Darmian

I'm just going to say (and it's my opinion so take it how you will) that with the official licence HC IS the sequel/continuation from Retail. The others are not, however cool some of their stuff is.

Alas he appears as a character in the LOOONG story that is Dark Deeds/Darker Deeds/Darkest Before Dawn...somewhere! A few times actually. He's not front and centre but he's a part of that story.

Good stuff! I've used Chris Jenkins myself and since he was officially introduced in the Corlett arc it'd be cool if he was added to the Contacts list for the AE.

Yep, there's not a damn thing you can do about them. Can't open them to dismiss them.

I pronounce it Chimera.

Although why we can't just have a body option I dunno. How hard could it be?

If you set an NPC as a friendly boss (non objective) and use dead slab instead of unconscious, AND have a small set of minions attached to them apparently examining the body, then the body SHOULD stay dead. Yes it's a pain. It doesn't always work either!

Bridge of Forever. No worries on names! Thanks for playing!

I know 😄 But...I want it. There ya go! If Reese can get there so can we. You could have an arc where you have a chance to finally track down Reese and stumble into the main events of Last Bastion. (There's sideways precedent where Chimera decides to track down Mr. G as opposed to defending Praetoria, except you'd obviously be defending Praetoria).

The only danger in that is the XP would push you past many of the contacts so perhaps the levels of the zones should be raised if this is implemented.

I've mained my Praetorian (in pic) Kameron Daniels and she hit 50 in 2020. Still Pure Gold and providing you can start from anywhere in Praetoria (bar one spot1), Echo Plaza or Pocket D then you CAN do iTrials AND Cathedral of Pain. Not to mention most of the seasonal events (excluding Red Widow and so on). EDIT: Blah, really should fully read all above posts before writing and repeating things. 1. Last Bastion is annoying. The only place in Praetoria a true Praetorian can't go. And it's a bad map.

I've got (so far) three trilogies of Praetorian material in the form of AEs set between levels 19 and 25 (Crusader, Warden and Power) with some shading into the events of the Praetorian War. Details in my signature. They're all designed to be as close to canon as possible. I'd write more set from 25 up if we had ANY maps for First Ward and Night Ward. We don't. I've notes on a final pre War trilogy for Loyalist Responsibility and that will arrive...whenever!

It was Praetoria that never had an equivalent of Viet Nam, not the Primal Earth of CoX.

As I mentioned Sunday and somewhere else, I started using the exit mission clue to duplicate the debrief that the leader gets so that all the team can read it. It's not perfect because you can easily lose it on the last mission if you are not being aware of what you're clicking, plus sometimes you NEED that last clue for stuff! But that's one hacky workaround I'm using for some team play AEs.

Had a fun run. Great to see it happen. Everyone else? Join in!!

Well this is a great start and long may it continue!

Good points @Police Woman. Breaking things into Team Play and Solo.

What time are these running at?

Ok, the title may need to be changed. Any suggestions happily accepted! This thread is spun off of a discussion that started here about Dev Choice awards and developed into debate about the various criteria we look at to decide (subjectively) if a story arc is "good" or not. All such comments are me phrasing things while currently at work and again may be revised when I get a chance to think more on how to put this. We had some discussion on good, enjoyable, fun, all of that. Plenty of agreement and plenty of disagreement! We can explore that further hopefully. As well as that we hit the wall of how to make story arcs more visible to those who playing the AE. Further suggestions welcome!

No no. I literally don't mean that. Let's open a new thread, include a link to this as a reference for previous discussion and start afresh. I've now opened this new thread here. In the meantime I return this thread to Dev Choices.

Oh yeah, I've added this to a few of mine that need it. It seems to help.

Hmm. Nowadays I've little time to write but I still have my notes for my final Praetorian Trilogy somewhere. It's Responsibility Loyalist. I've done trilogies of the other three factions and really tried to make them fit (a) into the lore of pre War Praetoria/edging into the start of the actual War; and (b) fitting into a "gap" between Neutropolis and First Ward events. The Responsibility Loyalist is my fave path through Praetoria so I've been very self critical on what I want to put out there in order to satisfy myself on how well it fits in. Eventually I'll get it done I suppose. I'd happily write more Praetorian stuff set later in First Ward and Night Ward if we had any of those maps. We don't. Other than that I've tried to write a long NPC team driven work that spans 50 missions. I had a lot of fun writing it and keeping track of all the spinning plates and I envisaged it as a combo TV series format with a Prequel and three "seasons" that has you engage with a mid level NPC super team and generally get to know them while their world is spinning out of control. I think it works. Comedy is so subjective that I won't even attempt that. And kudos to those who can do it. For things I look for? I'll try almost anything but a solid story and good character interaction will always hook me in. And when I say anything, well look at some of the Christmas AEs that are available! Some of those are insane. And even in an AE that might be 90% awful to me you can find something that shines, that makes me think "how the hell did they do that?" I've been lucky enough that several people have asked me that question about my stuff but here's a little known secret: sometimes the AE's borkiness produces strange and fun things you can find while testing and then the trick is to figure out (usually by redrafting the story bit) how to make it look like I MEANT that to happen 😄 And by now some of the newer AE writers might be discovering how @cranebump and @Ankylosaur are damn good at what they do. It's that they keep doing it. Carnegie Hall, folks!

BOOO! HISSS!

For the sake of @TerroirNoir2's sanity(!) we need a second thread on this. This is the Dev Choice thread. And despite the hiatus (most likely due to the limited time/resources of the Dev/GM team) I think that the award will return at some point. So with that said, any discussions of publicising ALL Story AEs should probably not be here in future.

Yeah absolutely true. However IRL I'm an editor, and if you knew how many of these early publishers didn't bother to hire someone like me because that's a waste of money then...no, you wouldn't be surprised because the evidence is still there to see. If the stories were good then you got away with it. If they weren't it wouldn't matter how many editors you had. I'm convoluting things here, but in general I think I'm agreeing with you. In general. However, I completely disagree with the elitism take. So I ask: why wouldn't you (not you personally, @UltraAlt, the generic "you"), want to get better at what you do? To make sure that your mistakes aren't repeated? I'd like my second arc to be better than my first, my tenth to be better than the ninth, and so on. If someone tries the AE and likes it, gets beyond a "test" mission then the learning process tends to kick in and that learning process drives improvement. And I'm very much NOT speaking here about others reviewing what I've written and telling me I screwed up or whatever. Or telling me I've done well and resting on imaginary laurels. I'm speaking about me wanting to be better at a thing I really enjoy doing. Yeah, my sentence ran on a bit longer than my reference to canon style stories though. You've got some valid points. You've got a few I disagree with, as you know. But you've highlighted something here that needs looking at. We're no longer speaking of Dev Choices but of ways to make Story Arcs visible. There's (currently) 14,267 listed arcs in the AE. I hate to think how many are farms. Well, there's roughly 300 arcs in the AE as of right now with "Test" with no plays, the earliest dating to 2020. I'm not suggesting penalizing players. If you've got a single mission"Test run v6" unplayed for 4+ years then deleting it and returning that AE slot to a player isn't unreasonable I think. If others think it is then fair enough. And I prefer to look for them because I love the comic book universe of COH/COV. But different strokes for different folks.