mission complete clue, "This is terrible news, the Power Crystal is gone" seems redundant with the earlier "Power Crystal" clue. You may want to consolidate them into one clue. Also "missing from it's vault" should be "missing from its vault".

Debriefing: seems a little short. Also, Contact Hologram says "We can't give the remaining Warrior Assault Force too much of a headstart". But I defeated all the Warriors in the Assault Force, as far as I can tell.

It also sounds like he assumes some of the Warriors stole the crystal and got away before I showed up; if this is what you're going for, add some clues to the mission that say this! Perhaps add a named Warrior boss in charge of a rear guard, that tells you when defeated that "You're too late.... Soandso has already made off with the crystal!"

Mission 3
Briefing: A previously unmentioned fourth Warrior Boss is apparently responsible for stealing the Power Crystal and is leaving by ship. How do we know any this? The fourth boss needs some foreshadowing, and there needs to be a plausible way for us to know that we need to catch his ship.

The Contact Hologram also somehow senses the Power Crystal has released mystical energy into Axxe (presumably the name of the fourth boss; this maybe should be made more clear), with the effect of powering him up.

No one seems to have any dialog in this mission except Axxe. You might consider adding a patrol or something with some dialog just to make this mission seem more lively.

Axxe is in his own faction called "WarriorBoss1"; he should probably be in "Warriors". He also doesn't have a description (he has the default Boss description instead).

[NPC] Axxe: We've been made, Attack!

This line seems awfully similar to what Shiv says in the first mission, you might change it a little to mix it up.

[NPC] Axxe: So close to contol of the Warriors

"contol" should be "control" here, and this needs a period at the end. I think you should rephrase this to something like: "Noooo! I was so close to control of the Warriors!"

Despite defeating Axxe, the mission, which is titled, "Defeat Axxe", doesn't end; since I still need to "Clear final Room". You might rename this mission to something like "Stop the Warriors Ship" or "Recapture the Power Crystal" or something suitably more general, that would make sense even after defeating Axxe.

The mission complete clue is named "Axxe Effectively Defeated", which is a little awkward sounding; I suggest "Axxe's Defeat".

"By Defeating the 4th Warrior Boss, the MU mages can siphon the energies of the Power Crystal out of Axxe and restore the Power Crystal" sounds a bit awkward; we know the 4th Warrior Boss's name, so may as well use it, and saying "Power Crystal" twice is a little clunky. In any case, maybe it makes more sense to tell this information in the mission debriefing; the contact could tell you about how the Mu mystics are draining the power out of Axxe there.

Did we ever actually find the Power Crystal? We never got a clue saying so. May want to explicitly say that it's found, or maybe add a glowy to this mission where you steal it back.

Debriefing: Some nice explanation of the aftermath of the previous mission. But I am not sure it makes sense for the Mu mystics to return the Power Crystal to the Banished Pantheon. Why wouldn't the Mu simply keep it for themselves? The contact said in the first mission that the Mu had been collecting artifacts, and he made his disdain for the Banished Pantheon pretty clear.

"We've received word from out contacts" should be "We've received word from our contacts". "there is a shake-up" should be "there has been a shake-up".

This actually seems a natural end for the story, but it continues on.

Mission 4
Briefing: The briefing explains that the contact is sending you on this mission because he is "feeling a bit peckish"; this seems a pretty weak motivation. Try and come up with a better reason for this. Anyway, I'm to steal a completely different Crystal from the Banished Pantheon, as part of a plan to give the Warriors...a different Crystal than they expected. One that sucks power out of them instead of gives power to them, apparently.

Second part of briefing: Seems too short, and somewhat inaccurate, because "Witches" makes me think we're about to go after the Cabal, but we're going after the Banished Pantheon.

Mission entry popup: this again refers to banished Pantheon as "witches", which isn't right.

Mission objective: "1 Crystal Curio" should probably be "Steal the crystal". I'm not sure why it is necessary to defeat the Spirit to complete this mission; the contact seemed only interested in the crystal. Perhaps the briefing could be rephrased a bit to explain why the Spirit needs to be eliminated.

Map choice: a warehouse is a weird place to find Banished Pantheon. Consider using a cave or a graveyard for them instead.

Found the crystal in a wall safe, which is kind of a weird thing for Banished Pantheon to be using. I think a display case or a treasure chest would make more sense.

Upon clicking the safe (which was named "Crystal Curio" but should probably be named "Safe" or whatever the glowy you end up using is), I get two clues: one from the glowy itself, and one from mission complete. Both clues are named "Xyphon Crystal" and provide pretty similar information; I think you should consolidate these two clues into one clue. "containor" should be "container", though. "Odysseus will be shocked when this shows up in place of his Power Crystal" seems to imply the Power Crystal belongs to Odysseus, which isn't strictly true. Maybe "in place of the Power Crystal that he was expecting."

Mission 5
Briefing: So now I'm to sneak into a Warrior hideout and deposit the fake, trapped crystal in their vaults. Then the crystal will act like a Trojan Horse and steal all of the Warriors' magic and deliver it to the Mu.

This is an interesting evil plan, but seems fundamentally flawed: it's already been established that Odysseus has basically fired all four of the Warrior bosses that came to the Rogue Isles to steal the Power Crystal. So how is it supposed to be believable that the (fake) Power Crystal ends up in his vaults anyway? Where is it supposed to have come from, since all the Warriors who went after it, never came back? It seems like Odysseus should instantly see through this plan.

Second part of briefing: too short, seems only half a sentence. Add more text here. The sentence you do have here needs a period at the end.

Mission title: "Find the Vault" should probably be "Steal the Warriors' Magic" or "Sabotage the Warriors' Vault" or something like that, since Finding the vault is just the beginning.

Mission objective: "Artifact Vault" should be "Plant the Crystal in the Artifact Vault".

No one in this mission seems to have any dialog. Maybe add some named Warrior bosses, patrols, or whatever, with some lines that they say, to make this mission a little more lively.

Considering this is supposed to be the Warrior's secret vault full of artifacts ... there should be some extra (optional) glowies representing artifacts here. Maybe the player could steal some of them.

After finding the artifact vault and clicking it, I got a clue saying "You hear approaching warriors".... although this is a nice clue, I think it should also mention that I successfully planted the Xyphon Crystal.

I now have "Defeat Shiv" as an objective; but why? Shiv is supposed to be in Mu Mystic custody, officially removed from the Warrior power structure in the earlier shake-up. Seems to be a continuity error.

Shiv's description, "weilds" should be "wields". He does mention that he was sprung from the Mu jail in an attempt to explain why he's here.

Thump's objective, "Thump" should be "Defeat Thump". In his description, "Super Strenght" should be "Super Strength".

"Midnight Visage" clue: "prision" should be "prison". Apparently this amulet let the Warriors Three escape, because it lets them alter their appearance. But there's only one amulet, and three Warrior bosses? I think the one amulet could only explain how Shiv escaped.

"Xyphon Crystal placed, Warriors Defeated again" is a little too long for a clue name, it overflows the normal text box. It does give some explanation for how the Warriors Three made it to here, though it doesn't explain why Odysseus likes them now (it was previously established that they were on the outs with the official Warrior power structure). "posession" should be "possession". "Gangwar" should be "gang war".

Debriefing: "We drained the magical abilities of the those three buffons" has an extra "the" and "buffons" should be "buffoons". "Odyssues" should be "Odysseus". Thinking about it, it is rather weird that the contact is trying to drain magical energies from the Warriors; I don't think most of them are magical at all! Though they may come into possession of magical artifacts, for the most part they seem like normals with medieval weapons.

The involvement of the Midnight Squad here is rather mystifying and is never clearly explained. They haven't been introduced as an interested party at all before this. Maybe there should be some foreshadowing for their involvement.

Overall
I like the use of the Warriors and Banished Pantheon, who you don't see all that often. But I confess that I am not sure what my motivation in this story arc is supposed to be; I'm helping the contact out, but what am I actually getting out of it? Why should I be doing this?

The pacing of the arc is a little strange to me, with the toughest fight being an EB in mission 3; the final mission has a series of boss fights chained together, but overall is a lot easier than the EB in the middle mission. You might want to make it so the hardest fight is in the final mission; or possibly truncate the arc to end right after mission 3, which seemed a logical stopping point.

Plot-wise, I thought it was a little weird that you're sort of both fighting the Banished Pantheon in mission 2, yet helping them by giving their crystal back after mission 3 -- then you steal another crystal from them in mission 4. This seems somewhat mixed up. I think it would make more logical sense if you just stole from them and/or killed them, and kept everything (or had the Mu guy keep it). Also, I wonder if CoT would be a more logical group to steal magical crystals from than BP; consider the St Martial SF, which is all about magic crystals and the CoT who are using them.

I found the last two missions a little hard to believe. This is partly because I think having the Power Crystal mysteriously show up in the Warrior's Vault would be unlikely to fool them (considering all the people sent after the Power Crystal were already fired for failing), and partly because I don't really think Warriors are magical enough that draining their magical power would do anything.

It seemed like there were a number of loose threads, too. The toughest bad guy, Axxe, showed up for one mission without any foreshadowing, then vanishes after that one mission never to appear again; I think you may want to tie him more strongly into this story, if you're going to use him. The use of the Midnight Squad to break all the Warriors out of jail comes across as something of a deus ex machina to explain why we can let the other 3 Warrior bosses appear in the final mission.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I felt I could only give this story arc 2 stars, sorry! I hope you think that is fair!

I now owe a review to:

@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #227331
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt2 221242
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369
airhead - Captain Dynamic 190069
@anachrodragon - The Next War on Drugs 245042
@baler - A Close Encounter 233720
@Cain Lightning - 41646
ArrowRose - 221702 (In Pursuit of Liberty)
mrNebs - "Release the Dragon" (arc#229358)
FredrikSvanberg - #1152
Geek_Boy - Speeding Through Time #51728
- space open -
FredrikSvanberg - #114284

For those interested in going through an arc that is relatively new and less polished, I have a new story arc that I've published:

A Warrior's Journey - The Flower Knight Task Force
Arc ID: 260284
Keywords: Challenging, Save the World, Magic
Length: Very Long
Morality: Heroic
Level range: 45-50
Description: Samurai and ninja battle for honor in a faraway realm. But someone has introduced firearms to the land, tilting the balance of power towards the evil Lord Kumo and the Spider Clan. Will you journey there to restore the balance? SFMA, Asian fantasy, L5R, wuxia, dimensional travel. Warning: AVs!


The final mission is fairly challenging, including several AVs and several allies. I'd particularly like input regarding game balance of that mission. I was able to solo it on a level 40 katana/willpower scrapper (the theme of this arc is squarely aimed at katana scrappers), but it may be quite tough for squishy characters.

It's had very little critical review so far, so any feedback would be most appreciated!

-------

Regarding my review queue, for people I owe two or more arc reviews to, I've shifted the second arc a couple slots down in the review queue, so that I don't do them consecutively.

My motivation for this is:
- I'd like to start each of your arcs "fresh", without being too heavily influenced by my feelings on the other arc.
- Quite often I will have similar comments on both arcs (for example, if you always misspell a certain word, or share certain mobs between arcs, or have particular issues on style, gameplay or plot that are common to both), so this may give you a chance to revise the second arc in response to my comments on the first arc.

I now owe a review to:

Noght - Warrior's Three 64855 (level 20-29 neutral)
@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #227331
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt2 221242
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369
airhead - Captain Dynamic 190069
@anachrodragon - The Next War on Drugs 245042
@baler - A Close Encounter 233720
@Cain Lightning - 41646
ArrowRose - 221702 (In Pursuit of Liberty)
mrNebs - "Release the Dragon" (arc#229358)
FredrikSvanberg - #1152
Geek_Boy - Speeding Through Time #51728
- space open -
FredrikSvanberg - #114284

7/9/2009

[Long - been awhile since my last update]

On Wednesday 7/1 I joined an Imperious TF with Samurai-ko (39 katana/will scrapper) as a sidekick. Our team mix was:

thug/dark MM
?/storm corr
dark/dark stalker
widow
SS/shield brute
kat/will scrapper (me)
TA/archery defender
warshade

This team didn't feel like it had quite enough support (I like dark, storm and even TA, but for some reason it wasn't quite adding up), and as a result the TF was a bit of a slog. At some point I died in mission 1 and embarrassingly found out that I had the TA defender on ignore; he had been trying to give me a rez arrow (aka Awaken) when he found that out. I had ignored him earlier in the week after he had dumped a dozen or so lines of macro'd spam to LBX channel; it wasn't anything serious, so I took him off ignore. It was slow going and we had a team wipe in mission 3 against the Phalanx computer. I had a moment of glory where I was the only team member alive, hacking away at the computer, for half a minute as robots zapped at me; they eventually dropped me when the computer had like 200 health left. After regrouping we managed to take it down, though. In the final mission, we had two straight wipes against the first Romulus, then dropped the first Romulus and had another team wipe against the second Romulus. We just didn't seem to have enough damage mitigation to stand up against AVs with lots of Nictus and Romans attacking at the same time. Our zerg tactics eventually overwhelmed the AVs, though, and we finished the TF in 2hrs 29mins for 28 merits (11.28 MPH), getting Samurai-ko to level 40.

On Thursday 7/2, I played Mega (33 SS/will brute) through Aeon's Nemesis, a pretty fun story arc where Marshal Brass hires you to look into the shady stuff he thinks Dr. Aeon is up to, especially related to AE itself. I had trouble finding all the glowies in one of the missions and had to restart the arc once, but the story overall was pretty neat (if a little confusing). I gave it 4 stars. This got Mega to level 34.

I went on to accept an invite to a 4 player pickup team led by a mastermind who had a fun "mad scientist" attitude, who complimented me on Mega's background story. We did several regular missions and a Talos mayhem.

I had Friday off for the holiday, and played a lot of CoH. I first signed on with a friend for a Dr. Kahn TF on Triumph server, playing Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper) with a team of:

will/nrg tanker
sonic/MM blaster
cold/sonic defender (no shields)
fire/nrg blaster
bs/shield scrapper
bs/regen scrapper (me)
sonic/elec defender
ice/nrg blaster

When I saw we only had a sonic defender and a buff-less cold defender, I remembered how tough the Barracuda SF was and I told my friend that, although I was happy to try this, I thought we were toast. She assured me that the hero TF was much, much easier than the villain SF, and it was true. Despite being light on support, we got through the TF in 51mins 45sec for 20 merits (23.19 MPH). I was struck by how much the final encounter reminded me of Pokemon; Reichsman has a bunch of AVs trapped in little pokeballs, and periodically he yells, "I choose YOU, Countess Crey!" and an AV comes out of the pokeball to try and kill us.

Also on this TF, I had a total stranger recognize Kid Valkyrie from Teen Phalanx Forever!, and tell me he loved the story arc, which was totally awesome!

Speaking of Teen Phalanx, I found a 2 week old email in my "spam" mailbox from the organizer of Projectionist's Mission Arc Contest asking me for details about what kind of art I'd like for a prize.... gahh! Stupid spam filter! Anyway, I asked him to make a picture of the Teen Phalanx in some sort of action scene, and he seemed to like this idea; I ended up mailing off to him the .costume files for the various Teen Phalanxers.

A little later I joined a Sister Psyche TF on Liberty server as Milady de Winter (20 ice/emp controller). Our team mix was:

shield/mace tanker
bs/shield scrapper
earth/TA controller
bs/will scrapper
ice/emp controller (me)
grav/rad controller
dark/dark defender
elec/elec blaster

This seemed a pretty strong team, and we were doing pretty well, but during the second mission the tanker, who was the TF leader, said "AFK a second" and then never came back. We finished the whole mission, then waited for him; since he was the TF leader, we couldn't get the next mission, couldn't kick him, and since he was inside a mission, the game would never idle him out. After about half an hour, we were all fed up and quit the TF. This seems to be a recurring thing with this person (he was also the scrapper who bailed during the first mission of an LGTF I was on) and several of us vowed never to join a TF led by this person again.

The whole thing took about an hour; those two missions did end up getting Milady to level 21, however. I'm not quite sure whether I will stick with her; I have trouble getting into controllers (and dominators, for that matter) because it just doesn't feel like the control powers do enough to be worthwhile. I do like being able to throw down ice slicks, but the ice hold and immob seem soooo low on DPS.

I played Mystery Girl (35 ff/nrg defender) for a little bit; she had been sitting on the bench for a couple months, but I got interested in force fields again and ran her through the Midnight Squad arc to unlock Cimerora, and started buying some IOs, figuring I'll try to raise her ranged DEF.

Then I played Alice Slaughter (34 db/will brute on Triumph) on a 6-player villain team for a bit, that did a Brickstown mayhem and got Alice to level 35, where I took Hurdle. I'm so totally used to having Swift and Hurdle (as prereqs for Stamina) that I find it hard to get by without them.

After that, I joined a Dr. Kahn TF on Liberty server; the team leader specifically asked for a scrapper (this almost never happens) and so I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper). Our team mix was:

2 blasters (nrg/nrg, fire/nrg)
2 controllers (ill/kin, ill/rad)
2 defenders (emp/psy, cold/ice)
1 tanker (shield/nrg)
1 scrapper (bs/shield, me)

With this team lineup it made sense why they wanted a scrapper, as the only one of the basic ATs they were missing. Anyway, this team handled the TF pretty easily and I got to explain my Pokemon theory to the people who were fighting Reichsman for the first time, which was fun. We finished in 54min 58sec for 20 merits (21.83 MPH).

After that TF wrapped up, there was a mother ship raid starting up in RWZ, and I joined in with Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster), picking up bomb #23 for her badge progress, and gaining a fistful of Vanguard merits. I have over 3000 now, I should probably burn them off using Vanguard heavies more often.

After the raid I played Strong Woman (31 inv/SS tanker) on a Katie TF, with a team of

2 tankers (will/axe, inv/SS)
2 blasters (AR/dev, psy/fire)
2 defenders (storm/archery, TA/archery)
2 controllers (mind/storm, fire/kin)

This ran a little slow, 41min 56sec, but otherwise seemed fine, getting us 9 merits (12.88 MPH). Strong Woman got to level 33 (think I took Kick at 32, to open Fighting Pool) and two compliments on her origin story, which is basically a pastiche of other typical origin stories tied up into a joke. I like level 33 recipes, so after the TF I cashed in all of Strong Woman's 300 reward merits for random recipe rolls, getting:

1 Stupefy (chance for KB) Wentw=100K
1 Impervium Armor (RES) Wentw=3M
1 Edict of the Master (DMG) Wentw=0
1 Devastation (chance for hold) Wentw=1.5M
1 Lockdown (chance for +2 mag) Wentw=2M
2 Glimpse o the Abyss (ACC/FEAR/RCHG) Wentw=300K
1 Aegis (END/RCHG) Wentw=100K
1 Mako's Bite (DMG/RCHG) Wentw=500K
2 Positron's Blast (chance for energy) Wentw=3M
1 Miracle (+recovery) Wentw=80M
1 Touch of the Nictus (ACC/END/RCHG) Wentw=1.5M
1 Luck of the Gambler (DEF/+7.5% global rchg) Wentw=60M
1 Scirocco's Dervish (chance for lethal) Wentw=1M

This seemed like a very good recipe draw (156.3M infl worth for 300 merits = 521K infl/merit, over double my usual average). The level 33 Miracle and LotG were the big prizes, of course; their market value was 90% of the value of the whole draw.

Strong Woman also had a few tickets kicking around in her inventory; cashed in 525 of those for a silver reward roll, getting a Touch of Death (DMG/RCHG). Not bad.

On Saturday I only played briefly, playing Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a speed Sharkhead SF, with

2 brute
3 stalker
1 rad corruptor
1 crab

finishing in 31min 16sec for 22 merits (42.22 MPH). I used 20 merits for a random recipe roll, getting a Decimation (ACC/END/RCHG), which I'll probably use on some character or another.



Sunday, I was playing Mega (34 will/SS brute) on some story-oriented missions, starting on Tales of Croatoa: A Rose by Any Other Name. While there, another brute struck up a conversation with me and I ended up agreeing to quit my arc and join her team for a story arc (teaming is more fun than soloing, after all). This turned out to be a farm mission where you fight an immense number of minotaurs hanging out in the city streets; I'm not that into farms, but this other brute seemed nice and I felt it would be rude to suddenly bail. So I ended up helping clear most of this mission before excusing myself. There were these medical lab things placed in the middle of spawns, which seemed to buff +END; a farming trick, I guess. This one mission got Mega to level 36; farming is pretty crazy exp. I took Tough at 35, figuring I'll need it eventually for those nasty Romans on the ITF.

On Monday, I tried to play Tales of Croatoa: A Rose by Any Other Name again; Mega had outleveled the arc, which was set for 25-34, so I tried playing Adventuress (27 MA/regen scrapper). Some sort of bug caused all the ghosts in the second mission to spawn at 34 (the high end of the level range), and my scrapper (at least this one) can't handle +7s, so I ended up quitting the arc again and restarting it with Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker). The arc was actually quite a well-written, moody investigation into a past tragedy, and involved most of the magical factions that hang out in Croatoa. Despite the bug I had run into, I liked this story arc a lot and gave it 5 stars.

After wrapping that up, I played Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) on a speed ITF with a team of:

brute
2 controllers (plant/kin, ill/rad)
dominator
3 scrappers (bs/shield, db/will, db/SR)
defender (kin/sonic)

The brute and scrappers basically blitzed all objectives, with the squishies trying to keep up without dying (I felt a bit bad that they would die a lot due to all the stray aggro). In this way, we finished in 33min 25sec for 28 merits (50.27 MPH).

After that, a villain team was looking for more buffer/debuffers, so I played TokyoRose (18 sonic/sonic corruptor) as a lackey on a mid 40s villain team, doing the PvE arc involving Fortunata Amelee. We did well against most of the enemies, but got stopped cold by an AV level Swan; unfortunately, her psy damage utterly ignores sonic shields. We ended up inviting a 47 brute to help us take down the level 44 Swan.

On Tuesday night I worked out a respec for Spy Girl, slotting up IO sets to increase her basic defenses. This is the design goal I was working towards (I got most of these IOs, but was unable to acquire some of them as of yet):

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

[u]Click this DataLink to open the build![u]

Spy Girl I15: Level 33 Natural Stalker
Primary Power Set: Martial Arts
Secondary Power Set: Ninjitsu
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Teleportation
Power Pool: Fighting

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Thunder Kick -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(3), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(3), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(5), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), T'Death-Dam%(7)
Level 1: Hide -- DefBuff-I(A)
Level 2: Storm Kick -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(7), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(9), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(9), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), T'Death-Dam%(11)
Level 4: Crippling Axe Kick -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(13), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(13), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(15), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(15), T'Death-Dam%(17)
Level 6: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 8: Danger Sense -- RedFtn-Def/EndRdx(A), RedFtn-Def/Rchg(17), RedFtn-EndRdx/Rchg(19), RedFtn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(31), RedFtn-Def(31), RedFtn-EndRdx(31)
Level 10: Combat Jumping -- Zephyr-ResKB(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(21)
Level 12: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A)
Level 14: Ninja Reflexes -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(19), DefBuff-I(21)
Level 16: Focus Chi -- GSFC-ToHit(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(27), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(29), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(29), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(33), GSFC-Build%(33)
Level 18: Recall Friend -- Zephyr-ResKB(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(33)
Level 20: Stamina -- EndMod-I(A)
Level 22: Kuji-In Sha -- Numna-Heal/EndRdx(A), Numna-EndRdx/Rchg(23), Numna-Heal/Rchg(23), Numna-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(25), Numna-Heal(25), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(27)
Level 24: Kuji-In Rin -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 26: Caltrops -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 28: Boxing -- Acc(A)
Level 30: Tough -- S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(A)
Level 32: Eagles Claw -- Acc-I(A)

Ended up with 38.95% range DEF and 40.74% melee DEF while hidden; not quite soft capped, but much better than before. I took the respec'd Spy Girl through a spin of Can You WIN the Internet?, a humorous story arc with the fun premise that you're taking down the various Internet bad guys, like gold sellers, spammers, message board flamers, and so on. This mission also featured some very disturbing catgirl prawn. It was pretty fun, but I thought it needed a little more; I gave it 4 stars.

Wednesday night, a friend seemed to be having trouble forming a Sister Psyche TF, so I jumped on that bandwagon, playing Milady de Winter (21 ice/emp controller). We eventually got a full team of:

dark/psy defender
fire/elec blaster
ill/rad controller
ice/emp controller (me)
storm/elec defender
will tanker
plant/sonic controller
dark/shield scrapper

We had five defender/controllers, none of which had the same support set, which I thought was really cool. I don't see a lot of dark defenders around any more, and watching her made me want to start one of my own (ack altitis!). With this much support, a tanker and a sprinkling of damage, we easily handled this TF, finishing in 1hr 59mins for 50 merits (25.21 MPH). This got Milady to level 24; I took Stamina at 22 (had taken Fortitude at 20 because I think Fortitude is Just That Good) and Shiver at 24 (still not sure how good this power is).

Finished the night playing Mega (36 SS/will brute) as a lackey on a 6-player Liberty Force coed hero/villain team running AE missions in Rikti War Zone; later in the evening I switched to Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) to ensure we'd have enough mentors. Twice we tried running through Relativity be Damned but kept restarting because we would invite a higher level character, then would want to make the high level person the leader and restart the arc so it'd spawn at their level. Eventually we gave up on that arc and did Quest for the Coral Horn, instead, followed by Batteries Included. This team was pretty fast paced so I didn't catch a lot of the story; Quest seemed fun enough to give 4 stars, but I really didn't read enough of the clues or the plot for Batteries to know what was going on, so I left that unrated. This did get Mega to level 37, whereupon I slotted two sets of level 40 Reactive Armor IOs I had crafted ahead of time, into Mind Over Body and Tough, for the sake of more +smash/lethal defense.

Thanks for giving these story arcs a try!

[ QUOTE ]
Everything went smooth until I was faced with Maiden Justice. I'm a dominator. Oh well, maybe this ally will help. I confuse the soldier next to her and start to whittle her down. When Maiden Justice healed herself for 1500 points of damage I was prepared to quit. Then her purple triangles dropped and I managed to mez her for a moment. As soon as they got up she almost one-shotted me. Then she started running. I followed and was killed by a shuriken.

Since this is the last mission and I've read how the story ends in other reviews, I don't bother trying to finish it.

[/ QUOTE ]

This AV fight has actually been one of the hardest things for me to balance in this arc. I originally had Statesman and Ms Liberty (renamed to Maiden Justice) here, since, well, to conquer the world you clearly should defeat CoH's signature heroes. But Statesman was too hard to solo, so I removed him; eventually I came to the conclusion that Ms Liberty was also too hard to solo, so I replaced her with the custom AV that is present now. I've actually tested and defeated this AV as a low 20s brute and as a low 20s stalker; I admittedly have not tested with a dominator (I just can't seem to play these effectively) but I do understand they have issues with AVs. What level dominator were you playing, if I might ask? I saw you mentioned playing both a 23 and a 7 dominator in other threads, either of which might be a little low for this. There are actually four total allies on this map that can help with the AV, if you go looking for them. It sounds like you didn't find the story all that engaging, though, so I can understand why you decided to ragequit after a defeat.

Do you have any thoughts on how to make this more dominator-friendly? I'm hesitant to outright remove this encounter, as I kind of feel like there needs to be at least one hero defending the "City of Heroes" from being conquered.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't believe that the death of a few generals and some troop transports could change these events as much as your narrator casually describes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm, not quite sure how to address this issue; I did try to have the contact explain the significance of Dunkirk and Stalingrad, so that it would make sense even to a non-history buff. Did you feel this explanation was not sufficient? I think you have already criticized the contact's briefings as too much narration, though. What would you suggest changing to make this more believable?

Or perhaps you are suggesting that defeating only the generals shouldn't be sufficient to defeat a national army. This may be true from a "realism" standpoint, but I think if I made my missions "Defeat all British soldiers" "Defeat all Russian soldiers" I would certainly get a lot of complaints about the gameplay.

I actually agree that the middle missions of the arc are currently the least interesting, and I'd like to make them more involving somehow. Any suggestions you might have for how to do this would be appreciated.

[ QUOTE ]
you have chosen to tell a story in a medium which is unsuitable for the kind of story you want....I think that these kinds of events, on this scale, aren't suited for the MA or even the CoH mission structure to depict. It would have been better if you had us go and do small-scale crimes which would have large-scale effects, instead of going directly for the large-scale event.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, there is some truth to these criticisms. As a general principle, I've been trying to write story arcs that are "different", both from the regular game content and from each other; at times, this may be trying to fit the square peg into a round hole, though.

This arc is my attempt to let the player villain Conquer the World, something that is a common goal for comic book archvillains, but which the CoV content never allows a player villain to do. I feel that conquering the world requires large scale conflict.

[ QUOTE ]
Celebrity Kidnapping was much more fun. I was almost disappointed that it was over so soon, I expected some of the people introduced in the last mission to come back. On the other hand we can all use short arcs now and then.

I was almost overwhelmed by all the ambushes a few times, and the super-powered journalists both surprised and confused me. I know it's a world of supers sometimes but having super-powered journalists who are so common that they don't even get individual heroic aliases.... it doesn't seem right.

Three stars.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am a little puzzled that "much more fun...disappointed it was over" equates to three stars, but hey, it's your right to rate things however you like. If I may ask, though, what would you suggest be added or changed to improve your opinion?

Regarding "super powered journalists", the intent is that the "Flash" and "Blind" powers should simulate camera photography. They aren't exactly meant to be super-powered, the flash bulbs are just supposed to be dizzying and disorienting when you get deluged by them. I'd love to give them actual cameras for these effects to emanate from, if this were possible. However, I'm afraid I can't accept "super-powered journalists so common they don't get heroic aliases.... it doesn't seem right" as a valid criticism. After all, Hellions, Skulls and Outcasts are among the first things you encounter in CoH, and are full of super-powered characters with no individuals heroic aliases.

My current evil plan is to buy more story arc slots, then publish a couple new arcs and ask people to start looking at those instead.

More on Can You Win The Internet?

[ QUOTE ]
My alpha draft of the mission text actually went into detail on how she was created in the 1950s as one of Alan Turing's last experiments, making her reasonably mature. I think I was trying to avert making a "sexy AI goddess", and that if there was a conscience or guardian angel of the internet, she'd look like your Granny and not like someone from Tron. Just a stylistic choice, really.

Actually, I think her critter text that I put in the MA Creator actually mentions her origin. Not that you can see that ever in the game.

[/ QUOTE ]

This makes total sense; you may want to communicate this to the player somehow. I think I15 added an "About this Contact" field though? You could also play with electric or glowy auras to try and make her look more artificial, but this might be tricky to make look good with her current costume.

[ QUOTE ]
This was the HARDEST part of writing the mish. How do you represent flamers in a game with content restrictions on profanity and making bigoted remarks (which are pretty much a flamer's bread & butter)? I didn't want someone to get peeved and flag the mish. I suppose I could swap things around and make generalized summaries of the posts. ("This is just a long list of derogatory slurs" or "This is a reeling post about how Positron was really born in Paraguay as 'Chinualomogo Ramirez Y Levi' and thusly is an illegal immigrant and...frankly you stop reading after the first sentence.")

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a valid point, including actual excerpts of flames may actually be unfun. I think I'd suggest going with the generalized summary of flame posts, but try to give a humorous or disdainful spin to each summary. "This thread seems to be nothing but badly formatted rants full of insults and racial epithets. Who knew there were so many insulting terms for Rhode Islanders? The Internet will definitely be better off after you modsmack this thread." (Something like that...)

[ QUOTE ]
Betty's kinda going on a tear here. She is a literal Net Nanny.

[/ QUOTE ]

You might consider re-titling her to "Betty the Net Nanny AI". That would instantly explain to players why she is dressed like a conservative grandma.

I could not find either of these missions, I suspect they were unpublished or invalidated:

Emansor - The Day I Tried To Live 131780
Noght - Warrior's Three 64885

So, skipping over them until/unless I hear an updated arc ID for them.

Can You WIN the Internet? review (arc ID 85544)

Premise appears to be to help an AI to "save the Internet" from various threats. Morality is neutral and level range is kind of all over, ranging from a 15-20 mission to a 40-54 mission. I decide to try to play with a 33 MA/ninj stalker, with some IO sets that give her around 40% defense (not quite soft capped).

The contact, "Betty the AI", does not really look tech-y or cyberpunk-y enough to be an AI. She does introduce herself as being an Artificial Intelligence, but perhaps it would be worth having her comment on why she looks like someone's grandma rather than something more electronic looking.

Mission 1
The caption for the briefing, "All That Glitters.." (and for all later missions) should perhaps be in a larger font or different color, to make it stand out from the rest of the briefing.

The contact wants me to go after some "gold spammers", people sending out spam emails trying to sell online game currency.

Inside, the mission is full of Goldbrickers, which actually makes sense.

Nice name for the boss. Though it took me a moment to figure out the "Au" in "Au4UCh33P!!1!" stood for gold's symbol on the periodic table; that might be a little too intellectual a reference for this character. His dialog is all horribly misspelled and full of typos, which I'm sure is intentional. It's a little strange that a Freakshow would be the boss of these Goldbrickers; though possibly he is here primarily to justify giving him mangled dialog.

Good clue from the phishing lists.

You might consider giving the Goldbrickers some dialog, discussing their gold farming or something, to make it seem a little more lively; as it is, only "Au4UCh33P!!1!" ever says anything in this mission.

It might also be fun to have several starving Third World children chained to computers farming gold, who would be hostages that the protagonist could rescue.

Debriefing: Not bad. I like how the AI showers you with random e-Commerce rewards.

Mission 2
Briefing: So this time the contact sends me after the various flamers and trolls that are making a mess of the online forums for some game.

I like the way the AI demonstrates the matter transference device on an orange and the protagonist gets concerned when the physical orange is turned into virtual orange juice.

I like the idea of "Cool off the Flame War!" but I'm not sure I buy into the idea that recovering the "Rule of Law" and "Web Reference" will actually stop a flame war. I think a goal like "6 disruptive users to moderate" (i.e. kill) and/or "4 message threads to modsmack" (i.e. clickies or destroyable file cabinets) would make more sense.

I like the mix of Bat'Zul minions (for flamers) and Trolls. I found and beat Concern, who had some funny dialog.

The "corpse of a Shattered Moderator" glowy is a little odd; we're "in a message board", you can't actually kill a moderator on a message board. The BANHAMMER clue is a nice one, but you might want to explain that you took the BANHAMMER from a fallen moderator.

You might consider adding some clues (maybe attached to optional glowies) that contain sample flames and diatribes about politics (both left and right wing), religion, telling new posters to read the darn FAQ, and Hitler (who inevitably is mentioned in flame wars).

You might consider making the mission map a little smaller; the main joke is the initial concept, and it started out funny but after searching three different elevators it had worn a little thin. A smaller map could avoid this problem.

Mission 3
Briefing: There's an extra space after the first "Well" and before the comma. Yay, an Avenue Q reference.... though was it really necessary to call it "prawn"? I tried creating a test arc and entering the word "porn" and it didn't trigger the profanity filter, so you could totally use that word.

The contact's threat to search your home computer for porn is amusing, though.

Second part of briefing: she carries out her threat with comedic results.

"slimy, perverted creature unfit to walk the world beside to decent, loving people" doesn't quite scan. Maybe "slimy, perverted creature unfit to associate with decent people".

I can buy "offensive" and "depraved", but can porn really be "blasphemous"? I suppose certain types could, but not generally, I'd think.

"Internet Prawn ring" doesn't sound quite right. Shouldn't it be "Internet Prawn site"?

"and that a fate I shudder to consider" should be "and that's a fate I shudder to consider".

Inside the mission: OK, now I see why you call this a "Prawn Ring". They're all...humanoid shrimp people with a porn obsession. Now that's pretty deviant!

This cat/shrimp-girl is so wrong

Good descriptions on the Prawn stars. I particularly like Catgirl Prawn's description, "Catgirl Prawn is pretty common on the Internet. It really doesn't make sense, given how many catgirls there are in real life anyway."

I like Bituah's little skit with the guards holding coffee cups, that was a good one.

Webcam Server's dialog is terrific. The Scrapyarder ambush is a little weird though? I guess they're mad at me stopping the live broadcast?

Debriefing: Good job, have a pizza? A little disappointing after the actual mission, which was pretty funny while simultaneously disturbing.

Mission 4
Briefing: wow, very purple prose. But it works.

Second part of briefing: I like how the "sixty seconds" she gives you is distorted into an hour of subjective time.

Inside the mission:

[NPC] Void Seeker: I don't get it, we're supposed to be draining the lifeforce of actual living being, not online users

"being" should be "beings" here.

I found and freed "Maybe Nemesis" who had some dialog about it all being a Nemesis plot, maybe. This is clearly meant as a joke, but I'm not sure why Nemesis is supposed to be here. (OK, so it's a Nemesis plot... still..) The clue he gives me is interesting, revealing an alliance between Nictus and Mapserver. I'm not sure why Nemesis would tell me this, though.

Found and freed "Positron", who was guarded by some Prawn stars. Positron had pretty silly dialog, even saying a "Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk". I am not sure why any of them are here; they don't seem to be related to the Mapserver goal. Am I supposed to be in the online game at this point? The Prawn stars were in the "real" world, so how did they get digitized into the system?

[NPC] Void Seeker: If only we could turn a corner & ambush some unsuspecting PCs & score ourselves a sweet TPK! Yus!

This is a fun thing for a patrol to say, but I think "Yus" should be "Yes".

[NPC] The Mapserver: Positron can't stop me, the programmers can't stop me. How could you, Mere User, dare to defeat me

This line has an extra space before "Positron" and needs a period after "defeat me".

The Mapserver is actually quite a tough fight; on villainous he spawned as an EB for me, but with both grav and ice control powers, and with (I think) two ambushes. This is probably fine for the final boss of a story arc, and I think the movement speed debuffs make grav and ice control a good fit for Mapserver, but it's quite hard. I think a lot of people might lose to him, especially because he summons a Singularity and has ambushes.

I like the mission exit popup. Though it reminds me: logically, shouldn't killing the Mapserver actually disconnect everyone from the Mapserver? It's really Mapserver Disconnects that are the thing everyone hates, not the actual Mapserver.

Souvenir: Not bad. "thats not right" should be "that's not right". The Key to the Internet sounds fun. Shouldn't it also give you a free pass to all Prawn sites?

Overall
A fun premise with some amusing concepts for each mission. Mission 3, against the Prawn stars, was especially good. I thought Mission 1 and Mission 2 had some good ideas, but needed some additional gold spammer and flame war related details in order to be a little more immersive.

I found Mission 4 confusing as I'm not really sure what it was supposed to represent; I got "digitized" but ran into the Prawn stars who I met in the "real world" Mission 3. I also ran into Nemesis and Positron, who are "real" (unless these are game-within-a-game representations). Although I like the clues that try to explain the Mapserver has allied with Nictus, how did the Nictus get "digitized" into the computer realm? Anyway, the mission didn't fully make sense to me.

Overall, I thought it was a fun arc, although I now need sulfuric acid to expunge the image of the Catgirl/Prawn hybrid from my brain. I gave it 4 stars.

-----

I owe a review to:

@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #212069
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240, Pt2 221242
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369
airhead - Captain Dynamic 190069
@anachrodragon - The Next War on Drugs 245042
@baler - A Close Encounter 233720
@Cain Lightning - 41646

[I apologize for the the length of this post, but I feel it is on-topic and possibly informative.]

[u]A Complete Guide to "Just a bunch of stuff that happened"![u]

tl;dr version
Have a theme and/or a moral to your story; or else make your story funny enough that the reviewer overlooks the lack of theme.

Long version
It seems the great majority of story arcs reviewed by Venture are tagged "Just a bunch of stuff that happened". From context, it seems that this term is a criticism of the story arc's plot. As a reviewer myself, I don't use this particular phrase, but I do often criticize arcs for stuff like "This needs foreshadowing" or "This mission has nothing to do with your plot". But closer inspection reveals that this is not what Venture means when he says "Just a bunch of stuff that happened".

This has made me curious as to what this phrase actually means; this catch phrase clearly has deeper meaning than is immediately obvious.

I've been fortunate enough to get two non-JABOSTH reviews from Venture (warning: shameless promotion ahead):

[ QUOTE ]
(Venture)
Arc# 1388, “Celebrity Kidnapping”
tl;dr: 4 stars. Offenses: aggravating mobs
Reviewed on: 5/9/2009
...
Arc #67335, "Teen Phalanx Forever!"
tl;dr: 5 stars. Nits: overpowered allies, dissonance in narrative
Reviewed on: 5/26/2009


[/ QUOTE ]

A lot of authors ask "Why did my arc get labeled Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened?" Now I'll ask myself, "Why did my arcs NOT get labeled Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened?"

For example, Teen Phalanx Forever has the protagonist (and her team) variously overcoming the plots of Dr. Vahzilok, Clockwork King and a mysterious AV, none of which really obviously have much to do with each other, and so I'm totally open to being charged with having a Random Events Plot, which TVTropes connects to "Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened". But I had an overarching framing story of the newbie teen hero who joins a new team, makes friends, learns the value of teamwork, and finally gains acceptance even from the Mean Girl. I'd like to think that this overall plot shone through and was what saved me from JABOSTH.

For Celebrity Kidnapping, the plot is basically that of a heist movie, where a band of criminals gets together and pulls off a daring crime. But once they succeed, they start backstabbing each other to try and increase their share of the profits, only to have a gajillion cops and other enemies try to jump them in the final act, and eventually only the protagonist walks away with the money. There's really no moral to the story (the protagonist is a villain, after all!) except possibly that you shouldn't trust sleazy fixer types (which ought to be blindingly obvious). So I'm not sure why I didn't get slapped with JABOSTH here, since I essentially have an "action movie" plot. Perhaps betrayal was flagged as my theme, or maybe the Rule of Funny gave me some slack; I'm not quite sure.

More research was required to truly understand the meaning of "Just a bunch of stuff that happened". I did some internet archaeology and came up with:

Significant historical quotes on the subject of "Just a bunch of stuff that happened"

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Venture (4/13/2009)
Extensive use of custom mobs says, to me, that the author is covering up for a weak or nonexistent theme with eye candy, that the mission is "just a bunch of stuff that happened". I'd much rather see a good story told within the canon than a mediocre action movie told with custom mobs.

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Venture (4/16/2009)
I've got a question; you keep using the phrase "Just a bunch of stuff that happens" to describe some of the plots, and although I can kind of pick up what you mean from the context, I'm curious what your actual definition is for it.

A story is "just a bunch of stuff that happened" if it doesn't have any kind of moral, theme or character development to it at all. Humor is an acceptable substitute, as long as it is actually funny. Of course that's subjective. "Hearts on Fire", despite its multitude of sins, does not have this problem, as it has a strong story about unrequited love. "Redoubt Operations I: Fires over Kalago" (just a random example) is an arc that the author very obviously put a lot of work into but has no story beyond "bad guys do bad things until you make them stop".
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I swiped the phrase (I think) from "Episode 257-494" of Teen Titans, in which "Control Freak" traps the Titans inside television shows until Beast Boy's superior knowledge of television defeats him. At the end someone says "see what happens when you watch too much TV?" and Starfire points out that they only won because Beast Boy watches too much TV. Raven asks "so, what's the moral here?" and Cyborg says "There isn't one. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened." Cue Everyone Laughs Ending, which quotes the episode differently so maybe I've misremembered the line. I'm sticking with my version though. :-P

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Venture (4/17/2009)
Hmm... it might help if you were more clear on what you didn't consider 'just a bunch of stuff that happened', Venture; after all, just about anything could have that accusation levelled at it.

Asked and answered upthread a bit. To reiterate, an arc is "just a bunch of stuff that happened" if there is no theme or moral to it. Humorous arcs get a bye here as long as they're actually funny. While I cite this offense fairly often there are a lot of arcs I didn't cite for it so you shouldn't have too much trouble finding good examples. Needless to say I don't think my arcs are guilty of it; feel free to call me on it if you disagree.
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This is getting back to the "just a bunch of stuff that happened" problem. If there is nothing to the story but the reveal that your Contact was a fraud then that's bad.

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Stratonexus (4/21/2009)
I know I have seen Venture 4 star some arcs where he also states that the arc is "just a bunch of stuff that happened". So while it is an offense, it is not a terrible one.

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Megajoule (4/22/2009)
Just wanted to note that one of the reasons why so many missions (Architect and canon) have no "moral or theme" and are "just a bunch of stuff that happened" is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to write such a story for literally thousands of characters. Done poorly, it can run into power-posing and/or snap a player right out of the story, even make them quit rather than continue.
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Consider a familiar question for heroic types: "What would make you break your code vs. killing?" The problems are obvious right off: some heroes don't have such a thing in the first place, and those who do have different thresholds, different answers to that question. If you present me with an arc where one of my more Silver-Agey heroes snaps and wastes a Smug Snake in front of TV cameras, because the clue or mission debriefing says so, that's it - I'm done. I probably won't rate it down because I'm not vindictive that way, but I will not be finishing or recommending that arc.
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So, how do you make a story that isn't JABOSTH without taking away a player's control of their character or making assumptions that will probably be wrong at least half of the time?

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Gotterdammerung (4/22/2009)
You make a good point about forcing your character to behave in a certain way, and that seems to be something that Venture dislikes as well; in many reviews, he's criticized the writer for making assumptions about a player characters motives/morals/background etc.
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However, that doesn't preclude having a theme. To go back to your example, if an arc gave you the option to defeat a boss (implicitly killing him) or to let him run away and fail the mission, that could allow the arc to explore a theme without necessarily assuming anything about the player. So, as you say, trying to use the theme "what would make your character break their code vs. killing" would be very difficult (though perhaps not impossible) to do in the confines of the Architect. On the other hand, it wouldn't be very hard at all to write an arc that explored a similar theme, like "is it ever justified to kill a villain" by, say, using an NPC as the character having the moral crisis.
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You're right in saying that avoiding JABOSTH is a very tricky thing to do, especially in a system where no assumptions can be made about the protagonist. However, I think Venture's right in placing such a big emphasis on this, because I believe it's critical to writing a good arc. The easiest way to do this is to look at your story and ask youself: "what question is this story asking?" If you're asking a question, you've got yourself a theme. If you answer the question, you've got yourself a moral. If you're really not asking anything, then you've got JABOSTH.
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None of which is to say that you always have to have a theme or moral. A comedic arc or an "action movie" arc can usually get by without them. However, you can't write something like that and then expect it to be taken seriously. On the other hand, if you're really trying for drama, then a theme is an integral part of that.
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Ultimately, it all comes down to maintaining a realistic and focused grasp on what exactly you're trying to accomplish with your arc. Honestly, if everyone just did that, there are a lot of arcs that would be vastly improved. If an arc feels loosely connected, disjointed, or chaotic, a lot of times it's because the writer didn't have any goal beyond "I want to write a good arc." When you click that New Arc button, you should imagine someone asking you: "What is this arc's reason for being, and what makes it so special?" If you don't have an answer for that, then you need to think about it some more.
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EDITOR NOTE: Gotterdammerung's opinion was later cited by Venture on 6/3/2009 so may be taken as canon in the Venture-verse.


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Arcanaville (4/22/2009)
My interpretation:
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Just a bunch of stuff that happens:

Mission one: please help me get my cat out of a tree.

Mission two: what, my cat has DE crystals on it? find out why the DE want my cat.

Mission three: The DE are being ordered to experiment on cats by the Rikti? Find the Rikti leader and defeat him.

Problem: sure, there's a thread to it, as in "hanging by."
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A bunch of stuff that happens for a reason, but reason uses the idiot ball:

Mission one: My research lab appears to have been broken into, but strangely the only thing stolen was not any of my research subjects, but my pet cat. This is strange, I need you to investigate.

Mission two: The trail led to a cave with the DE? That's odd. Let me see that device you recovered. This appears to be Rikti in design. My research involved the immune system of the Rikti, but how does my cat fit in? Find the Rikti responsible and learn what they are up to.

Mission three: The Rikti leader believed my research was a biological weapons lab? He apparently was going to try to plant a monitoring device on my cat.

Problem: The Rikti hired the DE to steal a cat?

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A bunch of stuff that happens for a reason, tries to avoid stupidville:

Mission one: I was conducting research on the DE, while I was gone one of them apparently broke out of its cage and for some reason stole my cat. Investigate the DE, and if you can recover my cat.

Mission two: You traced the DE to a cave with Rikti? So it seems the DE didn't break out on its own: the Rikti stole it and my cat. But why? Seek out the leader of this Rikti group and find out what they are after.

Mission three: The Rikti thought my research could be used to make a biological weapon against the Rikti? And they were going to plant a monitoring device on my cat to observe me? That's really strange.

Problem: its still a stupid plot, but at least it makes some sort of logic, and doesn't involve completely ludicrous acts of insanity.


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LaserJesus (4/24/2009)
What it means is that the story isn't much more than foiling a villain's plans, or the opposite for villains. I also wouldn't call it a sin, it's just that if you're judging a plot, one with character development and meaning is stronger than one without it.

Maybe Venture should explain it in his signature or something, this question gets asked so much.


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Arcanaville (4/24/2009)
I should point out that whether something is sufficiently well connected and has a sufficiently strong point is at least partially subjective, so its impossible to guarantee avoiding this problem in the mind of any one particular reviewer.
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However, one thing I *can* recommend to avoid the charge of "just a bunch of things that happen" is to not actually *make* just a bunch of things that happen.
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One thing I'm noticing in the arcs I play is that in some cases, it seems pretty obvious that the author essentially wrote a bunch of different missions, with whatever maps they thought would be cool, whatever bosses they thought would be cool, and whatever objectives they thought would be cool. Then they attempted to sprinkle "plot-dust" on them, to try to connect them.
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For example: mission one is in Orenbega fighting demons. Mission two is in ruined Atlas Park, fighting 5th Column. Why? Because in mission one the boss says he was sent to invade our dimension from an alternate reality in which I guess the 5th Column are planetary arsonists.
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The contact gives no clue the story is heading in this direction, and for that matter the contact doesn't give much of *any* reason for going to Orenbega in the first place. The contact is just a device to send you to mission one, and the boss in mission one (specifically, his dialog) is just a device to get you to mission two.
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It was (it seems to me) to be *implemented* as just a bunch of stuff that happens, that someone then tried to solder together. If nothing else, try to avoid doing that because it has a tendancy of being often obvious.
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Two questions I think the author should ask themselves while reviewing their mission arcs:

1. When the contact says "Accept my mission" pretend to be the player and say "and if I don't?" If you don't have a good reply, something's wrong.

2. When the contact says "Accept my mission" pretend to be the player and say "what's the point?" If you don't have a good answer, same thing.
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Lastly, it helps if everyone in the mission arc is actually participating in the same story. If the mission arc is about recruiting the player to stop the latest bunch of Nemesis plots, and one of them has a Nemesis LT poisoning the special burrito sauce at El Mexicano, and then the next one sends you to stop the bombing of Atlas Park, well it might make sense to you, but its likely to be perceived as a random bunch of things strung together, even if there exists a plot device to connect the events together.
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A *really* skilled author can make something that initially *appears* to be a random bunch of stuff that later *is* connected in ways that make perfect sense in retrospect. But this is by no means easy, or likely to strike all readers equally validly. If you fail, you'll probably fail directly into the deepest hole of JABOSTH.


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Smurch (5/12/2009)
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Just wanted to note that one of the reasons why so many missions (Architect and canon) have no "moral or theme" and are "just a bunch of stuff that happened" is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to write such a story for literally thousands of characters.

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The best thing to do, IMHO, is not to try. Via the description, give the basic premise/setup the player needs to meet you half way on and then just go on from there. By clicking play they are implicitly already on board with the basic premise. From there, build on that premise to present a theme.


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Venture (5/30/2009)
"Just a bunch of stuff that happened" means the story has no theme or moral to it. It's nothing but a meaningless string of events. It's just about some guys doing some stuff you don't like so you clobber them to make them stop. The plot doesn't say anything or teach anything, making it suitable for use by any of the most vapid Saturday-morning cartoons.


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Venture (6/3/2009)
Comparing this arc to something like Escalation (which has been getting great reviews all around, but which also seems to use the Stop The Bad Guy From Doing Bad Stuff plot) - what do you see as the critical difference? Is it the personal relationship between Escalation and the player?

"Escalation" has a primary theme about obsession and revenge. It has a secondary theme about bravery and the willingness to face a hopeless fight. The player goes out to fight Escalation over and over knowing, or at least as of Act V believing, he has no way to stop her for good, that she's only going to come back stronger if he wins.
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JABOSTH is the trope I have the most trouble understanding in practice as it applies within the MA. It seems like many, many of the canon arcs suffer from this problem, and while I have something of a spidey sense about it, I don't know that I can quantify what it really means.

While I haven't sat down and tabulated them all, I'd say the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of the canon stories are "just a bunch of stuff that happened".


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Summary
I tried to consolidate all known information on "Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened". I hope this is helpful for people to either understand why their arc got tagged JABOSTH, or else to try and modify their arc to avoid it. I feel like I learned something, anyway I don't plan to start using the JABOSTH tag myself, but I can see why Venture regards it as important.

It seems to me the best way to avoid JABOSTH is to ask yourself, "What is my story arc about?" If your answer is, "You find out about some bad guys and you fight them!" and nothing more, then it might be JABOSTH.

Tales of Croatoa: A Rose by Any Other Name.... review (arc id 178774)

The premise appears to be some sort of melodramatic mystery set in Croatoa. Level range is 25-34 blue side; I played a 27 MA/regen scrapper.

Mission 1
Briefing: Very nicely formatted and written briefing. I like how the caption is a larger font, and the use of different typeface for the "description" versus the contact's dialog. Minor nitpick: for consistency the third paragraph, beginning "You rub your eyes..." should be in italics, to match the descriptive text of the first paragraph starting "Patrolling through Croatoa..."

Aside from that the briefing does a good job of immediately setting up the premise of the story. The contact seems to be the ghost of a little girl.

Mission objectives: I have an objective to "Defeat Fel", but I have no idea who that is, so not sure why this is needed. Perhaps "Defeat redcap leader" would be more appropriate.

I like the rhyming dialog of the redcap patrol.

Found a glowy called "Treasure Chests", but it's just one treasure chest, so shouldn't be plural. Same for "Chests". Probably in the authoring tool it makes sense to create, say, 6 "Chests" but I think you want to name them the singular noun. I do like the various glowies that have been scattered around the mission for the sake of atmosphere, though.

"Fel Darkwood" appears to have a space after his name, probably unintentionally. You can tell this from the dialog:

[NPC] Fel Darkwood : Why does the hero trouble us?
[NPC] Fel Darkwood : Hehehe, the hero wants to play!
[NPC] Rascal: Lets play a game! "Whack-the-hero!"
[NPC] Fel Darkwood : Revenge shall be had! Then ol' Fel be glad!

(Note spacing before the colon.) Minor quibble: the first three of these lines don't rhyme at all.

Oddly I found a destroyable Treasure Chest, different than the clickable Treasure Chests. Figuring Billy must be inside, I broke it open. Indeed it was Billy. What Billy REALLY is, is actually quite cool. Very neat mission.

Debriefing: It's a little odd that Rose can hug Billy considering she's a ghost, but it works. The debriefing overall is nicely written and rather sad. Possibly the white text should be italicized (for sake of consistency with earlier briefing style). I'll stop mentioning the italic/nonitalic thing hereafter -- but you may want to decide whether you prefer "narrative text" to be italic or not, and standardize how you use it throughout.

Mission 2
Briefing: so the contact wants me to find her daddy. This is somewhat understandable...but my genre savvy sense tells me nothing good can come of this. Still, it would be hard to refuse a little girl's request.

Mission entry popup: "eery" should be "eerie".

The mission seems filled with level 34 ghosts. Considering I am level 27 and on Heroic difficulty, this seems a probable bug. This looks like a cool mission, but I'm not going to be able to handle +7s.

So I quit the arc with my scrapper, then switch to a 33 MA/ninj stalker to try the arc again. I used stalker stealth to speed through the first mission, to get back to mission 2. It is still full of level 34 ghosts, but +1s are doable.

I like the malevolent things the ghost patrols say.

Found a glowy that gave me "The Warehouse Massacre" clue. There is an extra space after "The Cabal".

The individual clues for each skeleton are a nice touch. Sneaking by the ghosts to nab clues about a horrible massacre is quite moody feeling.

Debriefing: A pretty nice debriefing. "Never say that, ever!" has an extraneous period after it.

The third paragraph, beginning with "Spy Girl, I know what you can do!" (where Spy Girl is my character's name) seems like it should belong to the briefing of the next mission, as it is essentially describing a new mission.

The idea that she wants to send me to talk with her friend "Jack" in Croatoa seems very ominous though.

Mission 3
Briefing: nicely written. I like how it mentions the contact seems bound to one place (a common ghost trait).

Mission accept message: "dont worry" should be "don't worry".

Second part of briefing: I like how she makes you take Billy to help introduce you to Jack. LOL!

Inside the mission, there's a lot of "Cabal Sisterhood" who appear to be custom characters added to the Cabal. I'm not sure why they're needed (rather than using standard Cabal), but they actually look like a good fit.

I found Jack and, whew, he's just a normal Fir Bolg...I totally thought I'd have to deal with Jack-in-Irons. He looks quite comical in the kneeling "captured" pose.

The dialog between Jack and the Cabal is verrry interesting. You might consider adding a clue (awarded after freeing Jack) that reiterates the info from this dialog.

Having freed Jack, I'm not sure why I still need to free the other 3 Fir Bolg. The mission briefing really only mentions talking to Jack. Perhaps this is needed to gain Jack's trust; it may need to be a little more clear though. The extra hostages DO have nice bits of dialog though.

Mission complete clue: I quite like the "Enlightenment" clue and the story presented here. And the use of the toy bear. The clue explains why the custom witches are necessary (because they need dark powers to match the story).

Debriefing: Wow, this debriefing is heartbreaking. The writing is very good. "inlayed" should be "inlaid" though.

Mission 4
Briefing: Well, this briefing no longer comes from the contact at all, it's all internal monologue. But based on the story, it has to be this way. It sounds like a "Defeat 200 Cabal" mission, which I'd be surprised if it were possible to create.

I do like the mission accept message, "Begin the Witch Hunt!"

Inside the mission: Thankfully, not a defeat all, though the story could possibly justify it.

Patrick's description: "payed a heavy price" should be "paid a heavy price".

Patrick Rescued clue: "Tou tell Patrick" should be "You tell Patrick". This clue also says "I will go to her ... immediately" but he just stands there after being freed. Should run off, if possible (though, I know I've had trouble getting freed hostages to run away on outdoor maps).

Some good clues from disrupting the rituals, too.

Debriefing: yay, Rose is back. Though, can you really hug a ghost? We'll let it go, it's a moment of heartwarming after all.

Mission 5
Briefing: Nice briefing and a smooth way to fit in the "warning: AV" message.

Second part of briefing: I quite like the teddy bear being used as a recurring motif. Of course, I suppose we've established that he really is the Item of Power here (sort of).

[NPC] Adriana Callihan: What else can you do to me? You've destroyed almost everyone I care about!

I think you can strike "almost" from that line, to make it a stronger statement. I like how Adriana is portrayed here, including her "Suicidal?" clue.

I like the dialog from the various minions, that helps fill you in on why Rhiannon is really doing all this.

Good use of the "Witch" pieces in Rhiannon's costume; I like her glowy eyes. And I just love this line:

[NPC] Rhiannon Darkraven: Why do you carry a teddy bear? Does it protect you? How pathetic...

I am not sure what the "A Voice from the Shadows" clue means; possibly foreshadowing for a sequel.

Debriefing: very nicely written finish with good closure on what happens to the whole Callihan family.

Overall
I really liked this story. It made me care about the characters and what happened to them. Both their tragedy and their eventual release were very moving. Very well written. Good use of clues.

The only serious problem I found was Ghosts spawning in Mission 2 at level 34 for a level 27 hero; I think this is a bug, but it can be a showstopper for people playing through this arc.

My other suggestions are mainly stylistic. I like how you use color and italics to differentiate when Rose is speaking versus descriptive text, emoting, and internal monologue, but the format for the descriptive text could use some standardization.

I gave this story arc 5 stars.

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I owe a review to:

Emansor - The Day I Tried To Live 131780
Noght - Warrior's Three 64885
twelfth - Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #212069
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240, Pt2 221242
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369
airhead - Captain Dynamic 190069
@anachrodragon - The Next War on Drugs 245042
@baler - A Close Encounter 233720

(Note - I ended up dropping the "non-owed" review queue; I haven't ever gotten to anything in that queue, and the earliest ones have been in there for months. I'll only track "owed" QPQ reviews from now on)

I believe you played Celebrity Kidnapping (arc id 1388) on May 23. It's had several revisions since then; same essential plot, but a few more details and extra craziness in the final mission. Feel free to give it another go if you're interested.

I think you played Teen Phalanx Forever (arc id 67335) around June 4 or 5, and you're welcome to play it again, but it hasn't changed too much since then, aside from some fixes required for I15, and an extra custom mob that I threw in since I15 gave me enough space for one.

Re-ran Aeon's Nemesis to try and get through it. I kinda sped through the first 3 missions to try and get back to where I was before; it looked like some typos had been fixed since my last pass, but I did not look too carefully. Did get through the fourth mission this time, finding all 9 experiments -- though had a bad couple minutes running down the last one, the glowy whiteboard (it was hard for me to notice this object was a clicky - this may have been my problem last time too).

Mission 4 debriefing: I like Marshal Brass's wry catalogue of Aeon's wacky experiments.

Mission 5
Briefing: It's a little puzzling that we can't just shut down the simulation (physically pulling the plug, even) and have Aeon pop out, but for sake of the plot we need to accept this. Perhaps that would leave Aeon stranded in the simulation somehow. It's kind of handwaved that we have to go to the Shadow Shard (or the simulated Shadow Shard) to rescue Aeon.

Mission entry popup: I like the implied memory leak and the double meaning of "garbage collection" here.

Map selection: odd, the briefing made me think I'd be in the Shadow Shard, but it looks like a regular science lab.

After destroying the first jammer, I got the "Clear Signal" clue indicating that Aeon was free to escape. I think you meant for this to be awarded after both jammers are destroyed (the way collections currently award clues is kinda weird). Destroying the second jammer awarded no clue, but the objective changed to "Verify Aeon escaped".

Found and rescued Dr. Lane, a "valuable scientist". With the way this mission is set up, I am not sure if Dr. Lane is a "real" scientist or a "simulated" scientist. The clue he gives seems to imply he's "real" ... but a good simulation might give the same clue.... hmmm. Not sure. He does claim that SimNemesis kidnapped him, I guess as part of a SimNemesis plot.

I like the various clues from the computer terminals. It strongly implies that the Sims are going wild and planning on crossing over into the "real" world of CoH.

I found Dr. Aeon, who spawned as an EB for me. Although I'm there to rescue him, he attacks me for some reason! Apparently he thinks I'm one of the Sims. His dialog IS pretty funny though. I beat him up, which is apparently how to "free" him from the simulation (at least once the jammers were destroyed).

The research project Aeon and Nemesis are working on is really pretty cool.

Went on to defeat 'Nemesis', who apparently was a simulation of Nemesis. It was a pretty decent final encounter for the arc; I liked his dialog. The ambushes were potentially nasty, but seemed appropriate for the final boss fight.

Debriefing: You know, I half expected Marshal Brass to give me a debriefing as if I had just got back from mission 2 (the "extreme" test of Architect Entertainment), and to find out that everything in the last 4 missions was just "part of the simulation". Nevertheless, this is a pretty good debriefing; I like that it explains what happens to Aeon afterwards. Though it seems to imply that Architect Entertainment is shut down as a result of this investigation, until a safer version can be put in place; interesting, maybe this arc is meant to be "before" I14 officially released.

Overall
I really liked the dialog and characterization in this arc, especially of Brass, Aeon and even Fusionette. The briefings were well written and the various glowies and the clues were all quite nicely done too.

I was a little iffy on the plot; it was kinda neat but also very convoluted and at times it was very confusing as to what was "real" and what was "simulated". Perhaps this was intentional, though. The line grew very fuzzy when the Sims could break into the real world and kidnap real people, and when stuff like simulated jammers could block "real" mediports. There were some quite cool ideas presented too, though; I really liked the idea of the self-perpetuating hologram, and "simulated" Nemesis going out of control was actually a neat idea.

I'm a little puzzled as to whether "Nemesis" was purely a simulation or partly real. My guess is that the "Nemesis" threat was spawned in mission 2 as a result of the "extreme threat" difficulty settings that Brass had you set -- but if this is the case, the Nemesis forces should've been normal enemies in mission 3, part of the regular simulation. But, the Techtician boss's hard crash in mission 3, followed by Nemesis ambushes, strongly implied that Nemesis was not really part of the simulation, but was an "anomaly". This seems to send mixed messages which made me confused on what was "really" happening.

I had a lot of trouble with the hunt for 9 experiments in mission 4, which caused me to quit my second try on this arc (my first try was aborted by I15). I actually like the explanation and clues for each of the experiments, the fact that they are all different types of objectives, plus the fact that there are some decoy objectives (by this I mean the Perfectly Safe Bomb, which totally looks like an "experiment" but isn't), made finding all 9 of them rather frustrating for me. I might suggest either making Perfectly Safe Bomb one of the experiments (and providing a way to complete it) or else removing it so as to reduce confusion.

Also, on reflection, it seems that all of the problems in the story arc were self-inflicted: the "Nemesis" plot never would've materialized if I hadn't been sent to meddle with the simulation program, with difficulty set to "extreme", in mission 2. So most of the arc is really just correcting a mistake made by the player (admittedly, at Brass's behest). I don't really like that as a theme; it'd be nicer if the player had some sense of gaining something from completing this story arc, rather than just fixing something she broke. Brass does do a good job of trying to sell defeating Aeon and shutting down his pet project as an accomplishment, though, which is nice. I think I might be happier if you added a little something to reward the player here, maybe suggest that Brass deposits some money in your Swiss Bank account or something; since as it is, it's not clear that the player got anything out of doing this.

I'm really torn on what to rate this arc; I kinda want to rate it around 4.5, as I really like the dialog, the writing style and the ideas. I went back and forth a couple times on what to rate it, but eventually settled on 4 stars, mainly because even in hindsight I'm still a bit confused as to what exactly happened. Even now I am conflicted between mission 3, which suggests Nemesis was an "anomaly" in the simulation, and mission 5, which seems to imply Nemesis was "simulated all along". I think a certain amount of confusion between what's "real" and what's "simulated" is appropriate for this story, but these plot points actually seem to conflict with each other. You might consider reconciling these to be a little more consistent, and/or providing some clarification of what happened; perhaps after the fact, if you'd prefer to maintain some ambiguity about what's going on during the missions.

Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue review (arc id 163967)

Premise appears to be to stop a conspiracy against a local restaurant. Level range is 1-54 heroic; I played a 33 SS/will brute.

Mission 1
Briefing: The contact is the daughter of the restaurant owner, and she wants me to go rescue her dad. This immediately reminds me of Penelope Yin's story, but in fairness, I'm sure there are lots of store owning dads who need rescuing.

I like the way you have the captions for the mission briefings in bold yellow text, that really makes it stand out.

"sabatoge" should be "sabotage".

The "casino" map seems an odd choice, but the contact did say that her dad was being held in "the casino hosting the restaurant". The map seems full of hostile "KCCC Employees", but I have no idea what KCCC is. The "info" on the minions doesn't tell me anything either; maybe would be a good place to put some explanation of who the KCCC are.

"Refridgerater" should be "Refrigerator".

After encountering some more KCCC Employees, their appearance and names make me think they must work for a villainous fast food restaurant.

Rescuing Mr Rider completed the mission; didn't seem to be a whole lot to this mission. I like the mission exit popup, though, with all its cheesy food preparation references.

Debriefing seems much too short. The "thank you" is nice, but it would be nice to have more info on what happened, who the KCCC are, why they kidnapped Mr Rider, etc.

Mission 2
Briefing: "Disasta Recipe" is mentioned as a villain here, but has not been mentioned before; the briefing should perhaps introduce her more fully, and explain a little about who this person is.

Mission title "Defeat Disasta Recipe" is exactly the same as the objective, "Defeat Disasta Recipe". You might rename the mission title to "Save the warehouse" or something, just to avoid repetition.

Map selection: I'm supposedly going to a food supplier warehouse, but the map appears to be the rave dance hall. While this is technically a warehouse, it doesn't look right for a place that would presumably be supplying the rib restaurant.

I found Disasta Recipe, and in her info I finally find out what KCCC standards for: King Colonel's Chicken & Cake fast food. Great name, but needs to be mentioned earlier. Probably more of the KCCC Employee descriptions should reference their employer, too.

[NPC] Disasta Recipe: I can't fail my father. I just can't!

Am I supposed to know who her father is? Is it supposed to be King Colonel? It's not mentioned in her info - I had the impression she's just another employee of KCCC.

The contact mentioned destroying any "strange food containers" in this mission, but I didn't see any. Also, she said that this is a supplier taken over by Disasta Recipe; why aren't there any employees of this supplier around? Maybe should be a few hostages to rescue, objects to destroy or glowies to click. As it is, all I had to do was defeat Disasta Recipe's group to complete the mission.

"Family Rivalry" clue, "Apparantly" should be "Apparently".

Debriefing: "upfront" should be "up front". The debriefing is pretty funny, actually; apparently King Colonel is a radioactive chef.

Mission 3
Briefing: So Mr Rider is being kidnapped, again. This would seem to duplicate mission 1, but the contact says I should run into the big bad guy here. Also Disasta Recipe has broken out of prison (already! gah) and may show up too.

Inside the mission, I link up with Tira Rider (the contact). She's a minion two levels lower than me...eep. Not sure I can keep her alive; fortunately, it's not a requirement. On the bright side, she won't be stealing the glory.

Fighting more of the KCCC Employees with fire and ice powers, I am struck by how much they remind me of Outcasts. You might consider having as part of your back story that King Colonel's employees are mostly former Outcast gang members; maybe adjusting their costumes to match. Up to you; I think it would be cool to tie them closer to an existing CoH faction though.

Consider giving the Cleaver mob the Hatchet, Impervium Axe or Roman Axe A as weapon? I think one of those would look more like a meat cleaver than the Lumberjack's Axe she's currently using.

I like the little crown you gave King Colonel. In his description, "A violent chef who's mere touch" should be "A violent chef whose mere touch". I am not quite sure why he thinks kidnapping Mr Rider will actually make people eat at King Colonel's Chicken and Cake; the story has previously established that KCCC was shut down because of health code violations (due to his radiation powers), not due to competition with the Rib Shack. So taking out the competition wouldn't really help.

Thinking about it, "Mr Rider" may not be the right thing to call Tyrone Rider. Since King Colonel is Tyrone Rider's brother, he could just as easily be called Mr Rider, too.

[NPC] King Colonel: Don't think you've won, Mega. Employees, a raise to whoever takes this pathetic Brute down!

Nice dying message. I'm quite surprised this dialog didn't trigger an ambush, though; it really sounds like it should.

I like that Disasta Recipe spawns in the path back to the door, but she really didn't have much to say except

[NPC] Disasta Recipe: So long suckers!

...which sounds like a running-away message. I think she needs more dialog. Maybe she could be mad about how you defeated her dad, or say something about how awesome KC Chicken and Cakes are.

Mission exit popup: I like this message and how it tells you what the eventual fates of King Colonel and Disasta Recipe are. "thank you for this showing of mercy" should be maybe "thank you for this display of mercy".

Debriefing: "a honorable thing" should be "an honorable thing".

Souvenir: "Golden Spork" is a great souvenir name. "memento" should be "momento", though, and "distateful" should be "distasteful".

Overall
I like the set up of the final mission, where you beat up King Colonel, causing Tyrone Rider to appear, and then you need to lead Tyrone Rider out of the mission with Disasta Recipe blocking the way. I thought the first two missions were a little too simplistic though (rescue 1 hostage, defeat 1 boss) and needed to have more details of interest in them.

For a mission about the Ribs Restaurant, I thought there was a shocking lack of ribs, or food of any sort, within the missions. I'd suggest adding lots more references to the yummy ribs and the awful chicken & cake, to help better establish the setting for your story arc. Maybe there should be non-required glowies in mission 1 giving a "Yummy Barbecued Ribs" clue, and non-required glowies in misson 3 giving "Radioactive Fried Chicken" and "Radioactive Cupcake" clues.

You might also add a few restaurant patrons as hostages in mission 1, and warehouse workers as hostages in mission 2.

I like the rivalry that is set up between KCCC and the Rib Restaurant, but I think the player needs to learn what the KCCC is much earlier, like in mission 1 where you first start encountering KCCC employees. Perhaps you could add to their background info, or add patrols with dialog that expositions about how King Colonel is going to be reopening his restaurant soon.

Also, King Colonel repeatedly kidnapping Tyrone Rider actually doesn't seem like it helps his restaurant business; especially since the KCCC restaurant was apparently shut down due to reasons unrelated to Rider's Ribs Restaurant. I like the rivalry between the two restaurants, but the motivation for the kidnapping needs some work.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I gave this story arc 3 stars. Hope you think that is fair!

-----

I owe a review to:

Hercules - 178774 Tales of Croatoa
Emansor - The Day I Tried To Live 131780
Noght - Warrior's Three 64885
twelfth - Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #212069
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240, Pt2 221242
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369

in queue:

@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
Theron - The Construct 91887
@Spry - Saving Grace 124477
@KemLi - A Father's Iron Will 198952
Cerulian Shadow - Attack of the Toymenator 207874
@Mr. Joe Black - A Ghost Story 101857

I did another run through Death to Disco! and sent feedback. I like the changes you've made. Feel free to check out either of the following. Teen Phalanx is (IMHO) the more funny of the two, but is a little longer.


Title: Celebrity Kidnapping
Arc ID: 1388
Creator’s Global Name: @PW
Mission Count: 3

Title: Teen Phalanx Forever
Arc ID: 67335
Creator’s Global Name: @PW
Mission Count: 4

Aeon's Nemesis review (arc id 161865)

The premise is that you're helping Marshal Brass with something related to the Architect system itself. Red side, level range seems around 30-50 with some variations. I did the first mission before I15, but after I15 I restarted the arc to try and avoid patch issues. I played a 33 SS/will brute.

Mission 1
Briefing: A pretty good briefing where the contact implies he has doubts about the effectiveness of Mission Architect as a tool for training Arachnos forces, but can't outright say that as it would contradict official policy. But he wants me to test it out on an unofficial basis. So the first mission is not "real", but is a simulation. This is a pretty similar premise to The Hero Simulator: The Beta Testers, only from red side; we'll see how it goes.

The mission itself seems decently crafted, though not unusually special aside from the Vanguard, who are pretty nasty opponents due to their debuffs; a group of 6ish of them managed to drop me once. They seem to be standard PvE Vanguard though, so I can't really complain.

I like the guest appearance by Fusionette. Her dialog is pretty good, though I almost think she sounds more competent than usual.

Debriefing: it doesn't sound like we learned anything from this test; the Architect Mission inside the Architect Mission seemed to be working fine. "Lead by Fusionette" should probably be "Led by Fusionette".

Mission 2
Briefing: Another Architect test, it seems, only this time with a randomly generated "extreme" threat. Not quite sure what I'm getting into from the briefing, but...it's just a test?

Mission title: "Find the Protoype" probably should be "Find the Prototype". But then, the briefing does not mention a prototype at all, so this may not make sense as a mission title anyway. Perhaps consider changing this to "Perform Extreme Test" or "Stop Threat to Rogue Isles" or something else that fits what the contact told us.

OK, entering the mission, the mission popup does a better job of explaining why I need to Find the Proto(t)ype.

Ran into some "Techticians"; I initially thought they were spelled wrong, but it seems the Techticians are some kind of generic mercenaries. There's a lot of already-existing mercenary factions that probably could've been used (for example, Sky Raiders or KoA or Malta). I like the dialog given to their patrols though.

When searching the safe glowies, I get a lot of messages like:

You begin cracking the safe.
You find nothing of interest in the safe.
You begin cracking the safe.
You find nothing of interest in the safe.
You begin cracking the safe.
The prototype is not here!

The last safe triggered the spawn of the prototype (I think), but "The prototype is not here!" is actually true of all the previous safes as well. The "Pogodyne Requisition Order" does explain why this safe is different, but you might change "The prototype is not here!" to something like "You find paperwork indicating the prototype has been moved!" or something similar.

In the nav tool, "Locate the protoype" should be "Locate the prototype". I understand why I need to locate the prototype now, but it's unclear why "Defeat the director" has suddenly become an objective after cracking the safe.

I found the "Director of Mercenary Resources" and fought him; he had some fun dialog. The mission ended as soon as I defeated him though, despite my never accomplishing the "Locate the protoype" objective. I thought that was odd until I read the "Field Test Authorization" clue from defeating the Director, which explains where the prototype went. You might consider striking the last sentence, "You could always get in the old fashioned way and steal the prototype", I think that would make more sense in the debriefing or next briefing than in a clue.

Debriefing: This does seem to explain why custom Techticians were used instead of Sky Raiders, so I'll withdraw that earlier complaint. "But that is probably the how a Nemesis plot should work" -- drop the extraneous "the" after "probably".

Mission 3
So I'm sent to a Council base to find this prototype and uncover the Nemesis plot.

The mission portrays a pretty nice battle between the invading Techticians and the Council. Patrols and battles help set the tone.

Found an ECM Master Tech who I think was the Techtician boss. In his description, "sohpisticated" should be "sophisticated". A Nemesis ambush attacked me during this fight (apparently hoping to catch me while distracted) and when I beat the ECM Master Tech, he had dialog like a computer program that crashed. Hmmm, interesting.

I still had the "Find the prototype" objective after defeating the ECM Master Tech, until I found a stray Techtician from his group and defeated him, at which time I got the "Deleted!" clue. You might consider making this "only boss needed" to complete this objective.

The "Deleted!" clue indicates I pick up the prototype, but it wasn't really clear that the ECM Master Tech was carrying the prototype (though I assume this was the case). You might consider adding an extra line (to the clue or to the dialog) indicating this.

I now need to "Find the source of the anomaly", forcing me to search the Council base again, which is kind of a pain. Interestingly, a lot of Nemesis patrols have spawned behind me, though. I eventually found a Nemesis Warhulk that told me that I had outlived my usefulness, and defeating him completed the mission. I'm not quite sure why he was more of an anomaly than the other Nemesis patrols, but I guess this works. I wonder if he should maybe be a Fake Nemesis instead?

Debriefing: I like the stuff he says here. The last paragraph sounds more like the set up for the next mission than anything else; consider moving that text to the next mission's briefing? Other players on the team (besides the leader) won't be able to see this debriefing.

Mission 4
Briefing: This kinda threw me for a loop initially; Dr. Aeon has been kidnapped, but the contact doesn't want me to go rescue him. Instead he wants me to break into Aeon's office (I guess while he's out). This made some sense (in terms of villain infighting) after I thought about it some, but I found the way the briefing presents this mission to be a little confusing.

Second part of the briefing explains the motivation a lot better.

Mission entry popup: "No one seems to noticed your arrival yet" should be "No one seems to have noticed your arrival yet".

Map selection: a standard "office" map is used to represent "Aeon's Office"; but since Aeon is a mad scientist, I kinda think it would make more sense to use a scientific lab map for his private office.

"AES MAinframe" should perhaps be "AES Mainframe" (note capitalization).

I found "A Perfectly Safe Bomb" guarded by two FRIENDLY Arachnos minions. This was a fun sight gag, and the guards had great lines. But I could not figure out any way to interact with this bomb; I can't attack it or click it, and I can't attack its guards. I ended up leaving it.

I like the Professor Echo dialog, which really gave the impression that he knew everything, yet was rather befuddled by knowing too much.

Haha, I like the fun messages from the glowies, particularly "This was a project to clone Blue Steel. Aeon abandoned it when he realized Blue Steel never bleeds." You might consider putting the message text into actual clues tied to the various glowies, just for fun. The game text they generate is easy to miss in the other game text spam, and also is not visible to players other than the one who clicked it.

"Teh Stun Meister" maybe should be "t3h Stun M31st3r".

I've now cleared the whole office but can't find the last experiment. I'm now thinking that "A Perfectly Safe Bomb" is, in fact, the last experiment. But I can't destroy the bomb, I think because I have to aggro its guards to interact with it; and I can't attack the guards, because they are tagged friendly.

I spent some time puzzling over this and could not figure out how to get past. I think that this mission is uncompletable as it stands. I suggest changing the Bomb's guards to be hostile; they ARE Arachnos, and all other Arachnos in this mission were hostile to me.

I feel like I have to quit the arc at this point, but this seems like some sort of bug, so I'm leaving the arc unrated for now.

-----

I owe a review to:

@Chocolate Rage - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967
Hercules - 178774 Tales of Croatoa
Emansor - The Day I Tried To Live 131780
Noght - Warrior's Three 64885
twelfth - Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #212069
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240, Pt2 221242
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369

in queue:

@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
Theron - The Construct 91887
@Spry - Saving Grace 124477
@KemLi - A Father's Iron Will 198952
Cerulian Shadow - Attack of the Toymenator 207874
@Mr. Joe Black - A Ghost Story 101857

I have a couple missions that have only custom characters, so default to level 1-54. But with I15 features I raised the min level to 25 or 30 for them, partly to match other missions in the same arc, and partly because I didn't want to give players the wrong idea that they would be perfectly okay running through this on a level 5 toon.

GARY COLEMAN:
Right now you are down and out and feeling really crappy

NICKY:
I'll say.

GARY COLEMAN:
And when I see how sad you are
It sort of makes me...
Happy!

NICKY:
Happy?!

GARY COLEMAN:
Sorry, Nicky, human nature-
Nothing I can do!
It's...
Schadenfreude!
Making me feel glad that I'm not you.

NICKY:
Well that's not very nice, Gary!

GARY COLEMAN:
I didn't say it was nice! But everybody does it!

D'ja ever clap when a waitress falls and drops a tray of glasses?

NICKY:
Yeah...

GARY COLEMAN:
And ain't it fun to watch figure skaters falling on their [censored]?

NICKY:
Sure!

GARY COLEMAN:
And don'tcha feel all warm and cozy,
Watching people out in the rain!

NICKY:
You bet!

GARY COLEMAN:
That's...

GARY AND NICKY:
Schadenfreude!

GARY COLEMAN:
People taking pleasure in your pain!

Thanks for the review! A few responses below. I've largely tried to accommodate your suggestions.

I also had to heavily revise some of my mobs; Prisoners getting removed from MA really put a crimp in things, and then I ran into some bug where Family won't spawn in the level 30-39 range. So now I've got a lot of "Convict" custom mobs and "Family" custom mobs, that I've tried to make look like Prisoners and Family. (Yeah, it's a horrible waste of arc space, but I couldn't come up with a better solution.)

[ QUOTE ]
You know, ordinarily I would throw a fit when SS customs start raging, but in this case how could he [Terry Wheeler] not! (but seriously, no rage please)

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't mean for him to have Rage, but he might've ended up with Rage somehow as a result of patches with powerset tinkering. As of I15, I made him a "custom powerset" boss, and he definitely shouldn't have Rage now.

[ QUOTE ]
Lois Watson. You're not... YOU ARE. Oh good lord, how many freakin' people are going to be waiting at the door?

Less than expected, actually. I was kinda expecting the bum and Unbelievable Man to show up to ruin the party.

Storyline - ****. So why didn't the bum and Unbelievable Man show up to ruin the party? (aside from maybe arc size limits) I was all set up for the crazy escalating showdown you get at the end of certain heist movies, but it was all just a bunch of cops.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm actually totally going for the "crazy escalating showdown at the end of a heist movie" feel here. A fight against a Family boss, then a map full of PPD spawning behind you, two Paparazzi ambushes, a custom PPD boss and two "reporter" bosses weren't enough, eh? How greedy.

I originally added Lois Watson and her sidekick Jimmy just as a throwaway gag (and also to split up the two Paparazzi ambushes so they won't both hit at once), but you've motivated me to actually make an Unbelievable Man boss for you to fight on the way out. He spawns after Lois threatens you with "You'll be sorry when Unbelievable Man hears about this!"

I only made him a boss instead of an EB or AV (though a real Unbelievable Man maybe deserves that stature) because fighting Unbelievable Man isn't meant to be the climax of the arc; he's really just Yet Another Speed Bump in the way of getting Paris out of the building (and into the hands of the reality TV executives).

I didn't add the Bum to the final scene because I didn't think he really had strong enough motivation to show up there. I could maybe throw in another ambush of Vagrants, wanting to get even? I'm already throwing an awful lot of stuff at the player in this mission though.

[ QUOTE ]

Gameplay - ****. Little irritations in running the first escort over all that broken terrain and watching her trip on rubble and fallen guard towers. Maybe just make her an ally and have the rescue spawn a Longbow Warden fanboy back near the chopper who flew in to make sure Paris was alright?

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, the whole point of the first mission is that you're kidnapping her, so you need to Get her to Da Choppa. I sympathize with the leading people over broken terrain thing (Allies seem even more stupid than usual since I15 hit) but the Zig map is definitely the right one for this mission.


[ QUOTE ]
I went back and forth on this, but overall, I was disappointed, just a little, to see the arc making promises it didn't keep. Dammit, I wanted to finally see what Unbelievable Man looks like!

[/ QUOTE ]

Heheh, your wish is granted. You're lucky I had tons of arc space left ... I've had to add 6 custom characters since I15! But Unbelievable Man is there now.

And he's taunting you. He's DARING you to come in after him. He doesn't think you have the guts to take him down!

7/1/2009

On Monday, the I15 update hit, and I spent much of my evening updating my story arcs to be I15 compliant.

Of my story arcs, the most dramatically impacted by I15 was Celebrity Kidnapping, which begins with a jailbreak from the Zig with help from the Family. Prisoners had been removed as a valid enemy group in I15, and it appeared some bug prevented Family from spawning in the level 30-39 range (even on villain side). I ended up having to bring back my custom "Convicts" faction with 2 orange jumpsuited prisoners, and create my own custom "Family" faction with a minion, lieutenant and a boss, who I tried to make look like existing Family mobs. This felt like a waste of arc space, but seemed necessary as I could not spawn the normal Prisoners and Family any more. Taking a suggestion from a reviewer, I also added "Unbelievable Man" as a new boss that spawns on your way out of the final mission, after you run off Lois Watson and her assistant Jimmy. An awful lot of stuff spawns on your way out of that mission already, but I think the hectic finale feels true to the "heist" genre.

Teen Phalanx Forever! worked pretty well right out of the box; I15 gave me a little extra space, so I added an extra model to the final ambush against the final AV. I15 deleted all "0 star" ratings, which suddenly catapulted Teen Phalanx to 5 stars and a decent position on page 2 of the search tool, which was quite nice. I was disappointed my other arcs didn't move up in rating as a result, but it's probably fair -- Teen Phalanx is definitely the best of my arcs right now.

Axis and Allies also worked fine after I15, and gave me enough extra space for me to re-add the American Sergeant to the US Army faction. I also tinkered heavily with custom power selections, giving Arctic Air back to the Russian generals (at some point they lost this due to power tweaking by the devs) and giving Unyielding to Maiden Justice (she seemed way too easy to beat if you could perma-knockdown her, but I previously couldn't give her Unyielding without also giving her Unstoppable). I almost changed all of my femme fatale contact's dialog into using a cheesy German accent (due to a player feedback) but a sanity check from MA Arc Finder channel persuaded me that this would be a dumb idea.

I15 also gave some built-in keywords that you could use to categorize your arcs, which I really like. Celebrity Kidnapping and Teen Phalanx Forever! are now both labeled Solo Friendly, Complex Mechanics and Comedy, while Axis and Allies is Solo Friendly, Custom Characters, Take Over the World. I spent some time testing all the arcs to make sure they were still functional, running Mega (33 SS/will brute) through the two villainous ones and Terrific Woman (13 SS/SR brute) through Teen Phalanx (which got her to level 14).

After messing with Mission Architect for a good long time, I signed on with an all-corruptor "Bison" (really Barracuda) Strike Force forming on Villains of Liberty. I played Schadenfreude (48 AR/pain corruptor) and everyone kept telling me how appropriate a name my character had for this SF. Our team mix was:

ice/cold corr
ice/rad corr
AR/pain corr (me)
AR/kin corr
ice/kin corr
fire/therm corr
dark/kin corr
rad/rad corr

We ran through the SF really fast (we had six people who didn't know how the SF worked, but the two people who had run it before were calling the shots) so I didn't quite get everything, but the plot seemed to be that we stole some stuff and end up letting Reichsman loose from a Freedom Phalanx super-prison. Reichsman looks just like M. Bison from Street Fighter, which is why everyone was calling it the "Bison SF". Schadenfreude being a card-carrying 5th Column member, I tried persuading my team to give up on that loser Lord Recluse and join up with Reichsman instead; no one went for it, though. The story kinda scripted us into opposing Reichsman for no really good reason. We ended up fighting Ms Liberty, Numina, a 5th column AV who ripped off my name (Schadenfreude), all four villain patron AVs, and then finally Reichsman himself. We had 8 corruptors and sickening amounts of debuff, but even so, Reichsman was pretty darn tough. I heard another BSF team running at the same time could not dent his HPs. My team was able to wear him down, despite him occasionally phase shifting or something insane like that, and completed the SF in 1hr 9mins for 20 merits (17.39 MPH; this seemed a really low reward for the effort involved) and the Arbiter badge. Schadenfreude hit level 49 along the way.

After the BSF I spent some time crafting IOs for Schadenfreude, slotting 6 Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control into her Tactics (for +2.5% global DMG and +2.5% DEF to all positions) and 5 Positron's Blast into her Buckshot (for +6.25% global RCHG). This puts her base ranged DEF at 9.25% and her base recharge at 46.25%.

On Tuesday night, I played Dreamwind (30 storm/psy defender on Protector server) as a sidekick on a 7-player Demolition Girls SG team running Praetorian AV missions. We had two tankers for awhile, but when the higher level tanker left the team, the other one refused to tank since the mobs were +6 to +7 to him. As a stormy, I offered to try tanking, and so I rushed a mob with hurricane on. This resulted in the tanker telling me that I "suck" as a tank because I was blowing things around. I was rather stung by this, so I suggested that he should take an SK (we had several level 46-47 players on the team, but he was playing at 42) and actually tank for us. He still refused to take an SK, but seemed to be guilt-tripped into actually trying to tank for awhile. I was annoyed enough by this that I considered leaving the team, but the team leader told me she "talked to" the tanker, and I wanted to beat up the Praetorian AVs, so I ended up staying. We beat up Chimera, Battle Maiden, Diabolique and Nightstar; this got Dreamwind to level 33. I took Lightning Storm at 32 and slotted it up some.

After that team broke up, I spent some time on Mega (33 SS/will brute) cashing in merits and tickets for recipes and turning them into IOs, which I've been squirreling away in my little base. 120 reward merits turned into 6 reward rolls, and I got:

Touch of the Nictus (ACC/END/RCHG) BlkMkt=5M
Obliteration (% of smashing) BlkMkt=10M
Aegis (+psi RES/mez resist) BlkMkt=1M
Devastation (% to hold) BlkMkt=4M
Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/HOLD/RCHG) BlkMkt=1K
Numina's Convalescence (+recovery/+regen) BlkMkt=51M

The Numina's unique was clearly the prize of this set. I crafted it but need some more slots before I can effectively use it. I also burned about 9000 tickets on Silver rewards, at 525 tickets a roll. Technically Bronze have a better payoff per ticket, but I just didn't want to have to deal with deleting a ton of junk recipes. From this I got:

Neronic Shutdown (HOLD/RCHG)
Obliteration (DMG/RCHG)
Impervium Armor (END/RCHG/RES)
Siphon Insight (ToHitDebuff/END/RCHG)
Eradication (ACC/RCHG)
Scirocco's Dervish (DMG/RCHG)
Shield Breaker (ACC/RCHG)
Performance Shifter (END/RCHG)
Luck of the Gambler (DEF)
Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/RCHG)
Ghost Widow's Embrace (END/HOLD)
Call to Arms (ACC/DMG)
Analyze Weakness (ACC/DefDebuff)
Obliteration (ACC/RCHG)
Pounding Slugfest (DMG/END)
Basilisk's Gaze (ACC/RCHG)
Basilisk's Gaze (RCHG/HOLD)
Aegis (END/RCHG)

I didn't take the time to price all these, but I was happiest with the LotG, the Obliterations, the Eradication and the Scirocco's Dervish, which all seem like recipes I might actually use. I spent quite a lot of time buying salvage and crafting IOs. For some of the common arcane salvage, though, the Black Market price was so high that I found it worthwhile to go buy arcane salvage rolls at the Ticket Vendor for 8 tickets a roll; pretty much all the arcane salvage is super-inflated in value, so even if it took me ten rolls to get, say, an Alchemical Silver, the extra salvage I got was still worth something.

6/29/2009

When I logged on Friday night, people were asking for help forming a mother ship raid in Rikti War Zone, so I ran Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) over there to help out, joining an 8-player team to destroy pylons and beat up aliens. I personally grabbed a bomb (number 22 out of 25 for my badge progress), got 2 reward merits from the master-at-arms, 312 Vanguard merits for the raid overall, and a compliment on Police Woman's costume.

After the raid wrapped up, it sounded like villains needed help for the King of the Hill PVP event in Recluse's Victory. So I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a 7-player villain team, that successfully stormed the Atlas statue and drove off the Hero team that was previously holding it. We weathered four or five counterattacks from the heroes; it seemed like blue side had more people, but curiously enough red side had more "support" classes (most of us were corruptors) so we dominated the zone for quite awhile, until a big hero assault pushed us off of the statue. This left the red side team rather scattered and we got defeated in detail for awhile, until we rallied and fought back for a bit, though we weren't able to retake the statue before the event ended.

After the PVP event finished, I went to Triumph server to play Alice Slaughter (34 db/will brute) on my continuing campaign to play Wonderland-themed story arcs. I played Alice in Wonderland (Part 2 of 2), which had cool looking models but not much story; I rated it 3 stars. Then I played Jabberwocky, which had fun clues that each were a stanza from the Jabberwocky poem, and seemed a well put-together single mission arc; I gave it 4 stars.

Finished the night playing Mega (32 SS/will brute) as a lackey on a 3-player level 50s team, which beat an elite boss Lord Recluse and completed a Peregrine Island mayhem. I also did some IO crafting, slotting two more sets of 4 Kinetic Combat into melee powers for +7.5% smash/lethal DEF, and 5 Decimation in her Hurl power for +6.25% recharge.

On Saturday afternoon, I spent some time duoing Mega with a level 34 brute. We did several door missions which went pretty well, until my teammate decided to spend a lengthy amount of time at the Black Market while I waited around. I wouldn't mind this too much, but a friend of mine was having trouble filling a team for Synapse TF, so I excused myself and jumped to blue side.

There, I found that I had hooked up with the second leg of the Task Force Commander Weekend event. Playing Milady de Winter (16 ice/emp controller), we did a Synapse TF with a team mix of:

grav/rad controller
inv/ss tanker
dark/elec defender
will/ss tanker
ice/emp controller (me)
fire/fire scrapper
earth/TA controller

This team was very safe but quite slow due to our very low DPS (the scrapper was on the low end and unSK'd so we essentially had no damage dealers). We had lots of support types so were never in any real danger, finishing the TF in 2hrs 55mins for 59 merits (counting 2 extra from Babbage; 20.23 MPH). This got Milady to level 20, and I took Clear Mind and Fortitude for her new powers. I could've taken Stamina instead, but I opted to take Fortitude because I wasn't having trouble with END management yet, while I consider Fortitude to be close to a godmode power.

The Task Force Commander marathon continued with a Sister Psyche TF. I started off on Milady at level 20, but our team was shaping up to be low on damage again, so I decided to switch to Kyrie Eleison (34 bs/inv scrapper) for extra DPS to help speed things up. I immediately got a compliment on how Kyrie Eleison was a great name for an angelic character, which was nice. Our team mix ended up being:

grav/rad controller
inv/SS tanker
dark/elec defender
ill/rad controller
bs/inv scrapper (me)

We had a minimum size team, but it was a solid mix of ATs and we got through the Sister Psyche TF with no difficulties. The game crashed on me as I exited the last mission, though, so I didn't get an elapsed time on the TF; I did verify I got the TF badge and the merits, though.

I took a break for dinner, but when I got back, the TF Commander marathon was still going, and I ended up playing Strong Woman (30 inv/SS tanker) on a Manticore TF with a team of:

kat/regen scrapper
plant/TA controller
3 blasters (fire/fire, AR/ice, fire/ice)
inv/SS tanker (me)
fire/rad controller
shield/SS tanker

The shield tanker seemed a little shy about attacking mobs, so I ended up charging into mobs of Crey most of the time, despite being sidekicked. We didn't have a proper stealth/TPer so didn't stealth very much (I did pseudo-stealth one mission by rushing to the end, letting Crey attacks bounce off my resists, and using veteran TP) but nevertheless finished without serious problems (other than nearly falling asleep at keyboard due to the late hour) in 1hr 41mins. This earned me 32 merits (19.01 MPH) and level 31.

On Sunday, I solo'd Mega through The Hero Simulator: Part 2, a story arc where you investigate a shady robotics company involved in sabotaging Architect Entertainment missions. This story was okay; I gave it 3 stars.

After that I saw a friend playing a lowbie brute, so I switched to Terrific Woman (10 SS/SR brute) to duo with her. We knocked out my Council Cargo story arc, defeating an elite boss Lt Blechley for 4 reward merits, then picked up a corruptor and helped her defeat an elite boss 3K Kelvin. We eventually grew to a 5 player team that got Terrific Woman to level 13; I took Swift at level 12.

Later on Sunday night, I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) as a lackey to another stalker doing a Founders Falls mayhem mission. We thoroughly plundered Founders Falls, clearing all the side missions, getting the explore badge and robbing the bank.

Then I joined a friend on a team in Peregrine Island, playing Rain Dancer (50 storm/archery defender) on a 7-player team fighting Praetorian AVs. We had no melee characters so I got to cut loose on stormy madness, which is great fun to inflict on unsuspecting AVs. We beat up Dominatrix, Marauder and Tyrant, all AV-level, and got the Statesman's Pal badge.

I finished the weekend playing TokyoRose (17 sonic/sonic corruptor) on a Cap au Diable SF. Our team was:

ice/cold corruptor
2 wolf spiders
SS/inv brute
sonic/sonic corruptor (me)
db/ninj stalker

We had two flavors of shields and no healing, so got to buff everyone so they felt really tough (until they ran out of hit points). We got through most of the missions fine in this way, with a few occasional deaths. It seemed like the sonic debuffs and the venom grenades from the spiders made all the enemies just melt; we steamrollered over the Infernal and Bat'Zul AVs very quickly as a result. Finished the SF in 1hr 1min for 12 merits (11.80 MPH) and got TokyoRose to 18, where I took Health.

With I15 going live, I'm going to pause reviewing for a couple days to give people a chance to fix their arc to work with I15. (And incidentally to give me time to fix MY story arcs to work with I15. Darn you devs! Why must you take my Prisoners faction away again!!)

I was 1 mission into "Aeon's Nemesis" as of last night; I'll resume with that arc after a couple days goes by. I'll probably restart the arc from the start to try and reduce potential problems.

The Hero Simulator Chapter 2, The Robot Mystery! review (arc id 172468)

Sequel to The Hero Simulator Chapter 1. This arc is apparently to investigate a new robotics company. Level range is 30-41 neutral. I played a 32 SS/will brute. The contact appears to be a hero in a techy looking costume named Shockwave.

Mission 1
Briefing: The contact finds it suspicious that Crey has closed one of its facilities; I'm not quite sure why. Consider having the contact explain just a little more about why this action would be suspicious; a company shutting down an office doesn't seem inherently worthy of investigation, but if there were some other hints of wrongdoing, it could be believable.

I like how this mission doesn't seem to obviously depend on the player having played through Chapter 1, but is still sorta connected. "Have you tried the it yet" should be "Have you tried it yet".

The mission accept message is "Beta Hero? Lets prove that wrong!" which doesn't make sense in this context (maybe it is copied from the other arc).

Inside the mission: It's kinda cool that the Crey patrol is chatting about the Hero Simulator. Foreshadowing, I imagine.

"Crey Tech Force" has a description of just "Crey Lt" -- probably should have a proper description.

"Crey Gunner" has a description of just "Crey Minion 1" -- probably should have a proper description. His skin is kind of a yellow, jaundiced color, also; not sure if that was intentional.

"Crey Masher" has a description of just "Crey Minion 2" -- probably should have a proper description.

I'm not totally sure why you needed to make several custom Crey minions and lieutenants, since they already have a lot of standard Crey enemies. They seem okay, though the lieutenants with force fields worry me.

"Boxes of stuff" glowy has "Rumaging" on its progress bar, should be "Rummaging". "Evidence Required" also has "Rumaging" on its progress bar. Should maybe just be "Evidence" (no Required).

I got the "Supply Inventory" clue which says that the robotics parts are very expensive, which means the supply has dried up, and another buyer is cutting in on the action. I kinda like the idea of this clue, but I think it's a big leap of logic to say that "since they are expensive ==> therefore supply has dried up." It might make more sense to find this info out from an internal memo or email from a purchasing agent who tells the Crey purchasers that supply has dried up.

I found a trash can glowy named "and more Clues" ... probably it should be named "Trash can" or "Wastebasket". I like that an earlier patrol mentioned the garbage can, but I thought the dialog:

[NPC] Medic: You dropped that broken PDA in the garbage can right?

was a little contrived, might want to reword it to sound more natural. Maybe something like "Busted my darn PDA. Now I wish I had gotten the extended service plan! I had to throw it out." then have guy #2 say, "Wow, that's rough."

Mission exit popup: Needs a period after "uneventful".

Mission 2
Briefing: The contact says "According to the PDA, the competitor that is curring into their robotics supplies may need to be investigated." I can buy that the PDA is a clue leading me to the next mission, but it needs to be better motivated. The fact that some other company is buying parts in competition with Crey doesn't seem suspicious enough to be worthy of a hero investigating (or a villain checking it out; though the way this is pitched, it sounds more heroic than neutral). I'd recommend you make this clue more incriminating, to help provide more motivation for the next mission. It might also be nice if the contact would tell you the name of the competitor here; since Crey is listed by name, it would be reasonable to give the other company's name too.

Mission accept message is "No More Beta Hero/Villain jokes, I promise!" which makes no sense in this context. Something like "I'll check it out" or "Agree to investigate" would be more reasonable.

Second part of briefing: "Whoever this groups is" should be "Whoever this group is". And, shouldn't the PDA say who this other group is already, since Shockwave has decoded it?

Inside the mission:

[NPC] Researcher: Ok, lets bust some heads!

"lets" should be "let's" here.

Found a glowy file cabinet labeled "Mystery Clues", maybe should be labeled "File Cabinet" instead. It gave me an interesting Mission Statement clue. However, I'm rather skeptical of the idea that you could find a Mission Statement and not know what the name of the "mystery" company is; usually a Mission Statement is explicitly tied to a company's corporate identity. I think maybe you are trying to keep this company mysterious, but I really think the clues so far would've told us what the company's name is by now. You could, however, make the company name something extremely generic and meaningless sounding, like Amaglamated Inc., and it would still be rather mysterious as to what their motivations are.

[NPC] Team Leader: Ok, lets roll this place, and find out who is messin' with Crey!

"lets" should be "let's".

[NPC] Team Leader: Yes, I'm Canadian, how did you guess?
[NPC] Team Leader: Ok, ok, UNCLE!! Were are looking for important stuff in a crate below.

This is fun though I am not sure they actually "cry uncle" in Canada. Though I could be wrong. "Were" should be "We're", and "below" is technically false - I actually found the crate upstairs from where I found the Team Leader.

The team leader also gives me a clue named "Desk!" which says "they are after some high value information hidden in a desk" -- which contradicts the dialog saying they're looking for a crate, and the glowy IS in fact a crate. I'm guessing maybe it changed from a desk to a crate someplace and maybe this clue didn't get updated.

Smash Bot V1 has a description of "Hits hard", should probably have a more detailed description.

Breaking the crate caused the mission to end, and I simultaneously got the "Plans!" and "Plans Revealed!" clues. It looks like these will always be awarded at the same time, and they give similar information; you might consider merging these into one clue. I also think that you should perhaps outline some of the details of "the plan to create an addictive agent for a holographic simulator" that are described here. It's not clear how a "robotics company" would be involved with a "Holographic Simulator" since those aren't the same technology; and you might also want to go into more detail on the "addictive agent" -- explaining just what it is that they are doing to make it so addictive.

Debriefing: "definately" should be "definitely".

Mission 3
Briefing: The contact decodes more data from the PDA and suddenly says "based on this new information, the addictive agent storage unit will be moved in about an hour". Since the PDA was just junk laying in a wastebasket, it is a little hard to believe that it would have info so current that it needs to be acted on within an hour. Plus, it doesn't make sense that a Crey computer would have information on this addictive agent, which is being produced by another company (not Crey). You might consider having some other clue in mission 2 that gives the info out which leads to this mission.

Inside the mission, a "Storage Unit" is the very first thing I find, and isn't guarded by anything - seems suspiciously easy. But it turns out to just be a decoy. Oddly, this is communicated through dialog:

[NPC] Storage Unit: Dang, it sounds hollow!
[NPC] Storage Unit: Yup, it was empty all right!

and since Storage Units can't really talk, this is kinda weird. You might consider dropping the Storage Unit's lines.

I found "Clifford", who apparently was the evil mastermind behind everything. His description is just "Clifford the Engineer", and since he's such an important character, I really suggest you give him a more detailed background story. Also, I don't think he was an actual objective in my nav tool, but maybe should be; unless his objective name was something nonobvious that I missed.

[NPC] Clifford: Perhaps you are more than just a of B lister after all!

should drop the "of" between "a" and "B lister".

The "Upgraded Shock Bots" having both Aim and Short Circuit make them quite nasty, may want to be careful with them - got drained to 0 END even while I was solo. On a big team, a large spawn of these might be too nasty for the players.

The "Defeat of Clifford" clue, "Cliffords" should be "Clifford's". I'm afraid the fact that Clifford was really behind the whole thing makes me like part 1 even less but I don't mind it working out that way for part 2.

I found an "Addictive Storage Unit" ... if you meant for the other storage units to be decoys, probably it should be named "Storage Unit" like all the others. Unless you intentionally made the name different to make this stand out.

I found a destroyable desk and smashed it and got some "keys to the giant robot" which I "threw in the lava". But...what if my character WANTS a giant robot? It's just a joke I guess. Consider making the desk a clickable glowy, rather than destroyable, since most CoH desks are searched by clicking them, not breaking them.

Shockwave was the very last thing I found, at the very tip top of the robot scaffolding. The mission ended as soon as I rescued him. If you want him to be a helpful ally, you might want to place him near the "front" of the mission. Also his dialog was:

[NPC] Shockwave: uuuuuummmmph
[NPC] Smash Bot V1: Attack!! Attack!! Contacing home base....
[NPC] Shockwave: Ughh hmmph
[NPC] Shockwave: Thanks, they caught me by suprise. Did you destroy the agent?

I think "uuuuummmph" and "Ughh hmmph" are not really meaningful dialog, you might want to write something more talky there. For his last line, "suprise" should be "surprise".

"The Real Story!" clue has some nice explanation in it, but maybe some of it would be more appropriate for the final debriefing with the contact. Some of it may be puzzling to a player who hasn't done Chapter 1. "he was you using you" should be "he was using you".

I think the references to Clifford in general would be very confusing to someone who hasn't done Chapter 1. Although you can maybe hope that most people would do Chapter 1 before Chapter 2, you might want to name-drop Clifford's name a couple times in the earlier parts of this story arc just so he is established as a character (albeit a peripheral one) before he is revealed to be the big villain.

Debriefing: "apprent" should be "apparent".

Overall
I did think this part was better constructed than Chapter 1, and the story seemed to more logically flow from mission 1 to mission 2, and from mission 2 to mission 3. I liked that there was a LOT of stuff to do in the final mission, and that the clues and debriefing finally explained what was behind the whole story.

I do think the story could benefit some more from additional explanation of how the addictive agent works (I mean the whole Hero Simulator is virtual, so it's not like they can insert crack cocaine into it ... or CAN THEY?) and more background on the company that was Crey's competitor and making these robots. Most of the mobs could benefit from some additional background description, too. Maybe there could be more foreshadowing of Clifford being the big bad guy also; perhaps something linking Clifford to the alternate robot company (maybe he's an ex-employee).

Some additional motivation for why the original investigation into Crey (in mission 1) is necessary would be nice also, as well as maybe changing the hook that gets you into mission 3 to be something more plausible.

Anyway, I thought it was okay but could use some polishing and additional detail. I gave it 3 stars.

-----

I owe a review to:

Darkonne - 161865 Aeon's Nemesis
@Chocolate Rage - Rider's Ribs Restaurant Rescue 163967
Hercules - 178774 Tales of Croatoa
Emansor - The Day I Tried To Live 131780
Noght - Warrior's Three 64885
twelfth - Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
@Stormsurge - Of Liberty and State Pt1 218636
@Citizen Razor - 195149
@Dalghryn - Consequences of War #212069
MrCaptainMan - The Audition Pt1 221240, Pt2 221242
@NullGeodesic - The Superadine Withdrawal Blues 205046
@jjac - The History of Statesman 219484
FoundBoy - Threefold Rule 197183
@Bubbawheat - Matchstick Women #3369

in queue:

@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
Theron - The Construct 91887
@Spry - Saving Grace 124477
@KemLi - A Father's Iron Will 198952
Cerulian Shadow - Attack of the Toymenator 207874
@Mr. Joe Black - A Ghost Story 101857

Alice in Wonderland (Part 2 of 2) (arc id 59650)

Through the Looking Glass: 59650 Alice (left) and Alice Slaughter (right)

Alice and the Flamingo

Alice and the Jabberwock

Off with her head! Alice versus the Queen of Hearts




Jabberwocky (arc id 1573)

Alice Slaughter (left) and 1573 Alice (right)

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
and the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Thanks for the kind words!

I must confess that several of the items you highlighted as being especially good were added specifically as a result of suggestions from players. Player feedback is awesome!

I'll take a look at tweaking the Paparazzi bio and the mission 3 completion clue as you suggest; both those seem like pretty reasonable ideas.

Thanks for running through Celebrity Kidnapping! I'm glad you liked it.