uberschveinen

You're playing a character who's a jerk, you roleplayed as a jerk, and now a whole bunch of people think you're a jerk. Why are you surprised by this series of events?

Everybody knows that the second you touch a unique map, the objective spawns are going to be really fun to organise, and that unless you take action they'll just do whatever the hell they feel like doing at the time. What I'm wondering, though, is whether anybody has managed to find workarounds for these common problems yet, even if only for specific maps.

Right now I'm trying to find one of these myself for the Marchand map, the one with three indoor levels and an outdoor roof, without much luck. I never really expected the bosses to just to stay where they're told to, but it's proven unusually hard to make them stay there. I tried the brute-force remedy of filling every single one of the front and middle spawns of the map with Patrol spawns, which tend to do what they're told, but without much luck. Inevitably, the bosses still just do whatever they want. I played a mission whose name escapes me now where the boss spawned consistently on the roof, so somebody out there knows how to make this happen.

Also, the 5th column HQ map. I've given up on trying to get both spawns working in the back, and it's too big a map to give players the runaround. Are there other, less broken maps that have the look of a missile silo command bunker?

Yes. It can't be done with the way animations work, and that can't be changed without completely recoding the entire animations part of the game engine.

Writing is an easy hobby. Writing is a very hard job.

One of the reasons everyone assumes writing is an easy job is because everyone can write things, and everyone has written things. It's something everyone assumes their own skill sets includes, in that way people have of assuming that they can do anything they've never specifically tried to before. That's not the problem. The problem is that while it is easy to see that you are just not competent at a complex proficiency-required job like programming, legal work, or accounting, and that your work is well below par with professional artists in creative fields like visual arts or music writing, it's not the case for writing. The less writing skill you have, the less obvious that lack of skill is. A little human optimism fills the gap, and hey presto, most people won't even notice that they aren't really any good at it, even if they try their hand at it. A similar sort of thing applies to singing, acting, and some forms of playing music. The first thing I noticed when I started doing a bit more writing for my own stuff was that I was actually pretty terrible at it when I was honest with myself.

That's just writing well at all, it's not even really professional writing. Professional writing requires that at professionalism which is a whole different ball of fun.

If you're a professional writer, it's not always about you any more. While you might have managed to keep full authorial control, at the end of they day you're going to need to write a piece that someone will pay money for so you can enjoy such luxuries as eating. When I'm puttering about at home and go 'hey, that's interesting' I can go off and write something about it, and I don't have to wonder whether it'll get in the way of meeting the contract for X pages by Y or whatever it was or if it's a bit outre and will get shuttled back and forth between publishers for a decade until I give up. I don't have to feel guilty because I haven't written enough, and I don't have to force myself to produce. I loathe the feeling of staring at a blank screen, knowing that I have to put something there by a deadline and make it good, and knowing that I just don't want to. I have respect for most professional writers, because to be a professional writer takes a degree of creative discipline that I don't have.

Right, so the only real major obstacle was the acceptance dialogue. I don't blame you, because I do the same thing. I can rationalise doing things in an arc I otherwise wouldn't, but it's distracting to have to.

This is a lead-up to the next arc, which is the one I really wanted to write but couldn't make fit rationally into one arc. There's only two of four missions that even have Malta there, and in one you don't actually have to fight them. Originally I wanted to stick a whole stack of weaker heroes into the Malta bases to fight, both for some variance and because it really bugs me that despite half the purpose of Malta being to co-opt heroes, you never even see one. I got one into this arc and planned to make it a whole team, but space is really tight given it's a five-mission arc and I've gone heavy on the objectives AND the dialogue. I'm hoping the possible space boost with GR is a reality, because it'll make that possible.

If it is really a nuisance I'll try to work some more in, but there's only so many groups you can have working with Malta without a whole lot of justification. Knives are easy, but they are never a way to make things less annoying.

Thanks for the help, anyway. It's much better to have someone else's opinion for fixes since it's easy to get enormously biased when you've put a lot of effort into something.

I made this arc vaguely intending to recapture the feel of the Crimson arcs, but take it further. I tend to prefer the more grim storylines, and this is just an outlay of that. I wrote this more as the thing I wanted to write than for a wide audience because otherwise it's hard to justify spending a fair few hours on it. Sure, I can make heroey stuff, but there's already so much of it in the game.

I made the arc selection 'heroic' because neutral would suggest to Villains that it's going to work with their characters. It'd be hard to justify why most villains even care about Vasiliy's ruthlessness, and those with genuinely complex characters I ca't help because there are just far too many potential motivations.

I changed the locker names around. It seems weird for a spy-type guy to use one drop point, but you're right, it's weirder for a contact name to just be wrong. I'll fix those up unless I can think of something more creative.

The first mission popup was more my thinking. In the game, I don't recall blueside if you ever actually make a plan to proactively attack Malta, mostly doing so in reaction. I'll try to make that more readily visible.

That clue's one of a few. It's hard to try and make it obvious that Malta is a pack of outright bastards without either forcing a character reaction or going into detail. I don't like going into detail, because imagined horrors are always going to be more insidious. Still, maybe I can take out the explicitly forced character reactions for something vaguer.

The ambushes are post-defeat because I figured it might be too hard for characters not specced out to be able to take out a boss, a big spawn, and a 3/4 health ambush. It does feel off, but I think making players repeatedly lose in the end room of one mission would probably be more annoying. This is my first experience with Architect, so if you have any ideas of how to do this better I could really use the help. Maybe I should playtest with my Energy/Thermal corruptor. If he can solo it, anything can.

Much of the point of this arc and the followup is that Vasiliy is not a nice guy at all. He's got his revenge kick, and he doesn't give a damn who gets in his way and what he has to do to get it. He's as monomaniacal in the pursuit of this as the Malta leadership is in their defense of what they see as right. The idea is that this is supposed to become more and more obvious as you play through the arc. The player is working with him only because he represents a genuine chance to do damage to Malta. I don't want to proscribe how far the character will agree with Vasiliy because every character will be different, and there's no mechanism in the game for the character to decide enough is enough. Still, if it's not obvious that the hero is only doing this because it's a rare chance to hit Malta, then I need to rewrite some things. Was there much in the way of specific dialogue that made you feel like your character was doing something they outright wouldn't, or was it just a general feeling?

Mostly just go through the arcs you find on the board. This board is a pretty good way of seeing which arcs are going to be what you want, since generally the people who are going to the effort of posting online about their arcs care enough to go to the effort of making decent arcs.

I can't really help with lower-level arcs, since I prefer to level in the game world, but I kept note of the arcs that were well-written and at the same time reasonably serious. Once you get there, I'll post away.

General:
- Yes, the names are much less appropriate. Sophocles only wrote so many plays.
- If you play this arc first Malta's reaction seems almost insane. It'd make more sense if it came straight after, say, a Crimson arc. If I can think of a way to write that in without wrecking it for the ones who did play Glory of our Empire I will. I don't think I'll be rid of the problem of why the hell you'd trust Vasiliy that much that fast, though.

Mission 1:
- I know, the glowie is wierd. I can't find a reliable way to make a better one spawn in the right spot.
- It's supposed to be a Malta airdrop. The idea sort of gets across, but not really. I'd pay cash moneys to use the Commando entrance animation for them here.
- I didn't really want to make players defeat a boss, but there's no option to force you to leave by the entrance and I don't want people just immediately exiting.

Mission 2:
- The MAGIC TRANSLATOR convention annoys me, but I suspect actually having them speak Korean would be more annoying to players.
- I would pay cash moneys for the ability to use a Warburg map for this.

Mission 3:
- I'm still tossing up all the details of how many objectives the player should have to complete. Making them spend more time on the map gets more of the 'what have I done?' thing across, but too long and it'd smother any emotional impact under piles of seethign tedium.

Mission 4:
- The Marchand map is perfect for this, except that the jerks took away the helicopter.
- I'm still tossing up how powerful your allies should be. Even though they're optional, it'd be easy to turn on too many and turn what should rightfully be a real challenge into a cakewalk.
- More crappy wall-spawning glowies. It only happens every few plays, but it's not fair to even one player that after slogging their way through eight other missions they'd still not finish the story. I'm pulling this arc until I can fix it.

Operation Oedipus: Glory of our Empire notes.

General:
- Yes, there are Sophocles references everywhere. It seemed fitting given the content of his plays, until I started running out of character names.
- Yes, the arc title is a reference. To what I won't say.

Mission 1:
- The encrypted database isn't meant to be there in the middle. No matter what I set its spawn flag to it keeps showing up there.
- The map isn't small, but I chose mostly because the Front-marked room is really easy to find glowies in.

Mission 2:
- This is a four-level map, but all of the levels are very small and it finishes with the convenient conference room.
- Every time but one I tested this the bosses spawned apart. One time they spawned stacked. If it happens again I'll have to change the map.

Mission 3:
- I know there's a hell of a lot of glowies. That's why they're so quick, and all neatly in one big open room. Besides, a crapton of explosives seemed a good way to get across that Vasiliy is a very angry man.
- If Theseus spawns in the middle, it makes for a great fight, with both sets of Titans coming in and beating the crap out of themselves and him. If he spawns in the hallway it ruins the effect, but that spawn seems rare.
- One test the Titan ambushes spawned in groups of six. Epic, yes. Fun, no.

Mission 4:
- A lot of back-and-forth. That's why I chose the smallest possible appropriate map.
- There's no way to have you take Vasiliy to a console, so outside will have to do. I considered having the main console objective become active after freeing Vasiliy, but then you'd have to go all the way back to the door afterwards. If I figure out a neat trick, I'll change this mission.

Mission 5:
- This is supposed to be you versus a massive Malta facility packed to the gills with dangerous men. Since I couldn't actually increase mob occurence, I opted for craploads of big ambushes. It works a little better, since it gets across the idea that Malta is actually a competent paramilitary organisation.
- The security console has a habit of spawning wherever it feels like spawning regardless of tags.
- The bombs in the reactor room are a nuisance, but it was the only place that made sense that didn't spawn the damned things in the wall. Again, I kept them to one room to make it less enraging.
- There are objectives everywhere because I thought it'd make this feel more like a big thing. It does, but not as well a a higher mob density would have.
- Yes, those are all-Sapper mobs. Only four on the entire map, and three of then you can sneak past. I thought a patrol that poses a genuine threat to any player would make this feel like a facility Malta is very serious about protecting. More to the point, a Sapper Plant without buttloads of Sappers would be thematically ridiculous. If they are genuinely too hard, I'll find a workaround.
- I know Laius is only a boss. Normally that would be a letdown for the last mission of an arc, but considering he has an all-Sapper spawn around him and two rather large ambushes, making him an Elite Boss would probably just be cruel.
- There was originally a point to using the Hero lab specifically, but space limitations made that problematic. Instead I spread that plot point across both arcs.

If there's one thing this board's taught me it's that you're never going to get an arc well-known without blatant advertising, and this board certainly seems to be the place to do it. I'll post up my new arcs here, with a few notes. If you've played one of them and have any comments or criticism, please post it in here. Also, if you want me to play one of yours, I can do that. I won't rate an arc save as a 5, rather, I'll just point out what I saw as weaknesses and suggest some improvements.

Also, these two arcs are my first experiences with creating using the Architect system, so be gentle.

Arc Title:Operation Oedipus: Glory of our Empire (part 1 of 2)
Arc ID: 372767
Factions:Malta
Morality:Heroic
Length:5 missions (part 2 4 missions)
Level Range:41-54
Synopsis:Malta's made a dangerous enemy. A man called Vasiliy says he knows how to take down the most dangerous organisation in Paragon City, and he needs your help to do it. Is it possible, and will it be worth the cost? (warning: grim)

Arc Title:Operation Oedipus: Day of Infamy (part 2 of 2)
Arc ID: 375443
Factions:Malta
Morality:Heroic
Length:4 missions (part 1 5 missions)
Level Range:41-54
Synopsis:Malta's been hurt, but desperation makes for a deadly foe. Will you do what it takes to finish the job, and can you trust a man out for revenge at any cost? (warning: grim)

I'm encountering an error message I can't get rid of, word-for-weord in the thread title. I've tried everything I coudl think of to get rid of it short of deleting the mission and starting again, which I don't want to do as this particular mission alone involved a few hours of work. I know this is probably in the "is it plugged in?" category of stupid questions, but it's really starting to bug me. What have I done wrong, and how do I fix it?

EDIT: Yes, it was "is it plugged in?" stupid. Hopefully this thread falls off the front page soon.

I'm not sure why you call SS the effective set as opposed to the fun set. It's stupendously fun, and just so happened to perfectly fit the fighting style I wanted for a new character. The whole thing just makes you look like a berserker beating the crap out everything by smashing a massive slab of steel (or rock) into it. I so desperately want the alternate KoB animation to start workign again, because it is the crowning visual glory of the set to ram the shield into someone's face at full strength for seven hundred damage. I would also pay cash moneys for Foot Stop to get an alternate animation that made you slam the ground with your shield instead.

I know better than to do both parts posted seperately. The only thing more enraging that when writers end series on cliffhangers is when they elect to die immediately afterwards.

As it is, the arcs could be broken up into fairly distinct sets. The first one basically consists of trying to get a mole into the high ranks of Malta by causing enough organisational chaos that he can get away with it and dealing a fat wad of damage to Malta interests at the same time, and ends with every Hero's dream of destroying the plant that makes those ******* Sapper sticks. The second one starts out with Malta's retaliation, driven to extremes because of how afraid they're getting of the character, works through that escalation until the PC drives Malta too far, and ends with that act turning global governments against Malta so they lose most of what makes them hard to kill.

I could likely work some more distinction into each arc so they work reasonably well as standalone stories, but by neccesity it's going to be very strange for a Player to start with the second one.

The effort involved is not an issue. I'm the sort of guy who'd rather spend a month of full days designing a weekend-long campaign to remember than spend an hour to make a day-long campaign everyone forgets. The hardest part is trying to change from a small format where you know your players well, have infinite freedom in your creativity, and can react instantly to work with the player's reaction to a vast and impersonal audience when you've got a painfully restrictive suite of tools to work with.

I think you mistake my intention in making it huge. I know that needless padding is unbearable thanks to only recently playing through Heroside solo-only, and developer missions have vastly more power in arc creation. I'm not using length as a shortcut to an epic feel, because I already know that that's a sure route to failure. I want it to be long because I think that having more missions, so long as they aren't crappy, will genuinely bring to the player the feeling that they are fighting a massive war with one of the most powerful enemies in Primal Earth, as opposed to just showing up and suddenly winning. This is not me saying 'it's a big story, so I'll need lots of missions'. That two arcs are needed is something I've seen purely from working the missions themselves. Any other enemy group, it'd be fine, but to have Malta itself go down in four or five missions without feeling anticlimactic would take compressed writing of a skill level far beyond my own. I also know far better than to give players a drama blueballsing, because that infuriates me beyond anything else an otherwise-talented author can do.

As it is, I can break down the missions as planned into how neccesary they are.

There are three missions that cannot be taken out of the arc without the plot becoming impossible to sustain. Without these a total scrap-and-rewrite is not just the best option but the only option.

There is one mission that is not plot-crucial, but is the single most important mission in terms of its contribution to the quality of the arc. I could take it out, but then the arc would be useless. It is where the feeling of extreme significance of the events comes from, but involves events so drastic that it simply feels wrong to lead into it too quickly.

There also genuinely needs to be a lead-in mission, simply because the prior four are blatantly inappropriate to start an arc with and cannot be made otherwise without severely weakening the plot.

These five missions are the absolute core of the arc and cannot practically be changed.

There are three or possibly four other missions that I would like to include. They can be done without, but not without screwing badly with the pacing of the plot. Since they aren't strictly neccesary, I'm doing everything I can to make them mechanically fun. The purpose they serve is to actually make this arc feel like a war, and not simply the PC dropping out of nowhere and magically solving everything. The basic gamble of this is on whether or not I can make them fun enough to stop them from feeling like they draw out the arc. This is a gamble based mostly on how I think and feel about stories, and I know I'm not nearly representative of most players.

I suppose the real question I should ask is this: Is there a point in an arc at which you as a player, despite enjoying what you are doing at that moment in an arc, begin to feel put out by an arc purely because of its length, disregarding its quality?

There's a lot of dislike of multi-arc storylines. Is there any particular reason, or is it just that they're not usually done well?

As it is, the one I'm working on pretty much has to be huge. Not specifically because of the story, but because it needs to feel massive. It's basically the player in a war to bring down Malta by any means neccesary, and managing to do that in four or five missions just wouldn't feel right.

Right. It seemed to me that I'd be able to make it as long as it had to be so long as I made sure every missions contributed in some useful way to the story's progression, and that none of the missions were any longer than strictly neccesary. That's probably the hard part, because while a long but packed mission right at the climax is either a good deal of fun if you're enjoying it or complete crap if you aren't.

How long can an Architect story arc stretch before it starts to weaken the story?

Obviously, that will depend on how well written the story is and how good the writing is at keeping your attention. Some arcs are tedious not halfway int othe first mission, whereas others could keep you going well into another continuation arc. Generally speaking, though, is there a point at which the sheer length of an arc is such that you start to lose interest in it?

I ask because I'm trying to plan out a particularly eventful multi-arc story. I can do it in two full arcs, but it will feel crowded, and likely limit many options. I could expand it to three to keep the interludes properly placed and give myself more kilobytes of breathing room, but somehow that just feels too long.

I think the general exodus away from the ZOMG XP aspect of Architect is actually a good thing. The people who still play it are much more likely to actually be seeking properly-crafted experiences and good stories, as opposed to Behemoth Grind XYZ.

I think the real issue with the Architect is the crappy search feature. Even a four-option Mission Style you can search for with Silly Fun Sensible and Serious would make it much easier to find the sort of stories you want to play. I hate having to trawl through endless LOLSORANDUM arcs to find something I can take seriously, and I can only imagine the other side does too.

I think the architect mission search feature could do with a label for missions that says how serious they are.

As it is, it can be difficult to find the right sort of mission for the mood you want, especially given the enormous number of really quite silly missions everyone makes.

I think a simple tag with four options, being [Silly - Fun - Sensible - Serious], would allow players much more ease in finding the missions they want to play. It may also help reduce players downranking missions because the mission wasn't what they wanted to play, if hat happens.

That's actually quite brilliant.

I like the Council Base in the Rikti War Zone. Or did. Until I got lost in it once.

Villainside is much better designed than Heroside. Heroside is difficult for me to play, because until you get to Peregrine Island you just don't know where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing. It just feels like you're tooling around the city, doing some hero work along the way. The mission arcs tend to be worse, with some exceptions, and are rife with meaningless filler. Most importantly, Heroside has no real progression for your character in it. All that really changes are your enemies. Redside genuinely makes you feel like you're going somewhere. By the end of it you've brought the Circle of Thorns to their knees, destroyed the high leadership of Longbow, taken out nearly every single hero in Paragon, worked with the most powerful figures of Arachnos, become one of the heads of Arachnos, and killed future Lord Recluse and thrown the bloody helmet at the modern Recluse's feet to tell him to back the hell off because you're beyond his power now. You become a story-acknowledged worldshaking figure who is one of the most powerful superhumans ever to exist.

The only thing Heroes have going for them is a much more active market, easier teams, and much better EPPs. For all that Redside is better written, Blueside is enormously popular simply because it's got better powers and loot.

I always liked the Praetorian earth lore, probably because I ended up with a different version of half of it thanks to playing redside first.

Thanks to the way the CoX universe works, that being the ridiculous stereotypes of comics all being real, all of the universes they encounter are similarly planet-of-hats deals. The only universe that displays any real complexity is Praetorian earth. In fact, it's so drastically at odds with the simplicity of very nearly all of the rest of CoX that it really stands out. A planet of multiple motivations and deeds based on individual ethics and not universal notions of good and evil, where the heroes are imperfect and the villains complex?

Praetorian earth is, without breaking the fundamental game basis of Superheroes, exactly what a comic book universe would see if they saw our world.