PoliceWoman

The Ideality - Part 2: An Ideal Plan review

Played a 50 AR/dev blaster.

Mission 1
Briefing seems normal, not bad but not exceptional. The Ideality are back and have taken some scientists hostage.

I do like the dialog the Ideality and the scientists have, both the "You shall be made perfect!" that they tell the scientists, and the scientists being so hopeful and thankful at being saved.

I still think you may want to remove mez protection from Bionic Barrager, to make it easier for squishies who rely on holds/stuns.

This map seems a little on the large side for what you need to do here.

The last scientist gave me a clue leading to a Central Office Supply. This is a decent new lead, but I'm still kinda puzzled as to why the Ideality took over this lab in the first place. Was there something special about this lab that made them want to take it over? Or are they just after more humans to convert into cyborgs? As it stands now, this mission looks like its sole purpose is to lead into the next mission; some explanation as to the Ideality's motivations in the first mission would be nice.

Mission 2
Briefing: Crimson Avenger the name of a DC comics hero, you might want to pick a different name to be safe. Also Vera says "After we gave him the info" when really it was just her (she did make a point of saying "While you were out"). Maybe should be "After I gave him the info".

The way this briefing is phrased makes it sound like the Crimson Avenger is the protagonist and the player is just supporting this NPC. I think it would be nicer if you could frame it so the player is the hero, not the NPC; especially considering your goal as you enter is "Rescue the Crimson Avenger".

When I rescue the Crimson Avenger, he says, "I'm glad you got my message" -- but the contact never gave me a message from him, she made it sound more like it was her idea to send me to back up Crimson Avenger. Maybe you could rephrase the briefing so the Crimson Avenger sent a message asking the player for help, via the contact.

The boss of this mission, NRG Type I, spawned very near the entrance. Not sure if that was intentional.

Having minions with healing/buffing powers (like Cyber Repair with pain dom and Cyber Support with force fields) may make the Ideality enemies really hard for bigger teams; with a big spawn, the number of minions with stacking buffs would get pretty crazy. You may want to restrict healing/buffing powers to lieutenants or higher.

I had Crimson Avenger get stuck going up an elevator and lost him there. I think this is an old bug with elevators and hostages, so probably nothing you can do about that, but you should know it can happen.

Found the professor, and found his name is Dr. Ronson. You might have Vera mention him by name rather than just calling him "some important professor" (I mean she gives the street address for the mission even, not sure why she wouldn't have this detail) and change the "Rescue the professor" objective to "Rescue Dr. Ronson".

I like Dr. Ronson's dialog. He sounds very absent-minded professor-ish with all his "Oh, hey!" and "Uh, please don't do that?" messages.

I thought I heard an Ideality ambush coming after me when I freed Dr. Ronson, but it never did find me, maybe got confused by elevators. Crimson Avenger did get unstuck again on my way back out, though.

The professor gave me a new address on the way out, saying it was important, but he didn't explain why. And why was the professor here in Central Office Supply in the first place? Why did the Ideality cyborgs capture him in particular? A lot of unanswered questions here. I think some of this needs to be explained; there needs to be more supporting reasons for the player to want to check out this random address Dr. Ronson gave them. At least have him say where he got the address and why he thinks it's important.

Debriefing: Even the contact seems confused as to what is going on. Need more info so the player knows what she's doing!

Mission 3
Briefing: So Vera wants me to check out the address, which of course is an Ideality base. I'm still very much in the dark as to what is going on; as a result it doesn't feel like I've made much progress so far.

In the mission, I have a lot of robots saying "Cyber Repair: Be alert. According to intelligence, Police Woman may be looking for this place." and other robots saying "Cyber Gunner: Be alert. According to intelligence, $target may be looking for this place." (with no string substitution) I've noticed that sometimes it won't replace $target with the name if the player isn't very close; you may want to rephrase their "unaware" dialog to not include $target as a result.

I found some Encrypted Files as a clue from clicking the glowy. It would be nice if the clue actually had some details on what is in the files; in general, I think it is better for the player to read the actual clues and figure out what's going on, rather than taking it back to the contact and expecting the contact to tell you about them in exposition.

After searching the warehouse, it's quite unclear to me why the Ideality was occupying that warehouse; they weren't really doing anything except patrolling around being worried I'd show up. As a result, it felt like this base purely existed for me to come in and find some clues in it. Maybe give this base some more purpose by putting some more humans being held hostage (prior to being converted), or some machinery or something else that gives the impression that the Ideality has some purpose for this base?

Mission 4
Briefing:
Vera says "those computer files you retrieved might contain all the evidence we'd ever need to put Ideal away for a long, long time!" Considering we have many eyewitnesses that the Ideality is kidnapping people and grafting cybernetics on them against their will, that seems like plenty of reason to arrest Ideal already, without the need for any additional evidence.

Second, Vera says "the Ideality found out where we're storing the evidence for this case, and is hitting that building pretty hard. I need you to get down there and protect the evidence." The only evidence I've gathered is this data file; a data file isn't physical evidence so doesn't need to be "stored" in a physical warehouse, and additionally you can make lots of copies of a data file, so it doesn't seem like robots trying to take back the original data file I recovered would really stop us from using the evidence. Unless you assume that no one made a back up copy of this valuable evidence, in which case you maybe should say this, but this would kinda make the contact and/or the player look dumb, so I wouldn't recommend it.

So as a result this briefing and this mission doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. For this plot to make sense, the evidence you recovered would need to be physical in nature (so it can't be copied and can reasonably be stolen back) and should furthermore incriminate someone who previously you had no evidence against (for example, a crooked city councilman who secretly is supporting the Ideality would work, but the known leader of a criminal organization doesn't work for this).

Entering the mission, it's already totally overrun with Ideality; why haven't they destroyed the evidence already? Maybe you should have some PPD here fighting the Ideality and guarding the evidence, but losing, or something like that.

After clearing the cyborgs around the evidence computer, suddenly the objective changed to "Defeat NRG Type II Robot", but there was no explanation for why. Maybe you need a clue or some of the robots in the ambush to say something about the Type II robot ("$name is here! Keep $himher pinned down until the NRG Type II can reinforce us!" or something), to give the player some reason why they need to fight it.

Minor quibble, but the way NRG Type II talks is a little too Rikti-like; "Order received: Eliminate all fleshbags" and "Target detected: Eliminating". I think "Warning: Operational parameter not defined" is fine though as it sounds like a proper computer warning.

Debriefing: "Good job protecting the evidence warehouse. You're not going to liek what we found out, though: all the evidence files you picked up were fakes; looks like they were just there to disguise a homing program." This....doesn't make sense. Why would they send robots to recover the evidence if it was fake? (This makes me wonder what the contact says if you fail to defend the evidence computer, too.) Also, "liek" should be "like".

This also means everything the player did in missions 3 and 4 was useless; so really, the player hasn't made any progress working on this plot at all, even at the end of mission 4. I think this is a problem; each mission really should build on the earlier missions.

Mission 5
Briefing: OK, despite having everything we learned turn out to be false, Crimson Avenger randomly found where Ideal is hanging out and is inviting me to help him out with the final bust. We also find out that the nice professor that we rescued turned out to be a cylon who was programmed to give us a false lead, so accomplishing mission 2 was also useless. This set up makes it sound like I would've done better to not get involved in this investigation at all, and just let Crimson Avenger do it all, which is not a good feeling.

So again I'm going in to be backup for Crimson Avenger.

OK, I finally found Ideal.

[SPOILER....]

Interesting plot twist that he was actually Crimson Avenger. But this actually doesn't make sense because the only reason we even did missions 2 and 5 were because of Crimson Avenger telling us where to go; without his info we never would've found most of these Ideality bases (at least, not the way the story is currently presented). So what was he thinking? Is this all an overly complex trap for the player character? I don't really think that makes sense as far as plots go, but if that's what you're going with, you need some foreshadowing of Ideal holding a huge grudge against the player in order to give Ideal enough motivation to concoct such a plan.

This also makes both the contact and the player look kinda dumb for not realizing Crimson Avenger was Ideal all along. I do think you should add some clues or foreshadowing for this reveal.

I'm not sure why but Ideal never summoned any robots while I was fighting him.

Debriefing: The final debriefing does a good job of trying to explain this elaborate plot and wrapping up the story arc as a whole.

Overall
I feel like the plot needs work; it makes sense why we go in and save the lab techs in the first mission, but the reasoning behind the other missions seems rather tenuous to me. Having the player's efforts in nearly all the missions be (essentially) futile makes the player feel like she isn't getting anywhere. Acting as backup for Crimson Avenger for most of the arc, then being tricked by him, is kinda demeaning for the player as well. Most of the arc only makes sense within the context of "It was all an elaborate plot by Ideal to entrap your character", and I don't think that is enough. I think it would be better if everything you do, every step of the way, makes sense; THEN at the end you can discover that, in fact, a lot of it was a plot by the big bad guy.

I'd recommend you revise some of your story so that the first several missions are better linked together, with each mission giving a clue leading to the next. I think the clue needs to be a little more than "Soandso hands you an address", give some explanation for why the address is important for the investigation rather than it just being a random address. Make it so the player finds out where Ideal's lair, maybe as a result of the computer files (maybe don't make them "fake" evidence, I don't think that was needed for the plot).... Make it more so the player is the central character with Crimson Avenger helping her.... then once the player gets to Ideal, at THAT point you find out Ideal was Crimson Avenger all along, and so on.

Anyway, as it stands now, I gave the story arc 3 stars; I hope you think that's fair.

------

I owe a review to:

@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - A Tangle in Time 2622
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - Dream Paper 1874
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230
@Flagrant Fowl - Strange Tale of Silent Witness 114250
@El Condor - Freaks and Geeks 55715
@Ryo Takenoko - 1 of Kidnapping an Idol 136188 or Santa's Workshop of Misfit Toys 134140
@Elisenda - 1 of (A Lame Joke, 22982) (Fine Literature, 136522)

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863

Wow, thanks for this detailed review! Definitely incorporating some of these suggestions.

[ QUOTE ]
• Blond should be spelled Blonde
• Perhaps she should be the heiress of the Holiday Hilton, or the Holiday Hotels, or something similar. Her name is a parody, so the hotel's name should be as well.

[/ QUOTE ]

Changed to "blonde" and "Holiday Hotel". Also changed to "Holiday Hotel" in Paris's description.

[ QUOTE ]
• Re-write text to "There's a sewer grate at the far end of the prison yard; that should lead you straight to her cell," being sure to add something about it being at the far end of the yard for those who've never done the tutorial, or don't remember it. [there are several grates before you get to the correct one]

[/ QUOTE ]

OK, reworded to "There's a sewer grate at the far end of the exercise yard"

[ QUOTE ]
• "Try TO get Paris out in one piece"

[/ QUOTE ]

Changed.

[ QUOTE ]

• Convict minion info text
"who has built up a lot of pent up aggression..." might better read "A convicted felon with years of pent-up aggression; he's ready to unloose it all now" [either way, pent-up should be hyphenated; it's a compound adjective].


[/ QUOTE ]

I think I like my phrasing a little better, but I did change "pent up" to "pent-up".

[ QUOTE ]

• Photographer info text:
"Paparazzi take photos of celebrities <change to>when the subjects least expect it..." and "or<comma> in this case, while..."


[/ QUOTE ]

I like this; changed all of them to have the info:

Paparazzi take photos of celebrities when the subjects least expect it, such as when they shop, walk through a city, eat at a restaurant or even swimming or lying on the beach. Or, in this case, while they're being kidnapped by supervillains.

[ QUOTE ]

• Paris Holiday info text:
"...became famous after appearing on an MTV reality show." instead of of "a reality show on MTV."
"story WHICH caused the producers <delete TV> to proclaim her the hottest star on televsion <instead of MTV>."
"Paris also sang some marginal music<comma instead of AND> shilled <instead of SOLD> some over-priced perfume, and had an irate ex-boyfriend post an explicit video of them <instead of HER> on <instead of TO> the internet. Unfortunately, <delete FOR HER> Paris' bad-girl <compound adjective> ways caught up with <instead of TO> her when <instead of AFTER>..."

[/ QUOTE ]

These seem like good changes, making them all. Her info is now:

The heiress to the Holiday Hotel fortune, Paris became famous after appearing on an MTV reality show where she "discovered" her latent superpowers in a fiery origin story which caused the producers to proclaim her the "hottest" star on television. Paris also sang some marginal music, shilled some overpriced perfume, and had an irate ex-boyfriend post an explicit video of them on the Internet. Unfortunately, Paris's bad-girl ways caught up with her when she was arrested and sentenced to prison for drunk driving.

[ QUOTE ]
• A small ambush on the way out would make sense, probably by the Paparazzi.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sadly I'm out of "detail" slots that I can use on this map. Another ambush wouldn't be bad, but I don't know that I want to delete something else in order to fit it in.

[ QUOTE ]
• After mission text - put a rich at the end as well: "We're going to be rich, $name, rich!"

[/ QUOTE ]

That does sound more Willy-like. Changed.

[ QUOTE ]

Mission Two:
• Mission Intro Text : "We split the ransom three ways—you, me, and the Family <instead of "one for you, one for me, and one for the Family.">
• Info Text on Bum: "Once a promising boxer, Terry Wheeler took a dive at his brother's urging, allowing Emil Marcone to make serious money on a series of inside bets. Ever since, Terry's life has been on the skids, and he now squats in an abandoned office, a washed-up has-been." [Leave the relationship to Willy implied, since you never mention it again, and eliminated to be verbs]

• Info Text on Hobo: "Formerly a Scrapyarder foreman, after the Cage Consortium busted his union he found himself out of work, out of luck, and out of options." ["with the Scrapyarders" is wordy; "out of work and un-employed" is redundant]


[/ QUOTE ]

Made all these text changes.


[ QUOTE ]

Mission Three:
Intro Text: change "in order to" to "to" in the first sentence, delete "Go and" from the second, and perhaps change the ending to just "we'll be able to settle our accounts"

[/ QUOTE ]

Changed as suggested.

[ QUOTE ]

• The final fight is suddenly much tougher than the rest of all the preceding missions. After no deaths through the arc, I died eight times after encountering the Marcone boss. Being ambushed while fighting the boss is very frustrating.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm, yeah, I've had a couple other people complain that the paparazzi ambushes here were too overwhelming. There currently are two "easy" ambushes while you fight the Marcone boss. I'm eliminating one ambush from the Marcone boss, instead causing "Lois Watson", another reporter to spawn. Then defeating Lois's spawn will cause the second Paparazzi ambush to occur.

So, in short, there's still mad paparazzi ambushes, but they are spaced farther apart.

[ QUOTE ]

• After you capture(?) Amanda Vines, there should be some text (perhaps a clue, so it's obvious) about leading her out. I was unsure at first what to do with her.

[/ QUOTE ]

She's not really an objective, she is just following you because she wants an exclusive interview.

[ QUOTE ]
• The grammar and word choice of the souvenir could be improved - some missing commas, too many to be verbs, etc. I can send you a message about it if you care.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure, PM me if you have some specific comments!


I republished and ran a test through and all this seemed to work. Thanks for the feedback!

The Ideality - Part 1: A New Foe

All the missions were labeled level 1-54. I played a 50 AR/dev blaster.

The description of the arc was very vague; essentially, one sentence saying that a mysterious new group has appeared and no one knows why. I kinda think you need a better pitch; as it is now, what would make someone try this arc over one of the many others which introduce a new villain group?

Mission 1
Briefing: the contact, who seems to be a new police detective, wants me to find out who has been trashing villain hideouts. The writing for the briefing seems good, but the logic behind the story hook seems weak to me. Someone is trashing villain hideouts and she wants me to find out why. It actually seems like villain hideouts being trashed might be a good thing; she explains "it's not being done by registered heroes" but this seems a rather thin explanation to me, as I'd think vigilante justice would be pretty common in CoH. I think you may need a better motivation for why the player should check this out.

Mission goals: in addition to defeating the invasion leader, would it make sense to also defeat the commander of the Council base, as long as I'm here anyway? Also "Defeat invasion leader" is used for both mission title and mission objective, you might want to mix it up a little bit so it isn't quite so repetitive. Maybe define the mission title as "Investigate attack on Council base", then either keep "Defeat invasion leader" or rename it to something like "Learn identity of invaders" (but still linked to defeating the boss).

I like the dialog the Ideality vs Council battles have, stuff like "Mechanical perfection awaits you!" helps give an idea what the Ideality group is after. Likewise I like Router's dialog.

Mission 2
Briefing: I think we're pretty quick to assume the Ideality are bad guys when we haven't seen them do anything but attack other villains, but if we assume that they are, the "gather information" premise seems good. I don't like being so in the dark about who these new villains are, so gathering info on them sounds good.

I like the title and the objectives of this mission.

Cyber Fighter's description has an extra space between "and" and "weapons" in the second sentence.

The Bionic Barragers have mez protection from Entropy Shield; I was able to blow them away as a blaster but they might be really hard for a controller or dominator.

I picked up the data file, the bionic parts and the hard drive but the clues attached to them seem really uninformative; would be nice if the player could make something of them.

Mission 3
Briefing: the contact tells you "the files you retrieved" helped reveal some info, so the data file and hard drive were useful, but not sure how the bionic parts did any good.

Mission goals: 3 Male Converts to Rescue, 3 Female Converts to Rescue. I'm not sure it helps any to distinguish them by gender; maybe it'd be better to aggregate them all into "6 Victims to Rescue".

The victims seem to be normal people, which is inconsistent with the Idealists' MO so far, i.e., taking over villain bases. If they have only taken villain bases so far, they should be converting captured villains (Council, CoT, whatever). If they are converting regular people, there ought to be some foreshadowing in earlier briefings or clues, hinting that normal people have been disappearing.

If you have the space for it, I think it would be cool if one or two of the people you rescue are "partially" converted; maybe with a robotic hand or a face plate or something, and suitably horrified at their experience. Or possibly they are partially converted and you end up having the fight and subdue them.

I rescued all 6 victims, but I kinda wonder what's stopping this conversion facility from just kidnapping more people and processing them, instead. Maybe there should be some lab equipment, used for the conversion process, that the player destroys, and/or a boss who is running the lab that you take out? If this seems like too many objectives in one mission, you could decrease the number of victims to save.

Mission 4
Briefing: Seems a bit bland. Freeing one of the victims leads us to another Ideality base; this makes logical sense but also feels rather routine.

Mission title and mission goal are both "Defeat Link Node"; maybe change the title to "Defeat base leader" to avoid repetition.

This base is very dingy and dirty; doesn't seem consistent with how perfectionist the Ideality is depicted.

I defeated the base leader and the mission immediately ended; seemed a little too straightforward. Link Node's dialog was okay but fairly stereotypical.

I think this mission needs more to it; as it stands, it does not feel like this mission adds a lot to your story, and I think you should either add more to this mission, or consider cutting it. As for what you could add, what is the purpose of this base? Does the Ideality have other goals besides optimizing humans? If that's the only thing they do, maybe there would be more humans to rescue here, or else post-op recently modified humans/villains that the player has to deal with. Maybe there could be some extra glowies to find giving clues as to what the Ideality is up to. Or alternatively, you could edit this mission out.

I got an Autonetic Microchip clue from defeating the boss; it's not clear to me why I (as the player) would think this microchip has the location of the Ideality's headquarters any more than a microchip from one of the other robots (since I can't read microchips). Consider clarifying this clue. It might be better for Link Node to confess it's location (Link Node isn't REALLY a computer, he's a modified human, right? so he could talk) or for the player to hack into a computer or the navigation system in one of the Ideality cyborgs in order to learn the directions to the main base.

Mission 5
Briefing: OK, in a bit of bait and switch, the microchip didn't include directions to the headquarters at all, but does show the location of another base. Though I wonder how the contact would KNOW this other base is NOT, in fact, the Ideality headquarters; I mean it would just be another Ideality base, either way, wouldn't it?

This other base is apparently a place where they build "NRG robots", which are not really explained anywhere before this. Maybe you should give a clue or a mention in an earlier briefing as to what the NRG robots are. (I think maybe they are mentioned in the description of some of the mobs, but most players will not check that.)

I think it is puzzling that the Ideality is building robots; aren't they established as wanting to convert humans into cyborgs, which they regard as perfect? If cyborgs are perfect, why build robots, too? Or does the Ideality like to use both cyborgs AND robots? I personally would suggest you just have them stick with cyborgs as their "ideal" model for the sake of simplicity, but if you want them to include both cyborgs and robots, maybe that needs some clues to explain more about the Ideality and why they have both.

You might consider re-using the "Rogue Robots" faction (after all, we have a killer robot faction already) -- maybe either using their mobs in the Ideality, or perhaps merging the Ideality into the Rogue Robots.

Inside the mission: I like the use of the Crey Paragon Protector lab as map for this mission; however, with the humanoid figures suspended in capsules, I kinda think this makes it look much more like a cyborg production facility than a robot factory. I think you should consider changing this from a robot factory to someplace they make cutting edge cyborgs (maybe making the Type I and Type II both advanced versions of Ideality cyborgs). Or if you prefer robots, maybe consider using Siege's factory instead.

NRG Type I is the first of the Ideality robots that has made a "bzzt" noise in its dialog; I kinda think either all your robots should make this noise, or none of them.

OK, I fought NRG Type II and he also goes "bzzt". Nothing else seems to though; I guess everything else is a cyborg?

I have to wonder, who is it that fabricated NRG Type I and the NRG Type II prototype? Shouldn't we be also arresting whomever it was that invented these killer robots? Or at least whatever local management was running the robot factory. There IS someone running the robot factory, right? Or if it's totally automated, maybe a glowy to "hack" the control systems and shut down the factory would be good.

Debriefing: The final debriefing is somewhat anticlimactic. "That should at least slow down the Ideality for awhile" doesn't sound like a very big deal. I realize this arc is only Part I for your overall storyline, but it would be nice if the final mission of each part had some closure.


Overall
I like the basic concept of the Ideality as initially presented, where they are capturing people and modifying them with cybernetic parts in an effort to "perfect" them. However, I don't think you did enough with this idea; this idea was used in mission 3 but then kinda dropped for missions 4 and 5. Also, the various things you have the Ideality doing don't seem very focused; during missions 1 and 2 they are conquering other villain bases, during mission 3 they are kidnapping civilians and converting them into cyborgs, and during mission 5 they are building prototype robots. (Not sure what they are doing in mission 4, it's never really explained what that base is for, which I think could be improved on as well.) As presented, it seems like they are doing various random things that aren't closely connected.

My suggestion would be for you to more heavily focus on the modifying humans into cyborgs aspect of the Ideality, which I think is the more intriguing part of their back story. The reason they invade villain bases is perhaps to capture villains to use as raw material. Consequently, in mission 2 where they've taken over a Council base, the player should encounter some Idealized Council -- probably some custom models that look like people in Council uniform, but with lots of cybernetic parts attached to them.

The police starts to care about the Ideality more when the Ideality starts kidnapping regular civilians in addition to villains for their raw materials (as in mission 3; maybe the hostages could be a mix of civilian and villain models).

I'd drop the robot angle and have the Type I and Type II bosses in the final mission be various Idealized big bad guys, like a cyborg Greater Devoured or something wacky like that.

Basically I think you should stick to the Ideality's essential theme and run with it as much as you can. Right now, though, I think the overall plot of this arc is rather unfocused. The Ideality starts out mysterious, then some interesting ideas are presented with respect to their desire to "perfect" people, but near the finish, they end up going with a fairly typical "let's build a better killer robot" plot.

I realize I suggested a lot of changes that may not fit with your vision; feel free to take or discard any of that advice. Hope it helps.

In any case, as it stands now I gave this arc 3 stars. I hope you think that is fair!

-----

I owe a review to:

@parhaius - Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - A Tangle in Time 2622
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - Dream Paper 1874
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230
@Flagrant Fowl - Strange Tale of Silent Witness 114250
@El Condor - Freaks and Geeks 55715
@Ryo Takenoko - 1 of Kidnapping an Idol 136188 or Santa's Workshop of Misfit Toys 134140

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

5/1/2009

On Wednesday I logged in Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and got the Jubilant 5th Anniversary badge. I think Police Woman is one of only two alts I have with all the anniversary badges. (My stable of toons has a fair bit of turnover...)

I went to Architect Entertainment and modified all my story arcs to have keywords in their original description, including the [SFMA] story focused mission arc keyword. I had originally really resisted putting these in, since I thought SFMA would be a meaningless acronym to most people, but the arc tags seem to have really caught on and even been stickied on the Mission Architect Resources forum. So I figure, I better get with the official standard. I hear that an official keyword system will eventually get added to the in-game system, too.

Also, as a result of extensive player feedback, I tweaked the French lieutenants in my Axis and Allies story arc to no longer use kinetics. I originally gave them this powerset as a joke because someone suggested the French should be good at running away, but it's admittedly ahistorical and stacking Siphon Speed is kind of unfun for the player.

Over the course of Wednesday and part of Thursday night, I solo'd my way through the Eclipse over Paragon arc, which is about a Council plot to turn everyone into werewolves. I got the Impulsive badge (clicking on 50 glowies) as a result. This seemed a good (but not amazing) story and I gave it 4 stars.

After that I played Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) and duo'd with a controller friend who wanted to test H G H, a story arc involving athletes on some kind of rage-inducing steroids. There wasn't a lot of story yet, it mostly just involved beating up a lot of angry baseball players.

I spent the tickets Kyrie had acquired on Silver rolls, getting:

1 Impervious Skin (+mez)
1 Cloud Senses (ToHitDebuff)
1 Gaussians Synchronized Fire Control (chance of build up)
1 Kinetic Combat (chance of knockdown)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/END)

....nothing too thrilling except maybe the Gaussians (build up).

After that I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a speed Sharkhead SF organized on Villains of Liberty, with a team mix of

2 stalkers (including me)
3 brutes
1 rad corruptor

We blitzed through this in 26mins 35sec, getting 22 merits (49.66 MPH). I immediately blew 20 merits on a recipe roll, getting

1 Performance Shifter (RCHG/ACC) BlkMkt=500K

and for good measure burned a bunch more tickets on Silver rolls, getting:

1 Cacophony (END/CONF)
2 Ghost Widow's Embrace (ACC/RCHG)
1 Stupefy (END/STUN)
1 Kinetic Combat (chance of knockdown)
1 Positron's Blast (DMG/END)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (HOLD/RNG)
1 Aegis (RCHG/RES)

After that I played Spacegirl (50 mind/rad controller) on a Lady Grey TF organized on LBX. Our team was

1 scrapper
1 rad controller (me)
2 stalkers
1 brute
1 crab
1 cold corruptor
1 dominator

A stalker freed Penelope in the first mission while the rest of us beat up Rikti for fun, then we all got TP'd back to the door to fight the Clockwork King. The second mission we fought through everything the "normal" way, but the third mission we purposely failed. Fourth mission we kinda blitzed the mitos without any particular plan, but people knew what they were doing so that seemed to work well enough, and then we stealth/TP'd to the final encounter in the last mission. Honoree was able to go Unstoppable on us, but we managed to drop him anyway, and finished the LGTF in 51min 8sec for 39 merits (45.76 MPH).

I saw a couple friends online who had started newbie defenders, so I rolled up a newbie MA/regen scrapper to team up with them. I got the name "Adventuress" and tried to give her an athletic, rangy look vaguely patterned after the Sonya Blade/Lara Croft sort of look. The three of us teamed up for radio missions in King's Row; we suffered 2 team wipes against the dreaded Vahzilok, but managed to beat them up eventually and all gained some levels. By the time the team broke up, Adventuress had reached to level 5.

Finished the night soloing Primadonna (36 sonic/kin corruptor) through Ashley McKnight's Origin of Power story arc, getting a badge and 3 merits for my trouble.

A few additional thoughts on Eclipse over Paragon after having slept on it:

I think it would help if you had more foreshadowing of Bruck changing sides before it actually happens; maybe a clue or dialog hinting that Bruck has closer ties to the Council than he's letting on.

I thought the plot switched too sharply from "These stunted werewolves are a failed experiment" to suddenly the stunted werewolves being the Council's Master Plan. Did Bruck deceive the player into thinking it's a failed experiment during mission 1, and the truth comes out in mission 3? Or did the Council actually think it WAS a failed experiment, but whatever Council boss decided that either got fired, killed, or persuaded by a good marketing plan? Maybe I missed where this was explained; but I would've liked more explanation of what happened to make them change their mind, as it is it's something of a sharp U-turn.

Considering Puritan, Fusionette, Faultline and Flower Knight all get mutated to join the war wolves, what's stopping Bruck from simply spraying the player hero with his nictus juice to convert her to the cause as well? (Well, aside from the fact that there's not a game mechanic for that.) Maybe the player at some point should either get immunized by the prototype cure, or given some kind of protective gear that blocks them from being transmuted into a war wolf; either by acquiring this as a "clue" in an earlier mission. Or possibly Colleen just expositions that she gives you this, but then warns that some other heroes already are on the scene but didn't have this protective gear so might have gotten compromised (thus hinting at the presence of the wolfed out versions of Fusionette et al).

Eclipse over Paragon review

Looks like a level 25-54 hero side arc, mainly fighting Council. I played a 50 AR/dev blaster.

Colleen Nelson does seem a good choice for contact for a Council arc.

Mission 1
Briefing: nice introduction to Colleen and her work.

Second part of briefing: Shouldn't Colleen tell me who the hero I'm meeting is?

Mission title: "Stop the Facility!" sounds rather vague to me; maybe consider "Shut down War Wolf Facility!"

Whoa, these Stunted Nightwolfs are definitely not what I was expecting.

After rescuing Peter Bruck, he gave me a clue with "If you want to find the rest of the liquid supply, I've put together a list of warehouses to check out" in it. I'm not sure what he means by "liquid supply" here; maybe some sort of chemical used in the war wolf process? Thinking this needs to be better explained?

Opening a crate helped explain the liquid, though. I'm not quite sure what the "Crate contents" clue means by "rocket can" though.

I like The Puritan's Commentary when you rescue him.

Mission 2
Briefing: "the Council deems this experiment a failure, Bruck can go home to his family and I can sleep soundly tonight" -- should maybe be "the Council deems this experiment a failure, so Bruck can go home to his family and I can sleep soundly tonight".

"The warehouses he mentionned" should maybe be "As for the warehouses he mentioned".

I like the little ambush set up in this mission. Though it makes me wonder about the reliability of Bruck's info; since there's none of the Nictus water here.

Mission 3
Briefing: Kind of a neat format for the briefing here, though I think you may overuse ellipses a little.

Second part of briefing: "anymore" should be "any more".

Mission title: "Investigate Steel Canyon!" is too broad. Should be more like "Investigate Council Attack" or maybe "Investigate Council Attack on Steel Canyon".

The deranged civilians, PPD and Longbow are pretty cool looking. I like that you have a variety of models for deranged people.

I think it might be worthwhile to have a clue that indicates the robots are spraying the Nictus liquid that you get after defeating a robot, just as is stated in the robot description.

I notice that some of the Deranged are in the "Bruck's army" faction, while others are in "Council Eclipse Division." Should they be in the same faction, or is this distinction intentional?

Mission 4
Briefing: I can see what you are trying to say here but I think it could be stated more clearly. Colleen maybe should say something like "Containment is the first priority" in order to support why she's sending you to stop the Council's distribution network instead of going after a cure. I think that would better explain the logic.

Colleen also says "they're programmed to rendezvous at stockpiles all over the city. We'll have to secure their serum supply and cut their plans short" -- maybe she should additionally say that she is sending the player to capture these stockpiles.

I'm not sure what the "Avoid Distractions" meant here. I did fight the wolfed out Puritan here and it didn't seem to be a problem. The map was so small that I don't think I could've gotten the 12 glowies without fighting him.

Colleen mentioned that stockpiles are all over the city, but really I only shut down one little warehouse as far as I can tell, so this shouldn't be enough to stop the supply. Maybe she should say that the place you are being sent to is a distribution center.

Mission 5
I was a little dubious about "3 guard dogs to defeat" but the costumed wolves ARE pretty funny. I love the mutated heroes. Their mangled dialog could maybe be a little better, it's real hard to get much out of "Flower Knight: Grrrryyy rrrraaaah!" I could tell Fusionette was trying to say her boyfriend's name and Jim was trying to say his girlfriend's name, but that does seem a weird thing to say when they're getting beat up. Maybe they should be confused and say "What's happening?" (suitably mangled) and then as their death message try to ask the player to help their significant other.

I was able to finish the various objectives, and I liked that there was a variety of them (defeating the boss, getting the glowies and beating the "guard dogs") but there wasn't really a "climactic" moment.

Debriefing: "You were a wonderful partner, but let's hope that one day we'll never have to work together again." I kind of understand what is being said here but it's a little awkwardly phrased. Maybe "but let's hope this doesn't happen again."

Overall
Overall I thought this was a good arc, fairly well written. Nothing really grabbed me as a moment of pure awesomeness, though the mutated versions of Fusionette, Jim Temblor and Flower Knight came close; I kinda think maybe you could develop these guys a little more for extra fun. Colleen made sense as a contact for a Council arc but I didn't get a sense that she had a whole lot of personality other than just being someone to give you missions, and the arc overall, while functional, didn't quite give me a sense of immersion. Not quite sure how to make that happen. Perhaps you could add a side plot where the player thinks she got exposed to some of the nictus water, and over the course of mission entrance/exit popups and clues, starts feeling itchy or getting urges to bay at the moon or other snippets that make the player worried they are getting afflicted by the war wolf disease. Giving the heroes who got wolfed some more dialog and personality would help too. Still, this story was pretty good and I liked it, so I gave it 4 stars.

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I owe a review to:

@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - A Tangle in Time 2622
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - Dream Paper 1874
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230
@Flagrant Fowl - Strange Tale of Silent Witness 114250
@El Condor - Freaks and Geeks 55715

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

What people are saying about Axis and Allies:

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[Tell] 2009-04-20 04: 31:08 Message From @Eviella : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Amusing, if that's the right word for an alternate reality where you help the 4th reich win. Well structured; 5 stars.


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[Tell] 2009-04-21 12: 35:14 Message From @Steele Magnolia : your clue for the 1st mission of Axis and Allies spells Fuhrer Furor


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I originally intentionally named this guy "Furor" because I was worried that using the proper spelling might trigger complaints about inappropriate content. After many, many complaints that I can't spell right, I've now renamed him to "Führer".

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[Tell] 2009-04-22 09: 06:43 Message From @Markus V8.0 : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: 5 stars for you!


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[Tell] 2009-04-22 16: 04:47 Message From @O.o Snap : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Very well written story.
[Tell] 2009-04-22 16: 05:57 Message From @O.o Snap : tehre is one lil problem I found under navigation. I think it was the 3rd mission where u needed to kill 2 generals and free Paulus... u should indicate when pluralized that you need to defeat the 2
[Tell] 2009-04-22 16: 07:08 Message From @O.o Snap : like on the plural version of the generals, write "generals to defeat" because it would only indicate 2 Generals. Another thing was the kinetic mastermind on 2nd mission... I can see how people woudl object... especially with caltrops + siphon sp


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I'll look at the Stalingrad objectives and see if I can make it clearer that you're supposed to kill the Soviet generals and rescue the German general. I guess it maybe is a little ambiguous and might give the player the wrong idea that they're supposed to do Darth Vader's "You have failed me for the last time!" force choke on the German general.

Several people have commented on the powers of the Allied officers, especially the kinetic. Originally this was meant to be a joke that would let the French run away really fast, and it wasn't too bad when the French officer was a boss, but after I demoted him to be a lieutenant, he shows up a lot more, so there's a lot more kinetics enemies running around. I'm leaning towards changing the French lieutenant from mercs/kin to mercs/regen or mercs/martial arts, something with less annoyance factor.

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[Tell] 2009-04-22 20: 58:45 Message From @muddlewait : Awww, you neutered the A&A baddies


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Yeah, I felt I had to drop Statesman from the last mission to keep this story arc relatively soloable.

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[Tell] 2009-04-22 22: 07:36 Message From @Manga : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Large maps are tricky and time consuming but it's still fun


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[Tell] @KingSac: Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Great arc!


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[Tell] 2009-04-23 19: 46:23 Message From @KillDozer : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: This was the best arc I've done so far! Excellent use of maps (despite having 3 outdoor maps), great costumes, and obviously a lot of actual historical fact to back it up! Fantastic! 5 stars. My humble little arc is called "Why Do Bad Girls Like Bad Boys?" (arc 63910). I hope you like it.


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[Tell] @jjac: Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Well, you know you're doing something right when you've made German dictatorship a fun and memorable experience. Found the stacked -spd from the French a bit annoying though, and the American Generals need to blend with the scenery a bit less. Chalk me up for another review.


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A second comment about the French having kinetics; yeah, definitely going to change that.

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[Tell] 2009-04-24 06: 00:13 Message From @Carnada : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Lots of fun, thank you! 5 stars. Please rate mine @ Carnada


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[Tell] 2009-04-24 23: 54:23 Message From @Lycanus : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Whoa....think I'll retry that in a few levels...interesting though...will save the rating for when I manage to finish this...(dunkirk is....killer)


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I'll change the lieutenants to have a less annoying secondary, hopefully that will help with the Dunkirk map.

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[Tell] 2009-04-25 05: 07:36 Message From @Meltman : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: The Allies powers make no sense.


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More support for getting rid of the kinetics on the Dunkirk map. I'll change that next time I'm on.

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[Tell] @Aracade: Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: That was pretty cool in my opinion. The use of mastermind pets is a good touch to make up for limited creation space.


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[Tell] @Steeple: Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: In all honesty, this is the best arc I've played. I wish I could give it 6 stars!
[Tell] @Steeple: I liked it even better than the Dev's choice arcs they have up. Gives me a goal to look towards.


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[Tell] 2009-04-27 13: 39:20 Message From @UPWARD : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: good one liked the set up alot


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[Tell] 2009-04-27 19: 44:01 Message From @Northpaw : Feedback on Architect Mission Axis and Allies: Fun arc. thanks for sharing it


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Thanks for the great feedback, everyone!

What people are saying about Teen Phalanx Forever!

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[Tell] 2009-04-21 04: 56:06 Message From @Eldermage : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: the ma is great! too bad Kid Val on the 2nd mission just doesnt do anything unless something comes too close


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Thanks! Regarding Kid Val, the AI of melee allies does seem to be weird sometimes, and is unfortunately beyond my control. In particular they'll often move to just outside of melee range with an enemy, but be just a little too far to be able to swing. I generally have good luck dragging melee allies onto enemies by moving to the other side of the bad guy, causing the ally to nearly bump into them.

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[Tell] 2009-04-21 17: 31:19 Message From @Dark Matter-VK : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Great job on this story arc, best one I've played yet!


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[Tell] 2009-04-21 21: 25:02 Message From @PhiladelphiaPA : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: WoW!!!


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[Tell] @Shadow-Rush: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: I enjoyed the arc for what it was. I don't usually enjoy arcs that are somewhat non-canon (the Phalanxers having kids), but I was pleased with how this one went. Just a suggestion, I know you mentioned the bosses being an archvillain in the mission descriptions, you may wish to highlight it with the yellow text. Or put a note of it in the arc description, or in the first mission stating that you may encounter AV's in this arc. Still 5 stars from me. I also posted a couple of my arcs on your review thread.


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Right now I have Coyote in his first mission briefing explicitly warning that the Teen Phalanx routinely fights AVs, but if the player "stays with the team" s/he should be okay. This is meant to hint that linking up with all the Teen Phalanx members will help to defeat the AVs. I also explicitly mention the AV in the briefings for missions 1 and 2; maybe highlighting their names in yellow would be a good idea though.

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[Tell] @Erisian: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Fun, good writing, nice character designs.


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[Tell] @Lirene: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Great arc! Wonderfully inspired idea. I particularly liked how you set up the Monitor Duty mission. Just one quibble: Manticore and Psyche have raised a teenage daughter, but Penelope Yin is still a teen herself? Until the second mission, I'd gathered the story took place in the future, which I think would be cool (sort of a "Batman Beyond" concept). I'd consider making Penelope an older, more mature young woman.


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Good catch; that IS a continuity problem, and not easy to resolve. Right now I am using the default "Penelope Yin" model; I could make an older version, but I'm not sure an older Penelope Yin would be as recognizable to the player, and Clockwork King's crush on her might not work as well with an adult version. I'm thinking my best bet is to just ignore the time scale issue and hope no one minds; just like Batman never ages past 30 even when his first Robin grows up to be in the mid 20s.

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[Tell] 2009-04-23 19: 05:54 Message From @Carnada : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: 5 stars from Carnada. Enjoyed the arc! Try mine!


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[Tell] @Staticore: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Great storyline - lots of fun, and a solid challenge. Would love to see another Teen Phalanx arc!


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[Tell] 2009-04-24 23: 13:27 Message From @Xenite Blackthread : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: That was just... awesome! It felt as real as a TV episode in any of those comic cartoon shows about teen supergroups. I loved the monitor duty mission, wonderful job there! A pleasure to play. (@Xenite Blackthread a.k.a LordXenite)


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[Tell] 2009-04-25 03: 13:46 Message From @FemFury : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Loved the teen versions of the Phalanx. The missions and the characterizations were very true to the structure of a teen superhero team. Nice windows slam too. Fun stucture and good use of mission design in the "monitor duty" mission, using the tools creatively to forward the story. Having fun figuring out what a teen sidekick version of my character is like...


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[Tell] 2009-04-25 21: 21:17 Message From @Tempest Teacup : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Absolutely phenomenal, PW, and I say that as someone who had to play through as a blaster. The monitor mission was genius, and the descriptions and dialogue were first-rate. I'm sure people commented on the necessary repetition of getting the team together every mission, and the difficulty of Vista due to ENERGY PUNCH-- but really those were minor issues for me. I had a whole lot of fun. Will recommend.


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[Tell] 2009-04-25 22: 58:47 Message From @Atiaxi : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: That was pretty darn awesome. I loved the 'monitor duty' mission, it was a great change of pace and the clues were hilarious. Citadel Vista was also a great enemy.


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[Tell] 2009-04-26 12: 00:28 Message From @Camper : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Excellent job.


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[Tell] 2009-04-26 12: 36:50 Message From @Antaean : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: I loved your arc - 5 stars for you! If you get the time, please feel free to try my arc 68526 and rate it as well.


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[Tell] 2009-04-26 14: 13:05 Message From @Armless Dan : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Very clever, fun to play. Loved the monitor duty mission, the set up the clues and the dialog. Rated 5 stars.


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[Tell] 2009-04-26 14: 56:57 Message From @Hobbes : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Excellent Story, I like it very much. Your texts are very good, long enough to flesh out the story and keep the interest. Great work.


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[Tell] 2009-04-27 05: 03:08 Message From @gdb : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Very cute. I got a little frustrated as I felt that I was getting too much help from Valkyrie & Back-Alley Brawler (especially in the last mission).


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It's interesting how this contrasts with the earlier person who had trouble getting Kid Valkyrie to do anything. Melee allies seem really hit or miss on their AI. I hate to change them all to be ranged, though, because I think their powersets need to match their mentors, and having a mix of ranged and melee types makes it feel more like a "team" to me.

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[Tell] @Eric Pile: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: I really enjoyed your arc, thank you


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[Tell] 2009-04-29 20: 30:25 Message From @Mecha GM : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: A thoroughly charming arc. Had a nice Teen Titans feel to it, and my choice of playing my Warshade actually felt like it fit in with the team. Lots of fun, and the Citadel XP/Vista joke caught me completely off guard. Kudos. If you have time and the inclination, I'd love some feedback on my arc, Operation Pitcher Plant (arc # 4370).


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Thanks everyone for the nice feedback!

Teen Phalanx Forever!

4/29/2009

I started Monday night browsing the market for knockback protection IOs, following Star Amethyst getting KB'ed all over the place on the Citadel TF. I managed to purchase two level 19 Steadfast Protection (KB protection) for 1M infl each, which seemed like a great deal; I'm thinking the price on these must've dropped due to the ability to get these more easily via tickets.

Looking at the Mission Architect interface, all my story arcs seem to have reached something of a steady-state at 4 stars with varying numbers of plays. Periodically I get someone who gives me 5 stars and a rave review in feedback, alternating with 3 star and 1 star reviews with no feedback whatsoever. I notice that all the highly rated story arcs (other than the Dev Choices) seem to get pushed down from 5-star averages to 4-star averages over time, and I now seriously give credence to the idea that there are a lot of people out there who simply enjoy 1-starring highly rated arcs, either out of spite or in an attempt to move their own story arcs higher in the relative standing. This really bothered me for awhile, but I think I've reached a state of acceptance on it.

Switching to red side, I played Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through part of The Bravuran Jobs, a story arc where you're doing odd jobs for a vaguely unscrupulous yet aristocratic third world dictator. Over the course of this arc, a couple friends from LEGION SG joined me to help out. This was decently written and felt pretty appropriately mercenary, but we found the third mission was too hard for us. I think this was because the custom mobs in this mission all had buff/debuff sets, including the minions who all seemed to be either thermal or kin, so essentially each spawn we fought was like a superteam of 6 to 8 corruptors, and their buffs/debuffs gave them mad synergy over our team of 2 brutes and 1 MM. We ended up abandoning this story arc after two team wipes; I didn't want to lose my progress, so I logged Millie off without quitting the arc, with the intention of continuing it solo. But even after I came back hours later, the mission still seemed to spawn groups of 6 mobs which weren't soloable for me (they would tend to stack debuffs then heal each other of any damage I did to them), so after dying a couple more times I threw in the towel and quit the arc. The story was decently written, but being completely unable to get through this mission, I couldn't justify giving it more than 3 stars. I talked it over with the story author via forum messages and we have the theory that even though I reset the mission to try and solo it, maybe the mission was still spawning for a team of 3 due to the wacky semi-TF-like code that AE missions use, so it may be easier if you just run through solo and never invite anyone.

My team switched up to play level 33s instead of level 28s, and I switched to Primadonna (33 sonic/kin corruptor). I had previously avoided leveling Primadonna up, as I was keeping her at level 33 and slotting level 23 IOs in order to be optimized for quick Cap SF runs; but since reward merits were introduced, the reward for running the Cap SF is much less, and now no one runs them any more. Instead, quick Sharkhead SF runs (and the occasional villain respec) seem to be the preferred source of red-side merits now, and I'm actually finding my 33 stalker to be a lot more helpful and fun to play on those. This coupled with the fact that I've occasionally wished I had a high level kin to run on ITFs and RSFs has motivated me to start leveling Primadonna up further.

Anyway, my team first tried a story called The Freakshow which turned out just to be a Freakshow farm mission, which we quickly got bored of and abandoned. We then went into The Missing, which was a fairly nice missing persons investigation, with good writing and story through most of the arc. I didn't like the ending of the story, however, because even though you accomplish all the mission objectives, the framing story basically forces you to fail at the end, which was rather unsatisfying. Still, it was pretty decent aside from that, and I gave this 4 stars.

Another friend joined us and as a team of 4 we tried testing the first mission of H G H which was one of the team member's attempts at writing a farm arc with some story around it; there were five missions and custom enemies, but the story hadn't been quite fleshed out yet and all the missions were, at least initially, identical. So we quit after the first mission to do something else.

Finished the night doing Pandas vs Rikti, where you travel to "Panda Earth", an alternate dimension populated by space pandas, and you help them fight off a Rikti invasion. I thought this story would be totally silly, but it was actually very well executed, with good dialog and writing, panda damsels in distress, panda quislings you have to put down, and a terrific Riktified panda as the big bad guy. My team did run into problems in the last mission when half the team needed to log off, and the remaining 2 of us (both squishy and very vulnerable to Rikti mezzes) got beat up a lot before my teammate volunteered to switch to a level 50 to stomp the final mission so we could see how it all ended; I don't think it's really the fault of the mission that we got beat up, we just had a much weaker team for the last mission than the rest of the arc. Anyway, something in the water on Panda Earth may have brainwashed me, but I thought this was really well done and I gave it 5 stars.

After that team broke up, I was still on Primadonna idling for a bit when a pickup team invited me; I agreed to join and found myself on a 6 player team doing a farm mission, which was an outdoor city map with nothing but Rikti Communications Officers in it. I'm not normally into farms, but I figured I'd give it a try to see what it was like; apparently the Rikti Comms Officers are disproportionately high exp, probably due to the devs moving the exp from Rikti portals to them. We cleared the map once; the team wanted to do it again, but it was late so I excused myself and called it a night.

On Tuesday night I logged on Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) and decided to burn some of her accumulated tickets. Spent 1000 tickets on the "Payoff" badge, which is sorta useless but shiny and I figured I would want to buy it sooner or later; then burned off my remaining tickets on Silver reward rolls at 525 tickets apiece. For my trouble I got:

1 Force Feedback (chance of recharge) Wentw=1K
1 Regenerative Tissue (+regen) Wentw=20M
1 Entropic Chaos (chance of heal) Wentw=25K
1 Scirocco's Dervish (ACC/DMG) Wentw=2M
1 Obliteration (ACC/DMG/RCHG) Wentw=7M
1 Pounding Slugfest (DMG/END) Wentw=50K
1 Kismet (DEF/RCHG) Wentw=5K
1 Cloud Senses (TOHITDEBUFF) Wentw=25K
1 Malaise's Illusions (ACC/RCHG) Wentw=1K

This seemed a much better value than the tickets I had previously spent on Bronze rolls, which did cost less tickets but gave me a lot of junk that I didn't want, also. The Regenerative Tissue recipe was the big prize from this recipe draw; after some pondering, I decided to put it up for sale on Wentworth's, and it instantly sold for 20M influence. Theoretically, I probably could've crafted and slotted it for some alt, but my guess is that the value of these recipes will go down over time as more of them get into the market from the ticket vendors, so I figure that if I don't immediately have a use for an expensive recipe, I should sell while it's hot.

The 5th Anniversary event was going on that night and AVs and GMs were spawning randomly in city zones. I have all the badges for those on Police Woman already, so I swapped to Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) to go after those. Blond also picked up a level 37 Performance Shifter (chance for END) IO recipe at Wentworth's for 4M, which seemed like a bargain; I had been looking for one of those for awhile to complete a Performance Shifter set, but they had been very expensive before.

While hanging out in Atlas Park and Steel Canyon, Blond Justice joined an "event" team going after the AVs and GMs, and we beat up a Winter Lord, Ghost Widow (twice), Lord Recluse, the Kronos titan, Babbage and Jurassik. It seemed like AVs and GMs were spawning all night; typically a bunch would spawn in a row, but there were long lulls between them where there wasn't much to do but wait. I ended up switching from monster hunting to join a SF that was forming on LBX.

So I switched to Primadonna (35 sonic/kin corruptor at this point) to do the Ice Mistral SF. Our team mix was:

2 brutes
3 corruptors (rad, dark and kin)
2 stalkers

We had some initial problems staying together as a team and working out lackeying, but pretty quickly got it together and did fine for the rest of the SF. I found that Dreadful Wail + small blue + Transference was a wonderful way to deliver a nova, yet not have to deal with the END crash; though it hurt if the Transference missed. In the final mission as we were getting close to the big bad guy, I warned the team "AV up ahead". One of the brutes replied, "AV, Smavy!" then instantly died, which was actually pretty funny. I think it was from a chain reaction of psychic crystals exploding all around her, though, as she then said "Now exploding crystals, THOSE really hurt!" We then proceeded to beat up the AV and win the SF, but we kinda pushed our luck by fighting the massive CoT ambush that shows up at the end, and ended up with a total party wipe despite the SF being complete. We could've probably exited the mission to avoid that, but we were totally in scrapperlock mode. It was still fun though, and on the bright side, hospitalling saved us a long run back from the boonies of Nerva. We finished the SF in 1hr 28mins and gained 25 merits (17.05MPH), and Primadonna hit level 36.

After that I joined some friends on Protector server, dusting off Dreamwind (28 storm/psy defender on Protector) and SKing to a 6 player team of Demolition Girls SG running level 40ish radio missions in Peregrine Island. We also did a Founders Falls safeguard and fought a Rikti invasion, getting Dreamwind to level 29, before calling it a night.

Returning to Liberty, I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) on a quick Sharkhead SF, with a team mix of:

3 brutes
4 stalkers
1 storm corruptor

We had two false starts because one of the players was actually on an Architect Entertainment mission, which didn't prevent us from starting the SF but utterly messed up the team when you tried to zone into a mission (splitting the team into multiple instances of the mission). We finally figured out what was happening and who needed to quit their current story arc, before getting a good start on the third try. We blitzed through the SF in 26mins 7sec, gaining 22 merits (50.54MPH). I spent 20 merits for a recipe draw, getting a fairly decent Scirocco's Dervish (DMG/ACC/END).

After that I switched to Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) to solo my way through The Oblivion Lens story arc, where you find a mystic artifact, give it to Azuria for safekeepping, then of course she loses it and hijinks ensue as you try to get it back. This story was okay, but not gripping, and had some plot holes, and the custom enemy group, which was a bunch of shadow monsters summoned by the magic lens, felt a little bland to me due to not having a lot of dialog and mostly looking the same (there were many flavors of shadow monster, but all of them were black and shadowy with dark powers, so they all seemed alike). I gave that story arc 3 stars.

Quite late at night, I succumbed to greed and joined a friend who was recruiting for a red side farm. I rationalized that I wanted to know how these farms worked, but let's face it, it's all about the tickets. I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) with exp disabled. The actual mission seemed to be full of dual blades enemies who couldn't jump or fly and had no range attacks, so the main farmer could hover above them doing AoEs without any risk. I started off trying to melee these guys but quickly found that just meant I was taking damage, which wasn't helpful, so I ended up standing on an elevated ledge where the mobs couldn't reach me. This was kind of dull (I really had nothing to do, except occasionally Recall Friend to get people who got disconnected back to the team) but generated several thousand tickets before I got tired and called it a night.

I did use some of these tickets on more Silver reward rolls at the 30-34 level range, getting:

1 Decimation (chance for build up)
1 Ghost Widow's Embrace (END/HOLD)
1 Analyze Weakness (DEFDEBUFF)
1 Expedient Reinforcement (ACC/RCHG)
1 Touch of the Nictus (HEAL)
1 Touch of Death (chance for negative)
1 Numina's Convalescence (HEAL)
1 Impervious Armor (RCHG/RES)
1 Force Feedback (chance for RCHG)

I didn't have the energy to check the prices of these at the Black Market, but I figure the Decimation and the Touch of Death are probably the good recipes out of this batch.

The Oblivion Lens review

Was recommended for level 30+, so I played a 33 bs/inv scrapper.

Mission 1
Briefing: Decently written, but it basically comes down to go kill some CoT because we think they're weak right now, which doesn't seem a very compelling.

Sullivan's dialog and that of his captors are OK, but nothing too special.

This mission overall seems pretty routine, freeing an ally with fairly standard dialog and defeating a generic CoT boss. The only unusual thing is the "Opal Lens" clue that I got from the final boss, which I assume is the macguffin for the rest of the arc.

Debriefing: OMG, Azuria is telling me she'll keep the Opal Lens safe in the MAGI vault. This can't end well.

Mission 2
Briefing: Some helpful exposition here on initial findings about the magic lens and what it's supposed to do. Shockingly, the Opal Lens is in danger of being stolen by the CoT and I need to go stop them.

Popup on entering mission: "Your decent into the interior" should be "Your descent..."

This new Nachtkrieger group seems pretty dangerous, stacking a lot of dark miasma debuffs on me.

Plot question: what caused the lens to start creating these Nachtkrieger guys? The lens was apparently in the hands of the CoT for awhile before with no ill effects. What's making it do this now? I think this needs some explanation.

Nachtkrieger Reiset's description: "solidres" should be "soldiers".

Nachtkrieger Bosigt's description: "Nactkrieger" should be "Nachtkrieger".

Nachtkrieger Lakai's description: "Nactkrieger" should be "Nachtkrieger".

Nachtkrieger Kampher's description: "Nactkrieger" should be "Nachtkrieger".

All these Nachtkriegers have exactly the same description (with some slight variation in typos) but have different appearance and different names. I wonder if you can fit some description in there of what a Reiset, Bosigt, Lakai, etc, actually is, and the difference each one has with the other Nachtkriegers?

Also, up close I can see they each have some costume detail, but since they are all completely black, a lot of that detail is lost when viewed from any significant distance. This might be intentional on your part, not sure. If you want to stay with the black, shadowy theme, you might also consider giving the ones that don't have dark armor already some sort of dark colored aura in their costume.

I'm a little worried about the amount of dark powers these guys are throwing around. It certainly makes sense for them to be using dark powers, but the acc debuffs will probably stack pretty severely, especially on a big team (think of how much people hate CoT ghosts who do the same thing). My scrapper isn't having any problem with this (she has Invincibility and Build Up to overcome To Hit debuffs), but a bigger team without many tohit buffs may have problems; you might want to test with a mid sized team and see. Stacking tar patches could be painful also, though thankfully it looks like only certain lieutenants drop those. Only problem is that the Nachtkriegers really SHOULD be dark based, considering their concept, so I'm not sure it would make sense to change their powersets either. Just something to keep an eye on.

There did not seem to be much to do in this mission other than kill the Nachtkriegers. I think you might want to add some more stuff to do in this mission; perhaps a sailor hostage that you free and/or a body bag glowy that you click, either of which gives you some clues as to what the Nachtkriegers are, and maybe what happened to the Oblivion Lens.

Debriefing: "Everyone on board" should maybe be "Everyone aboard". "frieghter" should be "freighter".

"I guess those were the Nachtkrieger that are talked about in the tomes" seems a pretty weak statement for her to say at this point. I suggest you rephrase this to something like "Those must have been the Nachtkrieger that are mentioned in the ancient tomes."

I like that she is willing to call in the Midnight Club; it's kinda cool that all the magical heroic organizations are getting involved in the story.

Mission 3
Briefing: Could use some paragraph breaks, it's currently a big wall of text. "agressive" should be "aggressive".

Considering mission 2's debriefing mentioned the Midnight Squad possibly knowing something about this artifact, I think it's odd that she does not mention them in the briefing for mission 3 where she has determined no one knows anything about it. At least mention something like "The Midnight Squad didn't have any record of this lens" for the sake of continuity. Or maybe the Midnight Squad points you to this Tophat guy; it's currently not explained why Tophat is the expert on the Oblivion Lens, or how Azuria even knows he's the go-to guy for this obscure artifact.

I also think it's a little odd to have to fight the Council for him, as the Council don't seem really connected and are not a particularly magic-oriented group.

Second part of briefing: "greatful" should be "grateful".

In the popup as you enter the mission, maybe mention that the player hears the sound of battle and the Legacy Chain reinforcements must have been teleported deeper in. The way it's phrased, it sounds like the Legacy Chain didn't make it to the base at all.

I might change the mission title to "Extract Tophat from Council Base" and the mission objective to "Rescue Tophat", instead of having them both be "Rescue Tophat from the Council", which looks a little repetitive.

I do like the fight dialog between the Council and Legacy Chain.

After rescuing Tophat, ironically, his top hat clipped with the roof of one of the cave tunnels and he got stuck in geometry. (Not really the fault of the mission though.) Running back and forth near him eventually got him unstuck though. He also may be a little too powerful an ally as an elite boss.

A Council ambush was triggered as soon as I got Tophat to the door; not sure whether this is intentional, though, because I can avoid it by exiting the mission (which is now complete). Maybe you meant for this ambush to appear when you free Tophat.

Mission 4
Briefing: add some paragraph breaks. Also, "Officially, Lord Recluse is denying the presence of the Nachtkrieger and refuses to grant entry into the Rogue Isles to anyone. Recluse also doesn't want extradimensional invaders underneath Mercy Isle and his envoys have invited our assistance." These two sentences seem contradictory. Maybe you mean to say Lord Recluse officially refuses to grant entry, but unofficially is allowing it? It's a little unclear.

This mission seemed a lot easier than I expected; I just had to click the glowy and it ended. (Well, and kill some of the Nachtkriegers that were chasing me.) Some Arachnos guys spawned after I clicked the glowy, but the mission was complete so I didn't seem to need to interact with them. Seemed a little easy as a result; would've been even easier with stealth.

Logic question: How did the Oblivion Lens get from the freighter in mission 2 to the cave in mission 4? Azuria originally thought CoT stole it, but I didn't see any. Did the Nachtkrieger themselves move it? If so, why to the Rogue Isles? Could use some explanation or clues.

Mission 5
Briefing: OK, "The Nachtkrieger have summoned more of their soldiers and are attacking our ritualists" -- but based on the story so far, I think it's only the Oblivion Lens that summons Nachtkrieger; so with the lens in the hands of these mystics, it shouldn't be possible for more Nachtkrieger to spontaneously appear. That's the whole point of neutralizing the lens, right? So where did these new Nachtkrieger, including the Nachtkrieger leader, come from? I think this is a plot hole.

Also what happened to those Legacy Chain people who helped attack the Council before? Surely this is an even more important thing for them to help with.

A science lab seems a very strange place to hold a magical ritual, though I guess this is explained as a FBSA facility in the briefing.

This was the first mission in which the Nachtkriegers had any dialog that I saw at all; I had thought maybe they couldn't speak before. Maybe they should talk in the earlier missions too.

I thought it was a little odd that the altar objective didn't spawn until after I defeated Nachtkrieger Herr; shouldn't the mystics have been performing a ritual on the altar before the Nachtkrieger even attacked? Also with the map being fairly large, it took a little trouble to find the altar, requiring retracing my steps some since it could've spawned somewhere I'd already visited.

I think it would've been nice if there were still some mystics around trying to perform the ritual while the altar is under attack, but I'm not sure if that's possible. Maybe next best would be if another group of Legacy Chain and/or Midnighters gets "teleported in" as a friendly ambush or something after you successfully defend the altar. Perhaps having a couple mages involved in battles with the Nachtkriegers and/or as allies you can rescue from them might be good too.

Debriefing: OK, I really like that Azuria tries to take the lens and put it back in the MAGI vault, but then the player stops her and takes the lens back to put in their SG vault instead.

Overall
The Nachtkrieger monsters needed more development overall, I thought; as they stand now they are rather generic seeming enemies, with their nearly identical all-black costumes and all-dark powers, and very little dialog. The dialog they do have seems to be standard villainous dialog that is not particularly unique to the Nachtkriegers. I think you could stand to develop the background of this villain group some more (perhaps in the mob descriptions and/or in clues in the story arc) and give them more personality (mostly in dialog and clues). Right now I'm afraid they seem a little bland; I think you need to develop them to make them seem more special and unique as enemies.

I felt the story had a few plot holes; the Lens suddenly causing Nachtkrieger to appear needed to be explained (after all, the CoT had the lens for a long time before and none had appeared), and the Nachtkrieger reinforcements showing up in the last mission didn't seem possible based on how the lens is described as working. But the writing was decent and the story in general seemed okay. The dialog was pretty standard fare (villains say typical villainous stuff) and I think could've been improved a little bit. I did like how the story tried to tie in the various heroic magical factions (MAGI, Legacy Chain and Midnighters - though only the Legacy Chain seems to actually appear in missions; perhaps you could add Midnighters or custom MAGI operatives to one of the missions if you have room). As a result of all this I gave this story arc 3 stars.

-----

I owe a review to:

@jjac - 1 of A Tangle in Time 2622 or Eclipse over Paragon 64609
@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - second arc
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - check 3rd arc
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230
@Flagrant Fowl - Strange Tale of Silent Witness 114250
@El Condor - Freaks and Geeks 55715

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

Comments on the Missing

[ QUOTE ]
As for the ending, one of my main purposes was to create a dark and tragic short story. It was actually more about highlighting the bad guy and how he thinks. To what insane lengths would he go through just to give payback to the hero that's been stopping him for a long time.

There were also hints of the inevitable fate that would befall the doctor as well, with the inclusion of the Council and how they mysteriously create their warwolves. According to CoH lore and their descriptions of the Council wolves, the way they are changed is very different from how they change their vampyr. Not through their super soldier serum, nor from usual scientific means. And the change is always permanent. What happened to the doctor was a bastardization of how the Council usually does it. Fully paid of course, by the main villain.

The Council involvement and their wolves were a clue themselves that what they did to her could not be changed. Of course, not everyone knows about it. The thing was I wasn't sure if I should hint on it, as it's sort of connected to a few Council story arcs I believe.

The ending was also my own venture to showing that even the heroes of Paragon City can really have much taken from them, in the life they've chosen. That it's the decisions they make and the will to stick to their principles that truly make them what they are. That even though someone they love and care for has been taken from them, there are heroes that will persevere and not cross the line. Unless they too become the monsters that they fight each and every day.

[/ QUOTE ]

This does all make some sense. I guess my main problem with the ending is that the way it comes across, it felt like the big bad guy actually was in control the whole time, and ends up winning, and the player, even if playing perfectly, was unable to have any effect on this outcome; and most of this comes out in exposition in the final debriefing. Effectively, the player loses, and there was nothing s/he could do about it.

I wonder if you could rephrase some of the clues and dialog to give the player more of a clue what is happening. Maybe when you find the "cure", the clue has you immediately realizing it's just ordinary water, and you wonder how you'll break it to Shadowrush and the transformed doctor. Maybe when you fight the big bad guy, he monologues about his master plan and how it's too late for the doctor; but then he expresses surprise that the player is able to arrest him ("That wasn't in the plan!"). Then in the final debriefing, the woman still dies and Shadowrush is still heartbroken, but maybe highlight the fact that the player was able to bring the perpetrator to justice. That would let you still have a tragic ending, but the player could feel like s/he accomplished something by stopping the bad guy from getting away with it. I think you have elements of this already there; it just doesn't come across currently that the player was able to help.


Comments on Pandas vs Rikti

I really think my team's difficulty with the last mission was mostly due to circumstances; we were doing fine on a 4 player team up to the very last mission, but then had two people need to log off, leaving us with a pretty squishy duo against tons of Rikti with +perception and lots of status effects. It took us awhile to adjust to the new team dynamic (since we were doing fine up to that point) which probably didn't help. We did rescue a couple of the ally pandas but couldn't keep them alive. I think it would've helped if we had a brute/tank type, and if we had been more vigilant about keeping our CM-type buffs on each other nonstop. Anyway, I don't think you need to adjust the difficulty; you're using standard PvE mobs, after all. It was just hard for the team I had at the time.

Comments on the Bravuran Jobs

[ QUOTE ]
Well, "crazy synergy" is the idea. Everybody in the group is working at "standard" level except for the lieutenant's fire buff set and the boss's merc set, for Spec Ops. Unfortunately I can't see the numbers on the flashbangs they were hitting you with. Did you actually get blinded or just notice the flash?

[/ QUOTE ]

I really think it is excessive to give buff/debuff sets to minions; both thermal and kinetics are force multipliers and if every minion has them, they essentially act like one of those all-defender superteams. I think you will find that if you face a large or even medium sized spawn of these, they will be far too difficult to handle. After my 3 player team had their first wipeout against these guys, we came back and found the enemy group ready for us with fully spawned pets, and both mobs and pets fully buffed with fire shields. The team was pretty sporting and willing to try them again even when they were ready for us, but after a second wipeout, no one really wanted to keep at it any further.

Regarding the flashbangs, I saw the flashes and wasn't able to identify the source. Flashbang grenades from the merc pets makes sense though. They didn't actually blind my character, I just noticed their special effect.

[ QUOTE ]
Nobody has boosted perception. ... Tech maps do tend to throw the occasional pair of spawns into close proximity to each other, and of course there are the ambushes you get from provoking the guards around defendable objects. .... Maybe the map was still set at/spawning for 3 for some reason? I'm pretty sure DB/Fire is worse all around than Elec(right?)/Invuln.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ambushes definitely were part of it, but even fighting non-ambush groups of mobs, it seemed like I was always fighting 5 or 6 at a time despite being solo; this is what made me think maybe I was getting 2 groups at a time, since I'm used to solo groups being 2-3 mobs at a time. Maybe they WERE spawning for a 3 player team still? I thought it would've completely reset since we all logged off for several hours and I logged back in to a freshly respawned map; but maybe Mission Architect works differently due to the pseudo-TF logic.

I started the arc solo, so it can't be that the spawn size is set at the beginning of the story arc; maybe it's determined by the high water mark of your team size somehow? That might also explain why my 2 player team got beat up by Rikti in the other story arc where the team size decreased from 4 to 2.

Anyway, even if there IS some weird logic that meant I was soloing a map spawned for 3 players (which is sounding kind of plausible now that I think about it), I think you should still drop the buff/debuff sets from the minions; reserve those for lieutenants and higher. If you don't agree, that's cool, but you might find it worthwhile to test using a mid-sized (3 to 5 players) team (of average ability, not an optimized superteam or anything) to see what happens.

Pandas vs Rikti review

The premise seems very weird; we're traveling to Panda Earth (an alternate dimension version of earth) to help them fight Rikti. I initially thought this would be really silly, but the Panda Earth kinda grew on me as the story progressed.

I played a 34 sonic/kin corruptor leading a 4-player team; two corruptors (both level 34), two masterminds (both sidekicks).

Mission 1
Great briefing! It sets the stage for why I'm saving space pandas from Rikti. I like the explanation of why pandas speak in emoticons.

It felt like there was not much to do but fight Rikti in this mission; we basically needed to rescue one guy and fight a lot of Rikti along the way. This mission maybe needs more items of interest in it.

Mission 2
Another good briefing. I liked the clue about the holo emitters.
I love the assassin's name, Sai'Lennt Bl'eid. I wondered if this is intended to be a Riktified version of the villain Silent Blade? There wasn't much of a resemblance other than name, though.

Debriefing: I like the genre savvyness of the line "This is like one of those movies with sudden twists!"

Mission 3
Briefing: "It seems, he had given up the fight against the Rikti long ago." maybe should be "It seems he gave up the fight against the Rikti long ago."

I like the pandas with capes, they look very amusing.

I like the (x_X) death message they generate.

I guess Ylla is a female panda due to having pink armor? Great description in her info, though; even references the fact that she looks like the other pandas.

Poor Commander Rottiar... I really like this dialog. He really thinks he's doing the right thing by betraying the other pandas.

Mission 4
Half my team left right before this mission, which left me with a duo of a sonic/kin corruptor (me) and a merc/pain MM lackey.

I love the "Save Panda Earth!" mission title. So dramatic!

With just two of us, and both of us fairly squishy, we got pretty badly manhandled by the Rikti, suffering 3 wipeouts due to mezzes and knockdowns. Unlike the other arc I gave up on due to wipeouts, these were just normal Rikti from the standard CoH game, and not customized mobs, so the problem definitely was with our team. I guess squishies just have a really hard time against Rikti and their status effects; I'm sure I would've been fine on a scrapper or brute.

I tried stealthing around some, to speed things up; this was NOT easy with all the Rikti drones, and I got clobbered once. Found that the map was huge! Seemed like the first map on the LGTF, and in the final room where you normally save Penelope Yin from Rikti, were the glowy, the captive, and an elite boss. Since we were getting schooled by normal Rikti, I did not think the two of us would be able to beat an EB (on some characters I can solo an EB, but definitely not on my kin corruptor).

We pondered giving up, but the mastermind decided he really wanted us to be able to finish so switched to a level 50 ninja/poison MM, SK'd me up and we wiped the rikti out.

The elite boss, O'Ballord, was hilarious when I got a good look at him up close; a Riktified panda is great!

Overall
I thought this would be really silly, but it turned out to be awesome. The panda theme (assuming you can get over the idea that you're helping humanoid pandas) was actually quite well done, with all the dialog and mission briefings and clues handled in character for Panda Earth. The costumes were quite good also, with various pandas having different harness and armor to distinguish them. I felt the first mission was a little bland and the last mission was too hard, although this was almost certainly due to my team composition; we had started with a larger team and were down to 2 squishies for the last mission, which meant that the Rikti mezzes and knockdown really hurt us a lot. With a more balanced team I'm sure we would've been fine, and the last mission did have a very epic feel to it. I gave this arc 5 stars.


-----

I owe a review to:

@Mr Beatdown - The Oblivion Lens 91897
@jjac - 1 of A Tangle in Time 2622 or Eclipse over Paragon 64609
@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - second arc
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - check 3rd arc
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

The Missing review

[This is out of order from my queue because I ended up leading a level 33 team doing AE missions, and I tried to pick a story arc that would let the team get exp.]

The premise of this story was that the contact, who is himself a hero, asks you to assist in a missing persons investigation, looking for a lady scientist by the name of Dr. Charlestin.

I played through this on a 3 player team. I was team leader and playing a 33 sonic/kin corruptor, and on my team were a 34 sonic/dark corruptor and a sidekicked 20 ninja/dark mastermind. It was pretty hard to take effective notes while simultaneously playing a kinetic, so unfortunately my comments are a little more sparse on this and the next review; hopefully the fact that I dragged the rest of my team through the arc too, giving it additional play time, will somewhat make up for this.

Mission 1
We follow a lead to a bank robbery being performed by a Family man named Bobby Red, who supposedly may know something about what happened to the hostage.

In Bobby's description, "Bobby Red is one of the more least respected bosses" .. doesn't scan. Change "more least" to "less".

After we defeat Bobby Red, he says he'll answer questions, but he doesn't actually give a clue; his confession is in the debriefing (and partly in the briefing for mission 2, which I'm not sure makes sense), but maybe should also be in a clue. Only the leader sees the debriefing; other players wouldn't know what he said without a clue.

In the debriefing, "was his true objective" should be "were his true objective"

Mission 2
In the briefing, it's said that Bobby Red mentioned we may be running out of time "for some reason". If he's actually in custody and willing to talk, he really should be more specific than "for some reason". If he doesn't know the reason time is running out, you can still communicate that, but the way it's phrased it makes it sound like he's holding back.

We entered a Council warehouse and discover our missing person has been horribly mutated as a result of weird science.

In the mission, the Unknown Creature had good dialog. I felt bad for the poor doctor at this point.

Mission 3
Briefing: There's suddenly a reveal that Shadowrush considers the scientist his mom, or something close to that. I thought this was rather sudden; maybe you need to lay some more groundwork for this in Shadowrush's earlier dialog.

We go in after the mastermind of this evil plan and attempt to recover a cure for the good doctor. There we also link up with Shadowrush as an ally.

We had a wipeout against Family consiglieres here, but I think it was because we were chatting on global chat and not paying attention.

A merc/pain MM joined us at this point (making us a team of 4).

Team member: "who invited shadowrush, such a scrapper!"

Debrief: Ugh, I'm really unhappy with the outcome - we did everything, got the "cure" and beat the big bad guy, but we didn't actually get to cure Dr. Charlestin; she dies and the bad guy "wins", and we're even told the bad guy out-thought us all and planned the whole thing.

Overall
Seemed like a decent story overall with good clues and plot, and a good number of objectives in each mission. The plot was good but not super-involving; at least right up to the end, where Dr Charlestin dies and the bad guy wins, and it's all revealed to all be an elaborate plot by the big bad guy that went exactly as planned. I don't need all stories to have a "good" ending, but I feel like doing everything you were asked to do and still having the girl die and the bad guy win is deeply unsatisfying. But there was a decent story here and some other good stuff, and so I gave this story arc 4 stars.

Retry of The Bravuran Jobs (seemed bugged last time I tried)

Recommended for level 20-30 red side. I played a 28 elec/will brute; initially on Ruthless difficulty, but later lowering to Villainous difficulty during mission 3.

The premise appears to be that you become a lackey for the Comte and Contessa of the fictional evil country of Bravura.

Minor quibble: Comte is French, and a Comte's wife is a Comtesse. Contessa is Italian, and a Contessa's husband is a Conte.

Mission 1

Nice briefing. To be hired requires a tryout. Strangely, the Contessa's idea of a tryout is to give her bodyguards the day off and to rely on an unproven villain to protect her. This is logically insane; if she isn't sure I'm reliable, she definitely should not send her bodyguards home and rely solely on me. It would make more sense for her tryout to be something that does not risk her safety; or else if the first mission MUST be to extract the Contessa, this mission should not be characterized as a tryout at all, but rather the first job of a trusted bodyguard.

Love the Contessa's dialog, both with her captors and when you rescue her. Very dignified.

Consider making Contessa's dual blades a rapier and main gauche; that would have a touch more class than the dual gladii.

Nice debriefing. I might clarify "I cannot enlist" with "I cannot officially enlist". I still think it is a little odd that you can hire hitmen and kidnappers and other criminals in the Rogue Isles, but Lloyd can't hire a lackey for the Contessa.

Mission 2
Briefing: You might consider changing the formatting slightly, to italicize Lloyd's actions and your internal monologue, and NOT italicize the things Lloyd says, including the stuff he reads from the newspaper. This would more consistent with how contact briefings usually go.

I also think it would be good to include in the newspaper clipping the Contessa expressing her shock and outrage at the Legacy Chain's violation of Bravuran sovereignty. This would help hammer home that the Contessa wants this done.

"Bravuran Field Hand: We were heard? But I saw-" - this dialog didn't make sense to me. (Maybe it will make sense later.)

"Archivist Parker: Wh- Millie Volt! How can you defend this?" - this dialog looks weird, I think you need to either delete the "Wh- " or else lengthen it to "What?" or at least "Wha?"

The mission is titled "Say hello to Mazapegul", but freeing Mazapegul does not end the mission, nor does getting him killed. After Mazapegul is deceased, "Say hello to Mazapegul" no longer seems a relevant mission title; maybe make the mission title more generic like "

I had no problems breaking the warding spires this time; I think you used a bigger model this time.

Despite getting Mazapegul killed, I still got the sapphires at the end of the mission! Or the junk he claims are sapphires, anyhow. I'm not sure there is a way you can solve that though, barring making the mission fail if Mazapegul dies (which would probably be annoying).

Debriefing: Nice debriefing, but after getting rooked on payment on this mission, I'm uncertain it makes logical sense for the villain to do another mission for this guy. Also "writen" should be "written".

Mission 3
Two players joined me starting on this mission, a 27 brute and a 20 ninja MM lackey.

Interesting mobs; they all have powers. The amount of buff and debuff they put out seems too high; I had my defense in the negatives and the enemies had a lot of heals and fire shields which seemed too much. Team suffered 2 wipeouts; the second time, I think we were getting hit by flash arrow or something similar, lots of MM pets were spawned, and everything had fire shields. It was just too nasty for a 3 player team. I offered to lower difficulty but the team ended up wanting to do something else.

We ended up switching to different characters and doing something else for a few hours. Quite a bit later I returned to continue soloing this with my elec/inv brute; I lowered difficulty to Villainous (the minimum) before entering, however. Solo on low difficulty the mobs weren't nearly as bad; I do think having minions with thermal and kinetics is too powerful, however, and with larger spawn sizes (such as from a team) the synergy between buff sets would rapidly get out of control.

Rikti dialog:

[NPC] Rikti test subject: Before: this was seen. Fooled again: I will not be.
[NPC] Rikti test subject: This is: new.
[NPC] Rikti test subject: Millie Volt? In a storm: any port suffices.

This doesn't quite sound like proper Rikti-speak to me; they tend to use longer words and few connective words like "was" and "is". Maybe rephrase to:

[NPC] Rikti test subject: Previously: Unforeseen. Future: Not fooled.
[NPC] Rikti test subject: Present circumstances: Novel.
[NPC] Rikti test subject: Query: Millie Volt? Meteorological disturbance: Any facility sufficient.

Even on villainous and solo, each spawn I fight is extremely dangerous to my invuln brute; when an ambush occurred, it nearly killed me even while candy popping purple and orange inspirations. I'm finding it takes 2 purples or a purple and a green inspiration to survive a single normal spawn, spawned for a solo player, on lowest difficulty. I can SEE the mobs buffing each other with fire shields and forge, making them hit harder and take less damage. I'm afraid these mobs are really hard and not very fun to fight, and I have to clear a LOT of them to reach the 3 hostages and 1 boss that are in the mission objectives.

Each fight seems to involve 5 or 6 mobs, which seems more than a single spawn; I kinda think they have a large aggro radius, maybe due to perception powers or buffs. I had to run away from fighting a single spawn once due to their stacking debuffs on me while they healed each other; two other times the single spawn overwhelmed my defenses and killed me.

After two team wipes and two deaths while soloing on the lowest difficulty, I'm throwing in the towel and giving up on this mission. Possibly this is doable on a stalker who can stealth to all the objectives and take out just the spawn around them. I didn't find it doable on a solo level 28 brute though, and brutes are generally considered decent soloers.

I think the Bravuran Militia definitely need to be toned down. At a minimum, I would remove all the buff/debuff secondaries from ALL your minions; those start to get crazy synergy once you have a few of them in the same place.

Overall
I like the premise and the writing style, and the costumes of the Bravuran NPCs. Each mission is interesting and has plenty of stuff to do. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the custom mobs in mission 3 is a showstopper for me; I really feel like I tried, a lot, to fight past these guys, and I tried both teamed up and solo, and took 4 deaths before giving up. With these results, I didn't feel like I could give this arc more than 3 stars.

4/27/2009

On Friday night I played Tehuantl (16 blood widow) on an 8 player all-VEAT Demolition Girls SG team, which rescued Wretch (as part of Seer Marino's story arc) and ran through the Origin of Power story arc for 3 merits. This got Tehuantl to level 18, where I took Indomitable Will for mez protection.

On Saturday morning, I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) though the Paragon Caper story arc, in which I got framed for a bank robbery and had to spend time clearing my name. This arc felt a little ironic for me as my character (whose concept is that of a normal police officer) had to fight a lot of PPD who had disdain for "superheroes", but probably most people wouldn't have this problem. There were a couple plot holes but overall I thought the story was very well written, and I gave it 5 stars.

Police Woman also picked up the Monitor Duty day job badge (from being logged out near a base portal) and the Rapid Response Member accolade; this now gives her a total of 607 badges.

After that I played Linda Lightspeed (33 kin/rad defender) on a Manticore TF organized by the Orange Group SG, with a team mix of:

2 controllers (kin and sonic)
warshade
scrapper
2 defenders (rad and kin)
2 tankers

One tanker quit the TF after he realized he was exemped down and consequently wasn't get exp, but we had another tanker anyway, so this wasn't a problem. Despite being in the 30-35 level range for Manticore, I actually have Linda's exp "turned off" in order to use merits to get recipes at level 33, so Linda didn't level at all. We finished in 1hr 50mins and after the TF I spent 60 merits to get:

1 Lockdown (ACC/END/RCHG/HOLD) Wentw=1.5M
1 Lockdown (chance of +2 mag) Wentw=5M
1 Scirocco (chance of lethal) Wentw=2.6M

On Sunday afternoon, I played Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) on a 7-player LEGION team doing Mission Architect story arcs. I played through the tail end of the Project Z Rays arc, which seemed to have something to do with Crey but I didn't see it all, so I didn't get the full story. Then we started on An Offesnive Defense System which was about a robotic security system run amok; this was full of killer robots that often summoned other robots (being robot/traps MMs). The preponderance of protector bots and force field generators had all the robots at the defense cap, and combined with their lethal resistance made it feel really hard to hurt anything in this mission. I think we had at least one team wipe where we ran into what seemed like a hundred robots and robot pets with force field buffs, which lagged out some of our players.

From there I switched to play Mayday (50 fortunata) on a Recluse SF with a team mix of:

2 thermal corruptors (one had shields; the other did not)
3 brutes (elec, will, inv)
crab
plant dominator
fortunata (me)

I kinda wish I had played a corruptor instead, though, because it felt like we did not have enough buff/debuff for this team to really work (despite Mayday having all the widow leadership toggles). We were pretty slow to kill Crimson and slow to kill the Kronos Titan, which made me worried about our chances of success on the RSF. No one else seemed especially stealthy, so I ended up being the one to fetch the secret codes on the Vindicators mission, which was the first time I had done that, so was kinda neat.

During the last mission the team wanted to pull the Freedom Phalanx to the top of the Atlas globe and fight them there. I was a little dubious about this (the fighting area up there is very small and it's easy to slip and fall), but we gave it a try, and it DID seem to keep the non-flying heroes out of the fight (Manticore and Synapse, at any rate; Back Alley Brawler apparently can SJ up there), which helped reduce the amount of damage we took. It did take several tries to defeat the heroes though, and our invuln brute disconnected and never came back, so we were shorthanded for the final fights. Our first pull we killed Numina, then wiped out. Second pull someone tried to jump Positron (who somehow got separated and was on his own) before the rest of the team was ready, but the other heroes somehow chain-aggroed onto us, causing a team wipe with no progress made. The third attempt we did a frontal assault on the heroes under Atlas's statue and beat Sister Psyche before wiping out. The fourth attempt was another frontal assault where we wiped out after getting Positron relatively low on life, but didn't actually beat any of the heroes. The fifth pull we tried pulling to the top of the globe again, and this time finally cleared all the flying/SJing heroes, and then were able to jump down and finish off Manticore and Synapse to complete the RSF in 2hrs 16mins. I got a Nucleolus SHO as reward.

After that I played Star Amethyst (26 warshade) on a Citadel TF with a team mix of:

sonic defender
thermal controller
warshade (me)
5 blasters

With no tankers or scrappers, I decided I was probably the closest thing we had to a tank, and so I tried to lead the way into fights; though we also had a very aggressive blapper who also liked to do that. We had insane sonic and thermal buffs, though, so we all were at the resist cap anyway (85% for a warshade) so this worked fine. One problem I did have is that knockback from the Council weapons was throwing me all over the place; I'll need to get a KB protection IO at some point. With 5 blasters (even with one who was afk most of the time) we had plenty of DPS, and a couple times I used warshade stealth + superspeed + warshade recall friend to stealth through missions. We tore through the TF in a fairly speedy 1hr 22mins, and Amethyst got the Slayer badge and level 28 along the way. I took Inky Aspect (warshade version of Oppressive Gloom, a PBAOE low magnitude stun) as a new power, and this really seemed to help control mobs that I ran into to attack.

Finished Sunday night doing more Architect story arcs, playing Kyrie Eleison (33 bs/inv scrapper) on a 4-player team that ran through The Prisoners from the Land of Oz, where Glinda the Good sends to to rescue Tiktok and Dorothy Gale from the Clockwork and Vahzilok. The Oz theme was neat but I think needed to be used more, and some of the missions needed more to do; but it was a fun story and I gave it 4 stars.

After that our team grew to 5 players and did Pandemonium, which involved traveling to the Panda dimension and fighting lots of hostile pandas, who all seemed to be either controllers or ninja, and between various fears, confuses, holds, slows and assassin strikes, I found myself faceplanting a lot. I have Kyrie's exp disabled currently, so the debt doesn't really bother me, but the pandas were quite painful to fight. The mission author was on the team and he was talking about cutting out the plant controllers, which would at least get rid of the evil carrion creepers.

Kyrie had collected a lot of tickets and since she's pinned at the level 33 "sweet spot" I like for recipes, I burned a bunch of tickets on Bronze reward rolls, getting:

1 Efficacy Adaptor (ENDMOD/RCHG)
1 Smashing Haymaker (DMG/END)
1 Analyze Weakness (DEFDEBUFF)
1 Impervious Skin (RCHG/RES)
1 Lethargic Repose (ACC/RCHG)
1 Freebird (ENDRDX)
2 Kinetic Crash (KB/DMG/ACC)
1 Air Burst (DMG/END)
1 Focused Smite (ACC/DMG/RCHG)
1 Ruin (ACC/END/RCHG)

for a total of 770 tickets. My initial impression of this recipe draw is that it's total crap, but 770 tickets isn't much; I had plenty more tickets I could've spent, but no more inventory room for more recipes. I may try Silver reward rolls next time.

Late at night I solo'd Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker) through Death to Disco! which is a fun arc where you go back in time to stop criminals from changing the timeline so as to keep disco around forever (consequently crushing rock and roll). This was a fun idea, but I think it needed a little more fleshing out. I gave it 4 stars.

A couple more thoughts on Death to Disco! :

* Consider using Dual Blades and/or Energy Melee instead of Archery and Assault Rifle for the disco minions; I think those attack sets look a little more like dance moves.

* Consider adding a few "rock star" allies to the second map; give them names like "Mick Osbourne", "Freddie Cooper" and "Ozzy Mercury" and make them thugs MMs. I think having some rock hooligans following you around smashing disco objects and beating up disco fans would make it feel more like the anti-disco riot that you are trying to represent.

I know you said you were tight on space, but thought I'd throw these out there anyway.

Ultimately I think the best things you can do are to add more disco and rock references to strengthen the arc's theme.

[ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Consider changing "Hall of Rock" to be "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame".



[/ QUOTE ]
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a real place and as far as I know the Deity of Rock does not live there.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was just thinking "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" sounds more like a real place. Perhaps "Rock of Ages"? No problem if you prefer "Hall of Rock" though.

[ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

In the mission: I am quite surprised that this mission is set outdoors and not in the "rave" dance club map. Even an outdoor city map would make more sense, I think. Although after doing some research I have learned that there actually WAS a "Disco Demolition Night" on July 12, 1979. I thought you had made this up! Perhaps put a precise date in your mission briefing and mention the location it was held (Comiskey Park) to add authenticity to the mission.

[/ QUOTE ]

I did a lot research and am old enough the remember the entire rise and fall of Disco, the Disco Demolition and to have actually gone to a real disco back in the day. Comiskey Park is an outdoor stadium and within the limits of the maps available I felt the one I chose was the best by far. Would I like an actual stadium map, sure, not available.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is admittedly my fault due to the stream-of-consciousness way I was writing this review. When I started writing this paragraph, I didn't know "Disco Demolition" was a real thing, and I thought it would make more sense that disco and rock would fight it out on the dance floor. By the end of the paragraph I had discovered on Wikipedia that it was a real event that you were referring to. Mission Architect, fun AND educational! So, yes, using an outdoor map made perfect sense in that context.

Based on the real event, I think you could include baseball players wondering what the heck is going on and riot police who show up to try and break things up. Though this all takes extra space, of course.

[ QUOTE ]
The failure of the first mission clearly made the second mission happen. The mission two briefing tells you clearly that you stopped Disco's plan to brainwash Carter back in 1977. As a result of this Fever came up with a "plan B" which was mission two that takes place in 1979 (giving him the two years to build his Disco Nation".

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm afraid I didn't think this connection was very strong; there is no foreshadowing of the second mission, no clues that lead to the second mission. Ultimately, you are only doing it because the contact tells you about it in exposition. I think that even a single clue in the first mission of what Dr Disco Fever's "Plan B" is, would help address this.

[ QUOTE ]
On one hand it is nice that you enjoyed it enough to want more, but annoying because the AE system gives you limited space which I have to work within. The arc is around 95% full so adding much more than a few lines here and there is impossible. Additionally, I wanted to keep it short. Though the Dev's only seem to love epic's, in my experience players like the one and two missions arcs so that was what I did.

[/ QUOTE ]

Keeping it short is cool; I just felt like there could be more within each mission. The space limitation IS fairly constraining, admittedly. The only suggestion I can offer for that is to consider cutting one of the custom characters that is least required for the plot; custom characters are the major resource hogs, I've found. Or relying on "standard" characters for extra hostages or persons (for example using generic extra hostages for other 1977 people or standard PPD/RIP for riot cops) would be low profile as additions go.

What you want to do is all ultimately up to you, of course, so don't feel like you have to. These are just my suggestions.

Death to Disco! review

The premise is to stop disco lovers from altering the timeline to cause disco to never die, thus causing rock to fade into oblivion. Fun idea.

The story arc is level 30-54 and labeled as "neutral" morality, so I played Spy Girl (33 MA/ninja stalker), who is kind of a retro looking shades-of-grey villain/antihero.

Mission 1
Briefing: "If his meddling is not corrected Disco will never die" -- add a comma after corrected.

Consider changing "Hall of Rock" to be "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame".

Logical flaw: rock and roll originated before disco, and so having the timeline change in 1977 wouldn't necessarily cause rock and roll to never exist. Though, having disco stay popular COULD relegate rock and roll to only being played on Oldies stations, which might be just as bad.

"then President" should maybe be "then-President".

"re-theme the national anthem to a disco beat" maybe should be "remix the national anthem with a disco beat".

"for that day it appears" - put a comma after day.

Second part of briefing: "For the love of Rock you must succeed!" put a comma after Rock.

Mission objectives include defeating Sauer, but briefing has no mention of Sauer and I have no idea who he is until I actually see him. Could use some foreshadowing of who he is to give the player some reason why he needs to defeat him. Alternatively you can change the mission objective from "Defeat Sauer" to "Defeat brainwasher" maybe, since we DO know someone here intends to brainwash the president.

Sauer's faction is "Crey Scientists" but maybe should be just "Crey". In his description, "unbalenced" should be "unbalanced". I actually doubt Crey Industries existed in 1977 according to the official canon, but that can probably slide for the sake of the story.

Sauer's dialog, "to love DIsco?" ... DIsco should be Disco. Sauer has great dialog otherwise though!

Good choice of face for Jimmy Carter

The guys guarding Jimmy Carter maybe should have some dialog when you attack them. Once I freed Jimmy Carter, he started doing a strange kind of moonwalking animation; not sure if that's under your control though.

Debriefing: The contact says "So Dr. Disco was planning to have the Crey brainwash Carter? Nice save Spy Girl!" ... while this may seem clear from the dialog, I think it would be helpful to give the player a Clue to this effect during the first mission; maybe when you beat up Sauer. Sauer does mention he has instructions to brainwash Carter, but never implicates Dr. Disco in his dialog.

Mission 2
Briefing: OK this mission sounds very silly but also pretty fun. Sounds like a mayhem mission specifically targeting disco paraphernalia.

In the mission: I am quite surprised that this mission is set outdoors and not in the "rave" dance club map. Even an outdoor city map would make more sense, I think. Although after doing some research I have learned that there actually WAS a "Disco Demolition Night" on July 12, 1979. I thought you had made this up! Perhaps put a precise date in your mission briefing and mention the location it was held (Comiskey Park) to add authenticity to the mission.

Good use of disco song lyrics for dialog.

"Go back to New Jersey you loser!" should have a comma after Jersey.

The Diva using sonic attacks and the Kung Fu Fightin guy using martial arts makes sense, but I don't think I understand why the Disco Granny has a bow and the Disco DJ has an assault rifle. I wish there were some way you could make them do dance moves as they attack (like the fighting style of the Disco Boys in Mystery Men), but I don't think this is possible.

I think the rockers should be chanting something like "We will, we will ROCK YOU!" or maybe "I love Rock and Roll! So put another dime in the jukebox baby!" to fight the disco lyrics with rock lyrics.

Dr Disco Fever has a terrific look and background. He's in the "Disco Rules" faction, shouldn't he be the same faction as the other disco people, "Disco Nation"?

"Ah, ah, ah, ah stayin alive, stayin alive..." maybe should be "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive!" (very minor nitpick)

"Not the hair!" should be "Would ya just watch the hair? Ya know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. He hits my hair." (from Saturday Night Fever)

"Watch it this is a $150 silk shirt." maybe should be "Watch it! This is a $150 silk shirt!"



Debriefing: "Thanks to your efforts Spy Girl, it looks like everthing is back to normal and we are once again one nation under Rock! Long live ROCK!!!!!" Put a comma after efforts and "everthing" should be "everything".

I kinda think that when you return, the Deity of Rock should start his debriefing with "Weeeee are the Champions, my friend!" and so on. If you can make every line he says a line from rock lyrics, that would be the ideal.


Overall
Fun concept with some fun references, but I think it needed a little more to really grab me. The two missions seemed only peripherally connected to each other by the framing story; I didn't have the sense that anything I did in the first mission directly impacted the second mission. Perhaps it would help if instead of the Deity of Rock telling you Dr Disco Fever's plan for mission 2, you found it out via a clue in mission 1; or perhaps if Jimmy Carter and Dr Sauer showed up in mission 2 with KC and the Sunshine Band forcing them to get down tonight and you rescued them from a fate worse than disco. It's a very short arc and I think maybe you could stand to add a little more stuff to each mission to make them more lively. Maybe throw in some more 1977 era personalities to the first mission that have to be rescued from brainwashing. To the second mission, maybe add a couple patrols each of Disco and Rock people, with additional disco and rock lyrics as lines.

Anyway, it IS a fun idea and as a result I gave it 4 stars.

-----

I owe a review to:

@GlaziusF - recheck 1st arc that wasn't completable earlier
@Mr Beatdown - The Oblivion Lens 91897
@jjac - 1 of A Tangle in Time 2622 or Eclipse over Paragon 64609
@Shadow-rush - 2 of The Missing 37636 or Pandas vs Rikti 68930
@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - second arc
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer
@GlaziusF - check 3rd arc

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

The Prisoners from the Land of Oz review

Concept is to rescue some Oz themed characters from L Frank Baum's books. Level range seems to be around level 20 blue side; I don't have a level 20 hero at the moment, so I played a 33 bs/inv scrapper, duoing with a friend's 20arch blaster. During the third mission, a 2-boxer with 2 controllers joined us.

Mission 1
Briefing: Glinda the Good is the contact and she has a pretty well-written briefing asking me to rescue Dorothy and Tiktok, a mechanical man. She thinks Clockwork are like Tiktok, so I need to do a Defeat all clockwork.

Mission title: "Defeat all clockwork" should probably be "Defeat all Clockwork" as Clockwork always seems to be capitalized in the canon material.

It's a defeat all, map is sorta medium sized, so not too bad. Decent clue at the end. Debriefing a little short, but OK. I think this mission needed some more stuff in it other that just killing clockwork, to make it a little more interesting.

Mission 2
Glinda seems to have a magic book where she reads about what happens next; neat idea. (Probably from the original books, but I haven't read those.)

Arachnos defender: "It's Kyrie Eleison , stop her !" (where Kyrie Eleison is my character's name) has an extra space after the name and before the exclamation point.

I'm not sure I understand reason why I was sent on this mission. How does saving this Arachnos base from Clockworks contribute to finding Tiktok the clockwork man? Seems a plot problem.

Arachnobot: "Get these Tinkertoys out of here" need a period at the end of it.

2 controllers (2 boxed by one player) wanted to join my team at this point, so we became a team of 4.

The debriefing seemed too short; "You've done well, but we've got more work to do."

This mission seemed a little out of place, you might consider dropping it to tighten up your plot, or else revising it to make it more seamlessly fit with your plot.

Mission 3
Glinda tells me to go to a cave, but entering the mission, it appears to be an office (at least the front part is). Tiktok is supposed to be in the cave, but I found him in the office part of the map. You can probably straighten this out by either making the whole map a cave, or changing Glinda to say something about an office with a cave under it.

Perfected Oscillator: Protect brother Tiktok [add a period at the end]
Tiktok Clone: When our King begins mass producing Tiktok's thought cogs we will be unstoppable [add a period at the end]
Clockwork King: Kyrie Eleison don't interfere. [should be "Don't interfere, Kyrie Eleison!"]
Clockwork King: Fine I'll tell you what happened to the girl [should be "Fine! I'll tell you what happened to the girl."]

Debriefing still too short.

Mission 4
Briefing: "too late for Dorothy" needs a period after it.

Popup as you enter the mission, "unheigenic" should be "unhygienic"

"Defeat Tessa" is in the mission objectives, but she hasn't been introduced until this mission, so it isn't clear why you need to defeat her. Either give some info about her before you enter the mission, or make "Defeat Tessa" trigger off of getting the contract signed by Tessa.

In the clue with the contract, "succesful" should be "successful".

Debriefing: "Apparantly" should be "Apparently,"
"Vhazilok" should be "Vahzilok"
"Dorthy" should be "Dorothy"

Mission 5
Mission goal: "Defeat Dr. Vahzilock" should be "Defeat Dr. Vahzilok"
"Reaper: Make sure the doctor isn't interupted" should be "interrupted."

When you rescue Dorothy, all she says is "Thank you!" which doesn't seem enough when this whole story arc has been building up to rescuing her. I did see that she gave a clue, but I still think she needs more dialog here.

In Dorothy's clue, "courtses" should be "curtseys". "frighted" should be "frightened"

The boss "Dr. Vahzilock" should be named "Dr. Vahzilok".

His dialog:
"Dr. Vahzilock: Kyrie Eleison is on the way to stop us; I'll due this surgery pro-bono it's too important to medical science. Let's begin"

... last part should be "I'll do this surgery pro bono. It's too important to medical science! Let's begin."


After defeating Dr. Vahzilok, Alexa and the Family suddenly spawned and the objective changed without explanation. I think you might want to add a clue to tell the player that they now need to defeat Alexa too. Though I kinda think it is a little underwhelming to beat Dr. Vahzilok, THEN fight some girl who was trying to pay him to cure her cancer. It makes more sense for Dr. Vahzilok to be the big bad guy, than this Family girl, even with her mob connections.

Debriefing: "grattitude" should be "gratitude"

Overall
I thought the Oz theme was neat, but I think you did not use it enough. I think you could use even more Oz imagery and enemies. Perhaps the sisters hiring Dr Vahzilok could actually be analogs of the Wicked Witch of the East and Wicked Witch of the West? Maybe some flying monkeys? Red caps for munchkins? Maybe you need to steal back the ruby slippers from someone in order to get Dorothy home?

Some of the earlier missions I think needed more stuff to do in them. I did like the subplot of the sisters hiring Dr Vahzilok to use Dorothy for their own nefarious purposes, but think that the mafia sisters aren't dangerous enough to use as the big bad guy of the arc; I think the final boss should either be Dr Vahzilok or perhaps a Wicked Witch.

Some of the things the contact said were great and some were too short and needed more material.

I did like the basic ideas and I wanted to rate this around 3.5, either a high 3 or a low 4. I ended up deciding to err on the side of generosity and I rated it 4 stars.

I owe a review to:

@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420
@Mr Beatdown - The Oblivion Lens 91897
@jjac - 1 of A Tangle in Time 2622 or Eclipse over Paragon 64609
@Shadow-rush - 2 of The Missing 37636 or Pandas vs Rikti 68930
@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - second arc
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910
DarthGM - one of 59608 Little Boy Legacy or 103694 Torchbearer

in queue:

WynterPhrost
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230


You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

The Paragon Caper review

Arc description says "challenging for high level characters", so I played a 50 AR/dev blaster.

Mission 1
Not a bad mission briefing. First mission appears to be to stop a bank robbery.

Ran into a bunch of "Spectral Goons", who appear to be some kind of ghostly criminals. I stealthed by them to the final room to fight the lead bank robber, as requested by the mission objectives. But after defeating the robber, he vanished and then I got a clue saying essentially that he is tricking the police into believing I robbed the bank.

Now I have to defeat the police captain to escape. This is an interesting switch, but I don't think it makes sense from a story standpoint; the contact, Detective Harlan, sent me here and KNOWS I came here, so the police should be well aware I'm here on their behalf. On top of that, Detective Harlan said there were no police available to check on this bank robbery, so having a police captain show up here isn't consistent with that. So this is both a logic problem and a continuity problem.

I found it very ironic for the police captain to say "I'm going to have to place you under arrest, Police Woman. Please come quietly." Not everyone will have this problem, of course. Wow, the captain hits REALLY hard for a lieutenant; got KO'd by him once, but managed to hospital, then come back and beat him (which is kind of odd for an escape; I mean I was out of the mission, and I had to come back in to beat him to escape).

Debriefing: well written debriefing, and the detective is properly apologetic about the mess he's gotten you in, though I still don't think it makes sense that the player would be wanted by the cops for this. Also you may want to name your villain something other then "The Shade", which is a name used by a DC comics villain with dark powers.

Mission 2
Nice mission briefing, well-written. Our goal is now to go to a local nightclub to try and gather information about "The Shade".

I like the mission title, "Get info from bar patrons", and the objective "Convince barkeep to sing". Busting up a bar for information is great, you see this sort of thing in comics all the time.

The bar seems full of these Paragon Underground people. And they seem really hostile, so instead of questioning them, I end up shooting them. It's one of the small casino maps so it's not long before I run into the bartender and defeat him. He gives me a nice clue for my trouble, a lead on Shade's location.

Mission 3
Now we're heading to a warehouse that we think the Shade is using as a hideout, just a few steps ahead of "the cops".

More of Shade's Goons here; I tested out fighting one of their lieutenants, as he was surrounded by particle effects indicating he was psy blast/dark armor. He had a lot of mez powers as well as mez protection, so he could stun me and I couldn't stun him; I was able to beat him due to Defiance but I think he'd be quite troublesome for some players. You might consider reducing his Dark Armor setting so he doesn't have Oppressive Gloom/Obsidian Armor?

OK, I now find that the contact is waiting here to beat me up. I guess this explains why he never told the police I was actually on the side of the good guys. He spawned as a +0 AR/willpower elite boss for me. I got him down to about 2% life but he ran into another spectral thug, that aggroed on me, along with his ambush, which ended up killing me. I could've played this better, though, as I had stealthed to him and not cleared mobs around him, so didn't have a lot of running-around room.

Returning from hospital I manage to beat Detective Harlan, and got a pretty well written clue, where he rants about how capes steal all the glory from the regular cops. In fact, I originally started Police Woman (my main character) because I felt bad for all the regular cops that get held at gunpoint by level 1 Hellions, and wanted to set a better example. So I simultaneously have a sense of sympathy and a sense of irony at the way the plot is going.

I now need to defeat Captain O'Connor again, who apparently is in on the conspiracy. Having defeated him and escaped, the mission exit blurb says that Detective Harlan slips away into the darkness, which is kinda cheating since I *did* defeat him.

I'm a little puzzled as to why the police didn't attack Shade's Goons, who are clearly villains; unless there is some sort of working understanding between these two factions.

I also got the "You've been played!" clue, which has a nice summary of how Harlan has been manipulating things. I am not sure I like this *plot* (the contact betraying the player and basically manipulating everything) but the writing explaining it seems well written.

Debriefing: I was wondering how the story would handle this, as Detective Harlan is STILL the contact. The debriefing is the contact taunting you with a "Catch me if you can" while he runs away. Consider italicizing the text you currently have in [square brackets].

Mission 4
Briefing: I'm chasing Det Harlan and being chased by other cops and Capt O'Connor; I think it's a little cheaty for both Harlan and O'Connor to still be active when I've defeated them both already. This whole briefing is in descriptive form rather than talking with Harlan.

Found Captain O'Connor's body; I thought this meant he was dead, but clicking the body gave me clue "Captain O'Connor's tale", so I assume this implies O'Connor is still alive. I think this clue needs to mention that who attacked him (presumably Harlan). You could also make it more clear that O'Connor is alive, perhaps by making his clicky "Captain O'Connor's unconscious body" ... but the body bag visual still strongly implies he's dead, so it might be better if you made him a hostage that you free, that initially starts in a prone position and runs off once he imparts his clue.

I like the inactive dialog from Harlan, which expositions much about his intentions.

I like how destroying the portal causes the Shade to emerge; I was going to suggest using a smaller map so he wouldn't spawn as far away, but he spawned pretty close by which helped. (I ended up searching most of the map before realizing he actually was in the same room as the portal; my fault.)

I think the Shade was an illusion/broadsword EB, and was initially pretty worried when he started spitting out PA and spectral terrors, but he turned out to be pretty squishy and I had an easier time killing him than I did Harlan. I almost think maybe he should be tougher; maybe change his secondary to some flavor of dark, but I do like the touch of class the sword attacks have.

Debriefing and wrapup was pretty nice, with Captain O'Connor now happy with you (he seems very understanding considering I had to beat him up twice) and arresting Harlan. I thought this was a good conclusion.

Overall
I felt the police were too quick to turn on the hero at the beginning; I think there needs to be more than just finding the hero at the scene of the bank robbery. Perhaps the villain can plant evidence framing the hero, and Captain O'Connor, the "good cop", could have dialog that indicates he is reluctant to arrest the hero due to his/her previous good deeds, but it looks bad and s/he had better come along quietly -- something to show that he recognizes the protagonist isn't a flat out villain.

I also think Detective Harlan's connection to the Shade's villain group was not built up enough; he just suddenly becomes a villain standing next to the Shade's Goons. I suggest you have some foreshadowing or clues that more closely tie them. Perhaps the player can notice that Harlan claimed no police would respond to the bank robbery and police did, or they could discover a ledger in the villain warehouse indicating payments to a dirty cop, something like that. Basically, I think you need to build up the link between Harlan and the Shade; right now they don't seem closely tied, so I didn't fully buy seeing Harlan standing near Shade's Goons.

Despite these issues, I really liked the writing style and the dialog and I thought the final mission wrapped things up pretty neatly. I was waffling between rating this story a high 4 stars or a low 5 stars (4.5 seemed about right) and ended up giving it 5 stars.



I owe a review to:

@Sakura-kishi - The Prisoners from the Land of OZ 49326
@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420
@Mr Beatdown - The Oblivion Lens 91897
@jjac - 1 of A Tangle in Time 2622 or Eclipse over Paragon 64609
@Shadow-rush - 2 of The Missing 37636 or Pandas vs Rikti 68930
@parhaius - 2 of Ideality Part1 42436 or Ideality Part2 103737
@Markus V8.0 - Shift Awesome! 97358
@KingSac - The Once and Future King Sac 99394
@jjac - second arc
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Xenite Blackthread - Childhood Horrors 5349
@FemFury - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143
@Lycanus - 110465, 16376 or 113224
@Aracade - Facing Chaos 105163
GGG247 - 2 of 103955 and 63910

in queue:

WynterPhrost
Baron_Rufus
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230

You can make me owe you a review if you run through and review one of:

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388)
Teen Phalanx Forever! (67335)

[ QUOTE ]
Here's my personal souvenir from this solo-friendly 5-stars arc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Love this screen shot! I'm glad you had a good time.

[ QUOTE ]
I tried to fix most of the obvious spelling errors such as "cunnying" and "dealth" multiple times (before your post). I don't know what I did not do right, but it is not fixing them.

[/ QUOTE ]


Two things that I've noticed, that seem to mess up editing published missions:

1. Be sure you are editing the published mission, NOT your local copy of the mission. You'll most likely have a copy of your story arc under both. The one you want to change is under "Published Stories" and when you save it, it should say "Republish & Exit" or something like that, NOT "Save & Exit".

2. I've noticed a definite lag between the time you "Republish" a story arc and when the changes actually take place. As a result, "Republish & Play" almost never seems to work for me; I nearly always end up in an instance of my story arc that doesn't have the changes I just added. I now almost always use "Republish & Exit", then wait a few seconds, then "Play" it if I want to test it.



I also try to periodically save a local copy of my published arcs, with the most current changes (I'm fidgety and frequently will go back and edit little details in my missions in response to feedback). This way if the server dies or rolls back to an older version, or the GMs decide to delete your story arc or something, you still have your local copy as a back up.

Hope that helps!

4/24/2009

Over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday night, I played Strong Woman (10 inv/SS tanker) through Bricked Electronics, a lowbie blue side story arc. The premise is that Mark Freeman, who can pick up some sort of psychometric impressions from electronics devices, found a cell phone giving off weird vibes, and he sends you off to investigate where it came from, and this leads you into uncovering a Goldbricker plot that culminates in foiling a bank robbery. I thought this arc had some good ideas and some nice character development, but also found the plot a little murky with a lot of loose ends. I gave it 4 stars.

A 50 empath friend was looking for something to do and I switched to Blond Justice (50 bs/shield scrapper) to team up with her; picked up a friend playing a 50 ice blaster and we did some AE missions. We first went into Hero of Twilight, which was a fantasy-themed story arc where we fought lots and lots of elves in an effort to (I think) save the elvish kingdom. It was sort of generic fantasy fare but the elves DID have cool costumes, and playing a sword and shield scrapper kinda worked well for this story. Here's a screenshot of Blond Justice fighting elves. There wasn't really a unifying story, and I felt some of the mobs had some balance problems (archery/invuln elf bosses that would go Unstoppable, illusion controllers with the full illusion set) and so I gave this arc 2 stars.

From there our team went into the Knights of Rularuu arc, which started off with investigating some Malta, but then segued into the main plot where you fought a lot of Rularuu. There were some very cool custom Rularuu mobs that had a look & feel that fit right in with the other Rularuu. Here's Blond Justice fighting Rularuu. This was a cool arc but I thought the original contact and the early missions didn't seem to fit well with the later, more serious Rularuu missions, and I ended up giving this arc 4 stars.

Our defender had left and I and the blaster ended up duoing through Operation Doolittle, which I lost my notes for, but I think we uncovered a plot where the bad guys were planning on nuking the Rikti homeworld, and we had to stop them. I was a bit shaky on this premise, as I get the impression most heroes (and villains for that matter) would like to nuke the Rikti homeworld, but I think the idea was that Genocide Is Wrong, so we needed to stop it.

Reviewing other people's story arcs has become a very popular activity on the Mission Architect Stories & Lore forum, where people post a story arc and typically the reviewer will critique the story arc (some people are nicer about this than others). On Thursday, someone posted a criticism of people who are posting reviews, and this generated a near flame war. I've also started a "review" arc, partly to promote my own stories and partly because it's a fun way to choose story arcs to run, and so I tried to take this meta-critique at face value and absorb what value I could from it. My response to this is posted here.

Thursday night, I played Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through The Environmentalist Encounter, which posits a heroic Environmentalist group coming to the Rogue Isles to start trouble. The Environmentalists have cool heroic type costumes and elemental based powers; but as a result they are a little too good at debuffing, and I spent most of the story arc with my recharge rate and my defenses floored by their debuffs. I ended up uncovering the Environmentalist plot to nuke the Rogue Isles, which does not sound very environmentally friendly, but they really hate villains. I managed to beat the first two Elite Bosses, but the third and final big bad guy was an Ice Armor Elite Boss who soundly thrashed me, mostly due to Chilling Embrace completely wrecking my ability to do damage. After getting beat up by the final boss, I decided to let the timer on the timed mission run out, with the result of the Rogue Isles being destroyed (at least according to the story). My contact yelled at me about letting his home country get nuked, but I guess I can live with it. I thought the story was a little thin and the mobs too powerful, so I ended up rating this 2 stars.

A friend on LBX was looking for a task force, any task force, so I took a break from Mission Architect to team up. Playing Star Amethyst (24 warshade), I organized and led a Moonfire TF, recruiting mostly from LBX and ending up with a team mix of:

warshade
peacebringer
3 controllers (thermal, empath, kinetics)
stone tanker
scrapper

It took awhile to recruit enough people for a team, but we ended up with a good archetype mix, and once we got going we did really well. We stealthed the missions that we could, used team teleport to rescue Dr Todd, and finished the TF in 1hr 20mins, gaining 31 merits (23.25 MPH). Star Amethyst hit level 26 on this TF and took Unchain Essence (the corpse bomb power).

After that I played Yuki-Onna (50 ice/cold corruptor) on a Lady Grey TF organized on the Villains of Liberty channel. As a result we had a mostly villainous team:

2 stalkers
invuln brute
kin corruptor
cold corruptor (me)
2 dominators (one disconnected mission 3 and never returned)
some sort of controller

We ran this for speed and utterly blazed through the TF, finishing in a speedy 38min 42sec for 39 merits (60.47 MPH).

This is my most cinematic story arc, so I hope matches what the original poster is going for. It also qualifies by virtue of having only 3 missions and less than 100 plays:

Arc Name: Celebrity Kidnapping
Arc ID: 1388
Faction: Paragon Police, Longbow, Convicts, Vagrants, Family, Paparazzi
Creator Global/Forum Name: @PW / PoliceWoman
Difficulty Level: Easy. No AVs or EBs. Have to keep an NPC alive through ambushes though.
Synopsis: Boy, does Willy Wheeler have a deal for you! A celebrity heiress has been sentenced to jail for drunk driving. The plan is to break her out of the Zig with the help of some thugs, then hold her for ransom for immense profit! What could go wrong?
Alignment: Villainous
Estimated Time to Play: 3 missions, small maps, no kill alls. About 30 minutes.

[ QUOTE ]
However, while I realize the 5th Column are awesome, I really wish people would stop using them in WWII arcs that take place in Europe. I know I'm being nitpicky here, but the 5th Column's name comes from the fact that they were insurgents on American soil who performed a sneak attack on Paragon City during the war. The 5th Column never fought in any battles in Europe during World War II. Also, the presence of warwolves, vampyr, and robots in World War II makes me go absolutely nuts. If you are going to use the 5th Column, make a custom group with only the soldiers in it, and call their faction Wehrmacht or something.

[/ QUOTE ]

What a neat idea! I'm totally going to steal this concept (rebranding the 5th Column guys as Wehrmacht) for my Axis and Allies story arc.

It was neat reading this review, even with the issues with the bosses being too hard. I had been thinking I needed to make a "help the good guys win WW2" arc to balance out my "help the bad guys win WW2" arc, but sounds like someone's already done it!