Sister_Twelve

Same thing I always say. If there's a point to the PVP, I'd be willing to listen. If it's PVP just for the sake of PVP, then it's pointless. This sounds like it's you wanting PVP just for the sake of PVP.

Level Range: 5-10
Morality: Heroic
Description: A chance meeting with an old woman on the streets of King's Row leads your hero into a plot 23 years in the making... and into the forgotten story of a heroine who deserves to be remembered.

Anyone who has a chance to give me a playthrough, I'd appreciate it.

- I haven't done the formatting yet. I will be working on that over the next couple of days, so you may if you run it, you may run into a 'half-formatted, half-not' sort of thing.
- There are a couple of custom Hellion bosses in missions 3-4. If they are too brutal, let me know.
- There will probably be typos. I haven't run over it with a fine tooth comb yet.
- Pay attention to the busy text. I am trying something with it in this arc I haven't tried before.
- Same with the narrative structure. It might tend to annoy CoH mission traditionalists.

Hopefully, you will have some fun with it and enjoy the story.

- S12

Well, to be fair, an editor isn't exactly going to tell you what to write. He or she is going to tell you that things need to be tightened or trimmed and pretty much leave it to you to decide how to do it. If you refuse, their response is generally to either tell you, "Thanks for submitting with us, but we've decided to go in a different direction," which is code for "Don't submit here again" or to tell you "It needs some work. Why don't you let me see it again once you've had a chance to work on it," which is code for "You're talented and I'm not going to burn bridges with you, but I am right and you and wrong."

Um... beg you pardon?

I posted my thoughts about the Mercedes Lackey arc in my One a Day thread to keep from threadjacking this one.

So today, along with the MA supergroup, I ran "A Night on the Boardwalk" by Mercedes Lackey.

Although, I think this is probably relatively pointless, since it is highly improbable that Mercedes Lackey will actually read this thread, the arc did make a few things occur to me as we were playing it, so I decided to go ahead and put this into my thread. Usually, I try to direct my thread to the mission author in hopes of helping them try to make their arcs better. I doubt that any revisions will occur to this narrative.

However, a lot of modern day ficition features the voice of the 'sharp and witty, takes no crap narrator,' who is unafraid to tell anyone what he/she thinks about anything. Brust uses this sort of narrator with Vlad Taltos. A lot of comic books feature this type of character... Wolverine, for example. This type of character is so common, in fact, that the character has become almost a caricature of itself.

The character usually works fairly well because all of the other characters in the narrative are also creations of the author, which means that the character against whom the 'sharp and witty' narrator directs his or her acid tongue generally deserves such treatment. The audience recognizes that the character deserves that sort of treatment and that the rest of the world either is too afraid of the character in question to say such things or are too oblivious to notice what the character deserves.

Therefore the 'sharp and witty' character is actually a device used by the author to forge a connection between the author and the reader, saying, in essence, 'yes, I get it too. I see what you are seeing. The deserved comeuppance for this character who deserves to be talked to or about is on its way.'

The problem with this arc, however, is that the 'sharp and witty' character doesn't come across as so 'sharp and witty,' so much as she comes across as 'crappy and nasty.'

The reason for this is pretty simple. Instead of directing her 'sharp and witty' comments at someone who deserves it and creates identification with her in the mind of the audience, from the very beginning she starts directing the nasty commentary at someone she does not know... someone controlled by the very audience with whom the author is attempting to create a connection.

So you see...

In short order, the audience in question could care less about the story unfolding because every time the audience member talks to the contact, she assures you that you are completely incompetent and that another hero could be doing everything that you are doing and doing it better. And this happens in EVERY INTRO and EVERY OUTRO. I imagine if I'd been able to speak to the contact to see what the busy text was, it would have been a comment about how much my character sucks and how much better this other hero is than I am.

So having utterly succeeded in alienating the player from the start, it's a little bit pointless for me to proceed further into the narrative, but to be honest, there's not much there. Things revolve around a ghostly temp service, A tiki lounge singer, and an adversary named Evil Old MacGuffin. Or MacGruffin, depending on which spelling you as a reader decide to go with.

There are a bunch of passing references to some pop culture artifacts like Star Trek and Scooby Doo and then the 'story' or what passes for it is done. The contact takes one more pot shot at your hero and sends you on your way, scratching your head and wondering exactly what just happened.

The long and short of it is that you just took a bunch of pointless abuse for no apprarent reason.

My Thoughts:

- Missions 1 and 2 take approximately 30 seconds each. Since half of the customs are reward borked, if you solo it, you will probably receive a maximum of about 10 AE tickets for playing these two.

- The customs don't have massive alpha strikes. The reason for that is simple. They have offense taken away from them, which means they are AE reward borked. However, I'd say that almost any AT will be able to handle them.

- Played through it on my Tank at whatever settings WN was on and did not sweat anything. I hardly took any damage at all. Even against the AV. I walked into the middle of his mob and yawned.

Overall, I would say that aside from farms I have walked into by accident, this was the single worst MA arc I have played to date. I did not crack a smile the entire time. If it was supposed to be funny, then I guess I just don't get it. Having my character personally insulted repeatedly over the course of an hour isn't amusing to me. References to Trek and Scooby Doo don't equal a narrative. And calling a character MacGuffin doesn't make him one.

Mechanical issues from the guest authors I can deal with. Obviously they are not used to the ins and outs of the AE interface. Therefore I can forgive the lack of rewards and the rest of it.

I can't forgive the horrible writing in this and I can hardly believe that someone with the reputation of Mercedes Lackey actually wrote it.

Thanks for the good reviews. guys.

A 5 star and a... err... 4.58-4.75 star.

About Bloody Vicious... I didn't consider that people might attempt to solo him with a tank class. Did you just reach a point where he wasn't hurting you, but you weren't hurting him either and just timed out?

Again, thanks. I appreciate the kind words.

- S12

Mostly good reviews so far:

2 more 5 star reviews from the Aentertainment Tonight guys on their show tonight, though for Abrahms it was more like a 4.58-4.75 because of the difficulty of Bloody Vicious in mission 4.

Rasta even mentioned that he thought it was Dev Choice worthy, though I think at only 10 total rates, we're a long way off from that.

- Thanks to beta plays by folks like PW, Tangler, Tubbius, etc, I think I've managed to get rid of most of the typos.
- Ended up removing the timer totally from mission 5. It was constraining and when I thought about it, it didn't make much sense at that point in the story. Hopefully, this will give folks the opportunity to fully explore the map and see all the details instead of just flying around willy-nilly and searching for Blitz.
- I will look at Bloody Vicious again. I've never had a problem taking him down, but he is the only one of the mission bosses I've lost to in testing... mainly because he made it to the elevator when he ran. I've subsequently moved the health condition at which the bosses run down to 10%. Trying to beat down 25% of an EB's health while that EB is running away and has a resistance set is probably a bit too tough.

Keep playing.

More self-congratulatory back-patting will come.



- S12

Best New Arc:

1. @Tubbius Hammer and Sickle of Paragon City #351727 - 2 pts
2. @FredrikSvanberg Fear And Loathing On Striga #350522 - 1 pt


Best New Author

@Arctic Princess Simplicity #365497 - 1 pt

Don't let your preconceptions of your story before you even start to write dictate how long it takes for you to tell your story. The story itself will tell you how long it needs to be. If you start to labor to find things to write in the middle sections, then you're probably padding. If you think you're done, but another 3 or 4 things spring to mind, then you probably aren't done.

There's nothing hard and fast that says you have to contain a story to 5 missions. Arc length is an artificial construct. Most genre fiction is serialized. There are fantasy series out there these days in which one book seems to end in mid-sentence and the start if the next book almost finishes the sentence. Perhaps not to that extreme, but we can all agree that there are books that are incomplete and obviously a lead-in to the next part of the trilogy.

There is no reason that mission arcs cannot do the same thing, but remember that if you do so, you probably cut your audience down, up to the point where those who do play it say publicly, "Wow this is really great!"

At that point, if it really is great, most of those who normally wouldn't play a multi-parter will play it just to see what the hype is about. So what you're really doing is probably cutting the audience who would play it initially - not cutting the audience who would ultimately play it if it's good.

The funny thing about people is that even with all the rules they invent for themselves to cut down on the material they consume, ('I'll never read x because..., 'I hate defeat-alls,' 'I hate large maps.' 'I won't play x...,' etc), if they hear the material is good, most of those rules will fall by the wayside pretty quickly.

I can think of several reasons why the community writing project is not good, but I'll stick to the primary one:

It's going to be bad.


Not bad as in, say, so godawful that it would be 1-starred by everyone who chooses to play it, but bad as in 'bland,' 'vanilla,' and/or 'unimaginative.'

The reasons for this are simple.

1.) Writers in general do not work particularly well with other writers. Why? Because our ideas are the best. It doesn't matter whether whether that idea is to re-write "Sex Slaves of the Andorian Moon" from the point of view of the third guardsman from the left or whether that idea is to turn "War and Peace" into a musical. As far as we are concerned, no one can execute this idea like we can and the results are going to be groundbreaking.

When someone comes along and tells us that our idea, well, frankly... sucks, we do not react well to it, especially if that idea is just in the formative stages of development. Our first reaction when our baby gets torpedoed is to torpedo the idea of whoever torpedoed us, no matter how good their ideas are or how bad.

This happens no matter how many people are on the writing team.

2.) "But, Sister, sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live work... in fact don't most TV shows and movies have teams of writers?"

Yes, they do. But in one case, the various writers on the 'team' in reality are not writing as a team. They are working on their own bits in the show pretty much on their own. Their bits go to the powers-that-be, who subesequently either approve or axe them. There is actually very little collaboration that occurs during the actual writing process.

In the second case, the division of labor is clearly delineated from the start. One guy is the head honcho. The rest of the guys are shield-carriers who are responsible for whatever scene it is that the head honcho doesn't feel like fleshing out.

Why do a lot of Hollywood movies suck? Often it is because they try the 'collaborative' approach that inevitably leads to sucking.

Even novelists who team write generally do not 'collaborate' most of the time. Most of the time, what they do is alternate. One writes a chapter. Then the other writes a chapter based off what the first has done.

3.) This medium is too short for a truly collaborative effort anyway.

It might, emphasis on might, work if the 'team' was as small as the MA group. It will not work at all if the 'team' consists of everyone in the community. Why? Because there just isn't enough content to go around in a 5 mission arc. The inevitable result is that ideas will be cut, feelings will be hurt, and the final product will not be a work of collective genius, but a mish-mash of watered down, collective mediocrity.

Go with the competition. I can virtually guarantee you that the finished product of the author that wins will be much better than whatever the community as a whole collectively produces.

There is a reason that art is produced in a singular manner by individuals who all have their own individual process.

Based on multiple players' feedback:

- Altered the size of the map on missions 3 and 4 to correct the pacing issues that started to drag down the arc in the middle of the story. Altered the contact's text to reflect the alteration of the map of mission 4 because the cave map I am using now is obvious Rikti in origin.

- Altered the makeup of The Dying and the HH Staff custom factions to include at least 1 minion, 1 lieutenant, and 1 boss to help with the reward issues. Hopefully, the player will now feel as though he/she is getting a decent reward for playing through those missions.

- Altered the mission type specific to the ambassador in mission 3, so the player no longer has to escort the ambassador to the door to complete the mission. This also had the side effect of correcting the problem associated with "The Dirt" clue, in which the object associated with the clue would never glow or blink until the ambassador was taken to the door. Hopefully this will eliminate the player's need to backtrack through the map to find the clue. Hopefully this will also result in the clues appearing in the character's clue list in the correct order.

- Fixed numerous typos and numerous references in various places to elements of the story that no longer exist.

- Beth McClain is an OSI operative who appears in mission 5. She used a custom character design. Changed her appearance to a recolored Knife of Artemis mercenary in order to free space so that I could add a lieutenant mob to the HH Staff group. Using the recolored Knife of Artemis resulted in a warning that the arc contains higher level villains reduced in level. Beth McClain does not fight. As soon as her story element is completed, she exits the map, so the warning is irrelevant to the arc's game play.

- There is also a warning related to enemies with custom power selections. This refers to the orphans in the final mission who have no attack powers and are there as a story element only. I have tried various versions of these orphans and the fact that their first impulse is to flee from the character works very well for the effect I am trying to achieve. The warning, however, is irrelevant to the game play. The staff members are customs, so they hit very hard, but I've tried to balance the difficulty of this mission to the best of my ability.

- Went back through and added text in that I'd removed before freeing up space. All of the mobs should now have bios again.

Thank you to everyone who has beta played it thus far.

- S12

I have exactly the same feeling here. Yup, going to check this one out soon (tm)

Tonight, in adddition to the normal MA supergroup weekend activity, I ran "Cadaver Crackdown" by Star of Thade.

One of the common refrains common to superhero stories in general is that there are times in which normal law enforcement agencies or officers are insufficient to handle the threats that society faces. Batman becomes Batman, for instance, because crime has become so ingrained into the pulse of Gotham City that the normal people of Gotham need a symbol in order to stand up and take their city back. In other books, it perhaps isn't the world itself that has rendered efforts at upholding the law by normal people moribund, but that the threats have become so large, (the supervillain, the unstoppable crime family, the great disaster), that the normal man cannot defeat them without paranormal assistance.

And as the genre has evolved, writers have written about nearly every angle on every concept common to it. We have seen recognition on the parts of various heroes over the years that the police and other law enforcement agencies would not be able to handle these problems on their own. As recently as in Superman Returns, the man of steel referenced this concept obliquely when he is discussing Lois' pulitzer winning news article with her.

"Every day I hear them crying out for one."

In essence, he is saying that the world needs him because the people cannot handle the threats that face them without him.

And so, in this story, we see this concept from a different point of view. The police themselves, when they recognize that they are insufficient to face the threat, what do they do? Well, unfortunately, in this story, they turn to evil.

This is another concept common, especially, to American literature. Americans in general hold a certain amount of distrust toward authority in general and the police in particular. Perhaps not all of the police. When the police are protecting us from criminals, we appreciate their efforts. But when the police are giving us speeding tickets and otherwise 'harassing' us, we grow annoyed with them. And we have seen many cautionary tales about policemen abusing their authority and the trust that we have placed in them - cops tasering little girls to get them into their cars, cops beating on people, cops shooting people caught on video, etc.

Don't get me wrong. In whole, I think the police holistically are brave men and women who do a largely thankless job. And I appreciate their efforts. But I think these kinds of stories are necessary because they remind us that the police are not simply uniforms and badges. They are men and women and because they are men and women, they are just as capable of making the wrong choice, taking the easy way, and descending down the rabbit hole toward evil as anyone else is.

In contemporary culture, the most similar story to this particular arc that immediately sprang to mind is an episode of the tv show Angel I saw several years ago. The threat to the character is many-fold when the threat comes from the police. There is the immediate physical threat of injury that suddenly paranormal police officers represent to those who attempt to stop them. But on top of that, there is also the threat of loss... ie the loss of the character's reputation and perhaps the loss of freedom since the player's character has set himself against the legal authority.

In this story, the police view themselves as insufficient to face the threats facing King's Row, so they make a deal with a master villain to give them what they believe they are lacking. Power. One of them realizes, (probably too late for him), that they have made the proverbial deal with the devil and brings the player character into the situation to stop this from escalating beyond all control.

The character ultimately succeeds, but not before being forced to bring down nearly the entire precinct in the process. The overtone of all of this is that this particular precinct appears to be relatively beloved by the (much abused) people of King's Row, so there is an added element of pathos to the entire affair.

Overall, there are many elements to this story and, despite the mechanical issues that I had with the arc, from a writing standpoint, it is certainly one of the most sophisticated stories I have played through in MA.

My thoughts:

- I believe the contact's voice can be tightened. He ends up rambling in places and, although this might be intentional in order to make him sound sick, there are times when his musings tend to become unfocused.

- The second mission is probably the one that I think needs work. It takes place on a huge outdoor map, there are bunches of red herring clues, and only 4 clues that are really relevant to the advancement of the plot. In other words, it plays out roughly as a large amount of wandering with no reward because the only rewards in MA come from defeating enemies and it takes a long time to accomplish. There are many players who will not play through the rest of the arc, I would guess, specifically because of this mission.

- The captain of the precinct is, I think, considered by the author to be the ultimate enemy of the arc, however as it plays out, you really only encounter him once. The references to him are rather oblique, therefore you are unsure what he has actually personally done. In other words, the detective you defeat prior to the final confrontation with the captain has more personal meaning to the character because over the course of the arc, there is more build up to this confrontation that there is to the one with the captain.

- There are a few custom characters. They are bursty, as most custom characters are. The visuals on them are pretty well-designed.

- The arc also features that favorite faction of all low-level characters everywhere, the Vahzilok.

- Played it carefully with my Widow at 1/+2/Boss/No Av. The toxic damage of the Vahz and the Rad effects of the Eidolons were pains in the tail, but that is not the fault of the author, and otherwise there were no issues.

Overall, this story is extremely well written. There was quite a bit more to it than you typically see in Mission Architect arcs. It will require a lot of reading on your part, but overall it is a rewarding arc to play.

- S12

Well, not to imply that they are doing anything less than working their tails off, but since we're technically dealing with a 'mirror universe,' a lot of the original map-building work will have already been done because they can use the basica blueprints for some of the Paragon City zones.

Sure, no problem.