SlickRiptide

Shakespeare was that rare talent who could mix and match high-brow and low-brow as needed to entertain many different sorts of audiences simultaneously.

It's a bit more difficult to do that under the limitations of the Mission Architect, though I actually think it might be an interesting exercise to imagine howThe Bard might have told some of his tales under those limitations.

In fact, that gives me some ideas for mission arcs...

I tend to think of Prateorian World the way I think of Star Trek's mirror universe. Tyrant is pretty much Statesman with a goatee. (Yeah, I know he doesn't technically wear one.)

This story is making me rethink that a bit. In fact, Mother Mayhem pretty much creeps me right out. I don't think I'll be seeing either her or Malaise quite the same way any more.

It's not entirely broken, which makes it more frustrating, actually.

It's a proximity/line of sight thing. If the hero is close enough to whatever the mob thinks is its perception range, it will use the character's name, otherwise it will say $name.

I don't play on Virtue much, so I can't offer much help. At the same time, I have to echo Averick a little bit.

Whenever I DO visit Virtue, finding RP is typically as simple as walking out into Atlas Plaza and striking up a conversation.

I'd offer two pieces of advice:

1) Post this in the Virtue forum instead of the Roleplaying forum. Despite the name of this particular forum, what you really want is to tell people on your server about your supergroup and why you're recruiting and who is a good fit.

2) Be a little more clear about why it is that you're posting. I sort of have the impression that the problem you're attempting to solve is not "where is the RP?" it's "Where are the people who would be willing to engage with or even become players in our supergroup's story?"

Those people will be found in the server forum.

Harumph. The arc I planned to post here has been taken down. Too bad. It looked to be part of a series of "untold adventures of signature heroes".

I suppose I'll pimp my arc instead.

Arc Name: The Galaxy Girl Maneuver
Arc ID: 132673
Morality: Heroic
Faction: Minions of Igneous (it lists Custom also, but that's only because the bosses are each in their own groups).
Length: Four missions, one hour give or take
Difficulty: Levels 5-15, soloable depending on archetype and veteran powers
Synopsis: Mender Lazarus recruits you to mend a timeline that was inadvertently altered as a side effect of a mission run by your future self. Setting things right reveals that it was not accidental at all. Someone is attempting to erase Galaxy Girl. It's up to you to thwart their plans and save not only Kelly Graham but history as we know it.

Correct me if I'm wrong - This weird variety of minions appears because you want the mission to spawn level-appropriate enemies for a wide range of players?

Don't bother. Really. Just pick a cohesive theme (preferably that doesn't involve someone being the "heir to a clan of ninjas") and run with it and don't worry about being all things to all people.

When you incorporate recognizable, iconic NPC's from the game in your arc, the average player is not going to tell himself "Ah, these aren't literal Skulls and Council soldiers, they're meant to represent generic minions of this evil mastermind I'm opposing." Hes going to say "Why are Skulls and Warwolves in the same story and why the heck are they working for Evil, Inc.?" Especially when one of those NPC's has the words "Skull Buckshot" or "Warwolf Alpha" over its head.

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Was the 1st Rikti invasion anything to shout about? I missed that event and also missed the 5th/Council war.

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Events tend to grow in importance as time goes by because the participants remember it fondly as their "sovereign experience".

Truthfully, the Rikti invasions we have today would not be so different than the end of beta invasion, except that the rikti leaders were controlled by devs (hence, playing intelligently and nigh invulnerable). Even if the general chaos level rose to the level that the old beta testers remember (or think they remember) the power sets and slotting today is nothing like what players had back then. We are both stronger and weaker, though mostly stronger.

I suspect there would be a lot of people saying "Wait, this is what we've been envying all this time? We get this every weekend..."

Honestly, if you go do a mothership raid, it's a reasonable approximation of what the end of beta invasion was like.

Similarly, the Fifth Column/Council War was great because it was new. There had been NPC's in the streets and NPC's threatening each other, but never NPC's actually battling and destroying each other.

Nowadays, that's ho-hum. We can make a whole roomful of battles in the architect if we want.

So, I guess I'm saying "You had to have been there." I think it will be great to experience it again if that's what happens, but I suspect a lot of people will be scratching their heads and saying "What was so great about that?" because they won't be getting the "wow, never seen that before!" rush from it that the original participants got.

I'm on the West Coast and I work from 7:30 to 4:00 so I'm going to miss the majority of the day. Probably most of it, given that spending time with the family and making dinner and what-not goes into those hours afterwards.

/shrug

It ain't an ideal world.

I don't have a clue why the hours are set the way they are. My guess is that this event is going to be very "hands-on" for the staffs of NCSoft and Paragon Studios in comparison to the way the game typically runs itself. It's not really a coincidence that 8am PDT is the beginning of the work day for the devs at Paragon Studios or that those self-same devs might want to actually go home by 9:00pm and decompress after a day of double-shifts.

C'est le vie.

As for the event, there is very little in this game that happens without there being at least a token effort to put some story behind it. If Matt went to the effort to capitalize the word CHAOS, I have a feeling that it means more than just "lots of anarchy in the streets". I'd guess that it refers to some new villain or organization that's behind whatever's going on, especially if that means that timelines are merging and the fifth/council war is suddenly taking over the streets, rikti mother ships are flying over Atlas Park, and soldiers of Rularru are bouncing around Steel Canyon.

Any of you who CAN make it to some or all of the mid-day events will have to keep a running commentary up on the forums for those of us who are obliged to server our employers instead of participating.

Perfect. It's a triangle.

Perhaps. When he says "we will call upon you too" he is referring to the Kheldians as a group. He says "too" because he told War Witch a couple of panels prior that she should rebuild her coven because the time was coming when the Kheldians would need to ally with the witches and, more generally, the supers. "Refound your coven, witch. Choose a NEW warrior to take your place. The time is coming when my kind must call on your kind."

The alien nature of the Kheldian is emphasized by the fact that it the final scenes it doesn't refer to either War Witch or Apex by name. It also refers to its fellows as "some are sleeping, as I did in Horus". The Kheldian sees Horus as a vessel, nothing more. It does not see Horus as part of itself the way that a Kheldian melded with a living human might.

The way I see things, it might well be some other Kheldian that would "call on" Apex. If his "friend" was the one to make the call, it might acknowledge Apex's fond memories of "Horus" but I don't see it wanting to BE Horus.

Of course, you could always pull the Trill gambit and have Apex discover that his friend "Horus" is now melded to a very comely 18-year-old girl who thinks that Apex is a bit of a hottie. I may have just given away a really good idea for mission architect story arc. *heh*

There's nothing to be done about Horus, IMO. Horus was an illusion. A psychotic break. Unlike the Kheldian meldings we have in-game, Horus was dead from the get-go, or he died within seconds of the melding.

His last words to Hernando are telling on two counts: "You, too, we will call upon. Until then, I am Horus no more. I go to wake the Kheldians." One, "Horus" is gone. Two, Sunstorm or another representative of the Kheldians may eventually find a reason to involve Apex with some aspect of their story.

If we assume that Blue King and Top Cow represent the same continuity, then I'd say that Apex hearing about Positron's attempt to reincorporate War Witch and bringing him the sword is perfectly consistent.

The final page of the comic is titled "Some Time Later, Paragon City". That's deliberately vague. It could be ten minutes or ten months. Hernando is nostalgic but looking to the future. The scabbard is attached to his back and he's replacing the sword into it.

There's no reason to carry it around like that if he has no intention of using it. It's no coincidence that, aside from being out of the way for punching people, the sword is positioned where it would be hung according to the weapon-drawing animations used in City of Heroes.

I remember back in the day that one of the rationales for the shout of "Level fifteen scrapper..." (ignoring the obvious fan service) was that he had re-rolled into broadsword. *heh* A level fifteen would never have taken on most of the enemies that Apex fought during the run of the comic.

If I was to judge by the scene, his mourning is finished and he's stepping out into the city once again to take up the mantle of hero.

As to his personality, I think Apex would be pretty much the same as ever. A little sadder and wiser, but not fundamentally altered. If having his roommate burn down a warehouse full of people and kill many of them didn't affect him, I don't see him being eternally damaged by her death.

He's gregarious by nature, so I'd see him joining a group or at least joining up with some more or less permanent partners again.

I think that I would try to achieve this effect by using a lot of triggered battles. Judging by the quick test I just ran you can trigger multiple battles from a single trigger, and they're on a different set of spawn points from those used by the mission enemies. That may, of course, be map dependent.

You'd have to choose your map carefully in order to support that many battles. It would almost have to be an outdoor map to achieve the effect you want of a mass invasion, or at least an indoor map with a large room that would let the player see the dialog balloons popping up all around.

Your biggest problem is just going to be finding a map that lets you generate that many spawns to start with.

Your next problem will be that the battles cannot be specified to be just one hero per battle. You're going to have multiple opponents on each side of the battle, and the models chosen will be essentially random. If it's a supergroup invasion, then you might need to have five or six battles, and have each individual battle involve a custom group of three members of the supergroup (which should not be named Freedom Force for obvious copyright reasons). That would give the highest probability of having all fifteen members of the supergroup appear, though it would NOT be a guarantee that there would be no duplication.

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Arc #1026, "To Hell and Back"
There's nothing said about Menloth having to survive, and I don't think it's even possible to have that as an objective yet, but I played along and didn't target him.

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Menloth actually has the best dialog in the mission. It's kinda too bad that you decided to be a nice guy about it.

On the one hand, the Grinch reference was really cute. On the other hand it made me stop reading immediately to post this. I s that good or bad? Hmmm...

*Edit* Good stuff Maynard. Mother Mayhem is genuinely creepy. I like the idea the characterization of Malaise. He's conflicted without being emo.

File a /bug report so the devs know to fix it.

The architect has a way of turning white space into html-like markers. If this happens after the normal error check, you can overflow a field without getting the orange error warning.

I'd check all of your text fields and shorten any that look like they're riding up against the field size limit. See if giving an extra five space or so on each one makes the problem disappear.

Also, file a bug report using /bug.

...riding the train meant stopping at EVERY station? Those reader boards that read "Next Station X" were actually accurate.

...you could hear toilet flushing if you stood near the restrooms in the train station?

...there was no travel power suppression so you could joust to your heart's content?

...the reward for doing a mission was the fun of having experienced the story? Completion bonuses were on the order of 20xp/inf, and the devs were afraid even that might somehow be too much. Missions also gave full debt. Despite the innovations that CoH introduced, at launch the devs were still very much convinced that the Everquest "lots of mobs standing around waiting to be killed" model was what players really wanted, and that rewarding missions would somehow be encouraging a kind of exploit. Somewhere along the way they realized that they had written all of these cool stories and nobody was playing them because the game essentially penalized you for doing so.

...hazard and trial zones were full of people because they were the fastest way to level? See previous remembrance, along with the prior mentions of various herding strategies.

...you could run out of missions by levels 28 and 38 and be forced to do nothing but street-sweeping if you insisted on playing solo?

...accolades arrived and low level players were selling spots on Spelunker badge teams to high level players that had skipped the early content?

...players discovered for the first time why The Statesman was not standing in Atlas Park alongside Ms. Liberty and actually thought it was a pretty cool story?

...The Hamidon went down for the first time and the devs said "Huh, that wasn't how we expected it to happen..."?

...Sister Psyche was wearing Aurora Borealis' body and Calvin Scott was standing nearby plotting to evict her?

...ambushes were not adjusted for group size? A solo player accepting a mission and triggering an ambush could expect anywhere from three to seven white and yellow mobs to come charging at him. If he face-planted, the ambush would then stand around and wait for him to come out of the hospital so that they could track him down and do it again.

Ah, memories.

Threads like this are why I don't want to deal with feedback through tells. Leaving you a rating less than five stars is not griefing you. Different people have different standards as well as different likes and dislikes.

Calling it griefing is basically saying that you deserve a five-star and anything else is just people being stupid. Get over it. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

I've got a lowbie arc, 10-20 range. My lvl 22 scrapper did well on it. I used my level 15 sonic defender as the litmus test, using only his two attacks from his secondary. (No vet powers.) He had some rocky bits, but was able to hold his own as long as I didn't rush through and end up with six guys on him at once. This character had taken all of the team buffs to that point, so he was really gimped compared to the typical character his "age". I figure if he was able to go through it that the average hero ought to be able to.

I'd be curious how anyone does. The arc is #39208, The Galaxy Girl Ploy (which ought to be the Galaxy Girl Gambit but can't be for obvious reasons). It does have a custom group but I've taken some pains to keep them manageable.

I'll save you some trouble on mission three (four total). If a boss runs, let it go. It's designed to escape (the map has a lot of doors to run through) and if you follow the dialog you SHOULD realize why unless I failed as a writer. *heh*

That's funny, because in beta test people were saying that willpower made the customs really hard to wear down.

I don't care if I get a thank you. I suppose it's nice but the truth is that I'm not interested in starting a conversation when I leave feedback. So many people leave no feedback at all, that I figure some kind of acknowledgement is appreciated by the author, normally.

When the author disagrees or wants clarification, I might oblige but I'd rather do it at my leisure and not when I'm about to go run another mission.

I suppose it's BECAUSE I typically say more than "GJ but use a smaller map".

I've published the occasional fan fiction on the roleplaying forum so I know what it's like to literally starve for feedback and want to pick the brains of anyone who seems willing to give you input. As the "pickee", though, the current feedback system ends up making me wish I'd just kept my opinions to myself much of the time.

I've had some luck with defining a minion to be ranged or melee, and then giving it power sets such that it has only one attack appropriate to its defined range. If that attack is in a secondary power set, so much the better. It doesn't so much weaken them as cause them to spend a lot of time running around trying to find the right range, which indirectly results in a lowered DPS from the minion.

Sometimes you just don't have a choice. Try finding any kind of "small" outdoor map. If you need a couple of non-destroyed city blocks that isn't obviously Atlas Park or someplace in the Rogue Isles, your choices just aren't that great.

It can get frustrating. I have this story that deals with stopping a villain who is interfering in the origin story of Galaxy Girl. Now, I don't expect to be able to pick "Constellation Row" but at the same time, it can't look like Atlas Park or Mercy Island either.

To really tell the story, I WANTED to show the progression of events leading up to Galaxy Girl's "birth", meaning chained objectives.

Yeah. After trying it a dozen ways I just gave up on that idea because it was too smegging boring running from one end of the map to the other trying to find the next objective. In the end, I finally ended up with some non-required objectives for flavor, and only two required objectives, which really should be chained but even chaining two of them was just too much boring work as a player.

Which then leaves the player asking "Why am I scouring twelve city blocks just to find two objectives?" Well, there just ain't any other maps to use, Mr. Player! If I had a two-block-square map, you could bet that I would have used it.

I did fill out a lot of the rest of the space with some battles that at least make the ambience a bit more interesting than acres and acres of mission enemies standing around waiting to be harvested.

I think this story is an interesting look at the psychology of the Praetorians. I can't help thinking, though, that in Statesman's shoes my response to "Tell or Show" would have been "I changed 'your' diapers. I've seen it all already."