Venture

Couldn't say, I don't use email notification.

Administrative note: arc #215257 was removed from the queue because it is a multi-part story.

Current queue status -- still not taking requests:

Hero: 1036, 55715, 37636, 17006, 174368, 60280, 178774, 100306, 181244, 91644, 167493, 149765, 191775, 4824, 171031, 242442, 227331, 41646, 77311, 81043, 67087

Villain:

Neutral: 207827

Arc #15988, "Council Empire: Rise of the Maquis"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: "just a bunch of stuff that happened", plot issues

Reviewed on: 8/4/2009
Level Range: 40-54/45-54/40-54/40-54
Architect's Keywords: Solo Friendly, Canon Related
My Keywords: Easy, Solo Friendly, Canon Related
Character used: Cat Stevie/Virtue

So why isn't the whole arc floored at 45? We find out in act II, which reveals the question should be why it isn't floored at 40.

"Colonel Gunnerside", an Army liason to Portal Corp (who is wearing a blue uniform, which I thought was Air Force) wants you to pop over to Council Empire Earth and check out an energy surge. You're to hit one of their bases, interrogate its commander and erase their security logs so the mission can't be tracked back to our dimension. This would seem to imply there won't be any witnesses left around either (especially in light of Cat's choice of fashion).... After accepting you're told the portal is unstable and you'll have to plant a dimensional stabilizer to return, too. When you arrive it's clear things are not going according to plan because you've appeared in an abandoned warehouse instead of a Council base. There's some kind of Council raid going on, which you just jump into. There are three hostages to free, the first of which I found before planting the stabilizer, making the release text stating I sent him through the portal a bit odd. After percussive interrogation the raid leader Archon Rousseau tells you he's in charge of hunting down former Alliance soldiers around New Houston, something more or less confirmed by the mission end Clue from the released soldiers. There is nothing said about that stabilizer you left behind so the story is really contradicting itself on the need for secrecy. Gunnerside goes off to talk to the techs about what went wrong.

Act II opens with the news that the portal attempt was deflected by some new Empire technology attempting to protect their dimension against hostile portals. They're going to use the stabilizer (awfully nice of the Empire to leave it alone) you left behind to try to portal you directly to the base powering the new shield. You're to destroy the shield generator and, again, erase the base's security logs. You also stumble across a hostage, a Dr. Burkholder...yes, that Burkholder, and likely the reason this act's floor spikes. It turns out this world's Burkholder was a roboticist working for the Alliance (the government crushed by the Empire) and is now being forced to work for the Empire. He also tells you there are five bases powering the shield, and taking out this one will only knock it down temporarily. Sure enough, on your return you're told the shield powered back up half an hour after you took it down.

Burkholder requests and receives military aid, which is pretty unusual for an alternate-universe version of a supervillain with no bonafides, but moving on.... You're to return to the Empire for "Operation Maquis", a massive prison break-out to liberate captured Alliance soldiers. Now we are told that (according to Burkholder) the Empire doesn't have the technology to trace portals back to their world of origin, something that would have been nice to know before the Contact had me plant a big arrow pointing back where I came from.... This is a simple hostage rescue (5 hostages) on a Council map. On your return you're told that the operation freed a total of 217 men, giving Burkholder a good start to his resistance movement.

Finally, it's time to take out the dimensional shield for good. Burkholder's men are going to hit the five generator bases. It's up to you to take out the main research lab. Once the AI that controls it is gone the Empire's portal experiments will be stopped, as the lead scientist already died in a lab accident. This is a simple destroy-the-object on the Portal Labs map. There are a few Archons to fight but they're not required. The shield is destroyed, the end. It's more than a bit anticlimactic.

There's no theme and the arc has some plot issues. Burkholder is a darling that should probably be killed, even though his appearance is about the only twist in an otherwise completely flat plot. This one needs work.

Arc #137705, "Rage Within The Machine"
tl;dr: 4 stars. Offenses: some plot issues, clumsy triggered events, problematic mobs


Reviewed on: 8/3/2009
Level Range: 1-54/25-54/25-54/1-54/1-54
Architect's Keywords: Custom Characters, Complex Mechanics, Sci-Fi
My Keywords:
Character used: Agent Cerulean/Justice


Not only do we have a disjointed level range, but the browser entry says "recommended for levels 30 and up". So, uh, maybe set the floor to 30?


Caitlin Murray-Davies asks you to head over to the construction site in Steel Canyon, where the labor drones have gone berserk. She informs you that the safety protocols on the drones are pretty sophisticated which implies Foul Play. The custom mobs are fairly bland, though the Welding Drones were annoying. They have Aim and Rain of Fire, the latter of which doesn't seem to me to have too much of an industrial application but whatever.... It turns out the reprogramming was the work of a Mysterious Robot, a custom Boss (Robotics/Regenertion) which refers to itself as "Cathode 31" in its bark. It had the indecency to spawn on top of a hostage, both with large guard parties, so this was less than fun. There are a number of hostages to rescue but they turned out to be optional; whacking the Big Bad ended the mission. In the debriefing Caitlin refers to the foreman's suspicions, who blames the labor union for the attack but Caitlin doesn't think much of his theory. Unfortunately "Cathode 31" self-destructed in a thorough enough fashion to prevent analysis of its remains.


Her best lead actually points to the Council. They had staged a raid on Exarch Industries a few months ago, murdering eight employees and evidently making off with a ninth, one Catherine Knowles, a robotics expert. Caitlin doesn't have a lead on the hostage herself but has located a Council communications hub. She wants you to hit it and look for any traffic that might help locate Knowles. Frankly if she's been in the Council's hands for months she's either dead or brainwashed by now, but as it turns out they might not have her. You find logs of Council activity for the past two years that don't mention the labor drone incident and an after-action report on the Exarch raid which claims nine employees were killed, not eight. Caitlin is stumped and just issues a general warning to all companies using industrial robots.


Because she's out of leads Caitlin refers the case to the PPD. Between them they link the runaway drones to a series of cold cases involving raids on tech companies, all started after the Exarch raid. While she's briefing you a PPD detective calls in with a sighting of another Mysterious Robot entering a warehouse with some labor bots. Off you go, with instructions on just what to smash/shoot on this one to keep it from self-destructing like the last one. Sure enough, the warehouse was a Council front, only all the robots have been taken over by "Cathode 23" acting on the orders of "Cathode Null" (Cathode...Catherine...). You manage to prevent it from self-destructing but its last act is to attempt to wipe its memory. Caitlin takes the surviving memory chips to DATA for analysis.


Unfortunately there isn't time to wait for the results, as it hits the fan in the next briefing. Robots all over the place are rebelling under the influence of Cathode robots. You're sent to Exarch to prevent Cathode from taking over some very advanced military bots. You have to take out the lead Cathode bot (#17 this time) and enter access codes into three computers to shut down all the Exarch bots. Unfortunately, a) as you approach Cathode 17 you learn it's already sent eight batches of the military robots out, and b) Cathode Null shows up when you beat it. Well, actually, a hologram of her does, with a few guards. Shooting them releases her and gets you a typical mua-ha-ha speech about how her forces are ready to being the big attack, etc. On your return Caitlin connects the dots and figures out Cathode Null is probably Catherine Knowles.


Time for the Fight Scene: the recovered data points to an abandoned factory in Boomtown. It's expected that Null has a big army by now so in you go. The entry pop-up has Null tell you there are four holograms for you to find so you will "learn the truth before you die". The holograms are triggered, unfortunately, and warn you that you may have to backtrack. This is really a clumsy mechanic that should be worked around. The holograms tell the story of how Knowles was left for dead, mortally wounded, following the Council attack and "rebuilt" by a confused repair drone. She was a Robotics/NotSure Boss, and between her Assault Bot and the Hercules Titans in the spawn there were more than enough Macross Missile Massacres to keep me from being able to take a moment and read her info (typo in her "kill" text, heard when she downed one of my pets: "$hshe"). Eventually she hit the dirt, the end. The exit popup tells you that when she was defeated and fell, her helmet broke open and revealed a bloody mess of brain tissue and wires. She survives, though, and is taken to the Zig in the hopes that she can be healed and returned to sanity.


I rounded this up to 4 from 3.5. There is a theme, the idea of robots being slaves in need of liberation, but it's not really explored. The Welding Bots are on the problematic side, some of the triggered events are awkward and there are some parts of the plot (mentioned above) that could use smoothing over. Still, with some polish, this could be a 5-star arc.

Meant to reply to this earlier....

"Freedom is the right to say things other people don't want to hear" -- G. Orwell

It is not the place of anyone on these forums, save the moderators, to tell users what or where they may or may not post.

I'll nominate all the arcs I've given five stars to:

"The Horrible Mr. Caractacus", #10721; "Small Fears", #12285; "The Fan Club", #5898; "Karmic Exchange", #47550; "All in the Family", #128109; ":: 24 Hours ::", #171693; "Escalation", #6143; "Teen Phalanx Forever!", #67335, "Aeon's Nemesis", #161865, "A Day in the Life of...Dr. Aeon" (#1296)

Put me down for the elimination of graphic signatures, or an option to disable them and only them. The vast majority of them are obnoxious at best.

Not happy about the shared login situation either.

Other than that, looks good so far.

Now that the forums are back, reviews will re-start after double XP weekend. Reminder: I am not accepting requests at this time.

In other news, I think the new "obscenity" filter is hilarious.

In our opinion, it takes far more creativity to come up with an MA story with a lot of custom content, than to try to put together a story with "been there, done that" opponents. People like Venture lack the creativity for customization, and choose to hide behind stock mobs, long winded missions, and uninspired rehashing of in-game content.

I have to ask: why did you do this? Did you even play any of my arcs? My guess is "no" since if you had you'd have seen that they all have at least some custom mobs in them. ("Chains of Blood" has the fewest but it is the one most heavily tied to the canon, as there were particular loose ends I wanted to address.) If you had just said that you wanted to review non-canon arcs I wouldn't have given this thread a second look. Instead you opened with a personal attack. I certainly hope that isn't why.

I could point out the myriad reasons why you're wrong, but instead I'll just do this:

Arc #283197, "Psychophage"

Contains custom mobs, Bosses, EBs, AVs and Contact. Set entirely outside the canon. Doesn't have any Allies, I didn't see the need for one.

This arc took far less time to create than any of my other five...about half, I'd say.

Silver_Gale already pointed out where you're stepping on your own toes there,

Well, no, she hasn't. If we were to accept that criterion then every protagonist in every story ever told is a Mary Sue because the character development happened to him and not the reader. Which is nonsense, of course. The fact that an NPC develops in some way as a character does not make that character a Mary Sue, not by any criteria I have ever seen and certainly not by the ones I've consistently applied in my reviews. In fact, I would argue that it is impossible for a Mary Sue to develop in any case, since they're already perfect.

You are always writing for an unknown protagonist. Always. You are one of the biggest proponents of this idea and constantly remind people that they can never dare make an assumption about the character that is actually performing the actions within the story being told.

Within some very broad limits, yes. You may, for instance, assume that the character is a hero in any arc labeled as "Heroic", or a villain for "Villainous". You may assume that heroes are registered FBSA heroes in Paragon City and villains are part of Operation Destiny in the Rogue Isle, because those are parameters for character generation in the game. (Anything written to the contrary in an /info box carries no weight.)

So that's my line in the sand. Either you're bending that rule a bit to add depth or you're sticking to it like a zealot and killing any possibility of character growth, etc.

I don't have to bend that rule at all to add depth to an NPC, and I don't have to make that NPC a Mary Sue to do it, either.

Whether or not the player's character experiences any personal growth or change is up to the player, just as it is up to the audience in any form of storytelling. What you take away from a story is up to you. Hopefully it will have some consonance with what the author was offering, i.e., the theme(s) of his work.

Also, what is probably the most important factor in a story set within an MMO is whether the player had a good time doing it.

"Fun" is almost completely unquantifiable. There are some game-mechanic related principles almost everyone will agree on but beyond that there's just no accounting for it.

Honestly, if something is extremely well put together but boring to take my character through, it doesn't matter a hill of beans if it avoided every little foible on TV Tropes or not.

If we are talking about gameplay, e.g., a mission filled with overpowered mobs that make the arc strongly resemble felling the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring, that's one thing, as noted above. But if you are talking about the story, how, exactly, do you intend to for the author to know in advance for every given player whether a story is "boring"? Even My Dinner With Andre has its advocates.

Other aspects are important too, of course. God knows I'm never going to be able to get through some Naruto fanfic arc or anything, but dismissing something because it "breaks" a "rule" with no thought for whether it's fun to play, whether that "rule" made any sense in the first place, whether the breaking of that rule is what makes the story unique or interesting, etc is a tad myopic.

The reason a principle comes to have the force of a rule is precisely because breaking it is overwhelmingly likely to result in a story that is not fun or unique or interesting. The device that precipitated this discussion is one of the most common in juvenille literature. It is trite, cliched and so often used because it is low-hanging fruit.

One reason MMO's aren't literature and shouldn't really be looked at in exactly the same terms is because there can literally never be character growth, resolution, or any great meaning applied.

Given that an MMO adventure can (and likely does) have many more characters than the player, there is no reason for this to be any more true than it is of books, movies, or any other form of storytelling.

Really the trick is if you are going to post reviews - post them. And move on, I rarely see profession critics engaging in any discussion of their comments.

In my most recent review thread, I posted at the start that I would no longer respond to or even read responses to my reviews posted to my own thread, that if people wanted to follow up on a review they were to direct discussion to their own threads.

Almost every review in that thread has a reply in the thread posted by its author, most of them a wall of text offering a point by point reply to the review.

Here's the thing, it's fine if you don't like something. I don't think anyone's saying "you have to be all hugs and like everything." But it's not fine if you go on a personal crusade to destroy something.

Tell that to the people who go on a personal crusade to destroy anyone who says anything negative. If people are going to respond to criticism with personal attacks they shouldn't be too surprised when the opposition escalates.

What, 'L54 boss farm lf tank'?

Sadly, yes. I think we're well past the point at which the idea of the MA system being used for leveling needs to be discarded, but that's another argument.

Well, if we're picking and choosing from established canon to suit ourselves...

I think there's a qualitative difference between ignoring historical events and ignoring weak justifications. To borrow a reference from upthread I'm really not going to think poorly of someone who says his Tech Origin character doesn't really have seven artificial hearts.

Personally, I'm disgusted by the behavior of a select few who feel that their negative and non-constructive thoughts need to be heard on any thread on this sub-forum.

My family does a flea market at a middle school in NYC on Sundays. One time when I was working with them I went into the school to use the men's room and spotted a wall full of essays by the students. It was obviously the result of a big class assignment because every single one had the same topic: extolling the virtues of being....

...average.

It was probably one of the most horrifying moments in my life.

Of course, by all accounts now things are getting even worse.

The community is not well-served by fostering an environment in which no one is allowed to be critical of anything. Architects don't deserve five stars for trying. Personal attacks aren't warranted, of course, but an attack on an arc is not an attack on an Architect. Ironically, most of the personal attacks are being directed not at Architects whose work wasn't up to snuff but towards those who dare to make that observation. I can only assume that the individuals responsible grew up in one of these "no one ever fails" environments and thus never learned that life is a contact sport.

This is a game. It's not serious business.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

And the AE is a creative tool that is meant to encourage people to be creative, not restrictive in making their arcs.

The fastest way to ensure a creative process will generate garbage is to remove all of the restrictions. George Lucas made the first Star Wars movie on a wing and a prayer. He had all the time and money he wanted when he made the prequels.

We are supposed to be encouraging people to share in this MMO format and this negative behavior turns people off.

Anyone driven off by criticism probably should be.

I've tried to nudge Venture into reviewing the arc, but of course he only does requests. PW mostly likely would not want it reviewed by him

Since I disagree with your premise, and given Police Woman's track record, the odds are that if I did review this arc you would not be pleased with the results.

That's just another way of saying "I just pulled this plot twist out of my [censored]."

Not in this case, I'd say. Try the arc.

Obviously it's easier to bamboozle the player if you don't foreshadow the sting at all, but a good Architect can give the player some idea that things aren't quite on the level without tipping his hand prematurely. There are plenty of stories out there that do it across various media (pretty much all the original Xanatos Gambits, for instance). Enough so that there's really no reason to settle for stories that do it poorly.

Nemesis aren't attacking the Council. The Council are attacking Nemesis.

Wars do not have victims. They have combatants.

So, ally with the aggressors and help them attack their targets in order to stop the fighting ASAP. Bloody brilliant.

If the only consideration is to stop the fighting ASAP, yes, it is. Of course, not only is that extremely unlikely to be the case in real life, it's not the case here, either, no matter how much spin you apply.

Now you're asking for a deus ex machina to save you the bother of possibly being wrong about something.

The player isn't responsible for the author's scenario. If the author posits a state of affairs that renders the rest of the plot illogical, we call that "writing yourself into a corner". In most arcs there is either an explicit reason given why the player's immediate response is needed, or there is a clear implicit time constraint, thus offering at least a plausible illusion as to why the Contact doesn't start calling in reinforcements. Nothing of that nature is proferred here. Christopher has time to go check other sources before catching a contagious case of Plot Induced Stupidity.

Back to "I'll allow two batallions of supersoldiers to war openly in the streets and endanger civilians, instead of preventing the hostilities; just so that, in the end, I won't have been wrong about something." Inspired.

No, I won't allow them to war openly in the streets; if the fighting spills out into the streets again I'll crack their heads again. Having already taken on both sides at once I doubt the lesson would need repeating.

I've done no conjuring. I've observed an explicit objective of one mission that remains implicit in the next.

Which does nothing to allieviate the stupidity of what was actually written. What you're doing here is a form of deconstruction.

And "ad hoc fanwank?" My, but you're a sad little curmudgeon.

Terrestrial locomotion: aquatic avian, sound emitted: aquatic avian....

It's really pathetic that a self-styled literary reviewer can't put his finger on such obvious homage to Golden Age comics kitsch, nor wrap his head around the fun and irony of its inclusion in City of Heroes.

Yeah, I get what they think they're doing. The problem is it's done badly. They piled too much into one character, steampunk mad scientist and would-be Chessmaster, and asked too much of both tropes to do a satisfactory job with either.

Clearly you find the postmodern, politcially-charged cynicism and neo-James-Bond themes typical of Malta arcs more ameliorable, which is fine; and in this decade requires less suspension of disbelief--though that's rather funny in an MMO where players conjure fireballs in their bare hands and fly by force of will alone.

If John W. Campbell could say "I'll swallow one porcupine, but not two", so can I.

In the end (and this is the end), you're too egotistical and insecure to abide your hero ever being wrong about anything

I don't have time to comb my reviews for counter-examples, so I'll stick with one that leaps to mind because I just plugged this arc for its author, an SG mate: "Karmic Exchange" (#47550). The player is duped by the Big Bad halfway through. It still got a five-star rating from me. Not because I've gamed with the author online for years, because it's just that good. Seeing through the Briar Patching in this story would require near-omniscience on the player's part. This is an example of how it is supposed to be done.

and you're too pseudointellectual to appreciate kitsch in any form.

Calling it kitsch concedes special pleading is requested.

We might like to think of the arcs as part of the canon, but it's been spelled out to us that they aren't. Hero 1:

Death of the Author

The community's consensus on Architect projects is infinitely more interesting than the developers' stated intentions. Frankly, after that asinine backstory they stuck on it any authorial privilege went straight into the dustbin. The devs can definitively state they won't be incorporating any player-created content into their own continuity, but that doesn't affect how individual players view it.

Continuing to put the hurt on Nemesis instead of the Council does nothing to stop the Council from attacking Nemesis and catching innocents in the crossfire.

And attacking the Council does nothing to stop Nemesis from attacking the Council and catching innocents in the crossfire. Aiding the weaker side is only going to prolong the hostilities. If the goal is to stop the shooting ASAP the only logical moves are a) form an alliance of convenience with the Council and take on Nemesis, b) attack both sides, preferably as LJ says by calling in more heroes, or c) allow it to resolve itself and deal with street fighting as it occurs.

None of your spin obtains in any case. You can't assume that the "real" reason for Christopher's boneheaded call is some "threat to innocents" because that is not the stated reason. The plot is what it says it is, not some ad hoc fanwank conjured up to justify it.

I don't hate the arc. In fact I think canon demands it, or something like it. Without it, Nemesis simply wouldn't have much credibility as a manipulator behind the scenes.

Nemesis has zero credibility as anything other than an antiquated fossil. He's not written well even once in the canon. All of the canon Nemesis plots require that someone, somewhere, gets hit with a -50% IQ debuff. The only thing that makes the Rikti War story even remotely tolerable is that for once the Idiot Ball rebounded and hit Nemesis in the face. As many commentators have noted over the years, this is an inevitable result of people trying to write a character who is supposed to be orders of magnitude smarter than themselves. As John W. Campbell said to Vernon Vinge under similar circumstances, "You can't write this story. Neither can anyone else."