Venture

If I was going to list Venture's biggest sin as a reviewer, it's that he doesn't review anything based on it's technical merits or on whether the author achieved their intent,

That's about the only thing I do grade them on.

This means that if your arc includes time travel, Nemesis, or in any way intimates that his character might feel a certain way about something, he's likely to absolutely hate it despite anything else it might have going for it.

False, and I don't nearly have the time to list all the counter-examples.

If it's a valid reason for stopping the first battle, it's a valid reason for preventing a second one.

That is not the reason put before the player. What is actually written throws the Idiot Ball. And I'm far from the only person who thinks so -- in fact, you are the only person in five years I've ever heard defend this arc.

Yeah and the whole "AE is all a video game" is a cop-out to explain how all the various arcs people create within the canon world can contradict each other. It was my understanding that the general consensus is that arcs are to be treated as if they were "real" unless they are obviously set outside the CoH multiverse, flagged "non-canon" or the dialogue indicates that the arc is a simulation.

That's pretty much how I see it. Unless the arc expressly sets itself outside canon it is to be taken as if it were a "standard" mission arc. Whether or not it "actually" is doesn't matter.

Otherwise any inconsistencies in the setting can be handwaved with "it's just a simulation".

It's stated in the first mission of the war between Nemesis and the Council that the conflict itself is causing significant collateral damage; and therefore the objective isn't to destroy both factions in one master stroke, but to force immediate detante in order to protect the public.


That's the excuse given for stopping the first battle, and if that was all there was to it, I wouldn't object. Unfortunately, it isn't:

[ QUOTE ]

The Nemesis Army and the Council are going for each other's throats in an all-out war of conquest, and Nemesis seems to be losing. I can't believe it, but it looks like Nemesis's forces have been hurt worse than I even suspected by all the defeats you've handed him. At this rate, the Council will be able to absorb Nemesis's entire organization within a month. Then the Center would have Nemesis as a replacement for Vandal! They'd be unstoppable!

So, God help me, I need to ask you to help me, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but help me help Nemesis by attacking the Council. I've discovered a key ammo depot for the Council; I'd like you to hit the supply depot and scour it for intelligence.


[/ QUOTE ]

...demonstrating that Maxwell Christopher has six-slotted the fifth power in Super Leap: Jumping the Shark.

Someone said that responding to some criticism with, "it's a simulation" was a dodge, but it's not at all (depending on the criticism, of course) It is considered a simulation.

It is not considered a simulation. The souvenir is no different from any other "normal" arc's souvenir. The author's claim to the contrary here carries no weight in my book.

By contrast, consider my arc "Why We Fight", which is expressly cast as an interactive AE simulation.

Personally I think it's a marginal case. I'd agree that taking Derek at his word (the Midnighters are really CoT) and killing Midnighters would be a case of catching the Idiot Ball,

...which is what I meant. I didn't think I had to spell that out. Some goomba I've never met, with no bonafides, tells me "those guys who look like friends are really enemies, take them out" and I pretty much have to do it.

but in point of fact, my scrapper Supersped past Derek and didn't kill any Midnighters; I just two-shotted all the pillars, ignoring the mobs.

If your character had the wherewithal to avoid all the mobs then good for you, but I'd wager nine out of ten people playing the arc in question are going to have to fight at least some of them.

Venture's estimation of "The Eternal Nemesis" springs readily to mind, but there have also been some user-created arcs where I've disagreed with his use of the trope.

"The Eternal Nemesis" has the Contact (and thus the character) fall for an obvious trick. Worse, even if it wasn't a trick, the proscribed course of action is still wrong. The proper strategic move was to let the two enemy factions slug it out and then take on the winner before he could recover or consolidate. Having the Contact not realize that in the face of an enemy he himself constantly states is a master of deception is just beyond stupid.

If you want to discuss my invocation of the trope in reviews you'll have to be more specific.

Thanks for the review!

The contact is the beastly Dietrich! But... she's being nice to me. I don't really want a contact who demeans me, but I also think Dietrich should be mean.

I was on the fence with her portrayal myself but the majority of respondents thus far have liked it. I felt she'd have some of the wind taken out of her sails by the resolution of the Vanguard arcs.

Special K is a drug?? I didn't realise a cereal and a habit were the same thing

Ketamine, a real-life drug. It is an anesthetic usually used by vets, but can be abused for recreational purposes.

Martha Kincaid description: divsion -> division

Thanks, I'll fix that once I'm out of this instance...h8 that we can't use the comlink in them any more.

Taggart (Arachnos) is mingling with Malta. Not seen that before. I can see their turf overlapping, but working together?

Not really working together, he showed up and whacked Kobushi for them. The Malta goons were just letting him leave...he wasn't there to mess with them, as far as they were concerned it was an internal Arachnos thing and none of their business.

As for precedent, there's this from the LRSF (Recluse speaking):

[ QUOTE ]

Malta has proven to be an important asset to Arachnos. Their advanced weaponry and skilled personnel are excellent, and they are the perfect mercenaries to use when Arachnos wants to disassociate themselves from a delicate operation.


[/ QUOTE ]

Of course, Recluse goes on with the overstepping-their-bounds-yadda-yadda to explain why you have to go beat them up now.

"A.V." Livingston. Heh. I guess acronyms are better than anagrams.

OK, I'm going to tip my hand now. There's very little chance anyone would actually break the code here. Anyway: if I drive from my home in West Orange to the town of Hanover, I have to go through Livingston first. "A. V." are the letters before "B. W.", as in Bernie Wrightson. And at least according to the online translators I tried, "Kobushi" is a Japanese word for "fist".

The fans over 30 should be able to take it from there, at least.

Adding:

5 stars: "A Day in the Life of...Dr. Aeon" (#1296)

4 stars: "Toys from Heck: The Penny Preston Taskforce" (#149323), "Shadow Initiation" (#67356)

you never let it go, Venture. You always have to have the last word, followed with 'and now im done with this nonsense', as though the other person involved is so much worthless scum.

I think an accurate vetting of my responses in various forum threads would show a substantial number of cases in which I simply walked away.

Ive never seen you say 'well lets just agree to differ' or anything of that ilk.

Just off the top of my head, I'd direct your attention to the threads for "Two Households Alike" and "Why We Fight" in which I did exactly that.

so someone posts a 'hey everyone, here's an arc i enjoyed!' thread, and the forum heavies turn it into a witch-hunt. Disgraceful behaviour.


No, only when the subject material warrants it.

And I would have let it go with one post if people hadn't yanked my chain.

This isn't the first time you blow up canisters and whatnot to stop a plague in game, and since this is the same game where the preferred method of stopping a ghost is punching it in the face repeatedly, smashing the shell and incinerating the canister didn't seem out of line.

I don't care how many times the developers make a mistake, it's still not acceptable for MA authors to repeat it.

The contact mentions (twice actually) that they ARE sending in a hazmat team to ensure the area is safe once you clear out the Arachnos. When you leave the map for the first time, it's clearly stated the sent in a cleanup team to scrub the area.

Too late.

They did. It's stated in the 1st mission dialog that Arachnos came straight down in their fliers, and immediately set up. After you check the area, you report back to Solemnise, who informs you they're waiting for Liberty to show up, and that they are sending in the cleanup crew. Mission dialog then points out specifically that 24 hours after they'd been in there, since they didn't return, they sent in SWAT and superheroes to investigate. The Hazmat team was doing their job, but as evidenced by mission 2, just ran out of time.

This isn't even close to correct. The area would have been quarantined immediately once it was known Arachnos was deploying a bioweapon, and CDC/SERAPH/etc. would have gone batty as soon as the leak was discovered. The response your story is describing is as if an oil tanker truck crashed on the highway and spilled oil all over the place. Do some reading about, say, predicted results of an airborne Ebola outbreak, and then consider that would be practically the common cold in the City universe. (Some of more out-there ones I've seen say weaponized strains of airborne Ebola could kill 20 million in a week. I don't know how much faith to put in that, but if they're off by a factor of 100 it's still horrifying.)

Furthermore, it's just laughable that no one would notice the center of one of the most important cities in the world going all Resident Evil for 24 hours. Of course, again, you're going to argue that none of this was "real" anyway but you're just digging yourself in deeper with that.

That's Hero-1's sword, that she normally wears at her waist. In game lore, she refuses to use it, instead holding on to it, awaiting Hero-1's return.

As Eva has pointed out, that's Excaliber and it's not that she refuses to use it, it's that she can't. Even Hero-1, the rightful bearer, can't use it now due to his...condition. I didn't bring this up earlier myself because with the rest of the transgressions it would have amounted to Arson, Murder and Jaywalking. Since the whole thing is a hallucination anyway it will just be handwaved in any case.

I'd like to note that once the hospital is introduced, you are told repeatedly that there's no supervillain plot, up to and including the fight with 'Nemesis' in which it begins with him outright stating he's not Nemesis, and then ending with you tearing off his mask to reveal...he's not Nemesis.

Once you have played the Dishonest Author card, you can't point to anything in your story as justification for your intended interpretation. Anything and everything could be a hallucination or deception of some kind. Thus, there is no valid interpretation of this story because there are no facts at all upon which to base one.

I think you're reading way too deeply into things, dude.

You cannot both claim that your arc is making some kind of philosophical statement and that people are reading it too deeply.

1. Something that can be finished in a reasonable amount of time. I won't limit it to number of missions as we've all seen the giant uber map one mission arc that takes three hours or the thirty minute 5 mission arc. Something in the hour range, give or take.

I believe all of my arcs can be run in less than an hour.

2. No defeat alls!

I have no de jure defeat-all objectives in any of my arcs. There are some that will probably play out as de facto defeat-alls, though.

3. Something fun! No that doesn't mean it has to be light hearted or a comedy arc, just a fun engaging story.

All five of mine are good here.

4. We love a good challenge. As long as its not ree-diculously impossible, we do like a tough mission.

Four out of my five current arcs have an AV in the last act, none of which are dialed up to 11. "Why We Fight" has nothing bigger than a Boss; it's a comedy arc and I don't think AVs or EBs are appropriate for such.

6. We aren't fond of Oranbega maps, but will tolerate the smaller/middle sized ones if the story is worth it. We're also a little tired of the cargo ship map as well.

"Chains of Blood" has two small Oranbega maps; "Splintered Shields" uses the small cargo ship map once. That one should, however, give you a particularly chaotic ride on a sizeable team, though, and while it does have glowies on it none of them are required objectives.

7. We are currently floating around lvl 40 so arcs there or higher would be great. [Note: we will not exemp down for an arc. As much as I love a good story, we play to level up]

"Two Households Alike" is out for you, then, it is a 20-29 Family arc. "Why We Fight" currently has its first act locked at 29; the other three scale to the top. I am currently experimenting with a variant of it that would be 40+ throughout.

You can find my arcs by searching on "@Venture" (don't leave out the "@") or you can get the numbers from the link in my signature.

Certainly this style of story has been done before and it will be done again because of one very important thing: it challenges our perception of perception.

Actually it doesn't. These stories are not profound. They're just cheap shots. That's why they're so commonly done by adolescent or amateur writers.

I've never seen Buffy but one example that jumps to mind is "12 Monkeys", a movie I very much enjoyed. It is superficially very similar, the contrast of 'reality' with 'hospital' and continually asks the viewer "what is real?"

As Lazarus points out 12 Monkeys plays games with the main character's head but plays fair with the audience. Good luck with that in a MA project.

I think this arc has done an admirable job of bringing up these issues (I offer all the discussion and reviews here as proof) and I wish there were many more arcs like it out there.

Controversy does not equate to profundity. The entire field of postmodernism brought about no end of controversy but had very little actual content. Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore could fart into a microphone and cause two weeks of arguments.

As a total aside, my RL name ("Tabitha") anagrams perfectly to "Habitat" so what does that say about me? Let us never forget that (though it it not the case here) coincidence does happen and nothing is significant till proven to be so!

What would we get if we included your last name, using all the letters? My guess is you couldn't make anything out of it without leaving out letters. It is much more likely that an anagram in a name found in an arc is the result of deliberate choice than mere coincidence, so it is proper for the player to assume it is going to be significant until shown not to be.

Yeah, I found the mob in MA last night. I haven't tried using it in a test mission to see what it does, but the power is listed as Call For Backup.

It definitely sounds like it's bugged. Sadly, if the pets don't give XP they probably don't count for the PPD badge either, not that it's any kind of ordeal for villains to get that one.

An anagram is a declaration? of what? even if I had noticed it, I would not have leapt to conclusions based on its presence.

No one accidentally picks a name that anagrams to Lord Nemesis. In fact, if a name completely anagrams (using all the letters) to anything at all it's likely to be significant.

It couldn't have developed a leak upon arrival?

It could have but no competent HAZMAT worker would make that assumption. They'd assume the worst because they'd have to.

Its a classic - classic - story technique whether you like or not.

I'm aware of numerous examples of its use. Many of them provide a definite answer to avoid cheating the audience. Some of them do not, and they tend to be controversial at best. From what I have seen there is really not much respect for this kind of story in the way it is done here in critical circles because it is too easy. As I said before it's the kind of thing you see in high-school English classes.

he problem, from my perspective based a couple of threads now, is you can't review and let it lie.

From my perspective, people won't let my review lie. It was OK for people to post BEST ARC EVAH without showing their work but as soon as I said I didn't like it I was accused of being a troll.

Arc #59147, "Shades of Betrayal, Acts of Salvation"
tl;dr: 3 stars. Offenses: throws the Idiot Ball, weak themes, balance issues, weak dialog

Reviewed on: 7/22/2009
Level Range: 25-35 (25-37 in act V)
Architect's Keywords: Canon Related, Save the World, Drama
My Keywords: Save the World, Magic
Character used: Amelia Escobar/Virtue

"Aaron Kinkay" (custom Contact, bio says he's a Midnighter researching parallel world and secret cults) wants your help in tracking down some unusual magical activity. Their leads point to the Grim Vale in Croatoa. This takes place on one of the more annoying outdoor Croatoa maps as you can't really scout it from the air. There are some Fir Bolg (that only spawned at 34 to my 35, on CL2) and Circle mobs about. Your target is "Sicarius", a Circle of Thorns Agony Mage, who is cutting a deal with the Fir Bolg for access to a new source of magical power. He drops a coin when you pummel him, which you take back to Aaron for research.

Aaron says the coin is connected to the Un'se'lei Council, which it seems are not to be confused with the Unseelie Court. While Aaron tries to get in touch with them, you're off to Founders' Falls to deal with the sudden appearance of some pillars. While the briefing suggests another outdoor mission you're instead sent to a Troll-type caves map. You have to destroy six pillars (typo in Clue: "whisp") and defeat "Garik", War Mace/Willpower Boss, with the help of "Derek" (War Mace/Invulnerability), both Un'se'lei. Derek tells you the Midnighters in the cave are actually Circle of Thorns in disguise. Once again the mobs spawned under level (I suspect there are level coverage issues in the factions used). When you finish, it turns out you've caught the Idiot Ball: those were Midnighters, Derek is a traitor and you've destroyed the pillars that were separating our world from the Un'se'lei world.

For your next task, you must retrieve the seven "Kalthor Keys" needed to repair the dimensional barriers. These are in the hands of Derek and Sicarius. Aaron also warns you that some of the Midnighters are now gunning for you thanks to your colossal stupidity. This one comes with a bring-friends warning. I'm not sure why as there was only the one Boss, Derek (who has a period after his name for some reason). Derek gives up four of the keys on defeat; Aaron recovers the rest off-screen. There is also an objective to "Rescue Garik" but that is achieved upon reading a stone with a message from him stating no prison can hold him. In the debriefing you are told the Un'se'lei have branded Derek and his men "Unseelie" meaning "outcast", which is beating up on Irish mythology but that was pretty much pummeled to death in the Croatoa arcs anyway.

Now that you have the keys it's time to rebuild the barriers, which will require humans and Un'se'lei to work together. You're sent to join up with someone named Elara in a 30 minute timed mission. You've got seven glowies to find with an Earth Control/Empathy Boss ally, making this an easy free-throw. The same goes for the next mission, in which you get two Allies, Garak and Javasha, a Dual Blades/Willpower Elite Boss. You have to take down Sicarius again, then hunt down some glowies, which trigger more glowies, then fight Kilcarsadur, the Circle Archmage in charge of the plot (Baron Zoria renamed). The two allies make it all way too easy.

The arc does have themes of betrayal and "power at any price", but it doesn't do much with them. There are some balance issues; the allies are too many and too powerful. The whole conflation between Un'se'lei and Unseelie really should just go away. There's a good story in here struggling to get out but it needs work.

You don't like having your precious little snowflake of a character having an identity crisis, you hate Nemesis, you apparently don't read all the arc's text, etc. etc., we get that.

I do read all of the text. Usually twice. I read what you wrote. What you wrote was bad.

As for hating Nemesis, he's become a magnet for a particular type of very bad writing, which this arc is an example of. I used him myself in "Why We Fight", albeit in a humorous context, and I five-starred "Aeon's Nemesis", which has him as the Big Bad. The character is poorly used in canon and too many people seem to think that what the developers do is right just because they did it.

I'm just pointing out how absurd it is to take an arc, ANY ARC, in which the author actually made a real attempt at creating a coherent story, paid strict attention to game lore, used reasonably balanced and interesting looking custom mobs, added lots of things to see and do, properly equalized level range, added contact and custom mob info, a souvenier, and so on, and then calling that arc outright terrible, a prank, wishing you could vote it negative stars, and so forth.

Attempts don't matter. Results do.

Full disclosure: the author is an SG mate.

This arc earned a five-star rating from me. It's well worth a play.

If I may deconstruct this a little, you seem to be ignoring a lot of things here.

Pet peeve: this is reductionism, not deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is taking a text (which doesn't have to be an actual text) and re-interpreting it so that it says the opposite of what it was intended to say (or, really, anything the interpreter wants it to say).

This was done specifically with this contact, and for this reason, because there is precident in the actual game for the exact same thing happening with this exact same sort of anagram, and, it hints that something is wrong to the observant right away.

The devs do not have papal infallibility. It's not right just because they did it. It is not a "hint" that something is wrong, it is a flat-out declaration, and it mocks the player because there is nothing he can do about it other than refuse to play the arc. Quoting Arcanaville from my first review thread:

[ QUOTE ]
By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.

The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.

[/ QUOTE ]

Rubbing the player's nose in an obvious Nemesis plot (or any other type of screw-the-player plot) constitutes terminating that contract with extreme prejudice.

If you actually read the mission dialog, the clues state you very carefully incinerate the canister, anything it came in contact with, AND the surrounding area. And then when you leave, you and the contact send in biohazard clean up crews in case you missed anything. It's right there in the mission text.

Yes, I read it the first time, and it is completely wrong. If those cannisters contained biohazardous materials and one was found to be leaking, the response would not be to blithely assume incinerating a few things would fix the problem. It would be more like OMFG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE RED ALERT ALL HANDS ON DECK BATTLESTATIONS DEFCON ONE! The cannister could have been leaking all the way from the Rogue Islands, it could have infected any number of people, including the player, the bioagent could have leaked over any amount of terrain and if it is an airborne agent it is already too late for the city. All of Atlas Park, if not the entire city, would have been quarantined on the spot until CDC, SERAPH, whoever, had figured out what they were dealing with.

That, by the way, is just considering the kinds of bioweapons that really exist, which frankly are scary enough. When you start throwing in the kind of things that could exist in City -- magically-active bacteria, techno-organic nanoviruses, "grey goo" -- really, it's a miracle the City world hasn't exterminated itself a dozen times over by now.

I know that's harping on what's really one of the arc's minor transgressions, but hopefully people will read this and stop treating these kinds of scenarios so casually in their arcs. It's come up a few times in my reviews.

This is literally the entire point of the arc. If you don't like it, that's fine, but giving 1 star for personal bias is a little extreme. The whole arc was deconstructing and pointing out the insanity of the entire superhero mythos and how absurd it would sound to a 'normal' person.

Which is kind of like complaining that ships in Star Trek travel faster than light. We already know it doesn't work, that's why it's taken as a genre convention.

There is no 'waking up', the entire arc has you bleeding on various levels in and out of lucidity. Every step of the way, up to, and including the ending, is left ambiguous as to how much of it exactly is 'real', specifically because a story that permanently changes the game or a character in a way that player doesn't approve of is bad form, so it is constructed in such a fashion that a player can take what they want from the finale without invalidating the story of the arc, or their character. You get what you put into it.

Philosophically you can't conclude anything from the arc. Once you have played the There Is No Reality card no conclusion is justifiable because there are no facts upon which to base one, not even cogito ergo sum. The arc is not "just a bunch of stuff that happened" because there is no way to tell what, if anything at all, has even happened. It has reached the Pauli Pinnacle: it is not even wrong.

when over 90% of your feedback is overwhelmingly positive, I think the person must be doing something right.

I'm sure Stephanie Meyer and Michael Bay tell themselves the same thing.

In an architect completely overwhelmed with farms, impossible to read grammar, broken enemies, and worse, this is really the unforgivable sin of arcs?

Yes.

You speak of wanting quality on the AE, but taking arcs that are actually trying to present a quality experience and shouting them down as the worst of the worst doesn't really endear people doing them to make more.

I haven't calculated the average in a while but I was running close to a 3 star arithmetic mean. I've given a good number of arcs 4 or 5 stars. You just can't play the VENTURE HAETS EVERYTHING! card.

The Longbow Eagle Death Squad is not an ambush. They are in flight when the map spawns, hanging around the bank. If you fly or leap anywhere around the bank they'll probably agro. They have extended agro range and can't be grounded by any means.

I haven't seen these PPD mobs that summon other PPD yet. I'll have to take a look in MA and see if they're listed....

I'm just saying that if you pin the level ranges, you get this problem across the whole story arc instead of just some missions.

If a player brings a level 30 character into an arc that says every mission is 40+ he has no one to blame but himself.

Personally I wish we could gate arcs by level instead of having lower-level characters autoleveled. I had someone send multiple tells complaining about the difficulty of "Two Households Alike" because he brought a level 17 character into a level 20-29 arc. I'd rather maybe lose a few extra plays than have people bring characters that are too low into my arcs.

I'll admit I didn't catch the anagram, so the ending was just a case of "oh no, not AGAIN."

We're at a point now where every time I see a name that's the slightest bit out of place I look for the letters E, I, M, N, and S and then start counting how many....

Wow, an arc that made Venture literally speechless with rage?

More like "Venture had RL stuff to do, and didn't have this one on the review list anyway".

You want the full list? Here it is:

a) Anagram on the Contact name: throws the Idiot Ball at the character and tells the player up-front that he's on the slow boat to Moronia.

b) Throws the Idiot Ball again in act I when the player is narrated as just blowing off a leak from a biohazard container. Heroes in this setting are registered and trained; they're not that dumb. This is over and above blowing up said containers in the first place which just would not be done. The obvious retort here is that the whole thing never happened in the first place but that's just jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

c) Appropriates the character's identity, which is an unforgivable trespass. The character's identity is utterly inviolate; it is what the player brings to the story in any RPG. The writer/GM already has the entire rest of the world to play with. Yes, the devs did this in "Mass Duplicity". That was crap too.

d) The five most common words in high-school fiction are: "and then he woke up". These kinds of stories are not cute or clever: they are tired, cheap and extremely obvious. If you didn't know you were going to have your chain yanked when you looked at the Contact, the splash screen for Act II should have told you there was at the very least a Jolly Candy-Like History Eraser Button coming up. There is no trick at all to writing them, because the writer holds all the cards in the first place. Yes, Joss Whedon did it on Buffy. That doesn't make it right, doubly so given the above. Things that work in books or movies (not that I even concede that this works anywhere; it doesn't) don't necessarily work in games.

Were the dialog tricks cute? Sure. I've done things like that myself. But they don't carry the arc and they don't excuse bad cliches.

Oh, and I do enjoy having fun. So much so that I take fun very seriously. Entertainment is far too important to be mindless.

-5 stars for the anagram on the Contact's name, and it went downhill from there.

If it didn't have 100 ratings I'd think I'd just been Punk'd.