Clave Dark 5

Yeah, we've asked for this before (we've asked for tons of stuff many times, and we're still waiting for even a brief "sorry we couldn't do that because blah blah..."), it would be really nice. I've got two arcs in production that could use it.

Make the AE count for something other than mindless farming; some of the restrictions added such as half XP mean it's best for nothing but farming, which is just silly. Leave the AFK farming types to do the work of "stocking the markets" that they supposedly do in addition to making it worth while to seek out missions on it. New Devs Choices should be drop fairly often, like a handful or more per "Page." Add in a bunch of items/foes/etc. that are currently missing. Unless the tech is too complex, anything base builders can put in their base should also be available as glowies, for instance. (seems like this one thing would be the easiest to achieve) Maybe do something to make the tickets worth taking again instead of drops, like upping their drop numbers, or make stuff cheaper to buying with tickets. Maybe "take the tickets, get full XP." I expect Regen will get fixed/nerfed first though, yes. 😄

IIRC I knew this guy and he'd published this on Live too. Note the level range, but it's still easy enough.

(Slightly off-topic, feel free to ignore) Seeing as how I recently mentioned doing so, I feel attacked! 😄 In theory, I like this idea, but I am easily distracted and probably so incredibly bored of the mission by the time I hit publish - such is the burden of a novelty-seeking personality. I have walked into other missions and gotten creamed and thusly realized that my given toon really shouldn't be trying to run something at 4/8 or when only at 27th level or etc. What if this toon has a "psi hole" in his armor, but that one doesn't (an otherwise good stalker of mine had to quit a stiry arc because of all the psi, for instance)? Ultimately I feel there's only so much I can do anyway, and that I have to trust the player to have some idea of where they stand on these things themselves, long as I don't throw a solo GM fight in there or something. I've more than once had a published mission get say ten plays (woo, TEN! Double digits!) and had one player tell me they got half way into the first one and died and that they couldn't even pretend face whatever and quit (see: psi-hole).

OK, fair point and I still think your avatar is bad-ass.

That was nearly two years ago, and I only make MA arcs sporadically, but thank you for taking the time once again now.

Yup, that's it. New Life Hack for Using the Janky MA Did you create a group of foes using recolored pre-existing foes, and you want to want to use of them for a Fight a Boss detail? The group will not show up on the Custim Group list until you add ONE Custom foe into the group and set that foe for Don't Auto-Spawn. ETA: but wait it gets better! You still have to recreate that boss again as described above! Oh how I love this system! ETA2: More! After going through all that, I found that the mission wouldn't start until I removed that Don't Auto-Spawn foe. So you have to just recreate the boss each time. What kind of cockamamie system is this?! Who cares?! No one will ever fix this.

I've created a group of foes called FOE BADGUYS, assembled from pre-exisiting bad guys, recolored and renamed. I set them for the map as the default Custom Group. I go to set a "Fight A Boss" and want to choose one of the bosses within FOE BADGUYS. FOE BADGUYS does not appear on my drop-down menu, but other groups I've made in the past do. What's (not) going on here?

Wait what? I've faced the problem of "how do I get enough text in here?" problem more than I care to say, could you expand on this for a second?

That's part of my problem with them too, they show up in no order at all on that screen and I invariably end yo scrolling up and down it "have I read this one yet? Yes, yes... there it is." For the most part they stop game play dead. Again, remember that these particular missions are meant to be about as deep as a tortilla. My general "no clues" stance here doesn't reflect a hard and fast rule that I hold against all clues ever used by anyone anywhere; otherwise I'd be in that same gaol.

Ripped from today's headlines! That was fun, but I'm glad I ran it on a tough toon with difficulty levels set low, I'm no power gamer. I thought it went just fine without clues; you know I'm sort of ag'in 'em in general and this provides another example why: it's a straightforward story that doesn't need more embellishing and there's no shame to that. One thing writing for the MA has taught me is that brevity counts for a lot, and I don't feel this sort of story really needs any long-form recap of what I just did, or all that much extra description: "You defeated the Blue Meanies trying to make everyone listen to Laurence Welk by blowing up the factory they were manufacturing their square haircuts in!" ("Yes, I know") "Statesman's Ghost sighs heavily after trying to explain it to the Rikti Monkey again and getting nowhere beyond frustrated." This isn't a hard and fast rule for me though; try and set a "this never works" rule on any creative act, and some smarmy dude will come along and prove it can and should have been done, and I've done lots of clues in the past myself, especially on weirder stuff where I let my verbose nature run riot - and be warned: I will again - but for more direct stories like this, I feel it helped the story zip right by smoothly.

Most days it's actually very early, like say 8 AM MST, but then I can't game from a long stretch. Days I'm off, maybe starting around 3 am? My schedule can vary along with what's going on personally. This is also why I never join anyone else's SG 😄

Damn that's really sad. Starting to wonder if other shards ARE better to play on to avoid the "number go up" mindlessness, but sadly I usually play during the overnight hours (night shifter), so I can't team on any other shard...

I have a little ceramic replica statue of an Egyptian cat, and thinking it might inspire a character, I went looking into it and discovered Egyptian Blue is a whole thing, and yeah, I tried to match his color close as the picker would let me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue

Always has been, and I just ran my anti-virus program again this morning and it wasn't flagged.

I sent you a message in-game, but just played the sequel, Nightmare of Sand. This is all 100% topnotch work from writing to costumes, etc. Great stuff! Anyone looking for some of the best AE work to run? You can only choose worse options than to play these. Oh, and here's the character that I ran the arc with, which you were asking after - obviously just a one note joke of a character, but obviously felt like there had been some synergy with running the arc with even that.

The linked article covers it. It's basically people defending their game by telling others to not slam a bad choice made by those running the game. Seems like a very too-online sort of think to dicker over, really.

I play on PI Radio teams more than I should and I think I can count the number of times someone has said "only at XX level or above" on one hand, usually the people will ask for any and all players. And never criticized what AT I was running, and I've run semi-petless MMs! I've even told them up front about that and they didn't care. You just had some bad luck and got the crazies first, stick around and you'll be fine, promise! ETA - as that (now removed ha ha) thumbs down indicates, there's actually more crazies on the forums that Exel ha ha

Well they are highly questionable, but they do seem to be, I guess sort of tethered to reality... rather...

100% correct on the crate from 2. I think that's something I had written in before I lost the file and then just forgot about needing to redo. 100% on the lower case, but I'm pretty sure that's my writing inside. With the pickles. 100% on the space between the words in 4. 100% on 5 too. I knew it felt clunky but I let it slide for the time being. Being optional, I'm not sold on "need to protect"; also, I put those in just for their destruction, sort of like writing your villain to kick a puppy just to highlight their evil nature. I will still reconsider that wording though. Thanks for the notes! ETA: turns out I forgot to write a Compass Task for the furniture when/if it gets down to one too. So I made the singular "Protect what Officer Furniture is Left (optional)" and the multiple "Office Furnishings Being Destroyed (optional)"

Regarding 4, that gets easier with time. I don't farm (except perhaps for monster hunting during Halloween), I don't play market games, and yet I'm always able to pay for the IOs I plan for (it helps to ignore purples, for example); might help to download Mids and work with that too. Have fun, stop and punch the roses.

@ZamuelNow If you spotted more typos, please let me know! I fixed all the ones that @huang3721 found, but I have fumbly fingers so there are indeed probably more. I am at a point where I am indeed "down on clues." Even my past works with multiple clues, they all felt like "stop - start": defeat this guy, stop a moment to read, now go over there, wait, here, read another... They remind me of a comic I was reading in the 80s that intersperses pages of the usual comic panels and such with a couple of pages of text. This is like putting nuts in a muffin (or more like pebbles) to me, they didn't fit there, they interrupted the flow of what a comic does (mostly). I'm also thinking of other comics I read with some text material, but they always stuck it at the back. That's a better choice, imho. Here, I guess that would be only using clues that drop at the very beginning or end. ....which segues me into the outro ha ha! IIRC, team members don't get to see those, so like a radio or newspaper, they're kind of extraneous for this project (just like the Still Busys, but I wasn't much a fan of those before either). They can be a good place for some text about the story though for soloers, sure, otherwise. These stories, like radios, being so thin however, I also didn't really see there was much else to cover. Newspapers vs. radios: hm, interesting point! I mean, PI radios by design would be hero-based, but why not expand that concept? I don't have any solid plans yet, but I am kicking around some ideas for more. The story in the last mission in this one was an idea I've been kicking about for some time, but I knew it would be worth about one mission... Writing an anthology around the character was a good way for me to shoe-horn that in somewhere. I have lots of notes and need to just keep looking for other one-shot stories I guess. Next first thought was something with Sam the Bartender from Pocket D, which would open things up for pan-alignment stories if nothing else. Anyway, rambling now.

Late to the topic but I see the OP got downvoted for suggesting "fun" ha ha

Very big thanks for that typo report, @huang3721! I've fixed those now. As I wanted these missions to feature different groups you might not see much, and to be like the usual radio missions that story wise go nowhere past the mission exit, it didn't occur to me make Me. E's friends be the same group that later attack the office. Seeing how either group is really pretty much the other with a reskin, maybe I'll go change that and drop a note about it in the dialogue... food for thought! @Darmian I did a cursory search and didn't see anyone using Jenkins before, which I would have expected by now - and there you go. Are you arcs still up? I'll take a look.

I was talking about doing this not long ago and finally, despite losing the early draft due to janky-ness of the MA, here it is! Missions designed to be played/PUGed by a level 50 leader who's careful enough to not keep it set at +4/+8 if the rest of the team is 12th level or whatever. Or play it solo at reasonable difficulty and have fun yourself! Just like real PI radios, no weird mechanics to worry over, no clues to stall your game play, and the stories are hardly connected except for the contact, so they can be safely ignored past the very basic "get the P.L.O.T. device" type of bare-bones framework. I tested this with solo a 50 tanker and scrapper and things went just fine. I'm sure there's typos aplenty and labels I forgot to change etc., so please feel free to let me know if you see anything. ETA -- And now, with more tiki culture! Yes, it's another set of stories composed under the same parameters as the original and also most likely rife with stupid errors - pots below to tell me how sloppy I was!