PoliceWoman

The Environmentalist Encounter review

Stated level range was 1-54 red side; I played a 28 elec/inv brute on Ruthless difficulty.

Sounds like the premise of this story arc is for the villain to confront and defeat this new hero group, the Environmentalists.

Mission 1

Briefing: "havent" should be "haven't", "doesnt" should be "doesn't", and "Does that right a bell?" should be "Does that ring a bell?" Also "destrustion" should be "destruction", "This just wont due" should be "This just won't do", "proffessionals" should be "professionals", and "Ill take care of those scum" should be "I'll take care of those scum".

Second part of briefing: needs a period at the end of the sentence.

Squeakersman goes into a lengthy rant about how the Environmentalists are destroying everything, but never does quite explain what it is that they do. I'm not sure if this was intentional.

The mission title, "Destroy all of the Environmentalists in the final room of the lair" is kinda long and unwieldy, and also redundant with the objective, which is "Defeat all enemies in end room!". You might shorten the mission title to something like "Destroy Environmentalists" or "Defeat Environmentalist Leader". Also, "end room" seems rather vague and confusing, I found one cave I *thought* was the "end room" but turned out not to be; "Defeat Rose" or "Defeat Environmentalist Leader" would be more clear.

I think you might want to explain why the Environmentalists are in this particular office that the player is busting up. Is it their home base? Is it someplace they took over from the villains? Some explanation of why they're here would be nice.

The Environmentalists seem to have a nature/elements theme going; decent costumes and descriptions. The cumulative effect of all their elemental effects might be a little too dangerous though; I spent a lot of time with my recharge floored and my defense debuffed into the negatives due to a combination of their powers. I think eart control, ice blasts, spine attacks. The combination of all these debuffs will probably make the Environmentalists unfun for players to fight; you might consider toning down the amount of slow and defense debuff that your mobs are throwing around.

I found Rose, who spawned as a +1 EB for me and seemed fairly hard. In her description, "midly" should be "mildly" and "alot" should be "a lot". I managed to beat her by using a lot of purples/oranges early on, then somehow lasting long enough for my elec melee to drain her out of END, after which she didn't attack very much. Some of her dialog only makes sense if the character she's fighting is male - "Come here big boy!" etc. "Im thinking that your not going to be the one for me" should be "I'm thinking that you're not going to be the one for me."

There didn't seem to be a lot to do in this mission other than just finding and fighting Rose. I think it would be helpful if you got some clues, either from defeating Rose or clicking glowies or something, that told you what the Environmentalists were planning; this would then lead into later missions.

Debriefing: Afraid I really didn't like it; it was only one line, "Muahaha you actually defeated them? Interesting. Maybe there is hope for you yet." and that one line was kinda rude, considering he seemed confident enough to send me into this mission in the first place. I suggest you rewrite it to more closely match the way he talked in the original briefing.

Mission 2

Briefing: "Interesting, that cunnying woman, Rose, was there? This is worse than I thought. .... I thought that their plan was only to cause mayhem, but by what Rose has said, they are planning on destroying the entire Rogue Islands." This information really belongs in the debriefing of the previous mission, and/or a clue from defeating Rose. Also I think "cunnying" maybe should be "cunning" and "Rogue Islands" should be "Rogue Isles". You may also want to give a clue as to just HOW they plan to destroy the Rogue Isles.

Also I'm not sure what you mean by "This cannot be dealth with slowly".

The actual briefing of the mission seems to be to just go fight more Environmentalists, in particular a leader named Piedra.

Entering the mission, I get a popup that says "Why do I smell rotten stones?" This is a puzzling statement. Stones are not normally described as rotten.

The mission title is "Locate Piedra", but probably should be "Defeat Piedra". It's basically a mission where you just find and defeat the boss. I think you might want to add some more details to this mission to make it more interesting than an average radio mission.

Piedra is again a +1 EB to me, a stone/stone brute... wow, very rough fight for me. I narrowly squeaked out a win by using all my inspirations. In his dialog, "this isnt happening" should be "this isn't happening" and "burried" should be buried.

In the clue you find after defeating Piedra, "Lets" should be "Let's". Also if the map is etched in stone, how can you take the map to the contact? Maybe you should describe the player copying the map. It would also be nice to give the player some clue what the map seems to be a map OF.

Mission 3

Briefing: OK, so the Environmentalists are setting off a universal bomb that will destroy all the Rogue Isles. I have to say this doesn't sound either heroic or environmentally safe, so this seems out of character for a heroic Environmentalist group. And...why would they etch a map to their bomb in *stone*? That doesn't make very much sense, I'm afraid.

Also, "posses" should be "possess", "entirity" should be "entirety" and "set to go of in 90 minutes" should be "set to go off in 90 minutes".

"Remember that the Environmentalists are crazy about trees, I would look around a tree for the Universal Bomb." ... this doesn't make sense, I'm afraid. If you like trees, you don't bomb them.

"Well too bad im too busy to go with you" ... im should be I'm. But actually, just delete this whole line, I don't think the contact needs to explain he won't go help you fight the AV.

Also "cant" should be "can't" in the mission accept text.

Mission title: "Univeral" should be "Universal".

Entering the mission, I find it is set in Oranbega. I thought this was a crazy map choice until I got to the final room which was the Thorn Tree room from the villain respec.

Disarming the bomb seemed awfully easy, all I had to do was move up to it and click it.

Found Helada, the Environmentalist leader. She was in the same room as the bomb (which was inside the Thorn Tree trunk), which seems a little unsafe when the bomb is capable of blowing up the whole Rogue Isles. In her description "Rouge Isles" should be "Rogue Isles". She's also a +1 EB, but ice blast/ice armor. As a brute I could not defeat her; her chilling embrace put my recharge to -88% and basically my attacks would not recharge fast enough, so I could not do more damage than her regen.

I didn't really feel like going to Bloody Bay for a shivan or trying to drag more people into the mission to kill Helada; I didn't really want to quit the arc either, though. But the final mission had a 90 minute timer, so I decided to let the timer run out and see what would happen.

Returned after my 90 minutes and the contact lectures me for letting them destroy the Rogue Isles. Heh, not bad! "alot" should be "a lot" though.


Overall:
I like how the Environmentalists look, and their elemental theme is cool, but I think they are too good at debuffing right now; in many fights against them I had my recharge and defense floored, which will be fatal for a lot of people and unfun for most. Helada, the final big boss, was too hard for me to beat, mostly because of chilling embrace slowing me so badly. I do see that you put some warnings in the story arc description that there are EBs and controllers in this story arc, but I still think you might be well advised to reduce the difficulty some in order to appeal to more players.

I think the story behind this arc needs some work, also. I get that the Environmentalists hate Arachnos, but it's not really clear why; maybe manufacture a reason (perhaps Arachnos is making the Rogue Isles the world's #1 polluter or something). The first two missions don't really have much story beyond a typical radio mission; you go in and kill a boss and that's it. Both could stand to have more detail added to them. The final mission does have the bomb threat in addition to the boss you have to kill; but the bomb is a little too easily disarmed to feel like a credible threat.

And I have to think that using a bomb to blow up the Rogue Isles does not seem like a suitable plot for this group, as it is neither heroic nor especially environmentally conscious. Let me suggest you give them a master plan that more closely fits their "environmentalist" theme - maybe they have some device that would cause the Rogue Isles to be overrun with trees, turning the whole place into Primeva in Nerva. Or maybe they start a new Ice Age that covers the Rogue Isles with glaciers.

Anyhow, between the mob difficulty and the story problems, I felt I could only give this arc 2 stars. I hope you think that is fair.

---------------------

I owe a review to:

Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@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

in queue:

WynterPhrost
Baron_Rufus
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616
@OverlordIndigo - A Hero is Made, Not Born 20863
LordXenite - Childhood Horrors 5349
@Steeple - Enter, the Darkened 107230
Shagster - Amazon-Avatars 5909 or Escalation 6143


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)

I found this thread offering general advice to all reviewers on this forum. Okay, so some people think the original poster really has an axe to grind against one particular reviewer's style; but I'm going to take this at face value and try to get some value from it. I certainly think it would be hypocritical for me to give out constructive criticism, but refuse to accept it.

So, that poster listed 5 things to avoid as a forum reviewer. Let's go over them.

[ QUOTE ]

1) Claiming "objectivity" of any kind, in any form. ... [E]valuation... is inherently subjective. Admit it and move on.

2) Playing "Guess What's In My Pocket". If you've got a bunch of peccadilloes that you don't reveal to your potential victims--I mean the people you review--then you're playing dirty pool. .... You have the right to be irrational as a reviewer, but if you don't tell the people asking for reviews about your dislikes, then you're setting people up, intentionally or not.

3) Snark. .... cutting people down with your witty bons mots.

4) Commenting publicly about others' grammar mistakes.

5) Reviewing something you haven't finished. .... Finish, or remain silent. If you can't finish, find a polite way to say so.


[/ QUOTE ]

So, responding to this list:

1) Everything I say is Just My Opinion. Am I objective? Well, I try to be. Do I succeed? Sometimes. Are there things I'm not objective about? Yes, totally.

2) I think this is a fair request. I did try to list what I thought I liked and disliked at the start of this thread, but after quite a few reviews, I've figured out more about what I like and don't like about story arcs. I will put a new and improved list of likes and dislikes at the end of this message.

3) I have endeavoured mightily to not be insulting or condescending towards anyone whose story arc I've reviewed in this thread. I'm well aware that each story arc is the result of hours of creative effort by the author, and have no wish to spend my time insulting this effort. The great majority of story arcs are not perfect and can use some improvement. I try to phrase my reviews so that they can be used as constructive criticism, and I try to offer the author suggestions for how I think their story can be improved.

4) I disagree with this, I think it is important to catch and report all typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes to the author. Often it is beneficial for a second set of eyes to proofread text that someone else has written; and most people who leave feedback won't bother to report things as trivial as typos, so often they can go unfixed even after 50 people play through the story. That said, I don't lower my rating of someone's arc based on typos or grammatical errors. Also, I'm as vulnerable to typos and grammar problems as anyone, so I won't pretend to be high and mighty about it.

5) I try to finish one play through someone's story arc before posting a review. I agree that you can't get a good picture of the full story unless you do this. I *have* quit from story arcs early a few times, but so far I've only quit early for the following reasons: (a) I can't make further progress in the story arc due to a bug, (b) The story arc requires Defeat All on a big map, (c) The story arc has no story behind it (e.g. contact's full briefing is "Go kil Skulz" and the mission is Defeat All Skulls on a farm map).

------------------------

So, absorbing the lessons from the above, here are the Top 10 Things I Hate When Reviewing a Story Arc:


10. Customized enemies that re-implement existing CoH enemies

This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but if you need a zombie, why not use a Banished Pantheon zombie instead of making your own? If you need a mobster, why not use a Family minion instead of making your own? If you need a generic shadowy mercenary organization, why not use Sky Raiders or Malta instead of making your own?

Okay, so maybe you just WANT to make your own mobs. That's cool, but if you do, try to think about what makes YOUR zombie different than the BP zombie, or YOUR shadowy mercenaries different from the Sky Raiders or Malta; then make sure your story highlights how they're different than the canonical threats. They ARE different, right?

9. Badly done Author Insertion

Oh, look, it's the character of the author or the author's friends, and they're here to help us or kick our butts! This can be done well, but it can also be done badly. If you do this, please make sure their appearance in the story makes sense within the plot of the story, and that you provide the player with some background info on these characters and an explanation for why they're there. Try to resist the temptation to make your character an AV/EB or otherwise overpowered; this will just annoy your players.

I'll freely confess that I love inserting my characters into story arcs. But I *try* to only do so if there is a story reason why they should be there. I also enjoy seeing people I know insert their characters into THEIR story arcs. But if I don't know you, and I run into your character, then the bar is automatically set higher because I have no idea who this new character is. I know this sounds unfair, but I think most people will feel the same way. So if you use your character, make sure it makes sense, and explain who he/she is.

8. Lack of dialog/clues/description from NPCs

So I see a named enemy in the mission, but inspecting their "info" shows only the standard boilerplate for a custom boss. I attack them and they never say a word, or else have very generic fight dialog ("You'll never defeat me!" "You're stronger than I realized!") that you could probably slap on any enemy and have it mostly work. Killing them maybe updates my mission objectives in the nav tool, but I don't actually get a clue or learn anything from it. An enemy like that is very generic and doesn't leave much of an impression on you; it's something of a wasted opportunity. You don't need to fill in ALL these areas, but I think it is a good idea to fill in at least a few, to give your NPC some personality, some history, and/or some purpose for being there.

7. Just not much to do during a mission

The mission is simply "Defeat Boss B" or "Click 3 glowies" and doesn't have anything more to it. While these are both valid missions, it just isn't that exciting to run through this mission. You only have 1 to 5 missions to tell your story in; with so few opportunities to make an impression on the player running your arc, I feel like you should try to make each mission individually cool.

6. Defeat all on a large or annoying map

It's time consuming and usually not that fun. Defeat all on smaller maps can be okay though, and sometimes there may be story reasons for a Defeat All (but try to use a smaller map in such cases).

5. Continuity errors

Your clue tells me X but your contact tells me Not X in his debriefing. Or the contact tells me X in mission 1 but Not X in mission 3. Basically any time some of the story text contradicts other text from earlier in the story. Try to keep the story consistent!

A less malignant example of this is when the contact tells me, "Wow you found out X!" during the mission debriefing, but I never got a clue to that effect during the mission itself.

4. Mission Impossible.

The customized mobs in the story arc are just too darn hard to fight, maybe due to the powersets that were chosen for each mob, or maybe all the minions have buff/debuff sets that combine to make the enemies too tough, or maybe the "standard/hard/extreme" setting is too high on some of your mobs, or you have four ambushes every time you turn around, or maybe you've simply determined that it's cool to have an elite boss in every spawn. Mobs with extreme defense sets (Willpower and Invuln seem most common) are especially bad for this; I've been in missions where every boss could go Unstoppable, and it was unpleasant.

For whatever reason, the player has no shot of completing your missions unless they are godlike or have a Statesman TF level team. A lot of my review runs are done solo, so in general, if I can't solo it, I probably can't give your arc a good review.

That said, I'm a decent soloer who can handle an occasional EB, and usually the main bad guy of a story arc gets a special dispensation to be more badass than the rest of the enemies.

3. Game over. You lose.

I finished the story arc, I did everything the missions asked me to do, and yet the main bad guy GETS AWAY in the end? This is maddening. Let the player "win" your story arc. "But it's continued in Part 2: Revenge of the Woozles" is not a good enough reason to leave the player with a sense of failure in Part 1, because they will never PLAY your Part 2 then.

A slightly less malignant case of this is when there IS no main bad guy to beat up in the final mission, and you win the story arc by clicking a glowy. This isn't as bad as the main bad guy escaping, but is still rather unsatisfying.

2. Not knowing why I'm doing what I'm doing.

What's my character's motivation for doing your missions? I'm beating up these sentient dandelions from dimension Upsilon Rho 5 for some reason, right? Can you please TELL me why I'm doing this? "Because the contact said so" is not usually a good enough reason. "It's an investigation (or conspiracy) and even the contact doesn't know why the sentient dandelions are involved" is one reason you can hide behind, but if you do this, put some clues for me to find that will explain things. And I certainly hope I find out what's going on by the end of the story arc!

1. The individual missions aren't connected into an overall story arc.

This can take several forms: first, there might be no story in any of the missions at all. Second, some missions seem to be from story A and other missions seem to be from story B, but the link between them is so tenuous that I don't understand why they're in the same arc; or, a less malignant form, the missions DO all share the same plot, but have wildly diverging styles or genres (e.g., mission 1 is screwball comedy, mission 2 is detective noir, mission 3 is cosmic horror).



And, for comparison, the Top 10 Things I Love When Reviewing a Story Arc:

10. Good costumes for custom characters.

If you're going to make a custom character, make them look good. If the custom character is supposed to fill a particular role, make their costume fit the role.

9. Random acts of kindness. (on hero side, anyway)

On heroic arcs I like randomly doing a peripheral good deed, like rescuing someone who was in trouble even though you weren't really there to do that; or redeeming a villain and turning them to the good side; that sort of thing makes me feel more heroic. There's no equivalent on villain arcs, though; I have no need to occasionally kick puppies to demonstrate my evilness. I do like villain arcs where you're clearly the bad guy accomplishing something criminal or evil, though.

8. Helpful clues.

Some story arcs don't use clues at all, or have clues that don't actually tell you much. I like when authors use clues to tell part of the story. I like when clues tell you information that lets YOU, the player, figure out what is going on; I prefer that to clues where "You found the widget! Your contact may be able to tell you more about it."

7. Clever concept.

Sometimes authors will create a story arc with a particularly clever concept as an idea, making their story quite different than the standard formula (go here, gather clues, go there, gather more clues, go over there, beat boss, win) that most story arcs follow. When executed well, this can be cool. (I hesitate to give examples for this as each one is very unique and special case.)

6. Dynamic missions.

I like missions where it appears stuff is happening as you progress through it; perhaps you run into moving patrols, encounter battles between factions, or a series of events occurs as a result of your actions. These all give the player a sense that stuff is going on, rather than the mission is just a big box full of exp waiting for you to collect it in bite sized chunks. Good use of linked objectives and mission details can contribute a lot to this.

5. Believable plotline.

Not sure how best to explain this, but some plotlines are more believable than others, while some make no sense at all. Try and make sure each mission logically follows from the previous one. You can certainly depend on the player's willing suspension of disbelief to some level ("Unobtainium is the critical component for the planetbuster bomb, we need you to go retrieve the Unobtainium before Dr. Badguy gets it!") but unless your story is intentionally over-the-top on parody, try not to make the player swallow anything too ridiculously unbelievable ("Unobtainium is only found in the gall bladder of Mongolian yaks, we need you to go to Mongolia and Defeat All Yaks in order to secure the world's supply of it").

4. Descriptive mission briefings

I really like to know what I'm doing on each mission, why I'm doing it, and particulars about what my objectives are. I feel like most of this should be in the mission briefing. Sometimes the particulars may be a little vague because you're just starting out your investigation, but even in this case, try to explain to the player what s/he's doing so that s/he can be clear on why they are doing your mission.

3. Good dialog and characterization.

I like when NPCs are given some dialog in the mission that helps establish their personality. It's too easy to leave the dialog boxes blank or just put some very generic chat message there that any NPC could've said. It's nicer when all their dialog is "in character" for whomever that character is supposed to be.

This also extends to clues you get from interviewing NPCs and mission briefings/debriefings you get from your contact; each of these lets you write longer dialog for the NPC in question. You can also build up your character's personality by finding things that belong to him/her or hearing other people talk about him/her.

2. A Grand Finale.

More and more, I'm finding the final mission to be the one I regard as the most important of the story arc. The last mission should lead up to a climactic moment; most commonly, when you defeat the Big Bad Guy and Save the World. Ideally the clues or debriefing should wrap up all the loose ends from the story arc, and the player should be left with the satisfied feeling of a Job Well Done. I've played story arcs that I thought were great for most of the arc, but the final mission felt unsatisfying, and I gave them a lower rating as a result; and other arcs where most of the arc was okay, but the final mission knocked my socks off, and I gave them a higher rating as a result. The final mission is your last opportunity to make an impression on your player. Make it count!

1. Sense of immersion.

If your writing grabs me from the first mission and sets a "mood" or a "tone" that is maintained through the whole story arc, I'll almost always give you high marks. This is done through good writing in the mission briefings/debriefings, the popup windows, the dialog from NPCs, the clues -- basically everywhere that you can put text that the player will read. It could be humor, but doesn't have to be; it could be horror, but doesn't have to be. I've been through arcs that set a tone of lighthearted fun, of Celtic mythology, or of stygian horror; each of which was good at pulling me out of my normal box, and building a sense of immersion that set the mood for their story.

Knights of Rularuu review

Did this on a 4 player team with a bs/shield scrapper (me), ice/ice blaster, emp/psy defender and an ice/storm controller. Being on a team, we were moving pretty fast and as a result I didn't catch as much detail as when soloing.

Based on the story arc concept, it sounds like Justice-Guy is conning us into doing his Agent Indigo and Agent Crimson missions for him.

Mission 1
This mission seemed to be to fight some random Malta.

We rescued a hero named Serras, but she promptly ditched us to go hang out with Justice-Guy off-panel somewhere. She mentioned she'd send someone else to help us out, and we soon rescued Rebecca, who was a Carnie boss. My team was very confused as to why a Carnie was helping us, and I'm not sure we ever got a good explanation for that.

In Rebecca's dialog, "terrorist cell to route" should be "terrorist cell to rout".

The Malta Data clue felt very generic in nature; it basically didn't say anything about what the clue actually was, merely that we should bring it to someone who can tell what it says. Would be nicer if the clue text gave some details about what is actually being learned here; we can still have the contact give us the full picture, but it'd be nice if players reading the clue had a chance to figure it out on their own, too.

Debriefing: Bizarrely, Justice-Guy spends most of the debriefing talking about some mission he did while we were gone. This would be okay for a throwaway line, but he actually spends more time talking about himself than about the mission my team just completed, which seems wrong.

After the first mission the empath had to log off, leaving me with a team of 3.

Mission 2

Started off normal, then got weird with Rularuu. We all thought the custom models for the Rularuu were very cool; they fit right in and we only really could tell because they were more humanoid looking than the other Rularuu.

I didn't notice anything especially wrong with this mission, other than it has Malta and Rularuu -- two nasty villain groups, together.

Mission 3

Joan's clue: santuary should be sanctuary

Debriefing: "funhouse - slash - prison - for - a - deity" is very awkwardly punctuated. Maybe "funhouse/deity-prison". Maybe add paragraph breaks to make this text more readable, also.

Mission 4

I like how the hostage was linked to the dimensional stabilizer. We were able to confront the AV and beat him with 3, but it was close at points.

Here's a picture of my character fighting some Rularuu (one of the customized ones is dead in the lower left):

Blond Justice vs Rularuu


Overall:
My team liked the special Rularuu models and the last two missions with the Rularuu; but felt the Malta subplot at the beginning and not-very-serious Justice-Guy and the Carnie didn't seem to mesh well with the more serious Rularuu subplot. I think you could tighten up the plot of your story arc by trimming the first mission or two, which mainly focus on the Malta group, who don't really seem important in the last 2 missions; then the players would directly launch into action against the Rularuu right away. Either that or rework the first couple missions to be more similar in tone to the last two, which have a darker and more serious tone due to the Rularuu and their various captives; maybe even switch out Justice-Guy as contact for one of the Firebase Zulu NPCs. As it is now, it seems like the Malta part of the arc and the Rularuu part of the arc are actually separate stories.

As a result of all this, I gave this story arc 4 stars.

----

(Reviewed Operation Doolittle, but since someone asked me to look at that arc in game and not on this forum, I'll send comments on that arc via PM instead of posting here.)

---------------------

I owe a review to:

@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@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
in queue:

WynterPhrost
Baron_Rufus
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780
@Canadian Canuk - 99 bottles of Beer 100616

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)

Hero of Twilight review

I played this on a 3 player team: bs/shield scrapper (me), emp/psy defender, ice/ice blaster.

This story arc's concept seemed to be fantasy based, where you're doing various good deeds and quests for an elf kingdom. Most maps were set in Croatoa to represent this magical kingdom.

Mission 1

Briefing:
"I live and breath the song" breath should bebreathe
"magnatude" should be "magnitude"

"I am deeply in need of your assistance Blond Justice if history.." put a comma after assistance.

In general, I think your briefing should better explain the nature of this magical kingdom that the players are helping to save. Players generally won't have any knowledge of this fantasy realm, so you need to tell them a little about it and its problems.

In the mission:
"curse beserker" should be "curse berserker" or "cursed berserker"

Your mobs are in faction called "Cursed Elves 2". The 2 looks very extraneous. Suggest you rename this faction "Cursed Elves".

None of your mobs have any description; I think putting a few lines explaining them would be helpful for developing a sense of immersion.

The mission gameplay was pretty simple; I fought a bunch of elfy looking characters, freed a captive, then the mission ended.

Mission 2

Briefing: "suprised" should be "surprised". The briefing sounds like fairly generic fantasy questing boilerplate; and it doesn't feel that closely connected to what just happened in mission 2.

In the mission, the Suns Shadow Elves did have a very nice look and were fun to fight. Here's a picture of my character fighting some of the elves:

Blond Justice versus Elves

In the boss encounter, we ran into both Empress Schism (the boss) and Empress Schism 2 (who seemed to be a copy). We weren't sure if this was intentional; they have no description so we aren't sure if the Empress is meant to have multiple bodies or mirror images or something.

Mission 3

"allthou" should be "although"

"during he reign" should be "during his reign"

"Anceints" should be "Ancients"

Pakdi's group says: "This is as far as you get appreantice of Warmaster Kordith!" appreantice should be apprentice.

We ran into another Empress Schism 2 boss, who summoned a crazy amount of illusion effects. Possibly her power level should be toned down a bit.

Now that I mention it, your elf assassins are ninjitsu which could be very dangerous to some players; you may not want to use those powers too often. Also the Rylic bosses semed to be archery/invuln, and had enough invuln to frequently use Unstoppable, making them nearly impossible for us to kill. You might consider reducing the number of invuln powers they get.

We had to save Pakdi before either the King ally or General Grim ver would spawn. But there is no obvious reason for why this is required; we already came into the mission knowing we need to save the King and fight the General, so it's not like Pakdi told us anything new.

When we found General Grimver, I noticed the mob is called Grimver but in text everywhere else (e.g. Mission Title) he's called Grim Ver. Pick one way to spell his name and stick with it.

In the mission debriefing:
dieties should be deities
suprising should be surprising
Temperal should be Temporal


Overall:
I'm afraid this story felt rather generic fantasy. In addition, it didn't really have a unifying narrative that connected all the missions together; each mission seemed its own little scene that was not very closely tied to the other missions in the sequence, other than nominally being in the same kingdom and sharing some of the same mobs. Of those mobs, I think a few may have powersets that will be hard for players to deal with (maybe would be fine if you lowered the difficulty level on their power sets too though), and none of them currently have any kind of description, which would help. I'm not sure if Empress Schism 2 appearing in multiple places is intentional or not, also. In general I think you will want to add some description or explanation of this fantasy world that the heroes are transported to, for the sake of setting up a good background for what is happening.

With no overall story, not much description and some problem mobs, I felt I couldn't rate this arc higher than 2 stars. Sorry, hope you think that's fair!

Bricked Electronics

Stated level range is 8-20 blue side. Played a 10 inv/ss tanker.

Very interesting premise (IMHO)... Mark Freeman has the power to read data remanence off of electronic devices and he's convinced there's something weird about a refurbished cell phone he acquired and he sends you to investigate it.

Mission 1
Briefing: despite quite a long briefing with interesting text in it, I find that Mark has actually told me almost nothing about what's going on but it's just the start of this investigation, so hopefully I'll learn more.

I like the pop-up as you enter, where you hear jetpacks. Helps set the scene.

Goldbricker Swag clue: "The Goldbrickers were probably trying to move fast, and that meant not hitting home base too early." I'm not sure what this actually means? Maybe this is an expression I'm not familiar with. Do you mean to say the Goldbrickers forgot this crate?

Billmark's dialog: "Ggh" needs a vowel in it.

Billmark's clue: "Rogue Isle Protector" should probably be "Rogue Isles Protector", or else use a specific island name. "The flakes of ink in the compartment suggest that he marked it up"... I don't think most people use ink that flakes any more. Maybe "ink smears" instead of flakes.

Debriefing: "A newpaper?" should be "A newspaper?" Also "Dead tree edition, my one weakness" doesn't scan; maybe "Dead trees, my one weakness" would make more sense.

Logic problem: if I brought Mark the jetpack the Goldbricker leader had, wouldn't he be able to divine something from that using his powers? Even if you don't want to give away more clues at this stage, consider mentioning that Mark tries this but doesn't learn much; as I see it, there's absolutely no reason not to bring every bit of electronics that we find to him to analyze.

Mission 2
Pretty good briefing, though still we don't seem to know anything. Another good popup on entering the mission that sets the scene.

You have some clockworks in the "Constructs" faction and others in "JJ's Constructs"; should these be in the same faction or are they intentionally different?

I found a destructible Charging Station 1-A that I destroyed, but it seemed unconnected to any of the objectives; not sure what it's purpose was. Or maybe it's just there for color.

I fought a Tweeter clockwork, a lieutenant with sonic blast; this actually seemed quite dangerous to my 10 tanker (who admittedly is still kinda squishy), due to the stacking sonic blasts. The other custom mobs seemed fine.

JJ's rant: "drek" should be "dreck". "'course they have" should be "'Course they have". "nobody's usin' it any more" should maybe be "nobody's usin' it no more", but the way it's written can work too. Her rant is very good but she never does say where she got the cell phone, which was the whole point of busting up her operation.

Debriefing: Mark is impressed that JJ was able to repair cellphones; but, I would actually think he'd be more impressed that she hotwired Clockwork robots and built a few robots of her own. May want to reword what he says.

Glad he is using his power to look at the cell phones I picked up. If you have a superpower, use it often.

Mission 3
Briefing: Nice touch on mentioning J.J. reformed and got a job. I'm a little puzzled how Mark knows the phones came from a cave; did J.J. tell him or his power tells him somehow? Would like some clarification. If it's his power, though, why wouldn't he have known from the first phone?

Also Mark complains that J.J.'s refurb of the phones wiped out the memory; but I'm pretty sure in mission 1's briefing Mark claimed that erasing the memory doesn't stop his power. I can't definitely check this from where I am in the arc, but if so, that would appear to be a contradiction on how his powers work.

The stuff about robbing a bank just sounds weird. Maybe drop it until later in the story, or else rewrite it to sound more like a mystic vision or psychic reading (i.e. describe it based on vague impressions that Mark psychically sensed).

Second part of briefing: Now Mark expects me to pick up some sort of trash? This wasn't mentioned in the first part of the briefing, which was just "Go check this cave out and have a look around". I think the briefing isn't quite clear on what the player is being asked to do.

Mission title of "Find Mark some fresh discards" is very inglorious sounding. Maybe "Investigate Cave" or "Collect Evidence" ? Both sound more officially heroic, but work out to be the same thing as "Find Mark some trash".

Upon entering the mission, I find it's not a cave, it's a Council base! I suppose a Council base is a type of cave, but I was expecting more of a CoT style cave based on the info. I kinda think Mark should've been able to tell us that the cave was being used for 5th Column loyalists though.

Technological Detritus clue: "netbooks", do you maybe mean "notebooks" or "e-books"? "Most of them are pretty damaged, from the fall if nothing else." What fall? Maybe you mean "Most of them are pretty damaged, apparently from getting dropped down an air shaft."

Now that I've picked up 2 boxes of tech detritus and defeated Archon Targus, a new goal of "3 gas cylinders to destroy" has appeared. However, this does not connect to the mission title of "Find Mark some fresh discards", which has been accomplished already but the mission hasn't completed. May want to rephrase mission title so it makes sense no matter what the humans are actually doing.

Debriefing is cute again refers to Mark having trouble with "wiped" electronics though.


Mission 4

Not a bad briefing, though Mark talking about getting "old files off a system", then suddenly switching gears and saying he got info from pictures taken by the phones, is a little dissonant. Most people don't refer to a phone as a system, so these sound like two different items; maybe rephrase the earlier sentence to also talk about phones.

Second part of briefing: "I tracked down the article Billmark was so interested in." The newspaper was described as something Mark was having trouble making anything of. He maybe should mention whatever it was that caused a breakthrough on learning a clue from the newspaper.

This second part of the briefing is a VERY long exposition on imaginary banking laws; I'm not sure it belongs here, as it is not relevant to the mission. It maybe should be a clue from a banker or a torn-out page of a law book or something. Additionally, I'm quite skeptical of this made-up law; even if you were pronounced missing and legally dead, the bank would be obliged to turn over the money to your legal heir. The financial arrangement described here demands too much suspension of disbelief.

Mission entry popup: Why would I assume that the strange noise is JJ's package? I'm in a villain base, there could be many possible explanations for strange noises other than a robotic gift from a geek girl you just met. It may make more sense to find whatever it is, THEN realize it is from JJ.

Got laptops for Mark but he still doesn't seem to get much off of them despite his technomancy?

Mission 5

I'm not sure that the bank financial stuff makes sense, but this mission does have an interesting structure, with a 10 minute time limit to save JJ from Goldbrickers.

Mission objectives: "Drop the Goldbricker boss" is already covred by the "Arrest all Goldbrickers!" goal.

Rescued JJ; I like that she is now a robots MM.

Managed to complete all the objectives in the 10 minutes allowed, with 2 minutes to spare.

Even after beating the Goldbricker boss and going through Mark's final debriefing, I'm still not quite sure what was going on here. I guess they were trying to steal the contents of one person's bank account before the money was nationalized? But if they are robbing the bank anyway, why not take everyone's money, not just this one person's money?

The Goldbricker boss's insane babbling suggests there is something more, and the reasons behind this particular robbery appear intentionally left a mystery. As a result, I didn't feel a sense of closure at the end of the arc; it still felt like there were loose ends that were never really addressed.

Also, in hindsight now, the original adventure hook of the refurbished cell phone seems a lot less central to the plot than I would've expected; based on the explanation during the story arc, it seems to have just been a phone used a couple times to talk about a robbery, then thrown down an elevator shaft. With all the ghost-in-the-machine type talk I had pictured the secret of the cell phone being much more dramatic for some reason.


Overall:
I like the style and the dialog, but felt the plotting had some problems; in places, I found the story hard to believe, loose ends were never tied up, and the original macguffin, the "haunted" cell phone, turns out to be a lot more mundane than expected. I also felt that Mark Freeman's technomancy powers were portrayed inconsistently; rather than always working the same way, they seemed to be more helpful or less helpful based on whether the plot needed to produce a clue at that moment or not.

On the other hand, I really liked JJ Cartwright's character development; it was very nice to be able to turn her from a villain to an ally and seemingly befriend her. The idea of using Mark Freeman and his techno powers was quite cool (despite my complaint about how he was used inconsistently). I liked the timed nature of the last mission with its laundry list of goals, it gave me a sense of time pressure; though I was tempted to fail the mission just to see how the story arc would handle it. The writing style was pretty good and full of extra detail, and there were a lot of good clues provided.

With all that said, I gave this story arc 4 stars.

4/22/2009

I logged on Monday night to instantly get awarded three Mission Architect badges:

Bard (250 players played my arcs)
Acclaimed (one of my arcs got 250 stars, cumulative over all voters)
Illustrious (one of my arcs got 500 stars, cumulative over all voters)

This was pretty cool. I think nearly all of these badges came from my Teen Phalanx Forever! story arc, which has been getting lots of positive feedback, which I've written up answers to in this thread. The main complaints I've gotten so far are that the arc is too easy/not enough exp, but since I've also had someone say the third mission was too hard for him to complete, I don't feel comfortable making it any harder.

Playing Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) I solo'd my way through the Poaching the Lion story arc, in which I fought a shadowy criminal organization called Codename Lions. The new villain group seemed rather generic and the story didn't give me a strong idea of who they really were and how they differed from, say, Sky Raiders or Family; and the missions themselves were pretty straightforward "Go kill Boss X", nothing too special. I ended up giving that story arc 2 stars.

Someone on LBX was complaining that I14 had "no new content" on it and generally complaining that CoH sucks. This really annoyed me and I felt like I had to respond to him. How can anyone look at the ten thousands of story arcs published via Mission Architect and say "Nope, no new content here!" It seemed unbelievable to me. Someone else did say that some people would complain even if they came up with a cure for cancer. Sadly, this is too true.

I switched to Schadenfreude (41 AR/pain corr) and joined a 3 player Liberty Force team running through the Scourge of the Phalanx: Iron Forged arc, a vanity story written by an SG-mate that is centered around some of our villain alts. I felt the enemies in this arc had some issues; we fought a lot of elec blast robots that drained END dry, and we fought two ninjitsu AVs who repeatedly 1-shotted (well, 2-shotted) our brute, and a willpower AV that took us half an hour to whittle down to 0 health. Our brute was the mission author and definitely agreed he needed to tone those enemies down. I did feel pleased that the NPC analog of my villain alt, a thug mastermind, seemed to be the most helpful of all the NPC allies, being both aggressive and dangerous to enemies; whereas a brute NPC ally seemed unclear on the concept of how to attack stuff.

Finished the night doing some tweaking of my Celebrity Kidnapping story arc. Based on feedback I had gotten, I revised Paris's background story to explain why she had super powers, and made the instructions for mission 1 more clearly state that you need to go through the sewer grate to get to the interior areas of the Breakout map. I was testing my changes by soloing Millie Volt (28 elec/inv brute) through the story arc when a random 27 robot mastermind asked if he could join me. I was really just testing, so was inclined to say no, but then thought, what the heck, I can drag him through testing my story arc just as well as solo it! I restarted Celebrity Kidnapping and invited the mastermind; in a duo, the spawns were definitely larger than when I was solo. I was on Ruthless difficulty, also, which made the spawns bigger and higher level. We even suffered a wipeout against the Paragon Police in the Breakout mission, as their glue arrow made us stick around while the other random patrols pathed into us, resulting in a big furball. I got my teammate killed again during the last mission when a pair of Family consiglieres along with their 2 attendant Singularities seemed to perma-hold the mastermind to death. We did mange to clear the mission and successfully complete the story arc, before calling it a night. I was worried my teammate might've gotten a negative impression due to his deaths, but he said he had fun!

On Tuesday night, I played Strong Woman (10 inv/SS tanker) through a couple lowbie story arcs. Started with The Other Heroes, where the contact tries to get the Freedom Phalanx or the Vindicators or someone to try and stop an Arachnos incursion in Atlas Park, but they're all busy, so she ends up asking you to do it. The plot and the dialog were pretty interesting and I love who they used as the big bad guy of this arc (a very underused Arachnos mad scientist), but found the final mission a little anticlimactic. I gave this arc 4 stars.

From there, I went into the Bricked Electronics story arc, where the premise is that a mutant contact with the ability to sense impressions from electronics devices sends you off to investigate the origin of a cell phone he found that has some kind of bad vibes emanating from it. So far it's kinda cool, but it was a Very Long arc and I only got about halfway through before I needed to call it a night.

Thanks for this detailed review!

[ QUOTE ]
Celebrity Kidnapping review
....
Briefing: Okay, I love Willy Wheeler as the contact, but was Willy ever this confident before? From what I remember, he's a stool pigeon and a wimp, not someone who easily bosses supervillains around.


[/ QUOTE ]

The impression I always got from Willy Wheeler is that he talks big and tries to impress you as being a well-connected fixer, but then he wusses out when things go sour. I'll review his earlier briefings and see if I can inject more weaselly-ness into them, though.

[ QUOTE ]
One thing took me by surprise, though: Paris has powers. This should have been mentioned in the briefing, as it would clear up why Paris is in the Zig, of all places.

[/ QUOTE ]

This does seem to be something people keep commenting on. I'll add a line to the first mission briefing mentioning that Paris has some low grade powers.

[ QUOTE ]
The mission popup at the beginning should maybe be a bit more descriptive. As it stands, yes, you know there's a riot going on. Perhaps a bit of color would work, though; something like: "Sirens wail and shotguns boom; you see prisoners and guards duking it out in the courtyard. You just walked into a full-blown prison riot!"

[/ QUOTE ]

I like this and will directly steal it.

[ QUOTE ]
Briefing: See previous comments about Willy's cojones. Also, why does the Family have Paris now? They weren't even mentioned in the first mission brief; maybe that should be brought up a bit sooner.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, the first briefing does have Willy saying that he's dealing in some Family goons who provoked the prison riot as a distraction, and you should be able to see some Family guys in the first mission fighting Prisoners..err, Convicts...by the jail cells. It's possible the Convicts might have wiped out the Family before you saw them, though, since as custom characters, even with the weakest powers I could give them they're probably stronger than the original Prisoners (who I really hope they bring back).

[ QUOTE ]
I wonder why the boss is named Terry Wheeler, though; is he supposed to be related to Willy, or was this just a bad naming coincidence?

[/ QUOTE ]

Another reviewer suggested I add a hobo boss here, and I came up with the idea of making the hobo lord Willy's washed up brother, as an instructional lesson in what happens to people who listen to Willy Wheeler. Terry has some extra background in his "info" box, but probably it isn't reasonable to expect every person to read that. I considered adding a clue for when you kill Terry, that would reveal some of his background story; but he's really a very peripheral character to the plot, so this might just clutter the clue journal needlessly. I'm currently leaning towards renaming him "Hobo" or "Bum" or something generic to make his name less distracting, but then if anyone actually DOES check his info, they get the life story of Terry Wheeler as a minor easter egg.

[ QUOTE ]
On the more technical side, I ran into one Unemployed Worker in the place - he was on the Scrapyarders team, everyone else was on Vagrants. Shouldn't he be a Vagrant too?

[/ QUOTE ]

Does seem odd. Most of the Vagrants are repurposed Scrapyarders and Warriors with a few custom guys mixed in; I'll check to see whether I directly used a Scrapyarder boss for Unemployed Worker or used a version from the Vagrants faction.


[ QUOTE ]
Just one question: why are the Photographers and Cameramen so butch?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure what you are asking here? Do you mean you think I should lower their "physique" slider?

[ QUOTE ]
I also couldn't help but notice you stuck yourself in there. Nice touch.

[/ QUOTE ]

Like many mission authors, I can't resist occasional author insertion. I like to think I try to limit it to only situations where it makes sense; for example, in this mission, there's a massive PPD presence in the third mission, so Police Woman is mixed in with all the other cops that show up to arrest the protagonist. I've had people say they thought Police Woman was just a custom PPD mob I added to this mission, so I think this has worked.

[ QUOTE ]
Overall, the story makes a lot of sense, the writing is well thought out, and the mission design is excellent. I ended up giving the arc 5 stars. Well done! Tomorrow night, I try to join the Teen Phalanx!

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks much, I appreciate the feedback and will look into making some changes based on your suggestions!

The Other Heroes review

@Scuzzbopper PM'd me suggesting I try out this newer arc of his, instead of the one he originally submitted.

Stated level range is 1-14 blue side, so I played a level 10 inv/SS tanker.

Mission 1:

Briefing: I like Susan Davies as a contact, been awhile since I've seen her! The central idea seems to be that Arachnos is attacking Atlas Park and Susan checked with 3 A-list heroes who were all busy or uninterested in helping, so she's now asking me. This is a little demeaning, but hey, I'm level 10. A level 50 hero exemping down to 14, though, probably would have a problem with Susan saying "I know you're new to the game" though.

I really like the stray Longbow, police and Hellions you've distributed around the map, in addition to the Arachnos spawns; they give the city more of a feeling of life. The hellion complaining about losing his purse snatching victim was pretty funny.

The guards on the transmitters and the control unit have nice emotes and dialog, but I'm still rather in the dark as to why I'm destroying them (though I guess anything Arachnos sets up in Atlas Park can't be good). I was quite puzzled until the Attack Leader gave up his clue, which was well placed (I was just thinking "I think this mission should give me some sort of clue as to what is happening"). Having Dr Geist be the evil mastermind is an inspired choice! I like that this ties the story closer to the CoH canon, and Geist is really underused and about the right level for this.

Debrief: The mission popup says you wonder if Susan will know who Geist is, but Susan's debrief doesn't mention Geist at all; seems like you would've mentioned the name to her. Continuity issue.

Mission 2

Briefing: OK, Susan starts talking about Geist here. But I think it would be more logical for her to have mentioned him in mission 1's debrief, either instead or additionally. Nice briefing though.

When you accept the mission, the mission title instantly changes to "Stop the Prison Break", which is kind of a spoiler for what happens in the mission. It's minor, but consider changing the mission title to "Interrogate Arachnos Prisoner", but keep the subgoal "Stop the Escaped Arachnos Prisoner". Then you won't know it's a jailbreak until you enter the zone, which I think would be a little more dramatic.

The Damned boss's dialog was pretty funny. His fire damage was quite nasty to me as an invuln (only 5% fire resist so far) but I was able to beat him.

I think there should be some actual police officers in this police station; right now it's all Arachnos and that one Hellion that I assume was to lower the level range. Maybe have a few PPD as hostages or allies that the hero needs to save?

Decently written clue from beating up the escapeee.

Debriefing is a little thin, but functional. Maybe add some text to it.

Mission 3

I notice this mission is 1-54 while the others are 1-14; not sure if this was intentional.

Pretty good briefing with lots of detail. Though with all sorts of things crawling up out of the sewers, I almost wonder if the player should be helping with that? Maybe have Susan explain that stopping Geist is more important or more time critical.

Second part of briefing implies that Geist actually was behind the prison break at the jail; but this isn't evident from the clues from the second mission. Maybe make that clearer, perhaps the escaped prisoner could mention that some of the Arachnos there were from Geist and not also escapees.

Watching the hydra mauling the Arachnos troops is actually quite funny! I like the panicky dialog from the Wolf Spiders also.

Although the transmitter in this mission is described as "like the ones in Atlas Park", this transmitter is a glowy that is clicky, but I think the ones in Atlas Park were all destructible objects that had to be bashed. Continuity error; they should be the same if they are described as being the same.

I like Geist's dialog also. However, shouldn't his ULTIMATE SECRET WEAPON have the initials USW, not USM?

Mission 4

Briefing: Really needs to be longer and have more explanation. If you're not the leader of the team running this, you wouldn't have seen the debriefing from mission 3 so you don't know that Geist's device is down in the sewers driving everyone out; so I think it would be a good idea if you re-iterate that here.

Possible logic problem with this mission: up to this point, all the transmitters have been described as *attracting* monsters to attack the area the transmitter is in. This mission seems to be to destroy a transmitter that is *repelling* monsters and pushing them out of the sewers. You may want to either fix this inconsistency or make some attempt at explaining it.

Second part of briefing: Wow, Susan is really unenthused about sending me, it seems! I guess that fits with the general attitude so far, though. I would've thought I'd get some points for arresting Geist, though.

I knocked out the transmitter and the mission ended; this made logical sense based on the plot so far, but was a little anticlimactic (I was able to simply fly/run past all the hydra to the final room, then bash the transmitter without having to fight anyone else). Having already beat up the big bad guy in mission 3, this mission didn't feel like it had much left for the player to do; it didn't help that the hydra, of course, can't have much dialog (which was a strength of previous missions). I did see a hellion and a Vahzilok that had a little dialog, though.

Overall:
I liked the plot and especially liked the in-mission dialog. Some of Susan's text is great and some could maybe use some fleshing out. I thought the last mission was rather anticlimactic as all you're doing is destroying one object. I think you could make your story stronger by adding more stuff to the last mission, editing the last mission out, or perhaps better, swapping the order of missions 3 and 4 so you clear the device(s) in the sewers first (and I think I'd put at least 2 and describe them as devices that drive hydra OUT of the sewers, differing from the transmitters that are luring them to certain places), then after that's taken care of, you go after Geist in his warehouse before he escapes.

Anyway, I did enjoy this story but thought it had a few problems that could use improvement. I rated it 4 stars.


---------------------

I owe a review to:

GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@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

in queue:

WynterPhrost
Baron_Rufus
Leaf Cutter Ant - Yellow Submarine 92780

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)

See what people are saying about Teen Phalanx Forever!:

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[Tell] 2009-04-20 03: 36:37 Message From @stellar : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: No statesboy - next issue? good arc


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[Tell] 2009-04-20 11: 40:12 Message From @Midnight Miss : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Liked the idea of the Teen Supers, it was fun picking up the crew as I went along....there was a minor sound glitch near the sewer falls at beginning and the tank seemed a little weak in comparison to the rest of the team


[/ QUOTE ][ QUOTE ]

[Tell] 2009-04-20 12: 45:52 Message From @MYCROFTXXX : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Yeah, that was fun! VERY cool concept! Ramping levels was very cool, also.


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[Tell] 2009-04-20 13: 49:33 Message From @Delphi : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Enjoyed it a lot!


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[Tell] 2009-04-20 13: 56:44 Message From @O.o Snap : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Really enjoyed this arc. It was very well written. You have a great imagination!
[Tell] @O.o Snap: I'm very critical when it comes to storyline... how everything meshes from storyline, to characters, and transition... I trie dto find fault and found nothing... I'm hoping it hits hall of fame or dev's choice... u hit it outta the ballpark lol...


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[Tell] 2009-04-20 21: 00:35 Message From @Industrial Strength : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Very clever use of the mission objectives system.


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[Tell] @Sakura-Kishi: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: would love to see a sequal


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[Tell] @Reika Winde: Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Love this arc! Keep up the good work...


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[Tell] 2009-04-21 02: 01:22 Message From @l0st : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Good writing and characters, but the allies make things a little too easy. maybe bump them down to LTs? 4 stars


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[Tell] 2009-04-21 02: 18:37 Message From @Tempest Master : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Cool arc


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[Tell] 2009-04-21 02: 20:15 Message From @Buxley : Feedback on Architect Mission Teen Phalanx Forever!: Very well written story arc, I enjoyed playing it. Thanks!


[/ QUOTE ]

In response to specific concerns:

* Statesboy never does appear in this arc; one of the ideas is that before you joined, Statesboy quit the team over some unspecified problem, and the Teen Phalanx has recruited you (and your team members) to bolster their ranks. Naturally, this is one of the reasons that Cora hates your guts (well, in addition to just plain being contrary).

* I'm afraid I can't do anything about sound issues from the mission editor.

* The melee allies are definitely weaker than the ranged ones; but I feel this is largely due to the mob AI. I think BABy in particular may seem weaker because he is SS/invuln and invuln secondary is not too hot at the low levels of this arc. I'm hesitant to change their powersets, though, as they are meant to match up with their canonical mentor heroes.

* I'm noting another data point of someone saying "Too easy". But I've also had one person who said "Too hard", so I'm reluctant to make it harder unless I get a lot of "Too easy" feedbacks. I would rather have some people think "That was fun but a little too easy", than have some people unable to finish the arc and think "That sucked because it was too hard" and quit the story arc.

Thanks much for the feedback!!

Poaching the Lion review

Missions were 1-54, 1-54, 25-34 and 1-54, heroic. Played on a 50 AR/dev blaster.

Mission 1
Briefing: "Codename Lions" I think should be "Codename Lion" based on your arc description.
Second part of briefing: put a comma after "Thanks to clues from undercover agents". "Paragon" should be "Paragon City".

Mission title: "Collect Drugs (for Government)" does not sound like a very heroic mission, but maybe you intend it to sound ironic. Consider changing mission title to "Bust Drug Dealers" if you want it to sound more heroic.

Assassin Trainee's description: "Assasin" should be "Assassin". Wow, his faction really IS "Codename Lions", but his description says "Lion organization" and the story arc description says "Codename Lion" -- pick which one you want (Lion or Lions) and use it consistently throughout your story arc.

Assassin's description: "Assassins" should be "Assassins". "Tacker Mask" maybe should be "Tracker Mask"? Not sure what you meant to say. "he alone is a formidable force" should probably be "he is a formidable force even when alone".

Scientist description: "They all have electrons in their suits that generate small bursts of electricity" -- "electrons" should be "electronics"

Lookout description: "serving as basic posts and lookouts". I don't think "posts" makes sense in this context. Maybe you mean "guards".

Tech Enforcer description: "Almost every part of his body replaced with machine" .. should maybe be "Almost every part of his body has been replaced with machines".

I was able to complete the first mission by clicking the 2 glowies and not fighting anything; not sure whether this was your intention. I think a more typical "drug bust" should involve arresting the ringleaders of the gang; so you might consider adding a named boss and requiring defeating the boss to complete the mission.

Mission 2:
Briefing is really pretty thin (2 lines?), I suggest you put more detail here. Maybe something about where this hideout is and what the player is supposed to do, maybe some info on the names and jobs of the "senior members" that the player is going in to bust, some flavor type details like that. Also "buisness" should be "business".

Second part of briefing: "especially the seniors" maybe should be "especially the senior members". The way it is phrased now, it sounds like I'll be busting septagenarians.

Mission objectives: Needs more detail, the way it is shown now I thought I had to arrest Special Agent Trosal as being one of the senior Lion agents, but when I found him, turned out he was a hostage. Mission briefing does not mention him at all, either, so not sure why I am rescuing him. Meanwhile, Adam Fong has his objective in exactly the same format but is someone I'm supposed to fight. I suggest you change your objectives to "Rescue Special Agent Trosal" and "Defeat Adam Fong", or maybe "2 undercover agents to rescue, Arrest Lion leadership".

Entry popup: You hear screams? Who is supposed to be screaming here?

Found Special Agent Trosal. "Assasin" should be "Assassin" in his description. If he's an undercover Assassin Trainee, why isn't he dressed as one? Also, his faction is "Scientist" which doesn't make sense for a spy, and his background says the Lions are determined to kill him, but the Lions near him are just holding him prisoner while he looks at his watch, which seems at odds with that.

After rescuing him, Trosal is helping me with psy powers and crossbow, but his only dialog is "Thanks" and there's not any explanation of who he is, how he got captured, what he found out while undercover, or anything like that. You may want to give a clue about the Lions organization as a result of rescuing him.

Adam Fong's description has "He runs most of the intelligence branch of the Lions, along with dealing." Dealing what? Think you need to add a word there. "It would be a great strike to the Lions to lose him", probably you want to say "It would be a terrible blow to the Lions to lose him."

Scientist guarding Rogers: "You aren'tcoming out of here alive, Police Woman." Should add a space after aren't. Also, a more natural expression would be "You aren't getting out of here alive, Police Woman!" The guard also says "You think you would get away with sending e-mails? They search all of them, in and out!" which is a little awkward sounding, maybe should be reworded to "You thought you could get away with sending intel via e-mail? All e-mails are monitored, in and out!"

I'm afraid this mission did not seem very involving to me; I'm rescuing 2 allies and defeated 1 boss, but didn't seem to learn much from doing so. I did get a clue from Fong (in which "buisness" should be "business") but it does not have much detail on what's going on. As a result the Lions organization has still not made much of an impression on me; I get that it's some kind of criminal organization but we just aren't told enough about them or what they're doing for it to feel important to stop them.

Debriefing: The contact tells me that I failed because Fong escaped and both his agents were discovered. But I clearly have in my scrollback "You have defeated Adam Fong" and both undercover agents had already been discovered before I even got to them, so I thought getting chewed out by the contact was extremely unwarranted. The sarcasm and rudeness in his debriefing made me want to quit the story arc, and I wouldn't be surprised if other players actually did quit it here.

Mission 3:
Briefing: "buisness" should be "business". Now the contact wants to send me to arrest some random Lions and Freakshow.

The mission title is "Defeat Codename Lions and Freakshow" but there are no Lions here. Also I imagine you won't defeat all of Codename Lions here, so you may want to have this as "Defeat Lions Agents and Freakshow". The only objective seems to be to defeat PwNz0r, though.

PwNz0r's dialog: "Maybe Fong already got taken care of by this thing." Should probably be "Maybe $heshe is why Fong never made it!"
"rAt least the Lions can't reach me in prison" .. "rAt" should be "At"

I was able to complete this mission by only defeating PwNz0r and his group, and never saw any Lions in the mission at all. So the briefing is actually incorrect, and the mission title probably shouldn't mention Lions at all. This mission probably needs more to do in it; simply killing one boss doesn't seem exciting enough to devote a whole mission to.

"Fong's Possible Locations" clue, "remeber" should be "remember". Also, if PwNz0r knows where Fong is, why is his dialog written as if he doesn't have any idea where Fong is? Continuity error. You also have a "Fong's Location" clue that I got at the same time, which seems redundant with the first clue.

Debriefing: "The Lions didn't show? Well, I kind of expected that, they aren't stupid." If he expected that, why did he send me on this mission? Doesn't make much sense.

Mission 4:
Briefing: This mission briefing (about 1.25 lines) is way too short and gives basically no info. I think you need to write more here. Something about the location, what Fong's up to, details about the mission.

This mission, "Defeat Adam Fong", feels rather redundant as I already defeated him in mission 2. I think I would've preferred the story arc treating Adam Fong as having really been defeated, but maybe interrogation led to a bigger boss higher up in the Codename Lions food chain, who you defeat here. The way it is now, the plot is kind of railroading the player into appearing incompetent for letting Adam Fong "escape" despite having beat him in the earlier mission; I don't think this is how you want to make your player feel, however.

I was able to finish this mission by just killing Adam Fong and nothing else. This mission probably needs more to do in it; simply killing one boss doesn't seem exciting enough to devote a whole mission to.

Fong mentions "The Mane" as someone he has to warn, but the arc ends right after that mission; perhaps this is a reference to a future sequel, though.

Debriefing: The contact seems very excited about my having defeated Fong and expositions about what a highly feared member of the Lion organization he is, but I never quite got that impression from the writing.

I think you maybe need to spend more time building up Fong as a villain rather than just have the contact *say* he is highly feared; perhaps sprinkle some clues in earlier missions about what Fong has been up to. Fong's description just says he does intelligence and dealing, which does not sound all that criminal and evil. Maybe introduce some horribly evil plot that Fong has been working on that endangers a lot of people, that the player has to foil, before finally leading up to arresting Fong? That would help define Fong as being more villainous.

Also in the debrief, "tranquelized" should be "tranquilized" and "reccomend" should be "recommend".


Overall:
I'm afraid this story never really gave me a feel for who "Codename Lions" really were; they were somewhat generic as villains go, and it felt to me like you could directly substitute the Sky Raiders or Family for the Lions and you wouldn't really notice. I think you need to think about what makes Codename Lions special and different from the other villain groups, and highlight that in your story.

I also felt that Adam Fong was not sufficiently built up as a Big Bad Guy, and I think I'd actually prefer you add a different Big Bad Guy who Adam tells you about, rather than have Adam Fong reappear in two different missions, having "gotten away" from the player. I also felt the contact yelling at the player for something the player had nothing to do with was uncalled for, and will make people playing through your story unhappy.

The mission gameplay seemed too straightforward also; the last two missions required only killing one boss in each, which felt too simple. I think you need to add some more stuff to do in each of your missions.

With all this I didn't feel I could rate this arc higher than 2 stars. Sorry about that! Hope some of these suggestions help you out though.



---------------------

I owe a review to:

@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@Sakura-kishi - The Prisoners from the Land of OZ 49326
@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420
@Mr Beatdown - The Oblivion Lens 91897

in queue:

WynterPhrost
Baron_Rufus

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)

Over the weekend I added a couple more pop culture lines just for fun:

* Mission 3, first wave of Freaks invading the SG base now should say "All your base are belong to us!"

* Mission 4, when you rescue Back Alley Boy, he should now say "Nobody puts BABy in the corner!"

I've gotten a lot of nice feedback on the story arc so far and I greatly appreciate it.

On feedback requesting changes:

I had one person say it was too easy because the NPCs beat things up, and another person say it was too hard (and presumably rage-quit ) because Clamor isn't soloable. With some people saying too easy and some people saying too hard, I feel like I better just leave the difficulty the way it is.

I also had two people say they weren't getting enough exp from this story arc because the NPCs were taking exp due to helping out. I really need to have the NPC allies present in order to support the story concept, though, so I can't think of anything I can do about this problem. Sorry!

Anyway, as of Sunday night, Teen Phalanx Forever! has had more players play through it than either of my other story arcs, which have been published for a week longer, and has been teetering on the edge of 4.5 stars. I kept watching my average rating flickering between 5 stars and 4 stars all weekend with much anxiety... what do you mean, get a life? Hmmmph!

Thanks much to everyone who has played through it!

4/20/2009

I spent most of Thursday night editing, testing and fine-tuning my "Axis and Allies" villainous story (arc #1379). I had gotten a complaint that most of my custom factions had no lieutenants, making most of the spawns nothing but minions. Originally on test server, I had had a custom minion, lieutenant and boss for each of the French, British, Soviet and US armies, but I found this took up WAY too much story arc space, since custom characters are the biggest resource hogs in mission architect. As a result I had deleted all the lieutenants except the US one, who I thought looked more cool than the others.

I tried to address this complaint by demoting the French boss to be a lieutenant, while keeping the British boss a boss; since the British and French armies are all mixed together in an "Allies" faction on the Dunkirk map, this gave the Allies a mix of minions, lieutenants and bosses. Someone else had told me the story of the Russian political officers who would shoot their men if they tried to run away, so I determined that one of these guys needed to be my Soviet lieutenant; I ended up naming him "Soviet Commissar" and giving him the thugs/sonic powersets, so that he could fire dual pistols and yell at you and yell at his men. (There was no obvious way to make him kill his own guys for cowardice, though, heheh.) I decided to pretend the thug minions were partisans throwing molotovs and stuff; admittedly a rationalization, and mercs maybe would've made more sense, but I have a lot of merc MMs on this arc already and the political officer just looks more right with dual revolvers than a submachinegun.

To squeeze the Soviet lieutenant into my story I had to delete another custom character, and I ended up deleting the custom "Bodyguard" minion from my "Secret Service" faction that guards the President in the final mission. I was able to repurpose some of the Crey agents to act like bodyguards, though, by adding them from the Crey standard faction into my "Secret Service" custom faction. This makes it still look like President Truman is being guarded by Secret Service agents in black suits, and gave me enough room to squeeze in that Soviet custom character! A couple drawbacks of this workaround, though: the Crey Agents still have Crey bio stories if you pull up their info, and also the only level 50 Crey agents are those snipers that hang out in Peregrine Island. The snipers kinda work for guarding President Truman, but I had to delete the Secret Service ambush from the mission, because an ambush of nothing but snipers is The Suck.

I also rewrote the souvenir for the mission to be a lot more like a standard CoH souvenir, with the story arc name and a plot synopsis; and with some trepidation, I renamed the boss in the first mission from "The Furor" to "Der Führer". I had originally named him "Furor" because I figured all Nazi terminology would be banned for inappropriate content, but I must've had a dozen people tell me that I had spelled it wrong, so I eventually decided that people care more about correct spelling than they do about Nazi terminology. I did get one person who said he was Jewish and felt squicky about the NPCs Heiling him as the Führer, which made me feel very guilty. The best I could say to this was, hey, at least you get to kill Hitler in the very first mission! I know that may sound rather thin, though, if you are sensitive to this sort of material.

While editing at the Rikti War Zone Architect Entertainment office, I noticed a RWZ mother ship raid was forming. I still need the bomb badge for that so I hopped over there and tried to join in. The one team that had room for another person had already gotten a bomb, so I decided to try soloing (eventually picked up a fortunata though) in hopes that I could snag a bomb at some point. I mostly did OK soloing, but a number of players were purposely trying to grief the raid by herding excess Rikti onto the raid, which caused many deaths and at least one raid wipe. I know some people feel like it's their sacred right to inflict suffering on other players (even I do this sometimes; after all, I *do* have a character named Schadenfreude), but this seemed quite rude. Griefers love when people get upset at them, though, so I said only "Thanks for helping pull for us!" Never did get a bomb credit, but I did pick up a bunch of Vanguard merits.

After the raid I spent some time trying to test my Axis and Allies arc changes, and I finally came to the conclusion that having to fight Statesman in the final mission is just too much for a soloer to handle, even if he's set to the weak "Signature Pet" version. I kited Statesman around for half an hour trying to kill him, but he would just go Unstoppable any time I got him low on life, and in Unstoppable the damage I could get through to him wasn't enough to counter his natural regen. I eventually DID kill him, but only because I got fed up with fighting him and dropped a Vanguard Heavy (figuring I had earned more than 250 Vanguard merits during the raid, so why not). This is more effort than I expect from a typical soloer, though, so I decided I had to cut Statesman from the mission, leaving only Maiden Justice (aka Ms Liberty of WW2) as hero in the "Invade America" scenario. I hated to do that because defeating Statesman while conquering the world seems such a perfect finish to the arc, but he was just too darn hard to kill for a soloer.

Also on Thursday, I ran through the "End the Deadstorm" story arc. The plot of this story was to stop a cosmic horror known as the "Deadstorm", a mysterious entity that basically was threatening to cause a zombie apocalypse. I fought lots of zombies, an evil priest, a nasty werewolf and ultimately an evil high priestess or avatar of this entity, and along the way I rescued a psychic ninja zombie mime (I think?) that was fighting for the good guys. The story was okay, but not terribly coherent either, and I was puzzled why the Deadstorm minions didn't seem to include any actual stormies. Gave this arc 3 stars.

On Friday we got a patch that deleted Prisoners as a usable faction from Mission Architect. Sadly, this wrecks the first mission of my "Celebrity Kidnapping" villain story (arc #1388), which starts with a jailbreak during a prison riot. Fortunately I had only used like 55% of my story space in this story arc (although a lot happens in this story, I originally used very few custom models so had tons of space to spare), so I was able to correct this by creating my own "Convicts" faction, with two orange-jumpsuited Convict minions in it. I made one a mace/regen swinging a wrench, and the other one a dual blades/regen with two daggers. This seemed to work as a substitute for the Prisoners, though I miss the cool randomly generated names the Prisoners had.

I also decided to revamp the second mission of Celebrity Kidnapping, which had a bunch of Tsoo hanging around in the office where you pick up the ransom, with no really good reason for having Tsoo except that they're about the right level for the story arc. Another player had suggested I should make this mission more interesting by having a bunch of hobos in here, with a crazed hobo lord; and I liked this idea enough that I made a custom "Vagrants" faction. I put a custom minion and custom boss into this faction, and padded the faction with some of the standard mobs that look like vagrants (mostly Scrapyarders, but a few Warriors and Lost). For the hobo lord, I was just itching to use Marlon Brando's line from On the Waterfront, "I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am." The plot of On the Waterfront inspired me to make the hobo lord the washed up brother of Willy Wheeler who was a promising boxer once, but Willy made him to take a fall in order to make money betting on the other guy. This let me turn the (formerly unrelated to the plot) hobo into foreshadowing that Willy can't be trusted, which I thought fit nicely. I also heavily rewrote the souvenir, then republished.

Friday night I played Tehuantl (11 blood widow) with an 8-player all VEAT team of Demolition Girls SG. We smashed our way through a King's Row mayhem, a Skyway mayhem, some VEAT story missions and some paper missions, ultimately getting Tehuantl to level 16. I took Spin, Super Jump and Hurdle as power picks.

After that team broke up, I solo'd Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster) through the "Empire - One Alliance" story arc (except the last mission, where a brute friend joined up). This was a conspiracy plot involving the Malta, Knives of Artemis and Council all fracturing into sub-factions who wanted to work with the (alternate dimension) Council Empire, and others who wanted to oppose them. This was a neat idea but somewhat confusing; I felt like I needed a scorecard to know who was on which side at any given time, and one mission actually had me facing Knives of Artemis in Oranbega (something I had always joked I'd make in order to torture players to the max). But the story and writing were pretty good so I gave it 4 stars. Police Woman got the Resolute badge (25 heroic arcs completed) for finishing this arc.

Checking Wentworth's I found salvage prices are all over the place. I'm mostly profiting, making good money flipping the mid-level rare salvage items, but I also ended up with a huge pile of 40 Deific Weapons that I had snagged for 2M-3M apiece (back when the high sale price was 4M each), but now I feel like I can't sell them because the price has dropped to 1M each, probably due to ticket purchases of rare salvage. Overall I'm making money though, up to about 330M infl in cash; some of this income is from killing stuff in MA missions, too, though.

On Saturday I played Police Woman, joining a 5-player LEGION team on another run through the "Brainssss" zombie horror mission. I joked that horror movie logic dictated that I was toast, being a female toon running in high heels. But actually I was ready for the insane zombie rush at the end, kicking off Vengeance when our first squishy teammate died, which gave us enough defense to survive the fast zombies.

We then did a story arc called "City of Heroes, Too" which had the premise that Northport, a city very similar to Paragon City, has its own set of heroes that the team (presumably villains) need to beat up. This played mostly like a mayhem and simply involved beating up a large number of Northport police and around a dozen costumed heroes (custom bosses). This was cute but there wasn't a lot of story to it, other than one day you decided to come here and smash things up; I rated it 3 stars.

After that we did a story called "Super Roman Infestation" which was a Defeat All on an outdoor map with nothing but bosses on it, each of which was dressed like a Cimeroran with a pumpkin head. This was pretty obviously a farm, so after fighting 2 spawns we decided to bail on that arc. There was no story at all and the mobs were pretty dippy, so I rated it 1 star.

We then tried "Cybernetically Challenged" which started off looking like it might have some story, but the first mission completed as soon as we entered (with a hostage seen leaving), and the second mission completed even before I could enter (I guess when the first person zoned all the way in). We thought this might be someone trying to farm mission completions somehow, so also bailed on this arc. It did not seem quite as lame as the previous arc, but still no great prize, so I gave this one 2 stars.

From there we went to the "Rinsanity" story arc, which looked like a vanity arc involving SGmates of the author getting kidnapped by Carnies and needing rescue, but it was actually pretty well done, and I gave it 4 stars.

After that team broke up, I solo'd through "Nuclear in 90 - The Fusionette Task Force"; this was a level 1-14 arc, so I played Strong Woman (a 10 inv/SS tanker that doesn't get out much). This story involved finding out why other members of the Nuclear 90 were helping out the Hellions and trying to rescue them. Shockingly, Fusionette does not screw up and get captured in this arc. There was a lot of good dialog and excellent characterization in this story arc, and I rated it 5 stars.

After that I joined a Sharkhead SF, playing Millie Volt (27 elec/inv brute). We had a team of:

4 brutes
1 kin corr
1 dominator

We really had no problems, except that during the Defeat Shockstorm mission, storms in my local area knocked out cable and consequently my internet connection dropped and was down for hours. By the time I got back, the SF was long over.

But upon returning, I did notice that my heroic arc, "Teen Phalanx Forever!" (arc #67335) had gotten a lot of good ratings and found its way onto the front page of the mission search tool, at least for the moment! Being near the front of the default search gave my arc massive exposure and it felt like my story had "gone viral", as a lot of total strangers were trying my story arc as a result, which was awesome. Most people seemed to like it, but occasional low ratings would periodically drop my arc's average rating from 5 stars to 4 stars, which would push my arc from page 1 to page 200 or so; my rating must've been very close to 4.5 as it kept fluctuating between 5 stars and 4 stars, which was actually quite nervewracking. People on the "MA Arc Finder" channel kept hinting darkly that there are "grief voters" out there that like nothing better than to 1-star all the story arcs that have high ratings; I'm really not sure if people out there are doing that or not (I'm not sure how I'd even tell), but I guess it's possible. Nevertheless by the end of the weekend, "Teen Phalanx Forever!" had 95 plays (in 4 days since being published), which is more than either of my other story arcs had scored to date (in 11 days since being published), and even with that many plays through, was still maintaining a pretty good average rating. I was psyched!

Late Saturday night I played Schadenfreude (40 AR/pain corr) on a 4 player Liberty Force team. We started "Rikti Farm", which was, as advertised, a Rikti farm; we got bored of that quickly and quit to do the "Johnny Sonata" dev choice arc instead, a Blues Brothers-ish story where you help Johnny get his band together.

After that we tried the "Butterfly Effect" dev choice arc, where Dr Aeon sends you back in time to validate his theories about time travel and causation. Of course you totally screw up the time stream, with hilarious effects. I loved the custom models (especially the variant versions of the named characters) and the story line of this arc, as did my team. I rated this 5 stars and we promptly went into the sequel story arc, "Return of the Lizard People", which was also awesome and I gave that 5 stars as well. We started the next sequel story arc, but it was late and I needed to go to sleep before we could get through it all.

On Sunday, I solo'd my way through the 15-19 arc "Council's Good Graces" on Kashira (19 db/ninj stalker) and then its 20-35 sequel, "Council's Long Con" on Spy Girl (33 MA/ninj stalker). The first arc was a little bland and basically had me just doing whatever the contact said without much understanding of what was going on; theoretically I was doing this to ingratiate myself with the Council, but since the guy was sending me out to wipe out Council bases, I was very suspicious that he was actually a double agent for Longbow that was playing me for a chump. I ended up rating that one 3 stars. The second arc involved trying to recruit away a weapons scientist from the Sky Raiders, and doing a fair bit of ground work to set up the perfect circumstances to make that happen; this plot seemed a lot more involving and I gave it 4 stars.

I had made thousands of tickets up to this point but not really figured out what to spend them on (except for unlocking more mission architect content, which I've been happily doing). So at this point I made my first ticket purchase of a non-Architect item: Spy Girl spent 70 tickets on a Bronze 35-39 roll, getting a level 33 Red Fortune (DMG/END/RCHG) recipe. This was actually pretty good, being something I'm likely to use, and valued at the Black Market at around 500K (7.14K infl/ticket).

After that I solo'd Millie Volt (27 elec/inv brute) a little, clearing up a couple grey missions, completing her second costume mission (and setting up hotkeys to use the "lightning bolt" costume change), and then going through the "Amulet of J'gara" story arc. This was actually a heroic 25-33 story arc, but Millie was close to level so I played her anyway. The story started a little slow, investigating the disappearance of some Midnighters that were poking around in Croatoa; but had an excellent finish, with a very cool looking final mission, which caused me to give it 5 stars. Millie hit level 28 and picked up Invincibility.

A pickup team invited Millie to join them, and I figured, what the heck, I'll try. This was a 5-player team doing a story called "The Fight" which had no story, but was a defeat all with tons of custom dual blades wielding bosses. So, a fairly obvious farm. The team was all level 27-28 villains though, so seemed like a normal team; unfortunately as level 27-28s it did not seem like we could actually handle big spawns of custom bosses, so the whole team wiped except for me with my shiny new invincibility. The team seemed impressed with Millie's durability (though truth be told I was candy popping purples and greens to stay alive against these guys, even though they were all lethal) but the mission didn't look doable since no one else could survive against them, so we decided to bail from it. I gave it 1 star as it had no story to speak of. (I actually would be willing to give some stars to obvious farms, if there is an actual story; I gave a few stars to that mean-hearted farm mission where you are looking for the little girl's pet rabbit.) The team wanted to reform to try a different arc, but I didn't want to get sucked into another farm so I excused myself.

Switched over to Triumph server where I played Kid Valkyrie (50 bs/regen scrapper) on a 7 player team running a mission in test mode. Kid Valkyrie's been idle for a long time, but writing "Teen Phalanx Forever!" made me want to play her more. I tried offering critique to the mission author of the various problems I saw with her mission, whose premise was that we were heroes breaking a falsely accused hero out of prison (though for some reason the PPD had decided to incarcerate the hero NPC in a Longbow base). About halfway through, though, my Internet connection died again, so I called it a night.

Council's Good Graces arc

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I think you can maybe drop the "Defeat warehouse manager" text from the nav tool as that is implied by the "Wipe out everyone inside".

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You can't. If there's no text there, the nav bar will simply say "Warehouse manager".

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Try unchecking him as a required objective (making him non-required) and erasing his nav bar text. The player will still be forced to kill him as part of "Wipe out everyone inside" though.

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Briefing: "Colonel Brimley under the 5th Column" should be "Oberst Brimley under the 5th Column".

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No. He was a Colonel. The 5th Column used military ranks. Like Colonel Burkholder. And many of their named bosses. Pretty much all of their named bosses used military ranks, not simply "Oberst" or the like.

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Oops, I stand corrected; I was thinking of the generic "Oberst" bosses, but I'd forgotten about Colonel Burkholder, Lt. Ubelmann and those guys that use American sounding ranks.

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I was uneasy at how in-the-dark this story kept me for most of the arc. Maybe it makes sense for Galdi's motivations but it makes the player feel like a tool, which is a little less fun.

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Well, aside from the first mission, Galdi's as in the dark as you are. You are uncovering a conspiracy, after all.

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That's cool, but I think the clues maybe could've told you a little more info earlier on, to help reinforce the direction you're taking the story. For most of the arc, I was very paranoid that Galdi was actually going to turn out to be a double agent for Longbow who was sending me to take out legit Council bosses. .... I've been working for Willy Wheeler too long, I guess.




Amulet of J'gara arc

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"Hello $name, it's been awhile." Even if I were blue side, a 27 wouldn't have ever gotten to talk to Buck before since he's a 30+ contact.

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Oversight. Maybe I'll just replace him with Montague or something but my options were limited as there are only two Midnight members in Croatoa, which is were this was meant to be taking place.

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It actually makes sense to use Buck Salinger since this is set in Croatoa; but maybe change the dialog so Buck doesn't necessarily act like you've worked with him before.

Though I confess I initially wrote down "Hey, Buck was a contact before the Midnight Club even existed! He can't be a Midnighter!" until I looked up his actual back story on ParagonWiki, which shows he's been in the Midnight Club all along.

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He doesn't get a background as there is nothing special about him, we don't give backgrounds to every single named boss and ally after all.

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I personally think it adds a little to the immersion of the story to have a little description (even if brief) for each named character. It is admittedly gold-plating that isn't strictly necessary, though.

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"Find Jeremiah Jones" felt rather bait and switch to me; I searched the whole cave for him hoping not to have to clear all, but he was nowhere to be seen, and it turned out defeating the named boss, Sitrix, completed the "Find Jeremiah Jones" objective instead.

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I have a hard time "idiot-proofing" things. I figured it wouldn't take long for people to figure out "Hmm, the CoT were holding this one guy, the other is nowhere to be found and there is a CoT boss standing there." I suppose i can make it more obvious.

[/ QUOTE ]

I made this comment because most of the canon PvE game has trained the player to treat a "Find Jeremiah Jones" objective as meaning you need to physically find the hostage in this mission, or at least a body bag representing his dead body; this previous training would actually hamper the player from completing your mission as written. If you change the objective to "Find out the fate of the last Midnighter", I think this makes it much clearer that you don't necessarily find Jeremiah, you might just find out what happened to him. I know this may sound like a very nitpicky distinction and maybe 4 out of 5 players will figure it out exactly as written, but you don't want that fifth player who can't figure out what he's supposed to do to rage-quit your arc and give you a low rating.

So yeah, I think as a general philosophy making things as clear as possible ("idiot proofing" if you must think of it that way) is better for keeping players interested in happy.

[ QUOTE ]
Don't know what you saw because I went into MA and confirmed that Pain Elementals are in the Void Demons group.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm, when I ran through the mission I did see a Pain Elemental in the "Animus and Anima" group. You might check to make sure you set the faction right in the published mission itself, not in the "custom groups" interface? I've noticed that sometimes these differ. Otherwise it might be a bug, I've heard of problems with the enemy group of captives and captors getting mixed up.

[ QUOTE ]
The captors do talk, I don't know how you keep missing these dialogs to be honest.

[/ QUOTE ]

I thought I was watching for those but did not see them for some reason. The last two maps are in pretty cramped quarters, possibly they generated their initial dialog when I was close by but actually looking at a different spawn at the time.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Wow, Mindskewer in this mission seems to be a nearly completely different mob, even being one rank higher (spawned as EB for me). I nearly got fried by her alpha strike but some quick inspiration popping kept me in the game until my 3 allies started helping, letting me beat her.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well the impression should be that she was feeding off of you and the captured Avatars represent that. May also mean that the previous fight only seemed to be so easy because you didn't finish it on the physical plane. You also noticed that her appearance completely changes in this mission? Did you get a chance to read her description as well?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, I didn't mean for my comment to sound negative - it's actually cool and makes sense that Mindskewer looks different and is more powerful "on the psychic plane" or wherever this final fight is occurring. I do think her description makes it clear what is happening; it seems my comment was unclear on whether it was a good or a bad thing.

[ QUOTE ]
This arc was designed backwards. I took that map in the last mission, designed the Void Demons specifically for it, put Mindskewer in there, then had to come up with a reason for the player to be there and worked backwards to the beginning.

[/ QUOTE ]

This makes sense for what I saw. I felt that the last mission was definitely the most cool mission of the arc; the first couple missions maybe could use some refinement to keep the overall quality up. But if you have to have an awesome mission and several more vanilla ones, having the awesome mission be the finale is definitely the best for dramatic value.

Heya, in case you don't check the other thread as often, I put up a review of "The Amulet of J'gara" in this thread. I really liked the finale mission in particular. Have fun!

I had a choice of 3 possible from @Lazarus; I picked the one with the least plays, which was

Amulet of J'gara

Stated level is 25-33 blue side. Played on a 27 elec/inv brute (yeah, villainous, but wanted exp for her; hit level 28 during mission 2), on Ruthless (level 4) difficulty.

Mission 1.

"Hello $name, it's been awhile." Even if I were blue side, a 27 wouldn't have ever gotten to talk to Buck before since he's a 30+ contact.

Bare minimum of info in the briefing; it's OK, but maybe could be better. Perhaps mention the names of the missing people and the nature of this magical item they were looking for? Why they thought this cave had it? Not strictly necessary, but would be nice to be filled in.

Mix of Tuatha and CoT? Wonder what's going on in here.

Found Luis D'Artier. The ghost guarding him says "We've been found!" while Luis simultaneously says "Someone found me!" - this is a little repetitive, maybe change one of these lines. Luis is acting like an ally; he can use some background info beyond the default Midnight Squad boilerplate. He spawned as a minion for me, which made him incredibly fragile (he got KO'd by a Tuatha's thrown branch before long); that's fine if it was intentional, but I'm not sure if it was.

"Find Jeremiah Jones" felt rather bait and switch to me; I searched the whole cave for him hoping not to have to clear all, but he was nowhere to be seen, and it turned out defeating the named boss, Sitrix, completed the "Find Jeremiah Jones" objective instead. I see that Luis hinted that Jeremiah had been "taken away" which mitigates this some. But, I do suggest you change your mission goals from "Find Luis D'Artier, Find Jeremiah Jones" to be "2 Midnighters to discover the fate of", then have this goal count down once when you free Luis (changing to "Discover the fate of the last Midnighter") and once when you defeat Sitrix (completing the mission). I think this format will be more suggestive to the player as to what is supposed to be done; "Find Jeremiah Jones" makes it sound like you should find a hostage, or at least a body bag.

The clues are well written, but I suggest you add to Luis D'Artier's story a little more info about what became of Jeremiah Jones. Something like "The boss mage took Jeremiah away, and I'm not sure what became of him after that" which would suggest to the player that he needs to go after Sitrix.

Debriefing: OK, now Buck says "Luis has some idea of where they took him." If this is true, Luis REALLY should've said something in his clue. Buck also says "You say they were striking a deal with the Tuatha de Dannon?" Dannon -> Dannan. It also wasn't terribly clear that the CoT were striking a deal; Sitrix did say something but it sounded more Sitrix was about to reward them ("You have done well delivering these Midnighters to us. Now about your reward...") than negotiate a deal with them. Perhaps alter the dialog to make this clearer; something like "You have done well delivering these Midnighters to us. I can see an arrangement between the Circle and the Tuatha will be to our mutual benefit." would make it a lot clearer.

"someone should be able to translate the text" feels very vague, Buck is an expert in this field and should say something like "With some time I can translate this text" or "Let me check some references, I think I can translate this text" or at least "I need to show this to Montague, he's the expert in ancient Croatoan inscriptions and should be able to translate it." Something more specific than "someone can do this, I'm sure".

Mission 2

Briefing: Buck does some exposition about having translated the text and it refers to the Amulet of J'gara and how horrible it is (66 words). Then he tells me what the current mission is, to rescue Jeremiah (15 words), a task seemingly unrelated to the huge paragraph immediately before it. I feel like this doesn't flow well; I can see that you may be setting up some foreshadowing for when the Amulet inevitably gets stolen from the Midnighter's Vault (why not just say Azuria's holding it in the MAGI Vault) which is good, but that part should be much shorter than the part where he tells you about the actual mission, which should be the meat of this briefing IMHO.

It also seems a little odd that Buck would be so alarmed at this text when this Amulet is already in his hands, in the Midnighter's Vault. As an NPC he should be supremely confident that the amulet is safe there. Not quite sure what the plot requires, but I wonder if it would be better if the amulet were buried in some crypt under no one's control; that would help justify him being worried about it falling in the wrong hands, and later he can send the player spelunking for it.

I think you should elaborate on where the Midnighters have divined Jeremiah's location to be (i.e., Oranbega). Also, the debrief for mission 2 said that Luis knows where they took him, so why is divination required? Seems a continuity error.

Accept mission: "Yes" is too short, suggest you replace with "Rescue Jeremiah".

Found Jeremiah, he could use a description (other than the default Midnight Squad boilerplate). Interestingly, Buck told me Jeremiah would help "fight your way back out", but I don't seem to have "lead Jeremiah out" as a goal; in fact, Jeremiah is helping me fight my way deeper in. May want to reword Buck's briefing or add a "lead Jeremiah out" as a goal. Preferably the former, having him die and force the mission to fail probably would mess up the plot. Jeremiah DOES seem very helpful in a fight, with earth control's -def doing a good job of canceling the annoying -acc dark melee effects from ghsots.

Polentes' dialog was a little dull (seemed like pretty standard stuff) but the clues you get from him and freeing Jeremiah are pretty well written.

When you ditch Jeremiah Jones, he says "Where did you go you whippersnapper?" Add a comma after go.

Found Polentes' Journal; the info there seems a little redundant with the Polentes Gloats and Jeremiah Jones' Story clues though.

The exit bubble "The Circle of Thorns are preparing to strike" appears to contradict the Polentes Gloats clue, where he says they are carrying out the assault "as we speak". Continuity error.

Mission 3

Briefing needs to be a little longer and more descriptive. I know it may seem clear from the mission 2 debriefing, but if you're not the team leader, you won't have seen that, so reiterate here that the CoT have launched a huge attack on the Midnight Club.

It's a defeat all, but the map isn't too big, so it's not too bad.

Although this is described as a pitched battle between CoT and Midnight Squad, there's no actual fighting that I can find; it's all CoT standing around in static spawns. Suggest you set up several "battles" between CoT and Midnight Squad, and maybe a patrol or two of each, to add to the chaos. Flag the Midnight Squad as being friendly and the heroes can jump into these fights to beat up the CoTs and save the Midnight Squad people.

The only Midnight Squad mobs I found were Chris McNeil and a Living Armor, both of whom had already been "captured" so were not really fighting. They both became allies; I think both the Chris and the Living Armor encounters needed more dialog (or if the Living Armor must be silent, have the CoT fighting it at least say something) to make them more interesting.

I'm actually surprised you don't have an object you need to rescue from the CoT in this mission, representing the Amulet of J'Gara. Consider adding one.

Mindskewer seemed a good enemy; her dialog was a little bland but she put up a good fight, confusing me several times (I had neglected to bring break frees as brutes rarely use them). Nomaris's parting line as he was defeated was very interesting though; foreshadowing something awful, I'm sure!

Debriefing: Huh? Buck starts talking then is cut off by (I assume) Mindskewer, who claims she had the amulet in her possession already and was using its powers. This is not hinted at during the actual mission; with the Amulet being portrayed as being so dangerous, and something the bad guys are so hot to get at, if Mindskewer had already captured it, there should definitely be a clue to that effect.

Also Mindskewer claims that I never left the Midnight Club. If this is to be taken at face value, there is no reason Buck should even get one sentence of dialog here, since you never should even get to him. Maybe you could delete Buck's dialog and instead open with something like,

"<i>You are walking towards Buck Salinger, but it seems like each step you take moves you no closer to him. He does not seem to notice you approaching, and does not respond when you call out to him. Suddenly you are aware of a malevolent presence, all around you...</i>" (then segue into Mindskewer's diatribe)

I like the list of mission goals in the nav tool of this mission, very cool sounding. Not sure what the blue color means, if anything, though.

Shadowman description: Nice description; subconcious -> subconscious. Same typo in Soul Eater description.

I like that Nomaris is so desperate that he asks you for help, AND you get to actually save him. I'm a little puzzled why Nomaris and Chris McNeil are here though. I guess we're not inside my subconscious, but somewhere inside Mindskewer herself?

Pain Elemental: "it's victims" should be "its victims". It's in "Animus and Anima" faction instead of "Void Demons", is that intentional? Avatar of Strength is in "Animus and Anima", guessing that faction is meant to be "your" traits?

Avatar of Strength and its guards should have some dialog as you come up on them; even someting small, like "Avatar of Strength: Must...stay...strong...!" while the demons taunt it with "Shadowman: Your strength is useless now!" or something like that. Just to build the mood a little. Likewise for Avatar of Initiative and Avatar of Balance. I just think it would be cool if the Avatars had some dialog showing their resolve and epitomizing the concept they represent.

"Shadowman: We will devour thier initiative." thier -> their

Avatar of Initiative buffed Avatar of Strength with clear mind, increasing his perception by a lot, making him Leeroy into mobs even pretty far away. It's OK if that's what you want, but not sure if that was intentional or not. The fortitude she's giving out is REALLY nice though!

Wow, Mindskewer in this mission seems to be a nearly completely different mob, even being one rank higher (spawned as EB for me). I nearly got fried by her alpha strike but some quick inspiration popping kept me in the game until my 3 allies started helping, letting me beat her.

I really like the set up for the last mission, with the smoky map and fiery prisons and the murky shadow demons it is VERY moody and atmospheric, and I thought rescuing your various positive attributes, which then buff you, was a cool mechanic.

Debriefing: Maybe have a brief note here saying that you come to and you're talking to Buck now, like normal. (Maybe this is implied by the normal font, but I think making it clear would be good, since you weren't talking to Buck the last time.)



Overall: Up to the last mission I was mildly positive about the arc, but I thought the last mission was really pretty cool. I do think there are things that could be cleaned up/improved in the first few missions (especially the mission briefing and story logic for the first two) but the cool ending pushed it over the top for me to rate it 5 stars.


------

I owe a review to:

doodaa - Poaching the Lion 1841
@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@Sakura-kishi - The Prisoners from the Land of OZ 49326
@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420

in queue:

WynterPhrost

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)

Here's my submission:

Arc Name: Teen Phalanx Forever!
Arc ID: 67335
Faction: Vahzilok, Clockwork, Freakshow, Rogue Robots
Creator Global/Forum Name: @PW / PoliceWoman
Difficulty Level: Moderate; there is one AV/EB per mission, but they are intentionally easy AVs/EBs (NOT customized), and allies are present to help.
Synopsis: The Teen Phalanx is on a recruitment drive, and they've extended an invitation to a teen version of your hero to try out! Do you have what it takes to join Paragon City's most prestigious teen superhero team?
Morality: Heroic
Estimated Time to Play: 4 missions, estimate 60-90 mins.
Level range: 15-20, 20, 20-25, 29-30 (mission levels gradually increase to "level" you up)

The Council's Long Con review

Stated level range is 20-35, played on a 33 MA/ninj stalker.

OK, looks like the concept is we have to aggressively recruit a scientist away form some other organization.

Mission 1

Mission briefing: "kidnaping" should be "kidnapping". Galdi wants me to recruit this guy but doesn't say who it is or who he works for. Surely I have need to know for THAT much.

Accept message: "sow dissention" should be "sow dissension".

Second part of briefing: Finally he tells me something about what I'm supposed to do! Sabotage a Sky Raider device, okay.

In between talking to Galdi and hitting the mission I apparently decided to expand my mission to also steal 3 weapons and 3 piles of goods. This doesn't make much sense to me, isn't the stated goal to NOT be noticed? I don't buy the idea that making it look like a smash & grab will make it less conspicuous. Also, this makes the official mission title, "Sabotage the Sky Raiders' Prototype", incorrect since I was able to sabotage the prototype and the mission would not complete. If you want to keep all these objectives, the mission maybe should be something like "Cause Trouble for Sky Raiders".

Mission objective "Bug the Prototype" should probably be "Sabotage Prototype" since we're not really planting a bug.

Found the prototype; it was a wall safe? I suggest you pick a different glowy, one of the floor-standing techy looking devices.

After stealing 3 piles of iPods and Gameboys and another 3 piles of Sky Raider weapons, I suggest on exiting this mission you add a popup which says, "You make a quick detour to the Black Market to fence your stolen goods before reporting back to Galdi."

Mission 2:
Briefing: OK, so he's sending me to bust up a Sky Raider base. Not sure why I'm really doing this other than Galdi told me to do it though; it's unclear to me how either this mission or last mission contributed to the goal of recruiting a Sky Raider scientist. If they even have scientists. Needs a bit more explanation of the motivation, I think.

I do like the mission title, "Trash the Sky Raiders' base" and the "Costly Equipment" destroyable objects. The dialog you gave the Sky Raiders guarding the equipment is great too! The "vintage roadster" equipment was pretty funny as well.

Mission 3:
This mission seemed very simple, I stealthed to Duray and took him out. The hardest part of it was just locating Duray on the big map.

The mission briefing made it sound like he would be an AV/EB, but he spawned as a lieutenant for me (level 33, lowest difficulty). He also looked like a Jump Bot and not a person in a suit of powered armor. There IS an actual Colonel Duray model in the Silver Mantis SF; you might consider designing a custom model for Colonel Duray that looks like that guy, only with some extra cybernetic looking armor.

Debriefing: "He'll blame Kaku for the failure" ... but Kaku has not been mentioned in the story up to this point. Needs some explanation, or maybe a mention earlier on that Kaku is the scientist we're targeting for recruitment.

Mission 4:
Dr. Kaku was in the very first room for me; I thought this would make it too easy, but it's cool that his rescue was linked to the next objective to take out a Jump Bot. I kind of wonder if you want to use one of the scientist in white lab coat models for Kaku; he looks like a jump bot.

The mission title, "Extract Dr. Kaku" is now incorrect since I've rescued Kaku but the mission is still going. Suggest you change it to something like "Extract Dr. Kaku and his work." You could even add a glowy representing his notes, in either hard copy or computerized form.

I found "Jump Bot Forcefield" .. this name is a little awkward, maybe it should be "Prototype Jump Bot" or "Forcefield Jump Bot Prototype" to make it clear he's the objective.

Debriefing: "I just hope they don't get too exited" ... should be "excited".


Overall:
I liked this arc a lot more than its prequel. It had a better defined story, and the premise of recruiting another scientist (without simply kidnapping him) was interesting. I started off thinking mission 1 and mission 2 didn't contribute much to the original plot, but it seemed to be better explained in mission 3; I might suggest you add a little more explanation (even if cryptic) in the debriefing for mission 1 and mission 2 as to HOW that is helping move the plot towards the goal of recruiting Dr. Kaku.

I thought mission 2 was especially fun and I liked the dialog in it. Mission 3 was over a little too quick (though as a stalker I had the advantage of directly stealthing to him and ambushing him) and I think maybe needed to have more to do. Maybe consider setting up something like the Silver Mantis SF where you have to stir up some trouble destroying hardware before Colonel Duray will come out and face you? I think Duray should have a more visually interesting model also.

I thought this was more fun and a better story than the previous one, and I gave it 4 stars.

------

I owe a review to:

Lazarus - 1 of MacGuffin Delivery 1567, Amulet of J'gara 1709, Portal Bandits 3326
doodaa - Poaching the Lion 1841
@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@Sakura-kishi - The Prisoners from the Land of OZ 49326
@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420

in queue:

WynterPhrost

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)

Council's Good Graces

Stated level range is 15-19
Played on 19 db/ninj stalker

Mission 1

Briefing: Nicely written. I kinda wish he would tell a little more about what the job is before he makes you decide whether to accept it. But even after accepting it he seems very closemouthed and "Don't ask" about it, so that seems to be how this contact is.

Mission title: "Eradicate the warehouse and seek clues" should probably be "Eradicate everyone in the warehouse and seek clues".

Defeat all and search 6 crates sounds like a lot to do, but the map doesn't seem too big to hopefully it's not too bad. I think you can maybe drop the "Defeat warehouse manager" text from the nav tool as that is implied by the "Wipe out everyone inside".

The fact that this warehouse is full of Council, yet I'm supposedly getting into the Council's Good Graces makes me immediately suspect the contact is playing me false.

Debriefing: The contact explains why I wiped out a Council base but I still suspect I'm getting played for a fool. Grr.

Mission 2:

Briefing: "wreck havoc" should be "wreak havoc".

10 glowies to click, ouch! Seems a little much, especially as most have no info; I think we could've gotten the idea with just 3 computers and 3 file cabinets, or even one of each.

Actually, I was able to complete the mission by killing the boss and clicking only enough glowies to get both clues, so that wasn't too bad.

Debriefing seems OK but didn't knock my socks off or anything.

Mission 3:

Briefing: "Colonel Brimley under the 5th Column" should be "Oberst Brimley under the 5th Column".

Okay, in the mission now. I'm surprised these guys are still Council and not 5th Column based on the briefing, but I guess Brimley IS Council-in-name-only so maybe it makes sense.

Archon Brimley really should have some special background story in his "info" box, since he's the big bad of the story arc. He also says "The Council is on to us" but his faction is "Council" so this doesn't make sense. It might be ok if he said something like "Galdi is on to us" or "Council Internal Security is on to us". Or if he said "the Council is on to us" and belonged to 5th Column.

Brimley says "You'll never suceed!" suceed should be succeed.

Debriefing: Galdi says "The traitor took a cyanide pill, huh?" This wasn't obvious during the mission; maybe put a clue you get on defeating Brimley that says he took poison before you could capture him.

Overall:
I was uneasy at how in-the-dark this story kept me for most of the arc. Maybe it makes sense for Galdi's motivations but it makes the player feel like a tool, which is a little less fun. The mission briefings were well written but told you very little (intentionally, I know) and as a result, I still was not sure Galdi was really working for the Council (and not working for Agent Indigo or someone to set up double agents) until I got to Brimley and heard him express worry about the Council being onto him. I think I would've liked some of the earlier clues to more clearly paint Brimley and the other boss as having been up to no good, rather than solely take Galdi's word for it.

There's nothing really wrong with the missions but there was nothing that jumped out as me as really wonderful and awesome either. I think you need to add *something* more to make the story stand out a little bit more. As a result I gave it 3 stars. Hope you think that is fair.

------

I owe a review to:

@HolyEvilAoD - Council's Long Con 1579
Lazarus - 1 of MacGuffin Delivery 1567, Amulet of J'gara 1709, Portal Bandits 3326
doodaa - Poaching the Lion 1841
@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246
@Sakura-kishi - The Prisoners from the Land of OZ 49326
@Wrong Number - Death to Disco 84420

in queue:

WynterPhrost

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

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388) [fixed the Prisoners problem]
Teen Phalanx Forever (67335)

Nuclear 90 - The Fusionette TF

Stated level range was 1-14 blue side, so I played a 10 inv/ss tanker.

Mission 1

Briefing: "It seems more than one hero...vanished when they investigated a string of warehouses in Atlas Park. Could you go and check out the warehouses out for us?" This immediately seems like Fusionette is trying to get me killed.... But then I guess that is in character for her. I'm not sure who "us" is in this context, maybe should be "me".

Second part of briefing: seems a little odd that she gave me a product placement for Up-and-Away Burger here; I'm not sure if she's trying to do a product endorsement here (she never struck me as that commercial before ) or, maybe more likely, is just being ditzy. Her giving me a TF name is very cute though.

I'm glad you're mainly using Hellions for this story. The custom mobs are probably too tough for people this low level.

I like Molecular Mandy's dialog when you fight her. Good costume and description, too. I already am getting the idea that Fusionette is unknowingly having me wreck some kind of undercover mission that her broodmates are on. I kinda think you should get a clue after defeating Mandy? Doesn't have to be super fancy, but it would help for people who are not the team leader (and don't see the debriefing) to know what's going on.

Mission 2

Briefing: Not a bad briefing. I totally suggest you change "Longbow reports that a bank known to store some valuable artifacts for MAGI has just been raided" to "Azuria reports that a bank vault she uses to store valuable artifacts for MAGI has been raided".... to continue perpetrating Azuria's incompetence at protecting magical stuff.

"Whats worse" should be "What's worse".

"Agree to investigate" isn't a good match for "Stop the Bank Raid" mission though; maybe reuse "Stop the Bank Raid" for the "accept mission" text.

Second part of briefing: the burger obsession motif is growing on me.

Mission entrance popup: "Goodie" maybe should be "Goody".

I like the Hellion dialog and the reference to Hellion Girlfriends. The constant reference to Up-and-Away Burger is starting to make me hungry.

Fought Neutrino Nick, then in the debriefing Fusionette says he was wearing a weird amulet that broke up when we beat him up. But I didn't see anything like that when I actually defeated him. OK, looking in my clue journal I see "A shattered amulet" (the game neglected to give me a CLUE FOUND for some reason). "'nstuff" should maybe be "'n stuff" or "and stuff".

I suggest you also change Neutrino Nick's "death" chat to be more like "Wha? Where am I? Did someone get the number of that truck?" to better show that he "came out of it" on defeat.

Debriefing maybe should add, "Hey, $name, did you forget my burger? Oh, right, I guess the whole artifact thing really IS more important. Never mind."


Mission 3:

"Okey-dokey $name , Lady Grey" ... you have an extra space after $name and before the comma.

Fusionette should probably explain just a *little* more about who "Jimmy" is, for the sake of people who have not yet been to Faultline to do those missions.

Inside the mission, the subgoals "Save Jim Temblor!" and "Save Electron Elly!" both have an extra ! at the end of them (looks wrong when separated by commas). And since you have to save 3 different people, "Save Jim Temblor?" is not a good mission name. Maybe the mission should be named "Track Amulets to Source" or "Rescue Heroes" or something like that.

More good dialog from the Hellions. I like the "Do you ever wonder if this crime thing might be keeping us from a nice college education?"

Electron Elly says "Man, my mp3 player needs recharging." This doesn't quite make sense because, well, she generates electricity! Nothing she ever has should need recharging. It would make more more sense for her to complain about shorting out her mp3 player ... again.

Jim Temblor's chats as you rescue him are great. He looks so shamefaced about being captured by Hellions! But, in his chats change "embarassing" to "embarrassing" and consider trimming the "..." ellipses preceding his sentences.

Radioactive Reimi's "info" text is terrific! And yet more Up-And-Away Burger references... you're getting a commission from them, I hope? Put a period after "Up-And-Away Burger" and before "She is also under the hypnotic control", though.

Reimi's dialog "Alrighty, finally some action" needs a period at the end of it.

When Reimi dropped, I got "The Mystery Revealed" where it says a Hellion revealed the secret before passing out. But it was Reimi I just beat up, not a Hellion, so this has a slight discontinuity.

"Calls himself Immolation Ken, he supposedly used to work for them MAGI guys but he got kicked out by that Azuria chick for bein' too cocky, so he came out here and gave us a buncha these amulets." <-- is much too long a sentence. I suggest you reformat to something like:

"Calls himself Immolation Ken. He supposedly used to work for them MAGI guys, but that Azuria chick kicked him out for bein' too cocky. After that he came out here and gave us a buncha these amulets."

Debriefing: Ahh yes, first we make a lunch date for Up-and-Away Burger. Then, oh yes, we have to stop evil. LOL.


Mission 4

Briefing: "Ready $name ?", remove space between $name and question mark. I'm rather surprised Lady Grey would personally interrogate Hellions for Fusionette, I mean they've got to be totally grey con to her, and she has defense of the whole world against Rikti invasions to keep her busy. Maybe have one of Lady Grey's lackeys handle that?

Briefing second part, I think "Well what are you waiting for, this is your show, you've proven that you don't need me to butt in, right?" should be punctuated: "Well, what are you waiting for? This is your show! You've proven that you don't need me to butt in. Right?"

Clue from Mandy, "Shattered Amulet" maybe should be "Mandy's Amulet" or "Shattered Amulet from Mandy" or "The Last Amulet" to distinguish it from your first "A shattered amulet" clue (from Nick). Also the text "Thats the last of the amulets... You hope, anyhow" should be "That's the last of the amulets. You hope, anyhow." (note punctuation changes)

Oh no it's K-K-Ken c-c-coming to k-k-kill me! I like his outfit, kind of reminds me of the Outcasts (which are about right for this level). Though I'm not sure why he has the Atomic symbol since he's not a Nuclear 90 and got his powers from a magic book according to the info you wrote. Maybe give him a fiery related symbol instead? Or a K. Maybe trim the leading "..." from his death message also. Ken was okay to fight, but I felt his dialog was not as cool as the stuff Fusionette, Faultline and the other Nuclear 90 said in your story arc so far (their dialog I thought was great). Maybe make him do a little more scenery chewing, or silly fire-related one-liners or something.

Exit popup, "Nice work, That's one less crazy" ... "That's" should be in lowercase.

How is it that the Fusionette TF is over and I haven't had to rescue Fusionette from being captured even once?

Debriefing: Yay, we won, time for burgers, LOL.



Overall:
I really liked this arc. The characterization of Fusionette and the other NPCs was outstanding (except for Ken, who can use a little more personality). Even the generic Hellions had good dialog. The Up-and-Away burger motif started out being weird but really grew on me by the end of the story arc. I thought it was very fun. I gave it 5 stars and recommended it to a friend who I know is a huge Fusionette fangirl.


-------------

I owe a review to:

@HolyEvilAoD - 2 of Council's Good Graces 1571, Council's Long Con 1579
Lazarus - 1 of MacGuffin Delivery 1567, Amulet of J'gara 1709, Portal Bandits 3326
doodaa - Poaching the Lion 1841
@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796
Pippy - The Paragon Caper 65246

in queue:

WynterPhrost

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)

Teen Phalanx Forever is (for the moment) on the front page of the story arc list (sorted by rating)! Yay, I'm so psyched! Thanks to everyone who looked at it so far!!

I hope you can get them to bring Prisoners back I had to make a custom "Convicts" villain group to fix one of my story arcs.

The Empire - One Alliance review

Played solo on a 50 AR/dev blaster.

Mission 1
Starts with an investigation of a break-in at an auto shop; sounds very different than the premise described in the story arc blurb. Has the conceit that the contact is calling you over the phone, because she isn't in town and needs someone to check it out; an interesting hook.

"over this insecure line" should be "over this unsecured line".

I like the mission title, "Discover the Intruders' Intentions".

As soon as I enter the mission, the mission entrance popup tells me that the Council are here, and "7 Council computers" are listed in the objectives. So now I know the intruders are Council without having seen even one of them. That seems kind of unsatisfying; I suggest you make both these a little more neutral, maybe not mention Council in the entrance popup and just list "7 computers to search" as objective instead of Council computers. This would give the player a chance to move into the mission on her own power and learn that Council are here on their own.

I like the exposition dialog that I get to overhear about the "proper set up" and "We did find that one schematic".

Um, the first computer I clicked on has the name "Get Info off the Network Fake, ambush 1". This sounds more like a private note to yourself. I think you maybe want to name this glowy simply "Computer". Found several other computers that had the same naming problem; a "Get information off the network fake" and a "Get information off the network.

Thinking about it, this mission is set in the contact's friend's auto shop. Why would this friend have 7 Council computers in his shop? Or do we think the Council set these 7 computers up and networked them, right after breaking in to the auto shop? Seems like a logic flaw.

Got a couple nice clues from the computers. The mission completed after I clicked just 3 computers, presumably because I found the right clue; so you might not want "7 computers to search" as an objective, because you don't really have to search all 7. You could maybe have the real glowy have simply "Get information from network" as its objective and leave the objective blank for the fakes. Though, regardless, it's weird that the Council would have a 7 node computer network set up in this place that they're Breaking and Entering.

I kinda like that this apparently mundane B&E investigation is the lead in to an otherdimensional adventure, though.

Very nice mission debriefing that gives the player some good info about the upcoming plot.

Mission 2
I had to read the mission briefing twice, it was a bit convoluted. It seems the contact is saying that Malta are allied with an otherdimensional faction, and Malta took over a Council base, so I need to attack this Council base with Malta in it, in order to learn something. Meanwhile the contact accidentally left something important in Lou's shop that the Council ran off with. Seems to me the portal tech that the Council stole is probably more urgent than taking out some random Malta?

In the second part of the briefing, "Be careful Police Woman" should be "Be careful, Police Woman". She reiterates that she has no idea why she's sending me to fight Malta. This all makes me think that I should really be following up the more obvious lead, helping Betty check into the Council stealing her portal device. I suspect you are trying to set up some sort of foreshadowing with Betty mentioning the portal device, but right now I think it would be more logical for either the next mission to be to find the portal device, or for Betty to not mention the side mission at all, since it's purely distracting.

As I enter, an Operation Engineer said "Oh! A hero. Excellent. We can kill two birds with a lot of bullets." Nice line, but he says it before he even SEES me. I think maybe that line should be moved to "Active" text.

The nav tool says my objectives are "Get information from captive" and "Question Ascendant Archon Francisco". But the contact gave me no information about this mission so I'm not sure I should even know these guys have a captive, or that Francisco is here. Maybe make these objectives more vague, like "Get information" and "Identify Malta's mysterious ally".

OK, as I advance into the base, I see Malta and Council are still fighting here. But Betty made it sound like the Malta had already taken the base over, so really there should be no fighting? Maybe rephrase Betty's briefing to say the Malta are currently attacking a Council base.

Ran into some Knives of Artemis with some good dialog; hinting at the Malta alliance with a mysterious Empire. (But is it the Council Empire or the Nemesis Empire?)

A KoA just said "Keep it down ladies. Enemy Council and Malta could still be here." Hmm, aren't KoA part of Malta? Why would they be worried about other Malta? Maybe rephrase to "Keep it down, ladies. Some Council holdouts are still around here somewhere."

I found Francisco; he's still running around free, so the Malta are definitely not in control of this base. He issued some sort of speech about creating a new world order, which I found odd when he has enemy Malta and KoA running around in his base. When I attacked him, it seemed like tons of ambushes jumped on me, aligned with Council Empire! After I killed him, I got the "Council Empire" clue, revealing that Francisco was actually from the Council Empire, and allied with both Malta and Council. If this is the case, I don't understand why Malta and Council are fighting? They should all be teamed up, not shooting each other. Am I missing something?

Okay, I found and rescued the Gray Knight and a lot more has become clear. I did like his conversation with "Susan". Probably should put a comma after "listened to me" and before "Susan". Gray Knight's clue says that Council Empire are allied with SOME Council, Malta and Knives on our world, while Francisco's clue simply says Council Empire are allied with Council, Malta and Knives. I think you should modify Francisco's clue to say that Council Empire are allied with "some" Council, Malta and Knives too, as the way it's written it sounds like they are allied with the whole group, which contradicts Gray Knight's clue. Maybe say something like "the Council Empire is allied with the Council of our world and an ultraconservative splinter faction of the Malta Group, including several members of the Knives of Artemis". But do make the two clues consistent.

I think it is very strange that "Mark" (Gray Knight) claims the Malta are "about freedom" and his clue suggests that the Malta are abandoning their basic principles. Maybe I missed something somewhere, but ... what principles? As far as I know, the Malta are killers and mercenaries, not some shades of grey organization that claims to have ideals.

This does explain why some Malta and some Council were shooting at each other, but I have to say it is very confusing distinguishing which Malta hate Council and which are friends with Council. Consider making a custom group called "Malta Splinter Faction" and add some standard Malta and some KoA models to it, and use that to represent the Malta working with the Council Empire? Maybe need a "Council Splinter Faction" too.

So far the plot is kind of confusing; but it occurs to me maybe this is intentional on your part, to give it a conspiracy sort of feeling. If so, you can maybe amp this up by using more "conspiracy theory" type language to help set the mood; e.g., Gray Knight gives you a "dossier" instead of a "letter", and have various patrols say "$name has seen too much! Liquidate $himher now!" and have your objectives in this mission be "Find out the Truth" and "Unmask conspiracy".

Debriefing: some nice text here, though I'm not sure why Betty is surprised that the Council would be open to working with the Council Empire; that seems like a natural alliance to me. Betty also tells me her side mission failed; not sure why I should care about that, hopefully it's foreshadowing for something.

Mission 3

Briefing: "Greets, Police Woman" should maybe be "Greetings, Police Woman". Suddenly Betty thinks I found Malta and Knives have chased some Council into Oranbega? When did I do this? She is expositioning about stuff that I supposedly have done, but really haven't. I think it would make more sense if she had learned this on her side mission than to portray the hero as having done it (since really I have done nothing but click on her for the next mission).

"word is those Council have some technical parts the Malta do not want them to have" ... this sentence is very awkward and I'm not even sure what it should mean; because the Malta don't want the Council to have these parts, we should take them? I think should be reworded. I suggest you give these technical parts a name and explain why it is horrible for the bad guys to have it, so that it will naturally follow that the player should confiscate it.

The mission accept message is "Help Betty Sizzle fix her mistake", but the briefing does not explain what this mistake is. Maybe the whole briefing should be reworded to something like:

"$name, following up with my previous investigation, I've found that the Council did indeed steal the McGuffin Device from Lou's shop, and they've stored it in a hidden weapons cache deep in Oranbega. The Malta have found out about this and are mounting a strike operation right now to take it from the Council! The McGuffin would allow whomever possesses it to freely transport men and material between dimensions. We can't allow either of these factions to have control of it!

Portal Corporation entrusted the McGuffin to me personally, so it's my responsibility to get it back. I was hoping you might be willing to help out?

> Help Betty Sizzle recover the McGuffin"

Why this mission is captioned "Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!" and why it is set in Oranbega is a mystery to me, though. The Council seem to have hundreds of those generic prefab bases, why would they stash something in Oranbega?

Mission title: "Recover the Portal Tech" immediately makes me think we are recovering a Technician. Maybe clarify this as "Recover the Portal Technology".

As I enter the mission, the first mob I encounter are Knives of Artemis belonging to a "MaltaKnivesNems" faction. This faction needs a better name. Also, just to warn you, Knives of Artemis in Oranbega is probably the nightmare scenario for a lot of players.

I like the dialog between the KoA and the Council about why they will or won't ally with the Council Empire. I think I need a scorecard to tell who is on which side though, it's very confusing. I guess the "MaltaKnivesNems" faction must be your Splinter Faction that I suggested in the previous mission, to separate the Council Empire aligned types. Suggest you use it also in the previous mission.

Or another way you could simplify it is if all the KoA are pro-Council Empire and all the regular Malta are anti-Council Empire. This seems to be pretty close to the way you have set up and would be easier to understand.

Found Betty Sizzle, she could perhaps use more biographical info. Betty says something about teleporting parts back to base, but the objective is to destroy the parts, so this seems inconsistent. I think she means teleporting the *crates* back.

One of the guards of the Portal Generator said " "$name. Great. What else can go wrong today." Should delete that leading quote mark and change the last period to a question mark.

Finished the mission. I still don't get the "Lions and tigers and bears" note; I saw none of those. The debriefing could use some work, it would be nice if Betty said what happened to the parts that were recovered.

Mission 4

Briefing: I think you might want to call the invading army something other than "the Vanguard" to avoid confusion with the RWZ-based "Vanguard". Maybe "Council Empire Army" or something.

Great map selection for this mission!

I teamed up with a brute for this last mission and his comment was "knives and malta mixed? You need to toss in Tsoo lieutenants and Master illusionists too."

Finished all the objectives in this map, but I think this final mission could've benefited from a named boss or mastermind that is the "big bad guy" of the story arc. It doesn't have to be an AV/EB, just someone with a real name; you can convert one of your Archons or the KoA coordinator to be this person, or you can force a boss to spawn after all the Archons are taken out, maybe. This would give the player more of a sense of accomplishment, I think.

Overall:
An interesting premise and some good writing. I did find it very confusing as to who was on which side of this interdimensional conflict at any given time, since there were some Malta, some KoA and some Council on each side. I think the "MaltaKnivesNems" were always on the invaders' side, so maybe use that faction more, though it needs a better faction name. I do think you should avoid using "Vanguard" as that will be confused with the RWZ Vanguard group.

I kinda think you should swap the Oranbega map for either a Council or Malta map; with no CoT in the story, putting KoA in Oranbega seemed simply cruel.

Anyway, I liked it overall but do think there are some things you can do to make it more clear what is going on and to improve gameplay. I waffled between giving this a high 3 or a low 4 stars; ended up settling on 4 stars because I did feel like the plot and the writing were interesting.



I owe a review to:

@Cavatina - Fusionette TF
@HolyEvilAoD - 2 of Council's Good Graces 1571, Council's Long Con 1579, Sad Story of Silas Gritch 1831
Lazarus - 1 of MacGuffin Delivery 1567, Amulet of J'gara 1709, Portal Bandits 3326
doodaa - Poaching the Lion 1841
@Scuzzbopper - What Price Victory? 58307
GlaziusF - 2nd arc
@Cryfire - 1 of 2503, 1651 or 1638
@Vanden - Knights of Rularuu 75386
@icerose - Operation: Doolittle 58609
@squeakersman - The Environmentalist 47796

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

Axis and Allies (1379)
Celebrity Kidnapping (1388) [fixed the Prisoners problem]
Teen Phalanx Forever (67335)

I've been reading that the Prisoners standard enemy group has been deleted from Mission Architect in the current patch. This almost certainly wrecks my "Celebrity Kidnapping" story arc, which starts with a prison break. Will need to fix that tonight.

Sounds cool! I'd be interested in either playing or judging.

You can find samples of my review style in this thread.

I spent some time solo testing, and I came to the conclusion that even the signature pet version of Statesman is way too hard for a soloer. I spent about half an hour jousting him, he got low on life and went unstoppable like 4 times, and I only killed him in the end because I summoned a Vanguard Heavy onto him (something I don't expect most soloers will be able or willing to do).

I ended up dropping Statesman out of the final mission, but I left Maiden Justice (aka Ms Liberty), who seems much more doable.

More changes:

* US Private is now AR/regen (no more web grenade)
* US Sergeant is now MA/dev (now with added web grenade)
* US Colonel and Generals are now merc/willpower. They also now have a cigar. (I remember someone asked for that...yes, really!)